Critical Race Theory

Catalog description

This course explores Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT refers to a body of work that emerged during the 1980s and 90s among legal educators to try and explain why there seemingly has been racial progress on the one hand through laws and court decisions that outlaw the most visible symbols of racial discrimination, but growing signs of racial inequality on the other in education, health, criminal justice, housing, politics, and other areas. During the past ten years, fields such as women’s studies, sociology, education, gender studies, history, criminology, and postcolonial studies have begun to look to the insights developed by critical race theorists. Without a doubt, CRT has spawned and/or influenced new areas of inquiry such as Latino/a critical studies, queer studies, critical race feminism, and critical white studies. Although social work researchers have begun to use CRT ideas such as intersectionality, the application of Critical Race Theory to the field remains largely unexplored.