Race, Empire and Education Collective

For most of its forty-year history, Critical Race Theory’s home was in academia, as an analytical framework for understanding the ways in which racism remains embedded in our major social institutions. In recent years, however, discussion of CRT has moved well beyond the universities. Since the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in2020, CRT has become a folk demon, a catch-all to signal conservative antipathy to ‘wokeness’. But what exactly is CRT and why has it affronted conservatives and liberals alike? This session explores CRT’s theoretical framework: its focus on ‘racial realism’ and ‘the permanence of racism’.