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SOCIAL SCIENCES

WRITTEN BY: Tommy Curry

Alternative Title: CRT

Critical race theory (CRT), the view that race, instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is socially constructed
and that race, as a socially constructed concept, functions as a means to maintain the interests of the white population
that constructed it. According to CRT, racial inequality emerges from the social, economic, and legal differences that white
people create between “races” to maintain elite white interest in labour markets and politics and as such create the
circumstances that give rise to poverty and criminality in many minority communities. Though the intellectual origins of
the movement go back much further, the CRT movement officially organized itself in July 1989.

Despite the relatively recent appearance of CRT in academia, some scholars have found it a valuable perspective on race
and racism in America. CRT launched what many race scholars now take as a commonsense view. CRT scholars hold that
the laws and policies in the United States are biased against people of colour, and they have focused their scholarship on
demonstrating the ways in which the legal institutions support that bias.

The launch of the CRT movement in 1989 marked its separation from critical legal studies (CLS; the theory established at a
conference in 1977 that rethinks and overturns accepted norms and standards in legal practice and theory). Instead of
drawing theories of social organization and individual behaviour from continental European thinkers such as G.W.F. Hegel
and Karl Marx or psychoanalytic figures like Sigmund Freud as its theoretical predecessors, as CLS and feminist
jurisprudence had done, CRT was inspired by the American civil rights tradition through figures such as Martin Luther
King, Jr. and W.E.B. Du Bois, and from nationalist thinkers such as Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and Frantz Fanon. Being
steeped in radical black thought and nationalist thinking, critical race theory advanced theoretical understandings of the
law, politics, and American sociology that focused on the efforts of white people (Euro-Americans) to maintain their
historical advantages over people of colour.

CRT has spread beyond the confines of legal studies to many other fields, notably women’s and gender studies, education,
American studies, and sociology. CRT spin-off movements formed by Asian Americans and by Latinos have also taken
hold. Latino critical theory (LatCrit) emerged as an organized group in 1995 and has become a forceful movement in CRT
scholarship and activism.

Tommy Curry

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 Critical race theory
SOCIAL SCIENCES

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Social differentiation by race

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