LibGuides: Anti-Racism: a Learning Guide: Critical Race Theory

What is CRT?

Critical Race Theory is a movement started in the 1970s by activists and scholars committed to the study and transformation of traditional relationships of race to racism and power. CRT was initially grounded in the law and has since expanded to other fields. CRT also has an activist dimension because it not only tries to understand our situation but to change it. The basic beliefs of CRT are:

Racism is ordinary, the 'normal' way that society does business, the 'common, everyday' experience of most People of Color in this country.
Racism serves the interests of both white people in power (the elites) materially and working class white people psychically, and therefore neither group has much incentive to fight it.
Race and races are social and political constructs, categories that society invents and manipulates when convenient. In reality our differences as human beings are dwarfed by what we have in common and have little or nothing to do with personality, intelligence, and morality.
Society chooses to ignore this and assigns characteristics to whole groups of people in order to advance the idea of race and the superiority of whiteness.
The power elite racializes different groups at different times to achieve their economic agenda, continually and repeatedly prioritizing profit over people.

Definition from "Racism Defined," Dismantling Racism Works Workbook

E-books from Pierce Databases

Critical Race Theory Matters by Margaret Zamudio; Christopher Russell; Jacquelyn L. Bridgeman; Francisco Rios
Critical Race Theory Matters provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of this influential movement, shining its keen light on specific issues within education. Through clear and accessible language, the authors synthesize scholarship in the field, highlight major themes and assumptions, and examine strategies of resistance and practices for challenging the existing inequalities in education. By linking theory to everyday practices in today's classroom, students will understand how CRT is relevant to a host of timely topics, from macro-policies such as Bilingual Education and Affirmative Action to micro-policies such as classroom management and curriculum.
Race Is... Race Isn't: critical race theory and qualitative studies in education by Laurence Parker
ISBN: 0429972059
Race Is… Race Isn't presents a group of qualitative research studies, literature reviews, and commentaries that collectively articulate critical race theory in secondary and post-secondary educational settings. The editors explore links and conflicts with other areas of difference, including language, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, with the goal of opening a dialogue about how critical race theory can be incorporated into education research methodologies.
Critical Race Theory by Richard Delgado; Jean Stefancic; Angela Harris (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9781479846368
Since the publication of the first edition of Critical Race Theory in 2001, the United States has lived through two economic downturns, an outbreak of terrorism, and the onset of an epidemic of hate directed against immigrants, especially undocumented Latinos and Middle Eastern people. On a more hopeful note, the country elected and re-elected its first black president and has witnessed the impressive advance of gay rights. As a field, critical race theory has taken note of all these developments, and this primer does so as well. It not only covers a range of emerging new topics and events, it also addresses the rise of a fierce wave of criticism from right-wing websites, think tanks, and foundations, some of which insist that America is now colorblind and has little use for racial analysis and study.
Born Out of Struggle: Critical Race Theory, School Creation, and the Politics of Interruption by David Omotoso Stovall
Rooted in the initial struggle of community members who staged a successful hunger strike to secure a high school in their Chicago neighborhood, David Omotoso Stovall's Born Out of Struggle focuses on his first-hand participation in the process to help design the school. Offering important lessons about how to remain accountable to communities while designing a curriculum with a social justice agenda, Stovall explores the use of critical race theory to encourage its practitioners to spend less time with abstract theories and engage more with communities that make a concerted effort to change their conditions. Stovall provides concrete examples of how to navigate the constraints of working with centralized bureaucracies in education and apply them to real-world situations.
Power to the Transfer: Critical Race Theory and a Transfer Receptive Culture by Dimpal Jain; N. Santiago Bernal Melendez; R. Alfred Herrera
This book aims to provide direction toward the development and maintenance of a transfer receptive culture, which is defined as an institutional commitment by a university to support transfer students of color. A transfer receptive culture explicitly acknowledges the roles of race and racism in the vertical transfer process from a community college to a university and unapologetically centers transfer as a form of equity in the higher education pipeline. The framework is guided by critical race theory in education, which acknowledges the role of white supremacy and its contemporary and historical role in shaping institutions of higher learning.
Tradition and the Black Atlantic by Henry Louis Gates
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Tradition and the Black Atlantic is both a vibrant romp down the rabbit hole of cultural studies and an examination of the discipline's roots and role in contemporary thought. In this conversational tour through the halls of theory, Gates leaps from Richard Wright to Spike Lee, from Pat Buchanan to Frantz Fanon, and ultimately to the source of anticolonialist thought: the unlikely figure of Edmund Burke. Throughout Tradition and the Black Atlantic , Gates shows that the culture wars have presented us with a surfeit of either/ors, tradition versus modernity Eurocentrism versus Afrocentricism. Pointing us away from these facile dichotomies, Gates deftly combines rigorous scholarship with humour, looking back to the roots of cultural studies in order to map out its future course.

Reference Sources

Critical race theory (CRT) is a scholarly and politically committed movement that takes as its starting point the centrality of race in American history and social life. CRT scholars focus on contemporary economic and political arrangements as well as the historic distribution of public and private resources. CRT began as an attempt to identify the ways in which race had either been ignored or minimized in the study of law and legal institutions, and to point out the consequences of that ignorance.

Fundamental to the scholarly inquiries that animate CRT is the idea that race is a socially constructed category that is deeply implicated in the use and circulation of power in society. Thus its two principal objects of analysis are race and power. CRT represents a body of work created primarily, but not exclusively, by legal scholars of color. It has generated related inquiries in the social sciences and humanities, especially history, sociology, anthropology, and education. Because it takes reflective engagement as a fundamental feature of its methodology, CRT sees the knowledge generated by community-based practices as an essential source for the questions that scholars need to ask. Methodologically, this has produced a narrative form of scholarship that uses “storytelling” as a concrete expression of the commitment to reflective engagement. The importance of storytelling is located in its narrative methodology for construing reality, making sense of that reality, and then translating that meaning, through the use of stories to invoke the voices of an excluded community.

Critical Race Theory. (2008). In J. H. Moore (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Race and Racism (Vol. 1, pp. 365-368). Macmillan Reference USA.