School Segregation CRT Student Debt
Critical Race Theory
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an approach to thinking about race and the law. CRT emerged in law schools in the 1970s and '80s, in response to the perceived failures of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Scholars were looking at the civil rights landscape and realizing that racial inequality wasn't on the wane. Derrick Bell was one of the first people to challenge the assumption that law was a neutral arbiter of race relations in the U.S. He was one of the first people to say, maybe the law is not a referee between the races, but perhaps the law is actually producing a relationship between the races that so often results in non-white people's subordination to white people. Thus, according to NPR's Code Switch, CRT was born. And no, your K-12 kids are not being taught CRT. Learn more about how conservatives leveraging a war against CRT is affecting the way we learn about Black History below.