How many of y’all where asked this in school? I would guess too few if any. You can read a much more detailed history here.Ĭritical race theory asks us to consider how we can transform the relationship between race, racism, and power and work toward the liberation of People of Color. At first it was mainly referenced in legal scholarship, but now it’s used across many different fields and disciplines. They blended concepts from critical legal studies and radical feminism with the influences of the Black Power and Chicano movements of the time and critical race theory was born. She’s was right! I know that Critical Race Theory sounds incredibly academic but I have a feeling many of you are already doing work based on CRT and just don’t know it, so I pulled together a little overview for y’all.īrief History: In the 1970’s and 80’s a group of lawyers, activists, and legal scholars* recognized that they needed a new framework to combat racism and oppression in America. It was like I was living in a totally different world than what my professors were teaching about.Ī friend of mine said that Freedom School is basically my way of bringing Critical Race Theory to the folks in my life. During this time I was trying to figure out why the education I was paying for was not meshing with the lived experience I possessed being a black woman from the south side of Chicago. I hadn’t learned about it in school because I attended predominantly white institutions. The very first time I heard about Critical Race Theory (CRT) I was in college.

Critical race theory tenets three