critical race theory phd

The State of Critical Race Theory in Education

• Posted February 23, 2022
• By Jill Anderson
• Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
• Moral, Civic, and Ethical Education

When Gloria Ladson-Billings set out in the 1990s to adapt critical race theory from law to education, she couldn’t have predicted that it would become the focus of heated school debates today.

Over the past couple years, the scrutiny of critical race theory — a theory she pioneered to help explain racial inequities in education — has become heavily politicized in school communities and by legislators. Along the way, it has also been grossly misunderstood and used as a lump term about many things that are not actually critical race theory, Ladson-Billings says. 

“It's like if I hate it, it must be critical race theory,” Ladson-Billings says. “You know, that could be anything from any discussions about diversity or equity. And now it's spread into LGBTQA things. Talk about gender, then that's critical race theory. Social-emotional learning has now gotten lumped into it. And so it is fascinating to me how the term has been literally sucked of all of its meaning and has now become 'anything I don't like.'”

In this week’s Harvard EdCast, Ladson-Billings discusses how she pioneered critical race theory, the current politicization and tension around teaching about race in the classroom, and offers a path forward for educators eager to engage in work that deals with the truth about America’s history. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Jill Anderson:   I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast.

Gloria Ladson-Billings never imagined a day when the words critical race theory would make the daily news, be argued over at school board meetings, or targeted by legislators. She pioneered an adaptation of critical race theory from law to education back in the 1990s. She's an educational researcher focused on theory and pedagogy who at the time was looking for a better way to explain racial disparities in education.

Today the theory is widely misunderstood and being used as an umbrella term for anything tied to race and education. I wondered what Gloria sees as a path forward from here. First, I wanted to know what she was thinking in this moment of increased tension and politicization around critical race theory and education.

Well, if I go back and look at the strategy that's been employed to attack critical race theory, it actually is pretty brilliant from a strategic point of view. The first time that I think that general public really hears this is in September of '20 when then president and candidate Donald Trump, who incidentally is behind in the polls, says that we're not going to have it because it's going to destroy democracy. It's going to tear the country apart. I'm not going to fund any training that even mentions critical race theory.

And what's interesting, he says, "And anti-racism." Now he's now paired two things together that were not really paired together in the literature and in practice. But if you dig a little deeper, you will find on the Twitter feed of Christopher Rufo, who is from the Manhattan Institute, two really I think powerful tweets. One in which he says, "We're going to render this brand toxic." Essentially what we're going to do is make you think, whenever you hear anything negative, you will think critical race theory. And it will destroy all of the, quote, cultural insanities. I think that's his term that Americans despise. There's a lot to be unpacked there, which Americans? Who is he talking about? What are these cultural insanities? And then there's another tweet in which he says, "We have effectively frozen the brand." So anytime you think of anything crazy, you think critical race theory. So he's done this very effective job of rendering the term, in some ways without meaning. It's like if I hate it, it must be critical race theory.

You know, that could be anything from any discussions about diversity or equity. And now it's spread into LGBTQA things. Talk about gender, then that's critical race theory. Social emotional learning has now got lumped into it. And so it is fascinating to me how the term has been literally sucked of all of its meaning and has now become anything I don't like.

Jill Anderson:  Can you break it down? What is critical race theory? What isn't it?

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Let me be pretty elemental here. Critical race theory is a theoretical tool that began in legal studies, in law schools, in an attempt to explain racial inequity. It serves the same function in education. How do you explain the inequity of achievement, the racial inequity of achievement in our schools?

Now let's be clear. The nation has always had an explanation for inequity. Since 1619, it's always had a explanation. And indeed from 1619 to the mid 20th century, that explanation was biogenetic. Those people are just not smart enough. Those people are just not worthy enough. Those people are not moral enough.

In fact across the country, we had on college and university campuses, programs and departments in eugenics. If you went to the World's Fair or the World Expositions back in the turn of the 20th century, you could see exhibits with, quote, groups of people from the best group who was always white and typically blonde and blue eyed, to the worst group, which is typically a group of Africans, generally pygmies. So the idea is you can rank people. So we've always had an explanation for why we thought inequity exists.

Somewhere around the mid 20th century, 1950s, you'll get a switch that says, well, no, it's really not genetic it's that some groups haven't had an equal opportunity. That was a powerful explanation. So one of the things that you begin to see around mid 1950s is legislation and court decisions, Brown versus Board of Education. You start to see the Voters Rights Act. You see the Civil Rights Act. You see affirmative action going into the 1960s. And yeah, I think that's a pretty good, powerful explanatory model.

Except they all get rolled back. 1954, Brown v. Board of Education . How many of our kids are still in segregated schools in 2022? So that didn't hold. Affirmative action. The court's about to hear that, right? Because of actually the case that's coming out of Harvard. Voters rights. How many of our states have rolled back voters rights? You can't give a person a bottle of water who was waiting in line in Georgia. We're shrinking the window for when people can vote.

So all of the things that were a part of the equality of opportunity explanation have rolled away. Critical race theory's explanation for racial inequality is that it is baked into the way we have organized the society. It is not aberrant. It's not one of those things that we all clutch our pearls and say, "Oh my God, I can't believe that happened." It happens on a regular basis all the time. And so that's really one of the tenets that people are uncomfortable hearing. That it's not abnormal behavior in our society for people to react in racist ways.

Jill Anderson: My understanding is that critical race theory is not something that is taught in schools. This is an older, like graduate school level, understanding and learning in education, not something for K–12 kids, not something my kid's going to learn in elementary school.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: You're exactly right. It is not. First of all, kids in K12 don't need theory. They need some very practical hands-on experiences. So no, it's not taught in K12 schools. I never even taught it as a professor at the University of Wisconsin. I didn't even teach it to my undergraduates. They had no use for it. My undergraduates were going to be teachers. So what would they do with it? I only taught it in graduate courses. And I have students who will tell you, "I talked with Professor Ladson-billings about using critical race theory for my research," and she looked at what I was doing and said, "It doesn't apply. Don't use it."

So I haven't been this sort of proselytizer. I've said to students, if what you're looking at needs an explanation for the inequality, you have a lot of theories that you can choose from. You can choose from feminist theory. That often looks at inequality across gender. You could look at Marx's theory. That looks at inequality across class. There are lots of theories to explain inequality. Critical race theory is trying to explain it across race and its intersections.

Jill Anderson:  We're seeing this lump definition falling under critical race theory, where it could be anything. It could be anti-racism, diversity and equity, multicultural education, anti-racism, cultural [inaudible 00:09:15]. All of it's being lumped together. It's not all the same thing.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Well, and in some ways it's proving the point of the critical race theorists, right? That it's kind normal. It's going to keep coming up because that's the way you see the world. I mean, here's an interesting lumping together that I think people have just bought whole cloth. That somehow Nikole Hannah-Jones' 1619 is critical race theory. No, it's not.

No. It. Is. Not. It is a journalist's attempt to pull together strands of a date that we tend to gloss over and say, here are all the things were happening and how the things that happened at this time influenced who we became. It's really interesting that people have jumped on that. And there is another book that came out, and it also came out of a newspaper special from the Hartford Courant years ago called Complicity. That book is set in New England and it talks about how the North essentially kept slavery going.

And when it was published by the Hartford Courant, Connecticut, and particularly Hartford said, we want a copy of this in every one of our middle and high schools to look out at what our role has been. Because the way we typically tell you our history is to say, the noble and good North and then the backward and racist South. Well, no, the entire country was engaged in the slave trade. And it benefited folks across the nation.

That particular special issue, which got turned into a book hasn't raised an eyebrow. But here comes Nikole Hannah-Jones. And initially, of course, she won a Pulitzer for it and people were celebrating her. But it's gotten lumped into this discussion that essentially says you cannot have a conversation about race.

What I find the most egregious about this situation is we are taking books out of classrooms, which is very anti-democratic. It is not, quote, the American way. And so you're saying that kids can't read the story of Ruby Bridges. It's okay for Ruby Bridges at six years old to have to have been escorted by federal marshals and have racial epithets spewed at her. It's just not okay for a six year old today to know that happened to her. I mean, one of the rationales for not talking about race, I don't even say critical race theory, but not talking about race in the classroom is we don't want white children to feel bad.

My response is, well great, but what were you guys in the 1950s and sixties when I was in school. Because I had to sit there in a mostly white classroom in Philadelphia and read Huckleberry Finn , with Mark Twain with a very liberal use of the n-word. And most of my classmates just snickering. I'd take it. I'd read it. It didn't make me feel good. I had to read Robinson Crusoe . I had to read Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind . I had to read Heart Of Darkness .

All of these books which we have canonized, are books of their time. And they often make us feel a particular kind way about who we are in this society. But all of a sudden one group is protected. We can't let white children feel bad about what they read.

Jill Anderson: I was reading your most recent book, Critical Race Theory in Education, a Scholars Journey , and I was struck by when you started to do this work and this research, and adapt it from law back in the early 1990s. You talked about presenting this for the first time, or one of the first times. And there was obviously a group excited by it, a group annoyed by it. I look at what's happening now and I see parents and educators. Some are excited by a movement to teach children more openly and honestly about race. And then there's going to be those who are annoyed by it. You've been navigating these two sides your whole life, your whole career. So what do you tell educators who are eager, and open, and want to do this work, but they're afraid of the opposition?

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  Well, I think there's a difference between essentially forcing one's ideas and agenda on students, and having kids develop the criticality that they will need to participate in democracy. And whenever we have pitched battles, we've been talking about race, but we've had the same kind of conversation around the environment, right? That you cannot be in coal country telling people that coal is bad, because people are making their living off of that coal. So we've been down this road before.

What I suggest to teachers is, number one, they have to have good relationships with the parents and community that they are serving, and they need to be transparent. I've taught US History for eighth graders and 11th graders before going into academe, and we've had to deal with hard questions. But there's a degree to which the community has always trusted that I had their students' best interests at heart, that I want them to be successful, that I want them to be able to make good decisions as citizens.

That's the bigger mission, I think, of education. That we are not just preparing people to go into the workplace. We are preparing people to go into voting booths, and to participate in healthy debate. The problem I'm having with critical race theory is I'm having a debate with people who don't know what we're debating. You know, I told one interview, I said, "It's like debating a toddler over bedtime. That's not a good debate." You can't win that debate. The toddler doesn't understand the concept. It's just that I don't want to do it.

I will say following the news coverage that I don't believe that all of these people out there are parents. I believe that there is a large number of operatives whose job it is to gin up sentiment against any forward movement and progress around racial equality, and equity, and diversity.

You know, to me, what should be incensing people was what they saw in Charlottesville, with those people, with those Tiki torches. What should be incensing people is what they saw January 6th. People lost their lives in both of those incidents. Nobody's lost their lives in a critical race theory discussion. You know?

I'm someone who believes that debate is healthy. And in fact debate is the only thing that you can have in a true democracy. The minute you start shutting off debate, the minute you say that's not even discussable, then you're moving towards totalitarianism. You know? That's what happened in the former Soviet Union and probably now in Russia. That's what has happened in regimes that say, no other idea is permitted, is discussable. And that's not a road that I think we should be walking here.

Jill Anderson: I feel like we're getting lost in the terminology, which we've talked about. And for school leaders, I wonder if the conversation needs to start with local districts in their communities debunking, or demystifying, or telling the truth about what critical race theory is, that kids aren't learning it in the schools. That that's not what it's about. Does it not even matter at this point because people are always going to be resistant to the things that you just even mentioned?

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  I'm a bit of a sports junkie, so I'll use a sports metaphor here. I'm just someone who would rather play offense than defense. I think if you get into this debate, you are on the defensive from the start. For me, I want to be on the offense. I want to say, as a school district, here are our core values. Here's what we stand for. Many, many years ago when I began my academic career, I started it at Santa Clara University, which is a private Catholic Jesuit university. And students would sometimes bristle at the discussions we would have about race and ethnicity, and diversity and equality.

And I'd always pull out the university's mission statement. And I'd say, "You see these words right here around social justice? That's where I am with this work. I don't know what they're doing at the business school on social justice, but I can tell you that the university has essentially made a commitment it to this particular issue. Now we can debate whether or not you agree with me, but I haven't pulled this out of thin air."

So if I'm a school superintendent, I want to say, "Here are core values that we have." I'm reminded of many years ago. I was supervising a student teacher. It was a second grade. And she had a little boy in a classroom and they were doing something for Martin Luther King. It might have been just coloring in a picture of him with some iconic statement. And this one little boy put a big X on it. And she said, "Why did you do that?" And his response was, "We don't believe in Martin Luther King in my house." So she said, "Wow, okay, well, why not?" And he really couldn't articulate. She says, "Well, tell me, who's your friend in this classroom?" And one of the first names out of his mouth was a little Black boy.

And she said, "Do you know that he's a lot like Martin Luther King? You know, he's a little boy. He's Black." She was worried about where this was headed and didn't know what to do as a student teacher, because she's not officially licensed to teach at this point. And I shared with her our strategy. I said, "Why don't you talk with your cooperating teacher about what happens and see what she says. If she doesn't seem to want to do anything, casually mention, don't go marching to the principal's office. But when you have a chance to interact with the principal, you might say something I had the strangest encounter the other day and then share it." Well, she did that.

The principal called the parents in and said, "Your child is not in trouble, but here's what you need to know about who we are and what we stand for."

Jill Anderson:  Wow.

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  You know? And so again, it wasn't like let's have a big school board meeting. Let's string up somebody for saying something. It wasn't tearing this child down. But it was reiterating, here are our core values. I think schools can stand on this. They can say, "This is what we stand for. This is who we are." They don't ever have to mention the word critical race theory.

The retrenchment we are seeing in some states, I think it was a textbook that they were going to use in Texas that essentially described enslaved people as workers. That's just wrong. That's absolutely wrong. And I can tell you that if we don't teach our children the truth, what happens when they show up in classes at the college level and they are exposed to the truth, they are incensed. They are angry and they cannot understand, why are we telling these lies?

We don't have to make up lies about the American story. It is a story of both triumph and defeat. It is a story of both valor and, some cases, shame. Slavery actually happened. We trafficked with human beings, and there's a consequence to that. But it doesn't mean we didn't get past it. It doesn't mean we didn't fight a war over it, and decide that's not who we want to be.

Jill Anderson:  What's the path forward? What can we do to make sure that students are supported and learning about their own history so that they are prepared to go out into a diverse global society?

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  I'm perhaps an unrepentant optimist, because I think that these young people are not fooled by this. You know, when they started, quote, passing bans and saying, "We can't have this and we won't have this," I said, "Nobody who's doing this understands anything about child and adolescent development." Because how do you get kids to do something? You tell them they can't do.

So I have had more outreach from young people asking me, tell me about this. What is this? These young people are burning up Google looking for what is this they're trying to keep from us? So I have a lot of faith in our youth that they are not going to allow us to censor that. Everything you tell them, they can't read, those are the books they go look for. You know, I have not seen a spate in reading like this in a very long time.

So I think it's interesting that people don't even understand something as basic as child development and adolescent development. But I do think that the engagement of young people, which we literally saw in the midst of the pandemic and the post George Floyd, the incredible access to information that young people have will save us. You know, it's almost like people feel like this is their last bastion and they're not going to let people take whatever privilege they see themselves having away from them. It's not sustainable. Young people will not stand for it.

Jill Anderson:  Well, I love that. And it's such a great note to end on because it feels good to think that there is a path forward, because right now things are looking very scary. Thank you so much.

Gloria Ladson-Billings:  Well, you're quite welcome. And I will tell you, again sports metaphor, I'm an, again, unrepentant 76ers fan. I realize you're in Massachusetts with those Celtics. But trust me, the 76ers. Okay? One of my favorite former 76ers is Allen Iverson and he has a wonderful line, I believe when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. He said, "My haters have made me great."

Well, I will tell you that I had conceived of that book on critical race theory well before Donald Trump made his statement in September of 2020. And I thought, "Okay, here's another book which will sell a modest number of copies to academics." The book is flying off the shelves. Y'all keep talking about it. You're just making me great.

Jill Anderson:  Maybe it will start the revolution that we need.

Gloria Ladson-Billings: Well, thank you so much.

Jill Anderson:  Thank you. Gloria Ladson-billings is a professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is the author of many books, including the recent Critical Race Theory in Education, a Scholar's Journey . I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.

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Critical Race Theory: A Brief History

How a complicated and expansive academic theory developed during the 1980s has become a hot-button political issue 40 years later.

By Jacey Fortin

About a year ago, even as the United States was seized by protests against racism, many Americans had never heard the phrase “ critical race theory. ”

Now, suddenly, the term is everywhere. It makes national and international headlines and is a target for talking heads. Culture wars over critical race theory have turned school boards into battlegrounds, and in higher education, the term has been tangled up in tenure battles . Dozens of United States senators have branded it “activist indoctrination.”

But C.R.T., as it is often abbreviated, is not new. It’s a graduate-level academic framework that encompasses decades of scholarship, which makes it difficult to find a satisfying answer to the basic question:

What, exactly, is critical race theory ?

First things first …

The person widely credited with coining the term is Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a law professor at the U.C.L.A. School of Law and Columbia Law School.

Asked for a definition, she first raised a question of her own: Why is this coming up now?

“It’s only prompted interest now that the conservative right wing has claimed it as a subversive set of ideas,” she said, adding that news outlets, including The New York Times, were covering critical race theory because it has been “made the problem by a well-resourced, highly mobilized coalition of forces.”

Some of those critics seem to cast racism as a personal characteristic first and foremost — a problem caused mainly by bigots who practice overt discrimination — and to frame discussions about racism as shaming, accusatory or divisive.

But critical race theorists say they are mainly concerned with institutions and systems.

“The problem is not bad people,” said Mari Matsuda, a law professor at the University of Hawaii who was an early developer of critical race theory. “The problem is a system that reproduces bad outcomes. It is both humane and inclusive to say, ‘We have done things that have hurt all of us, and we need to find a way out.’”

OK, so what is it?

Critical race theorists reject the philosophy of “colorblindness.” They acknowledge the stark racial disparities that have persisted in the United States despite decades of civil rights reforms, and they raise structural questions about how racist hierarchies are enforced, even among people with good intentions.

Proponents tend to understand race as a creation of society, not a biological reality. And many say it is important to elevate the voices and stories of people who experience racism.

But critical race theory is not a single worldview; the people who study it may disagree on some of the finer points. As Professor Crenshaw put it, C.R.T. is more a verb than a noun.

“It is a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced,” she said, “the ways that racial inequality is facilitated, and the ways that our history has created these inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced unless we attend to the existence of these inequalities.”

Professor Matsuda described it as a map for change.

“For me,” she said, “critical race theory is a method that takes the lived experience of racism seriously, using history and social reality to explain how racism operates in American law and culture, toward the end of eliminating the harmful effects of racism and bringing about a just and healthy world for all.”

Why is this coming up now?

Like many other academic frameworks, critical race theory has been subject to various counterarguments over the years . Some critics suggested, for example, that the field sacrificed academic rigor in favor of personal narratives. Others wondered whether its emphasis on systemic problems diminished the agency of individual people.

This year, the debates have spilled far beyond the pages of academic papers .

Last year, after protests over the police killing of George Floyd prompted new conversations about structural racism in the United States, President Donald J. Trump issued a memo to federal agencies that warned against critical race theory, labeling it as “divisive,” followed by an executive order barring any training that suggested the United States was fundamentally racist.

His focus on C.R.T. seemed to have originated with an interview he saw on Fox News, when Christopher F. Rufo , a conservative scholar now at the Manhattan Institute , told Tucker Carlson about the “cult indoctrination” of critical race theory.

Use of the term skyrocketed from there, though it is often used to describe a range of activities that don’t really fit the academic definition, like acknowledging historical racism in school lessons or attending diversity trainings at work.

The Biden administration rescinded Mr. Trump’s order, but by then it had already been made into a wedge issue. Republican-dominated state legislatures have tried to implement similar bans with support from conservative groups, many of whom have chosen public schools as a battleground .

“The woke class wants to teach kids to hate each other, rather than teaching them how to read,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said to the state’s board of education in June, shortly before it moved to ban critical race theory. He has also called critical race theory “state-sanctioned racism.”

According to Professor Crenshaw, opponents of C.R.T. are using a decades-old tactic: insisting that acknowledging racism is itself racist .

“The rhetoric allows for racial equity laws, demands and movements to be framed as aggression and discrimination against white people,” she said. That, she added, is at odds with what critical race theorists have been saying for four decades.

What happened four decades ago?

In 1980, Derrick Bell left Harvard Law School.

Professor Bell, a pioneering legal scholar who died in 2011 , is often described as the godfather of critical race theory. “He broke open the possibility of bringing Black consciousness to the premiere intellectual battlefields of our profession,” Professor Matsuda said.

His work explored (among other things) what it would mean to understand racism as a permanent feature of American life, and whether it was easier to pass civil rights legislation in the United States because those laws ultimately served the interests of white people .

After Professor Bell left Harvard Law, a group of students there began protesting the faculty’s lack of diversity. In 1983, The New York Times reported , the school had 60 tenured law professors. All but one were men, and only one was Black.

The demonstrators, including Professors Crenshaw and Matsuda, who were then graduate students at Harvard, also chafed at the limitations of their curriculum in critical legal studies, a discipline that questioned the neutrality of the American legal system, and sought to expand it to explore how laws sustained racial hierarchies.

“It was our job to rethink what these institutions were teaching us,” Professor Crenshaw said, “and to assist those institutions in transforming them into truly egalitarian spaces.”

The students saw that stark racial inequality had persisted despite the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and ’ 60s. They sought, and then developed, new tools and principles to understand why. A workshop that Professor Crenshaw organized in 1989 helped to establish these ideas as part of a new academic framework called critical race theory.

What is critical race theory used for today?

OiYan Poon, an associate professor with Colorado State University who studies race, education and intersectionality, said that opponents of critical race theory should try to learn about it from the original sources.

“If they did,” she said, “they would recognize that the founders of C.R.T. critiqued liberal ideologies, and that they called on research scholars to seek out and understand the roots of why racial disparities are so persistent, and to systemically dismantle racism.”

To that end, branches of C.R.T. have evolved that focus on the particular experiences of Indigenous , Latino , Asian American , and Black people and communities. In her own work, Dr. Poon has used C.R.T. to analyze Asian Americans’ opinions about affirmative action .

That expansiveness “signifies the potency and strength of critical race theory as a living theory — one that constantly evolves,” said María C. Ledesma, a professor of educational leadership at San José State University who has used critical race theory in her analyses of campus climate , pedagogy and the experiences of first-generation college students. “People are drawn to it because it resonates with them.”

Some scholars of critical race theory see the framework as a way to help the United States live up to its own ideals, or as a model for thinking about the big, daunting problems that affect everyone on this planet.

“I see it like global warming,” Professor Matsuda said. “We have a serious problem that requires big, structural changes; otherwise, we are dooming future generations to catastrophe. Our inability to think structurally, with a sense of mutual care, is dooming us — whether the problem is racism, or climate disaster, or world peace.”

Berkeley School of Education

Critical studies of race, class, and gender.

Our faculty engage in interdisciplinary analysis to understand the functions, limits, and possibilities of schooling. In particular, race, class, and gender relations are social forces that inform and shape the organization of schools and various educational spaces including formal and informal learning communities. Our faculty also examine the transformative functions of language and literacy keeping in constant view their potential to effect social change and create more just societies. We explore the role of schooling in building and sustaining a democratic society in the face of social inequality, economic restructuring, and changing social relations in the nation-state. Examples include the political activities of students and teachers in and out of school, the pedagogy of radical social movements, the root causes and effects of white supremacy and settler colonialism in education, the knowledge valued as the official curriculum, policies concerning discipline or funding, and disparities between educational contexts and in learning outcomes. Our vision for the cluster has led us to develop the areas of interest listed below.

To find a faculty member who is an expert in the area, click on the titles below.

Critical social and cultural theories.

Patricia Baquedano-López * Lisa García Bedolla Gina Garcia* Kris Gutiérrez * Zeus Leonardo Daniel Perlstein Thomas M. Philip* Derek Van Rheenen Michelle D. Young*

* Faculty available to advise new doctoral students.

Globalization, Immigration, and Migration

Patricia Baquedano-López * Lisa García Bedolla Cati V. de los Ríos Kris Gutiérrez * Glynda Hull * Erin Murphy-Graham * Daniel Perlstein Derek Van Rheenen

Race and Social Inequality in Urban Education

Patricia Baquedano-López * Lisa García Bedolla Travis J. Bristol Kris Gutiérrez * Zeus Leonardo Marcia Linn * Jabari Marhiri Daniel Perlstein Thomas M. Philip* Tesha Sengupta-Iriving* Derek Van Rheenen Frank C. Worrell*

Domination and Resistance across Educational Settings

Patricia Baquedano-López * Lisa García Bedolla Travis J. Bristol Cati V. de los Ríos Gina Garcia* Kris Gutiérrez * Glynda Hull * Zeus Leonardo Daniel Perlstein Derek Van Rheenen

Social Identities in Educational Contexts

Lisa García Bedolla Travis J. Bristol Cati V. de los Ríos Gina Garcia* Kris Gutiérrez * Glynda Hull * Zeus Leonardo Erin Murphy-Graham * Tesha Sengupta-Iriving* Laura Sterponi * Derek Van Rheenen Frank C. Worrell*

* Faculty available to advise new doctoral students.

Language, Literacy, and Digital Media

Patricia Baquedano-López * Lisa García Bedolla Cati V. de los Ríos Kris Gutiérrez * Glynda Hull * Marcia Linn * Laura Sterponi *

Critical Race Studies

Led by renowned scholars who have influenced law and policy for decades, UCLA Law’s Critical Race Studies Program is the premier setting for studying the intersection of race and the law.

Founding the CRS Program

A brief history of the founding of UCLA Law's Critical Race Studies.

The first law school program in the United States dedicated to critical race theory in legal scholarship and related disciplines, the Critical Race Studies program is unequaled in American legal education. The cornerstone of the program is the CRS specialization , a competitive academic course of study engaging top students who are committed to racial justice scholarship and legal practice. The CRS specialization enhances coursework with a variety of collaborative and interdisciplinary experiences to integrate theory and practice. The Critical Race Studies program hosts an annual symposium that draws top scholars from around the country for discussion of cutting-edge topics and works with student-led clinics to provide students with on-the-ground training and opportunities for representation and advocacy.

Please join our Critical Race Studies mailing list for our latest news and information.

More information about the CRS Symposium and our multimedia archives of past programming.

Intersecting Race and Law

In 2021, CRS launched CRT Forward, an initiative to address the current attacks on Critical Race Theory while also highlighting the past, present, and future contributions of the theory.

The signature event of the CRS program, highlighting strategies to end racial injustice and promoting collaboration across disciplines.

Presenting recordings of past CRS events and symposia.

Combating the effects of mass incarceration on Los Angeles communities

Collaborating with Legal Aid at Work and the Black Worker Center on this employment law clinic serving low-wage workers and members of the center.

Supporting students dedicated to achieving equity for Los Angeles' African American communities.

Sustaining the research and professional development of students pursuing a career in teaching the law.

LaToya Baldwin Clark

Jasleen kohli, e. tendayi achiume, ahilan arulanantham, devon w. carbado, kimberlé w. crenshaw, fanna gamal, laura e. gómez, ariela gross, cheryl i. harris, hiroshi motomura, sunita patel, angela r. riley, lauren van schilfgaarde, noah d. zatz, emmanuel mauleón, khaled m. abou el fadl, joseph berra, beth a. colgan, gerloni cotton, scott l. cummings, ingrid eagly, s. priya morley, joanna c. schwartz, andrew d. selbst, anna spain bradley, vishnu sridharan, brenda suttonwills, sherod thaxton, tony tolbert, leo trujillo-cox, alicia virani, karin h. wang, sanford s. williams, gary l. blasi, carole e. goldberg, gerald lópez, leisy abrego, bryonn bain, matt barreto, keith camacho, mishuana goeman, sarah haley, kelly lytle hernandez, robin d. g. kelley, sherene razack, gary segura, margaret shih, daniel solorzano, shannon speed, abel valenzuela jr., richard yarborough, taifha alexander, crt forward project director, ayda haghighatgoo, crs program coordinator, kyle reinhard, crt forward post-graduate fellow, our past faculty directors.

2023-24: LaToya Baldwin Clark

2022-23: Devon W. Carbado, Cheryl I. Harris, and Jerry Kang

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2020-21: Laura E. Gómez

2019-20: Laura E. Gómez

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2016-17: Cheryl I. Harris and Noah D. Zatz

2015-16: Chery I. Harris and Devon W. Carbado

2014-15: Cheryl I. Harris

2013-14: Devon W. Carbado

2012-13: Cheryl I. Harris and Jyoti Nanda

2011-12: Cheryl I. Harris and Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

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2008-09: Jerry Kang

2007-09: Jerry Kang

2006-07: Cheryl I. Harris

2005-06: Cheryl I. Harris

2004-05: Cheryl I. Harris

2003-04: Devon W. Carbado

2002-03: Devon W. Carbado

2001-02: Jerry Kang and Laura E. Gómez

2000-01: Jerry Kang and Laura E. Gómez

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Ph.D. Minor, Critical Race & Postcolonial Studies

Ph.d. minor, critical race and post-colonial studies.

Jointly administered by the Departments of English and American Studies, this minor introduces you to key debates and theories in Critical Race and Postcolonial Studies (CRPS), the interdisciplinary study of the complex process of racialization. Students pursuing the CRPS minor are involved in the current debates and methods of this growing field.

Study in the minor is dedicated to parsing power relationships constituted by webs of social categories (such as race, ethnicity, nation, gender, and sexuality) at multiple degrees of scale, seeking to map the ways power is structured in social relations as well as through the range of categories at play in any given historical context. Work in this field is attentive to questions of material production, class, capital, and power, and is oriented transnationally and diasporically to global histories of indigeneity, colonialism, and empire.

CRPS comprises the cutting-edges of these fields as they have evolved in conversation with each other and with poststructuralist theory, integrating feminist and queer color critique at the turn of the millennium. Today this umbrella offers an interdisciplinary field with a distinctive historiography, methodology, and expanding canon. As an analytical framework, CRPS highlights dynamics of social categories as they relate to power, dedicated to critiques of inequity and exclusion in the U.S. and throughout the world.

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Berkeley Berkeley Academic Guide: Academic Guide 2023-24

Critical theory.

About the Program

The Designated Emphasis (DE) in Critical Theory enables graduate students already enrolled in UC Berkeley PhD programs from across the social sciences, arts, and humanities to obtain certification of a Designated Emphasis specialization in Critical Theory. (The DE is not an independent degree-granting program.) Students admitted to the DE who complete its requirements will receive a parenthetical notation to that effect on their doctoral degrees. The program offers graduate fellowships, hosts international scholars, and presents lectures, seminars, and other events for the wider campus community and local public. Critical Theory also maintains important collaborative relations with other critical theory institutes and programs nationally and internationally.

Critical Theory is often associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of intellectuals who, starting in the 1920s, developed critiques of modern capitalist society, fascism, and the new global dispensations that followed in the aftermath of World War II. In doing so, the Frankfurt School constructed modes of social theory distinct from established forms of philosophy. But key modern concepts of critique had already emerged in various forms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the works of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and others. Critique has assumed historically distinct modalities across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well.

The Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory offers courses on the nineteenth-century notion of critique; on the Frankfurt School and other twentieth-century currents of critical theory and philosophy; and on contemporary forms and modes of critical theory, including critical race theory, postcolonialist theory, feminist critique, gender studies and queer theory, and the diverse approaches to critique arising with and after structuralism and postructuralism. The program emphasizes the centrality of theoretical critique in the examination of contemporary values, of the power relations that constrain and enable political, social, cultural and economic life, and of the modes of justification that legitimate historical and cultural inquiry and sociopolitical analysis.

The DE student community comprises approximately 100 graduate students enrolled in a wide range of established PhD programs across the humanities and social sciences at UC Berkeley.

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Only students enrolled in PhD programs at Berkeley are eligible to apply for the DE in Critical Theory. Students must apply in the first or second year of graduate study in order to fulfill the requirements of the DE in addition to those of their home departments.

Petitions for admission to the DE are accepted each spring for admission to the program. The DE in Critical Theory admits approximately 15 students each year. Petitions and due dates are available on the program’s website .

For further information regarding admission to graduate programs at UC Berkeley, please see the  Graduate Division's Admissions website .

Designated Emphasis Requirements

Curriculum/coursework, qualifying exam.

One of the members of the student’s qualifying examination committee must represent the DE in Critical Theory and be a member of the DE’s designated faculty. These faculty members may be outside or inside members of the student’s committees.

Dissertation

One of the members of the student’s qualifying dissertation committee must represent the DE in Critical Theory and be a member of the DE’s designated faculty. These faculty members may be outside or inside members of the student’s committees.

Degree Conferral

Upon successful completion of the dissertation, the student’s transcript will include the designation: “PhD in [major] with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory.” This designation certifies that a candidate has participated in, and successfully completed, a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory in addition to all departmental requirements for the doctorate.

Research Resources

A full annual calendar of lectures, colloquia, and conferences contributes to Critical Theory’s rich research environment. The ongoing participation of international visiting scholars and researchers as well as student-led working and writing groups facilitate dialogue and build community across academic disciplines.

With adequate funding, the Program in Critical Theory awards yearly dissertation fellowships to Critical Theory DE students with records of achievement and promising dissertation projects. The annual fellowships are open to Critical Theory students in UC Berkeley departments including  African American Studies, Ancient Greek & Roman Studies, Anthropology, Berkeley Law, Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Energy & Resources Group, English, Ethnic Studies, Film & Media, French, Gender & Women’s Studies, German, Geography, History, History of Art, Italian, Medical Anthropology, Music, Philosophy, Political Science, Rhetoric, School of Education, School of Public Health, Sociology, South & Southeast Asian Studies, Slavic Languages and Literature, Spanish & Portuguese, and Theater, Dance and Performance Studies. 

The fellowships support students writing their dissertations, providing full fee remission (where required) and a full stipend, usually for a semester. Other research grants of shorter term (including summer) may also be awarded, as resources permit.

CRIT TH 200 Critique in 19th-Century Thought 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2018, Spring 2017, Fall 2015 This course will examine various formulations of critique in 19th-century theory. Thinkers who may be studied include Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Weber, though the selection will vary by instructor. This is the "foundations" course for the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Critique in 19th-Century Thought: Read More [+]

Rules & Requirements

Prerequisites: Admission to the critical theory designated emphasis or consent of instructor

Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit without restriction.

Hours & Format

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 2-3 hours of seminar per week

Additional Format: Two to three hours of seminar per week.

Additional Details

Subject/Course Level: Critical Theory Graduate Group/Graduate

Grading: Letter grade.

Instructor: Brown

Critique in 19th-Century Thought: Read Less [-]

CRIT TH 205 The Classical Frankfurt School: The First Generation of Critical Theory 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2016, Fall 2015, Spring 2015 This course will explore the founding texts of the Frankfurt School's first generation: Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Lowenthal, and their circle. It will follow the development of critical theory through its Weimar years, American exile, and return to postwar Germany. The Classical Frankfurt School: The First Generation of Critical Theory: Read More [+]

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of lecture per week

Additional Format: Three hours of lecture per week.

Instructor: Jay

The Classical Frankfurt School: The First Generation of Critical Theory: Read Less [-]

CRIT TH 240 Contemporary Critique and Critical Theory 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Fall 2016, Spring 2016 This course will explore various contemporary engagements with the foundations of critical theory in relation to other histories and locations. Topics will vary by instructor but may include: post-continental political theory, critique and the problem of political dissent and citizenship, gender and race in relation to critical practices, psychoanalysis, and literary and art theory and criticism. Contemporary Critique and Critical Theory: Read More [+]

Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit with instructor consent.

Additional Format: Three hours of Lecture per week for 15 weeks.

Contemporary Critique and Critical Theory: Read Less [-]

CRIT TH 290 Critical Theory Elective 2 - 4 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022 Critical Theory electives are taught by core and affiliated faculty in the Critical Theory program and offer important treatments of theoretical materials significant to the intellectual traditions of the program's course of study in nineteenth-century social theory and philosophy, Frankfurt School and related currents in theory and criticism, and contemporary critical theory. In a typical Critical Theory elective, theoretical materials are presented in dialogue with an anthropological, artistic/aesthetic, economic, educational, historical, philosophical, political, rhetorical, sociological, or other disciplinary matrix that constitutes the course's primary materials for study and inquiry. Critical Theory Elective: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Admission to the Critical Theory Designated Emphasis or consent of the instructor

Critical Theory Elective: Read Less [-]

CRIT TH 298 Critical Theory Special Study 4 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2017, Spring 2016 Advanced study in interpretive approaches within the field of critical theory, focusing on the question of how critical theory enters into the framing of a long-term research project. We will consider the status and limits of theory, the relation between literary and social theory, reading practices, and archival research. Critical Theory Special Study: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Admission to the Critical Theory Designated Emphasis or consent of the instructor. This course is intended for graduate students who are working on their prospectus or dissertation

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 2 hours of seminar per week

Additional Format: Two hours of seminar per week.

Instructor: Butler

Critical Theory Special Study: Read Less [-]

Contact Information

The program in critical theory.

440 Stephens Hall, MC 2340

[email protected]

Critical Theory Co-Director

Poulomi Saha, PhD

[email protected]

Sharad Chari, PhD

[email protected]

Student Affairs Coordinator

Patty Dunlap

Phone: 510-367-0762

[email protected]

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The PDF will include all information unique to this page.

Critical race theory: the concept dividing the US

• Published 22 July 2021

Critical race theory has become a topic of fierce political debate in the US in recent months. The conflict has most prominently played out in public school districts, as parents, teachers and school administrators grapple with how to teach race, discrimination and inequality in the classroom.

For supporters, it's an important framework for understanding the way systemic racism can perpetuate discrimination and disadvantage. For opponents, it's a subversive plan to indoctrinate young Americans to reject their country and its history.

To start, there is an inability to even agree on what critical race theory is, where it came from and what it seeks to accomplish. Beneath the rhetoric, however, lies an ongoing fundamental dispute about equality and equity - what these concepts mean, and what government's role should be in addressing them.

What is critical race theory?

Critical race theory (CRT) originated as a field of legal study in the 1970s spearheaded by Derrick Bell, Harvard University's first permanently-appointed black law professor, to address what he saw as shortcomings in understanding how discrimination and inequity are perpetuated in the law. These inequities shape outcomes in society, the economy, culture and politics, he argued.

The term itself first began to gain prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s, as more scholars wrote and researched on the topic.

Although the field of study traditionally has been the domain of graduate and legal study, it has served recently as a framework for academics trying to find ways of addressing racial inequities through the education system - particularly in light of last summer's Black Lives Matter protests.

"The George Floyd murder caused this whole nation to take a look at race and racism, and I think there was a broad recognition that something was amiss," says Marvin Lynn, a critical race theory scholar and professor of education at Portland State University.

Protesters in Virginia denounce CRT outside a government building in June 2021

How is critical race theory taught?

How - and even whether - CRT is being taught is the subject of contention that lies at the heart of the current debate.

As a curriculum subject, critical race theory is largely the purview of university law schools and graduate programmes.

Derrick Bell is considered the originator of critical race theory

The concepts, however, have influenced historians, journalists and educators in school districts across the US who say they want to do more to teach the public about the US struggles with discrimination rooted in race.

One high-profile effort, the New York Times magazine's 1619 Project, was a series of essays and articles that sought to "reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very centre of our national narrative", per the paper's description.

It received mixed reviews, including sometimes sharp criticism from historians who disputed its accuracy.

How the concepts translate into a public-school curriculum and teacher training have become the flashpoint of the CRT controversy.

An elementary school in Cupertino, California, for instance, asked third-graders to label their own power and privilege in an "identity map". At least 30 schools recommended that students should read Not My Idea, a children's book that called racism "a white person's problem and we are all caught up in it".

Marvin Lynn

Its author, Anastasia Higginbotham, has argued that "any place where there are white people has violent white supremacy embedded into it" and is not shy about labelling her discussions on race as "CRT".

Instances like these have led to what has become an increasingly intense criticism.

Why did the debate become a national controversy?

Arguably, a large part of the debate has been inflamed and muddled by the activism of a conservative documentary filmmaker named Christopher Rufo.

As detailed in an extensive New Yorker profile , external , Rufo built a cottage industry exposing government racial awareness training across the US. While doing so, he discovered the academic writing behind it - and set out to raise awareness about what he saw as an organised effort to "re-engineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race".

He labelled all of the various episodes and instances he was cataloguing as examples of "critical race theory" in practice, even though the academic discipline was not always an exact fit for what he was documenting.

"The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think 'critical race theory'," he wrote on Twitter , external . "We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans."

The term, he told the New York Times, made for the "perfect villain" because it sounded academic, elitist, racist and divisive.

How far have African Americans come since 1960s?

Legislative as well as grassroots rebukes of public-school teaching labelled as CRT have cropped up around the country.

A contentious school board meeting on systemic racism and transgender rights in a Virginia county near Washington DC, made national news when a protestor was arrested for disorderly conduct. Nine Republican-controlled states have passed laws or enacted other rules banning the teaching of "critical race theory".

Because it is a concept, not a stand-alone subject, opponents have assembled lists to help parents identify what they see as harmful terms and topics in the classroom.

In a now-deleted tweet, the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation highlighted words like "discrimination", "social justice", "identity" and "colonialism" as indicating CRT in the curriculum.

The CRT debate doesn't fall neatly along political lines, however. The town of Cupertino, where parents objected to their school's race education programme, is overwhelmingly liberal. And those expressing concern at town halls and school board hearings aren't all conservative - or white.

Andrew Sullivan, a polemicist and public intellectual, summarised the criticism of CRT as "illiberal".

"Liberalism assumes that we are all individuals, capable of reasoning with each other as equals," he argued in a recent blog post , external , whereas CRT assumes that "we are mere representatives of racial constructs which are part of a permanent struggle between the oppressors (white) and oppressed (non-white)".

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One thing Americans find hard to talk about

But if the issue is power - who has it, and who wants it - it's not surprising that schools aren't the only terrain on which this political dispute is being fought.

Critics complain that initiatives put forth by social media companies, corporations and the US military are also bending, in their view, to the forces of "woke" liberalism.

What do supporters and opponents say?

There's a cartoon that circulates among critical race theory supporters showing children, one tall and one short, trying to peer over a fence to watch a baseball game. Equality, the illustration explains, is giving children the same sized box to stand on - with one child still unable to see over the obstacle. Equity, on the other hand, gives the shortest child the most boxes, so that everyone can see the field.

The idea of equity is to provide more to those who are perceived to have the greatest disadvantage in order to achieve better equality of outcome and to compensate for the historical wrongs of discrimination and systemic racism.

"A key part of the argument of critical race theory is that racism is endemic to American society because of the way society is structured," says Lynn. Teaching with the framework addressed issues that "people have been trying to do for a long time to correct some of the problems we have in schools" he says.

It's a view that animated affirmative action programmes - race-based preferences in hiring and college admissions - in the past, and currently influences everything from road repair in Oakland, California, to the Biden administration's vaccine outreach efforts.

Such race-conscious prioritisation, in the view of critics, is a slippery slope that would lead to out-of-control government favouritism. It integrates racial awareness into classroom teaching and contravenes the idea that America - and American institutions - should be colour-blind.

"Critical race theory, taken to its logical conclusion, is fundamentally incompatible with America as it has traditionally been understood and, I would argue, liberal democracy in any modern understanding of the word," says Nate Hochman, a Publius fellow at the conservative Claremont Institution in California.

He says the idea of "equity" is more than just policy prescriptions, it's about "abandoning the broad political philosophy that has traditionally held this country together".

Some also believe teaching about "institutional racism" will have the opposite effect from what CRT advocates intend.

"As a black college student, I'm certainly not paying to sit in a classroom and be told that I'm a helpless victim — that regardless of how hard I try, or how hard I work, it'll never be enough because racism will always win," writes , external CJ Pierson, a conservative activist at the University of Alabama.

Who seems to have the upper hand?

Both sides appear to think the other is winning.

Lynn, the CRT scholar, worries that state laws are having a chilling effect on teachers across the US, making them afraid of even touching on the topic of race in the classroom.

Hochman sees opponents of CRT as the ones on the ropes, with the Black Lives Matter protests serving as a political catalyst for radical change.

"We underwent a revolution last summer," he says. "The constant pushing of all of our institutions to do more, to be more radical, to be more anti-American, to be more racialist, to be more intolerant of views - there is this fervent energy to cannibalise the country."

Just a few months removed from undergraduate university, Hochman says he saw friends made more racially aware - and intolerant - by such teaching.

"We're teaching young people to hate the country they're going to inherit," he says. "This is a historically unprecedented experiment, and it can only go ugly places."

Texas lawmakers have been holding hearings on CRT

Pitching one's cause as a fight against overwhelming odds is often an effective way of rallying supporters. At the moment, polls show , external that most Americans haven't heard "a lot" about critical race theory, although Republicans (30%) are more likely than Democrats (21%).

In other words, there's a lot of room for opinions about race education and equity to shift, potentially decisively.

Where does this debate go from here?

Like most US political controversies in the US, this one will end up spilling into both the voting booths and the courtrooms.

Republicans are already planning mid-term campaign efforts to boost their fundraising and tie Democratic incumbents to critical race theory, in hopes the party can win back independent and moderate white suburban voters uneasy with proposed changes to public schooling or the implication that they are to blame for the enduring inequity in American society - and must make sacrifices to rectify past wrongs.

The truth behind segregated US neighbourhoods

What is Black Lives Matter and what are the aims?

Civil liberties groups are sure to file lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the state restrictions on teaching critical race theory. And conservative legal advocacy organisations are already gearing up with their own filings.

In Illinois, a white teacher is suing her school district, alleging that its teacher training and classroom lesson plans violate US civil rights laws by discriminating against her and her students on the basis of their race.

"We're teaching young people to hate the country they're going to inherit," says Hochman

Whether this controversy endures, however, is an open question. A few years ago, conservatives warned of Islamic sharia law being taught in American classrooms - a concern that has since dropped off the radar. Every mid-term cycle there seems to be a new hot-button issue - police defunding, Ebola outbreaks, immigrant caravans and Islamic state extremists are just a few recent examples.

This fight may be different, however.

Controversies come and go, but America's reckoning with its history, and with the role racism has played in it, are not a passing political fad. And with US society becoming increasingly diverse, it's a reckoning that a growing portion of the US population seems interested in accelerating.

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Trump bans 'anti-American' diversity training

• Published 5 September 2020

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Critical Race Theory, Race Equity, and Public Health: Toward Antiracism Praxis

C. L. Ford originated the commentary and led the writing. C. O. Airhihenbuwa assisted in developing key ideas and in writing the commentary.

Racial scholars argue that racism produces rates of morbidity, mortality, and overall well-being that vary depending on socially assigned race. Eliminating racism is therefore central to achieving health equity, but this requires new paradigms that are responsive to structural racism's contemporary influence on health, health inequities, and research.

Critical Race Theory is an emerging transdisciplinary, race-equity methodology that originated in legal studies and is grounded in social justice. Critical Race Theory's tools for conducting research and practice are intended to elucidate contemporary racial phenomena, expand the vocabulary with which to discuss complex racial concepts, and challenge racial hierarchies.

We introduce Critical Race Theory to the public health community, highlight key Critical Race Theory characteristics (race consciousness, emphases on contemporary societal dynamics and socially marginalized groups, and praxis between research and practice) and describe Critical Race Theory's contribution to a study on racism and HIV testing among African Americans.

ALTHOUGH RACE REMAINS salient to public health in a variety of ways, the field's theoretical and methodological conventions inadequately address the complexity with which structural racism influences both health and the production of knowledge about populations, health, and health disparities. Many projects lack clarity about the nature of racial stratification. They conceptualize, measure, and analyze race- and racism-related factors using tools better suited for studying other risk factors. Although structural forces drive inequities, research and interventions disproportionately emphasize individual and interpersonal mechanisms. Additionally, overconfidence in the objectivity of research can blind investigators to the inadvertent influence of a priori assumptions on research.

Race as a category denoting skin color was first used to classify human bodies by Francois Bernier, a French physician. 1 The notion of racial groupings was introduced in Carolus Linnaeus's Natural History in 1735 and subsequently advanced by many others. 1 Both Linnaeus's concept of race and the subsequent racial groupings devalued and degraded those classified as non-European. 2 Linnaeus's classification became the foundation on which many countries, including the United States, based their racial policies. Later, racialized policies gained “scientific” affirmation in the work of scholars such as Josiah Nott, whose publications reinforcing White supremacy appeared in 1843 in such respected journals as the American Journal of the Medical Sciences .

Prevailing notions about race shaped early scientific research, but because investigators were not critical about their relationships to their racialized social contexts, they were unable to perceive the insidious influence of racism in their work. The contributions of minorities who might have challenged underlying assumptions were largely excluded. Their exclusion buttressed artificially high levels of confidence among researchers about the import and validity of racial findings. Against this backdrop, progressive scholars, many of them racial or ethnic minorities, began to scrutinize knowledge production processes and the implications for minority communities. By the late 20th century, they had begun developing new frameworks such as Critical Race Theory to explicitly account for the influences of racism on both outcomes and research processes.

Gilmore defines racism as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” 3 (p247) This definition suggests that health for all cannot be achieved if structural racism persists. Eliminating racism, therefore, is part and parcel to achieving the objectives of public health. Table 1 provides definitions of public health and of the Critical Race Theory concepts discussed in this commentary.

Definitions of Public Health and Selected Concepts of Critical Race Theory

Source. Critical Race Theory concepts adapted from Delgado and Stefancic. 5

Critical Race Theory offers the field of public health a new paradigm for investigating the root causes of health disparities. Based on race equity and social justice principles, Critical Race Theory encourages the development of solutions that bridge gaps in health, housing, employment, and other factors that condition living.

The newly developed Public Health Critical Race Framework adapts Critical Race Theory for public health research and practice (Ford CL and Airhihenbuwa CO, unpublished paper, 2009). Our aim here, however, is to introduce Critical Race Theory to the multidisciplinary field of public health and, more specifically, to researchers of health disparities and health equity. We also illustrate its application to empirical research.

In the following section, we discuss the origins of Critical Race Theory, highlighting 4 of its basic features: race consciousness, contemporary orientation, centering in the margins rather than in the mainstream, and praxis (i.e., theory-informed action).

Although the term “theory” appears in its name, Critical Race Theory is not like behavior change or epidemiological theories. Rather, it is an iterative methodology for helping investigators remain attentive to equity while carrying out research, scholarship, and practice. It also urges scholars to work to transform the hierarchies they identify through research.

Critical Race Theory integrates transdisciplinary methodologies that draw on theory, experiential knowledge, and critical consciousness ( Table 1 ) to illuminate and combat root causes of structural racism. It emerged after years of struggle by law students and faculty contesting what they perceived as institutionalized racism in the hiring and curricular decisions of elite law schools. 4 Convinced that their understandings of racial power dynamics diverged in important ways from those of other legal models, they convened a meeting in 1989 at which they enumerated key racial equity principles. They coined the term “Critical Race Theory” to name the emergent set of methodologies that draws on these principles in pursuing racial equity via the law. Persons whose scholarship relies on Critical Race Theory (called critical race theorists) are often described as “a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.” 5 (p2)

Over the last 2 decades, Critical Race Theory scholarship has generated a broad transdisciplinary movement toward race equity. Knowledge production is the primary medium through which Critical Race Theory operates. The scholarship distinguishes contemporary racial mechanisms from older ones (e.g., Jim Crowism), expands the vocabulary for discussing racial phenomena and investigating racism effects, and explicitly incorporates the knowledge of racial and ethnic minority communities regarding marginality.

Race Consciousness

Critical Race Theory challenges widely held but erroneous beliefs that “race consciousness” is synonymous with “racism” and that “colorblindness” is synonymous with the absence of racism. 6 Colorblindness, which is both an attitude and a school of thought, posits that nonracial factors (e.g., income) fundamentally explain ostensibly racial phenomena. Although abuses of race-conscious research (such as early eugenics research) have been noted, in truth, both race consciousness and colorblindness can be deployed in ways that contribute to inequities. Only colorblindness, however, precludes explicit examination of racism's potential contributions to inequities. Race consciousness is essential for understanding racialized constructs and mechanisms.

Contemporary Mechanisms

By definition, structural racism evolves across time and contexts. Research on racism should reflect the aspects of racialization that are contemporarily salient. 7 Currently, structural mechanisms continue to have the greatest impacts even though contemporary racism is characterized by its subtlety and ordinariness ( Table 1 ). The Critical Race Theory concept of ordinariness posits that racism is normal and integral to society. Minorities are chronically exposed to diverse forms of everyday racism (e.g., being followed while shopping). In response, they may learn to ignore everyday racism because it occurs so frequently, become adept at detecting it, or become hypervigilant about it, perceiving any unfair treatment as racism. Understanding ordinariness can inform research hypotheses about minorities’ health behaviors and attitudes.

Centering in the Margins

To center in the margins ( Table 1 ) is to shift a discourse's starting point from a majority group's perspective, which is the usual approach, to that of the marginalized group or groups. The position of critical race theorists as “outsiders within” their respective disciplines is valuable in facilitating this process. By grounding themselves in the experiences and perspectives of the minority communities from which they largely come, critical race theorists integrate critical analyses of their lived experiences and disciplinary conventions to advance knowledge on inequities. This synthesis can enhance the relevancy of findings for communities and provide disciplines with fresh perspectives on old problems.

Critical Race Theory is an iterative methodology for helping investigators remain attentive to equity while carrying out research, scholarship, and practice. Community engagement and critical self-reflection enrich research processes, while research based on the lived experiences of marginalized communities provides the communities with more meaningful data for their ongoing efforts toward collective self-improvement.

For years, some public health researchers have employed (implicitly or explicitly) Critical Race Theory approaches to investigate racism, 8 , 9 emphasize the historical and sociopolitical roots of contemporary disparities, 10 – 12 study how the field's conventions may inadvertently constrain movement toward equity, 13 – 15 focus on structural forces, 16 – 19 emphasize the intersectionality of racial and other axes of inequity, 20 , 21 investigate links between White racial identity and inequities, 22 , 23 and use allegory 24 as an antiracism educational tool. Critical Race Theory can contribute the following: a comprehensive framework for connecting these research endeavors, a vocabulary for advancing understandings of racial constructs and phenomena, critical analyses of knowledge production processes, and praxis that builds on community-based participatory approaches linking research, practice, and communities. 25 , 26 To illustrate how Critical Race Theory can inform public health research, we describe in the next section several ways that it informed a study 27 of HIV testing among African Americans. That study, by C. L. Ford et al., purposefully employed Critical Race Theory in its design and in carrying out the research.

APPLICATION OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY

The study was conducted from 2003 to 2005 in an urban area with a high prevalence of HIV. It sought to understand whether racism-related factors are potential barriers to African Americans obtaining readily available, routine HIV testing as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Routine HIV testing has become the backbone of US HIV prevention because, after more than 2 decades of HIV prevention efforts, prevalence remains elevated. 28 Although African Americans are diagnosed later and have worse prognoses than members of other groups, the factors influencing their HIV testing behaviors are poorly understood. The focus on racism as a potential barrier grew in part out of formative research during which some African Americans reported that discriminatory treatment by clinic staff might be a barrier to HIV testing.

The study's methods and key findings have been described elsewhere. 27 Briefly, we enrolled approximately 400 African Americans presenting to a public health clinic for diagnosis or screening of a sexually transmitted disease. Everyone newly presenting for these purposes was automatically offered HIV testing. Controlling for standard HIV prevention covariates such as perceived HIV risk and patient satisfaction, we examined the contribution of perceived everyday racism to laboratory-confirmed HIV test uptake or decline. As perceived racism may be inversely correlated with segregation, 29 we also accounted for levels of segregation in participants’ residential areas. In the next section, we discuss the relevance of race consciousness, contemporary mechanisms, centering in the margins, and praxis to the study. This discussion is illustrative and does not capture the entirety of Critical Race Theory or all the ways it informed this research.

Conceptual Model

The conceptual model integrated the Andersen access to care model, 30 , 31 which is widely used to examine behavior within clinical settings, a socioecological framework, 32 and Critical Race Theory concepts. Figure 1 shows the backbone of Andersen's model, which we adapted to specify variables for inclusion ( Figure 2 ). In Andersen's model, race typically is considered a population characteristic that predisposes one toward particular behavior(s). According to Critical Race Theory, however, race is socially constructed. It is less a risk factor itself than a marker of risk for racism-related exposures. Race is useful in that it enables the identification of persons at risk for exposures that vary by racial category (e.g., discrimination). We removed race from the model as a manipulable variable, limited the sample to African Americans, and incorporated 2 racism variables: perceived everyday racism (individual level) and residential segregation (neighborhood level). Removing race from the model shifted the focus from how Black race might influence behaviors to how the racialized experiences of African Americans might do so.

Andersen's access to care model.

Note . Andersen's model 30 , 31 goes beyond behavioral outcomes to examine health outcomes.

Adaptation of Andersen's access to care model 30 , 31 used as the study's conceptual model.

Robert Brackman allied the independent spirit of his young subject with the future of the whole country, titling his portrait of her “Somewhere in America.” From the recent Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition, “1934: A New Deal for Artists.” Printed with permission. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Art Museum.

Race consciousness ( Table 1 ) informed all aspects of the project, including development of the conceptual model. Race consciousness suggested that considering the racialized social context of African Americans would be germane to research on their HIV preventive behaviors given their historical experiences with the health care system and stigma linking HIV and Black race. Social construction suggests that different racial groups experience the social environment differently. We conceptualized social contexts as racialized at the individual, clinical, and residential levels and sought to explain African Americans’ experiences of their social contexts. Limiting the study to African Americans contrasts with typical approaches that compare groups, making the underlying question, “How do African Americans differ from Whites?” 15 Our within-group design encouraged exploration of the diversity of perceptions, experiences, and attitudes among African Americans. 15 , 33 , 34

The study controlled for standard explanatory factors (e.g., perceived HIV risk) to focus on racism-related contributions. Drawing on race consciousness, the investigators first enumerated salient aspects of contemporary racism (e.g., its ubiquity, multilevel nature, etc.) and applied these broad characteristics to Andersen's model. This led to the individual-level focus on perceived everyday racism rather than on the extreme forms of racism (e.g., HIV conspiracy beliefs) previously examined.

A key characteristic of contemporary racism is its subtlety and ordinariness. Ordinariness suggests that constant, chronic exposure to seemingly minor insults (e.g., being followed while shopping) may have lasting impacts on one's health. Ordinariness reinforced the decision to operationalize the main individual-level explanatory factor as perceived everyday racism. Everyday racism is an integral element of the social environment. We conceptualized everyday racism as a ubiquitous aspect of the social environment and perceived everyday racism as individuals’ detection of it.

The study was motivated in part by extensive outreach conducted among community residents. Critical self-awareness, especially regarding personal privilege and racial relations, informed team members’ interactions with community members, study participants, and other research project staff. For instance, throughout the research process, members of the research team noted ways that their identities (especially with regard to race) and social positions (e.g., educational attainment) could influence power dynamics in their interactions with participants or recruits.

Through critical self-consciousness, 1 member of the research team realized that she considered her racial identity (African American) to be more important than her other identities (e.g., class), which led her to hold a priori assumptions (e.g., that she and study participants held similar views). By identifying these assumptions and their potential implications early on, she prevented their inadvertent influences on the research process (e.g., data collection or data interpretation) and derived more accurate assessments of the nature of her interactions with community members. For some recruits and participants, her affiliation with a predominantly White institution was a major source of distrust and was more salient than her race. Challenging power differentials is central to Critical Race Theory. Her critical self-consciousness helped her to do just that by attending to intraracial power imbalances throughout the research process.

Together, critical consciousness and race consciousness ( Table 1 ) helped the project remain oriented toward race equity. Because all research is produced within and in relation to social contexts that may inadvertently influence research, 35 , 36 this grounding in equity heightened awareness of the power imbalances between academic institutions and the communities in which they conduct research. We attempted to redress these imbalances throughout the research process. For instance, African American community members were recruited and trained as research assistants even though doing so was more expensive and labor intensive than hiring student research assistants.

The project was attentive to the ways that researchers may be personally affected by racism while studying it. In an arm of the study that entailed phoning a probability sample of residents based on a sampling frame derived from telephone directory white pages, interviewers sometimes reached non–African Americans who, ineligible for the study, responded to the interviewers with hostility. Staff debriefed after such incidents. Research staff also read literature on racism and race, discussed their personal experiences with and perceptions about racism, and regularly checked in with each other during the data collection period.

Analyses and Interpretations

The choice of analytic technique—logistic regression with generalized estimating equations (GEE)—followed from the conceptual model in which perceived racism occurs within racialized social environments. Critical Race Theory was relevant to the analyses in that it informed the conceptual model and interpretations of the study's findings. As in other recent studies, 37 , 38 our findings suggested that despite perceiving everyday racism, African Americans at high risk for HIV transmission actively engage in primary preventive behaviors. 27 On the basis of the Critical Race Theory concept “centering in the margins,” our report of the findings included the strengths on which members of marginalized communities may draw.

One objective of Critical Race Theory is to go beyond merely documenting disparities. Therefore, we included policy and practice implications in the published findings and shared the findings with community members, frontline public health professionals (e.g., outreach workers, clinic staff), and study participants.

CONCLUSIONS

We have introduced Critical Race Theory, a race equity methodology that originated in legal studies, to the public health community, and described several ways that Critical Race Theory informed a study of racism and HIV testing among African Americans. Four Critical Race Theory concepts—race consciousness, contemporary orientation, centering in the margins, and praxis—were central to that study. Critical Race Theory has been adapted for use in several fields, including education and gender studies. Public health's tradition of championing social justice issues suggests that Critical Race Theory can provide powerful new tools for targeting racial and ethnic health inequities. To facilitate appropriate and systematic use of Critical Race Theory within public health, Ford and Airhihenbuwa developed the Public Health Critical Race Framework (unpublished paper, 2009). That framework and the Critical Race Theory concepts introduced here build on the growing public health momentum toward achieving health equity.

Acknowledgments

This project received support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation Kellogg Health Scholars Program (P0117943) and the UCLA AIDS Institute and Center for AIDS Research.

We acknowledge Peter Ford, JD, and Phyllis M. Autry for their contributions regarding Critical Race Theory, Kara Keeling for rich conversations on this topic, and 2 anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

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Park, E. (2023). "Asians Are the Least Troublemaker": Navigating Racial In-betweenness in Korean American Community-based Spaces. SOCIOLOGY OF RACE AND ETHNICITY .

Park, E., Hernandez, G. O., & Lee, S. J. (2022). Asian Americans and the battle against affirmative action: opposition to race-based admissions as neoliberal racial subjectivity performance. RACE ETHNICITY AND EDUCATION .

Park, E. (2020). Asian Americans in the Suburbs: Race, Class, and Korean Immigrant Parental Engagement. EQUITY & EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION , 53 (1-2), 30–49.

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Critical Race Initiative Overview

Coordinator: Rashawn Ray |  (301) 405-9581  | rjray [at] umd.edu   sdesai [at] umd.edu ( )

The Critical Race Initiative (CRI) is a group of scholars who center critical race theory (CRT) as an important framework by which to understand inequality in society. CRT addresses the ways that race permeates social institutions to maintain systemic forms of inequality. Under this framework, racism not only operates through social interaction stemming from individual prejudice but also through institutional conditions rooted in the culture of social life. Entrenched in white privilege, these conditions maintain an ideology of inferiority among minorities that dictate status, power, and prestige structures.

In addition to focusing on what race is, CRI more so focuses on what race does, how it is used, and how it operates via individual, social/cultural, and institutional conditions that manufacture and maintain racial inequality within political, social, and economic spheres. Correspondingly, race is treated as a social process rather than simply a variable to control for in a statistical model. In this social process, race operates not only as a point of departure to differentiate individuals and groups but as socially constructed destinations: that is, we all experience an ongoing process of racialization in our daily lives.

Accordingly, CRI has six primary aims:

• Form a collective wisdom about critical race theory and its analytic focus
• Shift the discourse past the Black/White narrative to highlight processes and mechanisms of racial inequality that affect all racial/ethnic minorities
• Focus on race as a set of experiences, racialized identities, and social processes that are mutually facilitated by individual, social/cultural, and institutional conditions
• Transform victimization into empowerment
• Foster racial uplift activism through scholarship, teaching, community-based participatory research, and social policy
• Draw upon core strengths of faculty and students in the Department of Sociology, BSOS, and UMD

2nd Annual Parren Mitchell Symposium

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Critical Theory and Objects of Study

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Christopher Taylor

Christina von Nolcken

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Department of English

Aja Martinez, PH.D.

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Aja Y. Martinez (she/her) is an associate professor of ­­­­­­­­English and author of the multi-award-winning book  Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory (2nd edition forthcoming). Her scholarship engages with both public and academic audiences in a series of new projects that include several critical academic journal essays and book chapters, a CRT theoretical introductory chapter for a Routledge collection, a special College English double issue on CRT, CRT symposia in three academic journals, and four book-length projects. Three book projects, co-researched and -written with UNT historian and Indigenous studies scholar Robert O. Smith, are under contract with New York University Press, Penn State University Press, and University of California Press--kicking off Cal UP's new series on CRT. Within these projects Martinez and Smith draw on mixed methods, ranging from archival, to ethnographic, to literary and rhetorical analysis. These books reframe the histories of CRT's origins in legal studies while making provocative claims concerning CRT's storytelling pedagogy, methodology, and theory. Additionally, Martinez is coeditor and cofounder, with Michele Eodice and Sandra Tarabochia (University of Oklahoma), of the transdisciplinary, digital open-access, and multimodal journal  Writers: Craft and Context . Last, Martinez is coeditor, with Stacey Waite (University of Nebraska) of the University of Pittsburgh Press's series  Composition, Literacy, and Culture .

LitHub Roundtable : On the Importance of Critical Race Theory--and the Delusional Attacks On It Richard Delgado, Aja Martinez, and Victor Ray in Conversation on Structural Racism, the Future of CRT, and More.

Counterstory webpage: https://store.ncte.org/book/counterstory-rhetoric-and-writing-critical-race-theory#_=_

Code-meshing webpage: https://store.ncte.org/book/code-meshing-world-english-pedagogy-policy-performance#_=_

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Critical theory involves the attempt to better understand power, conflict and crisis, and to achieve change, emancipation, or distance from the beliefs, presuppositions, forces, forms, conventions, conditions, assemblages, and institutions of human life.

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The Program in Critical Theory was launched with the intention of providing graduate students the opportunity to train in true interdisciplinarity, bringing together some of the most rigorous and innovative forms of critique from across the humanities and social sciences.   Over the past 18 years and hundreds of graduate students, the Program in Critical Theory has nurtured field-defining scholarship and shaped critical conversations for generations to come.

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This Phoenix district isn't teaching controversial history. It's teaching kids to think

Opinion: balsz school district doesn't teach kids what to think about history, but rather how to think and share their ideas respectfully..

A tiny elementary school district covering a blue-collar, minority neighborhood behind Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport has found itself at the center of a national debate over race in education .

You wouldn’t know that by walking into the 500-student David Crockett Elementary School.

The Black, Hispanic and Native American students in kindergarten through fifth grade are busy trying to get up to standard in basic subjects, a task made difficult by the reality that more than 90% of them come from economically disadvantaged households.

Still, “the home of the Bears” has become a target of Tom Horne’s rampage against critical race theory .

“Students should be taught … that race, an accident of birth, is irrelevant to anything,” the state education superintendent has said. “I am open minded about almost all political issues, but this belief is in the marrow of my bones and not subject to the slightest compromise.”  

Balsz never adapted '1619 Project' for its classes

Horne has claimed that the Balsz Elementary School District has adopted CRT into its curriculum by adapting the controversial “1619 Project,” a sweeping work of journalism that traces U.S. history to the start of slavery, showing how racism in the past has affected policy, practice and people in the present.

Educators, however, say that never happened.

“As I see it, it comes down to some of how history is taught,” said Todd Schwarz, president of the Balsz district school board, sitting on a bench near the Crockett playground.

“We did consider, at one point, having someone come in and talk to teachers about ‘The 1619 Project,’ which was a very interesting historical study. It’s not a perfect history. No history is. … The idea was ‘How do we incorporate some of what we’re reading here into our lessons?’

“It turned out, after one professional development session, that it didn’t seem like it was going to work for an elementary school district.

“We stopped it; we dropped it. But there’s a ghost on the internet that keeps popping up when you Google the Balsz Elementary School District. ‘Oh, the 1619 Project.’ ”

Horne uses critical race theory to drive a wedge

The controversy starts with the very definition of CRT.

Horne has called the 5-year-old 1619 Project “the primary source” for teaching CRT, which “has distorted the meaning of the previously attractive word ‘equity.’ To proponents of critical race theory, it means distributing benefits by racial percentages, rather than by individual merit.”

That’s not what educators at Balsz say.

“From my perspective, critical race theory is something that was initiated decades ago as a theory that leans into the philosophies and understanding of giving a voice to those who don’t usually have a voice in research,” said George Barnes, superintendent of the Balsz district.

“I think over the last 10 years, there’s been some pretty hot conversation on what CRT is, and the misnomer that giving kids a space to learn more about themselves and more about our country is going to cause some sort of negative feelings in the community, overall.”

Horne uses critical race theory: To drag us backward

Schwarz, a politician, says it more plainly.

“What I see is conservatives using the term ‘critical race theory’ to just drive a wedge,” he said. “It’s a phrase that they use to drive a wedge between teachers and families, between schools and families, between white people and Black people, quite frankly.”

How the district teaches history on race

Educators in districts like Balsz say they can’t function without bond and override elections to pay competitive salaries and improve schools. But such measures won’t win support if administrators don’t have trust.

It feels like that’s the point for conservatives like Horne, so desperate to cling to power that they’ll distort history and ruin futures to pull it off.

To be sure, “The 1619 Project” is a massive collection of historical essays that are far over the head of most any fifth-grader.

Horne: Schools teach critical race theory under different names

But it didn’t come up in Skyler Atterbom’s class, where fifth-grade students were learning about Reconstruction, a period of advancements following the Civil War before the vicious snapback of Jim Crow.

Atterbom showed a short NBC News Learn video on YouTube about the Freedman’s Bureau, which legalized marriages, reunited families and brought Black literacy rates up from nothing (it was illegal to teach slaves to read or write) to about 30%, in part by establishing schools such as Howard University in Washington, D.C.  

By 1872, historically Black colleges and universities had granted about 1,000 degrees, but the programs that provided a vital bridge between slavery and citizenship were unpopular among white people. The bureau’s funding was cut drastically following Lincoln’s assassination, leading to its disbandment.

“I think the goal with that is to let the kids think for themselves and teach them how to tackle challenging topics in a respectful and thoughtful way. And that’s all I try to do,” Atterbom said.

Students are taught to share ideas with respect

For Atterbom, it’s not about teaching kids what to think, it’s about teaching them how to think and to share their ideas in a respectful and thoughtful way, starting with listening.

“If I’ve done my job right, they’ve learned to communicate and write more effectively,” he said. “And then also, more importantly to me, to communicate to each other more effectively.

“That’s why at the beginning of every class, I emphasize when we share ideas, I want you to repeat what the person in front of you said first. It’s a learning process … There’s adults who don’t know how to do that. So, if I can teach them that as an 11-year-old, I’ve done my job.”

For Horne, race is “irrelevant to anything.” History says otherwise. Either way, terms like “1619 Project” and “CRT” were absent from Atterbom’s class.

Still, students in the Balsz district, right behind the airport, are trying to fly under the radar and ignore the noise surrounding a national debate over race in education that has noting to do with students and everything to do with conservatives clinging to power.

Reach Moore at  [email protected]  or 602-444-2236. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter,  @SayingMoore .