Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory, often shortened to CRT, is a conceptual framework developed to understand how social ideas of race and ethnicity interact with law, politics and mass media, mainly in the United States. It treats racism as built into laws and institutions, not only as the prejudice of individuals, and it holds that race is a social construct with no biological basis. A central idea is intersectionality, the way inequalities of race, class, gender and disability interconnect. Scholars in this tradition argue that formally color-blind laws can still produce racially unequal outcomes, such as disparate incarceration rates. The framework began in the mid-1970s among American legal scholars who reworked critical legal studies, and it later spread into sociology and education. Academic critics say it relies on storytelling over evidence, and since 2020 it has been the target of political efforts to restrict its teaching in US schools, a dispute in which advocates and opponents describe its tenets very differently.