Subject People Key-Topics Critical Race Theory Bibliographic Details Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology

Sections Critical Race Theory REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS Critical race theory refers to a historical and contemporary body of scholarship that aims to interrogate the discourses, ideologies, and social structures that produce and maintain conditions of racial injustice. Critical race theory analyzes how race and racism are foundational elements in historical and contemporary social structures and social experiences. In defining critical race theory, it is important to make a distinction between the deep historical tradition of critical theorizing about race and racism and a specific body of American legal scholarship that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in response to the successes and failures of the Civil Rights Movement struggles for the freedom and liberation of people of color of the 1950s and 1960s. While this new school of legal thought coined the phrase "critical race theory" to signal a new critical analysis of the role of the law in propagating and maintaining racism, this movement is part of a broader intellectual tradition of critical theories of race and anti-racist struggle that has political roots in the work of pioneering scholar-activists like Frederick Douglass, Ida Wells-Barnett, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Using this broader framework, critical race theory can be viewed as a diagnostic body of "intellectual activism" scholarship that seeks to identify the pressure points for anti-racist struggle. Given the historical scope of critical race theories, this essay highlights several core themes that tie together this eclectic body of explicitly political theorizing. The first core theme deals with how critical race theories frame their two focal objects of study: race and racism. First, critical race theory understands the concept of race as a social construction that is produced as a result of the cultural and political meanings ascribed to it through social interactions and relationships across multiple levels of social organization. Since the 1600s, race has been a constitutive feature of global social, political, economic, and cultural organization. Critical race theories have demonstrated how race concepts and their accompanying racisms were foundational to the administration of colonial social systems, the rise and expansion of global capitalism, and th