critical race theory Concepts

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words

“victimhood…sorted by category, tallied, and ultimately ranked,” but the left openly embraced the notion that not all minorities experienced the same level of disadvantage. Critical race theory (CRT), particularly scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, provided a framework for understanding how overlapping minority identities compound oppression. This theory also influenced

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/01/womens-march-feminists-oppose-donald-trump-struggle-agree-how. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Critical race theory: Jacey Fortin, “Critical Race Theory: A Brief History,” New York Times, November 8, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-critical-race-theory.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT concept of intersectionality: Jane Coaston, “The Intersectionality Wars,” Vox

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, Tyler, 69, 239–40 “Crank That” (song), 35 Creative Commons, 51 Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, 153 Cribs (TV series), 41 Crisis of Culture, The (Roy), 273 critical race theory (CRT), 153–54 Cross Colours, 29 Cross, David, 22 Crouch, Ian, 106 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (film), 245 crowdsourcing, 162 “Cruel Summer” (song), 211 Crumbs

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

by Anand Giridharadas · 27 Aug 2018 · 296pp · 98,018 words

” (Chester Pierce, psychiatry, Harvard, 1970); “white privilege” (Peggy McIntosh, women’s studies, Wellesley, 1988); “gender identity” (Johns Hopkins School of Medicine); “intersectionality” (Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, critical race theory, University of California at Los Angeles, 1989). Nonetheless, Cuddy believed that in her field, the real need was for serious scholars, equipped with serious money

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth

by Elizabeth Williamson · 8 Mar 2022 · 574pp · 148,233 words

, the 1776 Commission, charged with “restoring patriotic education in our schools.” “I’m gonna go listen to what Trump has to say about them teaching critical race theory,” Watt said. “I’m so glad I have all that stuff in my attic. I might need that!” Two months later, Jim’s body was

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way

by Nick Cohen · 15 Jul 2015 · 414pp · 121,243 words

profound. However, no academics could come close to matching the obfuscation and murkiness of post-modern specialists in ‘theory’ – feminist theory, postcolonial theory, ‘other’ theory, critical race theory, queer theory, communicative action theory, structuration theory, neo-Marxian theory … any kind of theory, every kind of theory. In 1996 ‘theory’ was the victim of

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis

by Beth Macy · 15 Aug 2022 · 389pp · 111,372 words

government they hated stood by, and politicians who professed to lead them were engulfed in culture wars about transgender bathroom rights, Stonewall Jackson statues, and critical race theory. “People are making a virtue of going it alone and not depending on anyone, almost as a kind of self-protection,” Silva told me. Or

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein · 14 Sep 2021 · 384pp · 105,110 words

prisons are similar in their use of power to control populations (as analyzed by Michel Foucault in his metaphorical extension of Bentham’s Panopticon). And Critical Race Theory has at its foundation the real observation that the American legal system has had a particularly difficult time emerging from its racist past, and that

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, Medicine and Psychiatry, 28(4): 533–559. 4. For two excellent descriptions of how post-modernism, and its intellectual descendants such as post-structuralism and Critical Race Theory, have invaded the academy, see Pluckrose, H., Lindsay, J. and Boghossian, P., 2018. Academic grievance studies and the corruption of scholarship. Areo, February 10, 2018

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, 50 cost-benefit analysis, 204–5 COVID-19 pandemic, 71, 247–49 cowbirds, 126 cows, 83 craft, 9, 85, 227 craniates, 23 crepuscular, 91–92 Critical Race Theory, 193–94 crocodiles, 107 crows, 8, 34, 131, 147, 202, 212 cuckoos, 126 culture, 7, 9–10, 210–213, 252 adaptive evolution and, 13–14

The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

by Jesselyn Cook · 22 Jul 2024 · 321pp · 95,778 words

in the background of his life. Beyond the inescapable vaccine fearmongering, which often had little to do with actual science, national right-wing campaigns against critical race theory and the purported “trans agenda” were already dividing parents at his kids’ school. Rylee’s place was like a haven from the ugliness of the

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody

by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay · 14 Jul 2020 · 378pp · 107,957 words

POSTMODERNISM’S APPLIED TURN Making Oppression Real 3 POSTCOLONIAL THEORY Deconstructing the West to Save the Other 4 QUEER THEORY Freedom from the Normal 5 CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND INTERSECTIONALITY Ending Racism by Seeing It Everywhere 6 FEMINISMS AND GENDER STUDIES Simplification as Sophistication 7 DISABILITY AND FAT STUDIES Support-Group Identity Theory

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gender, sex, and sexuality, then, it also continues to do harm to the causes it seeks most interestedly to support. 5 CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND INTERSECTIONALITY Ending Racism by Seeing It Everywhere Critical race Theory is, at root, an American phenomenon. So thoroughly is this the case that although its ideas have been used outside the

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particularly poverty. Postmodernists have countered that, while material reality is of practical importance, it cannot be meaningfully improved while discourses continue to prioritize white people. Critical race theory in both incarnations, materialist and postmodern, reacted against liberalism and stresses a form of radicalism. As described by critical race Theorists Richard Delgado and Jean

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Stefancic, Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.7 As Delgado and

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wave of influential Theorists: scholars like Patricia Williams, Angela Harris, and Kimberlé Crenshaw—a student of Bell who helped him create the term “Critical Race Theory.” These scholars drew on critical race Theory, which included class analysis, and on feminism, which incorporated ideas about gender and sexuality. This produced a highly layered, “sophisticated” analysis of identity

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material realities relevant to systemic and structural understandings of racism, especially poverty. This was replaced by analysis of discourse and power. At the same time, critical race Theory invested heavily in identity politics and its supposed intellectual justification, standpoint theory—roughly, the idea that one’s identity and position in society influence how

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clear in its exposition. Indeed, the frustratingly obscure and ambiguous postmodern language of postcolonial and queer Theories is conspicuously absent from critical race Theory, probably because of its genesis in legal studies. Critical race Theory maintains a commitment to the role of discourse in constructing social reality and addresses issues of apparently infinite complexity, but it

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and educators include a fundamental distrust of liberalism, a rejection of meritocracy,24 and a commitment to working towards Social Justice.25 THE SPREAD OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY Critical race Theory has expanded out of legal studies and into many disciplines concerned with Social Justice. The theory of education (pedagogy) has been particularly strongly affected. As

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Delgado and Stefancic observe, Although CRT [critical race Theory] began as a movement in the law, it has rapidly spread beyond that discipline. Today, many scholars in the field of education consider themselves critical

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and hierarchy, tracking, affirmative action, high-stakes testing, controversies over curriculum and history, bilingual and multicultural education, and alternative and charter schools.26 They list critical race Theory’s strongest footholds, indicating how effectively it can embed itself in other disciplines: Political scientists ponder voting strategies coined by critical race theorists, while women

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and feminist Theoretical approaches hold that reason is a Western philosophical tradition, which unfairly disadvantages women and racial minorities. Consequently, critical race Theory takes an unapologetically activist stance: Unlike some academic disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension. It tries not only to understand our social situation but to change it, setting out not only

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black women by treating their experience as simply a variation on white women’s experience. These ideas developed into a core line of thought in critical race Theory that was instrumental to the development of intersectionality. INTERSECTIONALITY The critical race scholar who references postmodernism most explicitly in her work and who most clearly

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,” in which she defines intersectionality as a “provisional concept linking contemporary politics with postmodern theory.”32 For Crenshaw, a postmodern approach to intersectionality allowed both critical race Theory and feminism to incorporate political activism while retaining their understandings of race and gender as cultural constructs. Furthermore, this Theoretical approach allowed for ever more

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Pink have been criticized for failing “to understand and act from a place deeply cognizant of the multicategory dynamics of power at play.”55 Applying critical race Theory, Hancock argues that the mainstreaming of intersectionality is itself problematic because it whitens and “memeifies” intersectionality. For Hancock, the danger of “whitening” intersectionality and

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comfort is suspect.” Moreover, “Resistance is a predictable reaction to anti-racist education and must be explicitly and strategically addressed.”63 The core problems with critical race Theory are that it puts social significance back into racial categories and inflames racism, tends to be purely Theoretical, uses the postmodern knowledge and political principles

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postmodernism, which accepted identity oppression as “real” and thus made postmodernism relevant to feminist activism. It incorporated aspects of queer Theory, postcolonial Theory, and, particularly, critical race Theory through the concept of intersectionality. These new developments fundamentally changed the character of feminism both in the popular consciousness and in the academy. The resulting

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the postmodern political principle, as they came to be expressed through queer Theory (hence the focus on gender and its status as a social construction), critical race Theory (intersectionality), and postcolonial Theory (extending intersectionality to include postcolonial themes). In this new feminist paradigm, knowledge is “situated,” which means that it comes from

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society but also within feminism itself. The intersectional turn was pushed by scholars and activists, who used elements of queer Theory, postcolonial Theory, and especially critical race Theory to problematize feminism and feminists, in addition to commenting on what they painted as an intractably complicated and oppressive society. Intersectional Theory provided an entirely

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Theoretical project to make LGBTQ identities more visible. In every branch of applied postmodern Theory, objections to liberalism are a central tenet. Recall, for example, critical race Theory’s claim that liberalism primarily benefits the dominant, postcolonial Theory’s view of liberalism as a form of imperialist universalizing, and queer Theory’s objection

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Theorist Peggy McIntosh, a well-off white woman, and the author of a 1989 essay called “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.”41 Influenced by critical race Theory, McIntosh focuses on white privilege, but the concept of social privilege, unconnected to economic class, was soon extended to other identity categories—male, straight,

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sanctioned feminist, race, or sexuality issues. SUMMARY OF THE SHIFT The dominant form of feminism within gender studies, then, is intersectional feminism, which draws on critical race Theory, queer Theory, and postcolonial Theory. Gender studies rapidly moved away from its origins in “women’s studies” and its roots in materialist analyses, with the

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gender intersectional, to focus relentlessly on a simplistic concept of societal privilege, rooted overwhelmingly in identity (and not in economics) and to incorporate elements of critical race Theory and queer Theory, results in a highly muddled, Theoretical, and abstract analysis that makes it difficult—if not impossible—to reach any conclusions other than

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gender, and other identities are a peculiar fascination, while “normal” identities are problematized for the alleged implications of their very existence. We see this in critical race Theory, which advocates identifying with one’s socially constructed racial status and adopting, promoting, and protecting specific cultures. We see it in intersectional feminism, which continually

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This perfectly reasonable goal began to change in the 1980s. After the turn towards applied postmodernism and the incorporation of intersectional feminism, queer Theory, and critical race Theory, disability studies began to view ability as a social construct, and has since become increasingly radical and in denial about reality. Various forms of disability

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two postmodern principles: knowledge is a social construct, and society consists of systems of power and privilege. This orientation within disability studies frequently draws on critical race Theory. Disability studies as a whole relies heavily on both Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, and consequently its most frequent postmodern themes are the blurring of

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and complicate the issue of prejudice against the disabled—entirely unnecessarily—by burying it under a mountain of “overlapping discourses of privilege.” The use of critical race Theory as a model to insist that disabilities are ultimately social constructions is particularly unhelpful, given that—unlike social categories of race—physical and mental impairments

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2–7, this view was made actionable in the applied phase in the 1980s and 1990s, which saw postmodernism fragment into postcolonial Theory, queer Theory, critical race Theory, intersectional feminism, disability studies, and fat studies. Subsequently, especially since 2010, these postmodern ideas have become fully concretized in the combined intersectional Social Justice

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“epistemic virtues” of epistemic humility, epistemic curiosity/diligence, and epistemic openness.32 These vices and virtues, associated with relative privilege and oppression, feature prominently in critical race Theory and postcolonial Theory, where an oppressed standpoint allows a double or multiple consciousness, because oppressed people operate in different systems at the same time. The

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of modernity. It is mostly distinct from postmodern critical theory, which is often referred to simply as “Theory” or, more specific critical Theoretic lines like “critical race Theory” or “critical dietetics.” In fact, the members of the Frankfurt School, especially Jürgen Habermas, were largely critical of postmodernism. Contemporary approaches that are typically referred

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spend almost no time acknowledging that biological realities exist and almost all their time rejecting them and asserting the social construction of those categories. 5 Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality 1.Michael Neill, “‘Mulattos,’ ‘Blacks,’ and ‘Indian Moors’: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference,” Shakespeare Quarterly 49, no. 4 (1998).

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and practice of race inequality in the UK. Nicola Rollock and David Gillborn, “Critical Race Theory (CRT),” BERA, 2011, www.bera.ac.uk/publication/critical-race-theory-crt. 24.For example, Payne Hiraldo, of the University of Vermont, set out five tenets of critical race Theory for use in higher education. These are: Counter-storytelling—“A framework that legitimizes

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presentation of observable evidence. 25.The Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education presents yet another variation on these core tenets but stresses the political aims of critical race Theory more strongly. Under the subheading “Centrality of Racism,” Christine E. Sleeter writes, “Critical race theorists assume that racism is not an aberration, but rather

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a fundamental, endemic, and normalized way of organizing society.” Christine E. Sleeter, “Critical Race Theory and Education,” in Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education, ed. James A. Banks (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2012), 491. Sleeter continues to identify the following tenets

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of critical race Theory: 1.Challenges to claims of neutrality, color blindness, and meritocracy; 2.Whites as beneficiaries of racial remedies (interest convergence thesis); 3.Centrality of experiential knowledge

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trans-exclusionary and the intersectional feminists who are trans activists. Remember too that divides between materialists and postmodernists are prominent in both postcolonial Theory and critical race Theory. 36.This new alignment can be seen in the foreword to The Fat Studies Reader, which focuses on Theoretical developments: Like feminist studies, queer

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as both a phenomenon and a topic of study, [it] obviously connects to and interpenetrates with major social and intellectual movements, such as feminism, hermeneutics, critical race theory, disability studies, and decolonialising, queer, and trans epistemologies. Ian James Kid, José Medina, and Gaile Polhaus, “Introduction,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice,

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–80. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert J. Hurley. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976. ———. Speech

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for Change.” In Decolonising the University, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, 19–36. London: Pluto Press, 2018. Gillborn, David. “Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and the Primacy of Racism.” Qualitative Inquiry 21, no. 3 (2015): 277–87. Goodley, Dan. Dis/ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism. New York: Routledge

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Spirit. 1807. Hicks, Stephen R. C. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Tempe, AZ: Scholargy Publishing, 2004. Hiraldo, Payne. “The Role of Critical Race Theory in Higher Education.” Vermont Connection 31, no. 7 (2010): Article 7. scholarworks.uvm.edu/tvc/vol31/iss1/7. Hirschmann, Nancy J. “Choosing Betrayal.” Perspectives on

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The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, edited by Ian James Kidd, José Medina, and Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., 79–88. London: Routledge, 2017. Sleeter, Christine E. “Critical Race Theory and Education.” In Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education, edited by James A. Banks, 491–95. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2012. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism

by Ruth Kinna · 31 Jul 2019 · 405pp · 103,723 words

the Black Blocs? Anarchy in Action around the World, trans. Lazer Lederhendler (Oakland: PM Press, 2014) Intersectionality Kimberlé Crenshaw, Instructors’ Guide: Free Resources on Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory Across Disciplines, online at http://www.racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/Kimberle-Crenshaw-Instructors_-Guide-1.pdf Francis Dupuis-Déri, ‘Is the State Part of the Matrix

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth

by Jonathan Rauch · 21 Jun 2021 · 446pp · 109,157 words

, UC Berkeley,” NBC Bay Area, January 16, 2018. 38. Mari J. Matsuda, Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment (Westview, 1993). 39. For a full treatment of the fallacy that suppressing so-called hate speech reduces hatred, see

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. Christopher Dummitt, “Confessions of a Social Constructionist,” Quillette, September 17, 2019. 75. This and related ideologies have been called political correctness, wokeness, the successor ideology, critical race theory, and intersectionalism, among other terms. In general, the variants have in common a neo-Marxist structure in which the axes of oppression and revolution are