Critical Race Theory

Although born of two distinct academic worlds, critical race theory and action research are natural bedfellows. Critical race theory originated in the legal academy to expose the ways in which American law and its analytical paradigms create, reproduce and maintain hierarchical social status regimes, particularly those based on race and ethnicity. The term critical race theory, or CRT for short, has been in existence since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the first identifiable CRT articles and essays were published in several leading American law journals. Those first pieces focused their critiques on American constitutional and civil rights jurisprudence as it had developed in the post–Brown v. Board of Education era (from the 1950s through the early 1980s), but its reach has broadened significantly since then to encompass a broad range of legal subjects, [Page 216]including but not limited to criminal law, anti-discrimination law (which covers, e.g., the law of employment discrimination and affirmative action), tort law, property law and contract law. Additionally, over the past 30 years, CRT scholars have drawn heavily on non-legal disciplines, such as sociology, history, political theory, philosophy, cultural theory, literary theory and economics, to name a few. Thus, like action research, one of CRT's defining features is that it is inter- and cross-disciplinary, both internally (with respect to law) and externally (with respect to non-law fields).

Even more significantly, CRT shares with action research a ‘first principles' commitment to addressing issues of community and social life, especially as they relate to social political and socio-economic inequality and how such inequalities are affected by the law. Because most CRT scholars are also trained lawyers who are particularly sensitive to and knowledgeable about the strategic significance and mechanics of both legal process and forms of remedy, CRT scholars have much to offer action researchers by way of collaboration and much to learn from action researchers by way of the same. To provide more insight into why this is the case, this entry first provides a brief history of CRT's origins within the legal academy. It then identifies and describes key intellectual insights of the CRT movement that coincide with the values and commitments of action research.