Critical Race Theory Essay

Ideas The law scholars started to examine how racism could be perpetuated despite legal remedies to address it. Their major concerns included why the civil rights movement had stalled, why the critical legal studies had very little to say about race as a major form of oppression, and how the law was used to subvert racial justice (Sleeter, 2012). Eventually, in the 1990s, CRT was taken up by scholars in other disciplines such as education with the work of Gloria and William being cited as marking the entry of CRT in education. Tenets From its earliest formulations, CRT has been united by the concern to understand and oppose race inequality. Its main goal is to expose the hidden customary and systemic ways in which racism works.

CRT challenges the idea that laws are racially neutral and holds that claims of neutrality and color blindness mask the white privileges and powers. Laws may apply equally to everyone on paper, but in practice, the whites use power, property, and customary ways of behaving in a way that may affect the maintenance of racism. For instance, in distributional of educational resources, the adoption of color blind approaches (which fail to acknowledge racial reality) and the emphasis on supposed “merit” may appear open and equitable but in reality they not only perpetuate racial inequalities but also present them as fair and just. • Centrality of experiential knowledge and story telling Based on a white world view- often known as majoritarian stories- the ideology and knowledge system masks or denies racism.

CRT places special importance on experiential knowledge of the people of color. This could further be sub-branched as: • Asian CRT (AsianCrit) - examines racism in the past and current nativism and immigration policies, and the use of the “model minority” stereotype as a form of racialized control. • White CRT (WhiteCrit) – examines race, racism, and racial identity as it is enacted by whites. It names and exposes the workings of white privilege. ii. Feminist CRT (FemCrit) - examines gender oppression that people of color experience (Sleeter, 2012). CRT promotes despair and hopelessness by saying that things can never change. CRT does not deny the hope for success. It just argues that total victory over racism may prove difficult but goes on to insist that there is a duty to combat injustice.

CRT in Education Considering the research that has already been conducted on d/Deaf college students, it is apparent that most of those researches lack racial diversity. However, a research by Lissa Stapleton enlightens on the population of students, d/Deaf women of color, and their experiences based on their racial and d/Deaf identities while attending college education. CRT asks the question of how laws and policies are used to subvert racial justice. In this context, CRT could also seek to find out why deaf students of color are barely considered in research concerning their college experiences, whereas policies in research have made it clear that it is not appropriate to conduct research that triggers a reader to unconsciously assume that all d/Deaf students are white.