Critical Race Theory! what is it?

iruo June 28, 20220 Comments
crt

Hello everyone! I trust y’all are doing great. The focus of today’s article is Critical Race Theory, also known as CRT. There has been much dissension lately in the US about CRT, and it’s been a big deal. Sometime in 2021, the topic exploded in the public arena, particularly in K-12, where numerous state legislaturesdebated billsseeking to prohibit its use in the classroom.

Is Critical Race Theory a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of colour against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in strong disagreement in regard to this.

To be fair, the ridges are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The occurrences of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like; housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the government’s role should be in correcting these past wrongs. When you add children and schooling into the mix, the debate becomes especially explosive.

Just what is Critical Race Theory?

Critical Race Theory is a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement ofcivil-rightsscholars and activists who seek to investigate the intersection ofrace,society, andlaw in the United Statesand to challenge mainstreamAmerican liberalapproaches toracial justice. The wordcritical” is an academic term that refers tocritical thinking,critical theory, and scholarlycriticism, rather than criticizing or blaming people.CRT is also used in sociology to explain social, political, and legal structures and power distribution through the lens of race.For example, the CRTconceptual frameworkis one way to study racial bias in laws and institutions, such as the how and why ofimprisonment ratesand how sentencing varies among racial groups in the United States.It first arose in the 1970s, like other critical schools of thought, such ascritical legal studies, which examines how legal rules protect the status quo.

critical race theory

In other words, CRT is anintellectualandsocial movementand loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on thepremisethatraceis not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour. Critical race theorists hold thatracismisinherentin the law and legal institutions of the United States insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especiallyAfrican Americans. Critical race theorists are generally dedicated to applying their understanding of the institutional or structural nature of racism to the concrete (if distant) goal of eliminating all race-based and other unjusthierarchies.

Fundamental Tenets of Critical Race Theory

Pursuant to the legal scholars;Richard Delgado andJean Stefancic, there are several general submissions regarding race andracismthat many critical race theorists would accept, despite the considerable variation of belief among members of the movement. These submissions constitutea set of fundamental tenets of CRT. They include:

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