Critical Race Perspectives on Desegregation: The Forgotten Voices of Black Educators

Abstract

This chapter addresses the relationship between critical race theory (CRT) scholarship in North America and antiracist research elsewhere, especially in the United Kingdom. It argues that a dialogue between CRT, to date dominated by a focus on the United States, and British antiracism could prove especially fruitful for scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. The chapter reflects on the role of theory in British antiracism. In Britain, antiracism arose as much from a critique of liberal multiculturalism as it did from an analysis of the racist nature of the state. The chapter outlines the CRT and then considers its promise for critical antiracist scholarship and praxis internationally. CRT embraces a movement of left scholars, most of them scholars of color, situated in law schools, whose work challenges the ways in which race and racial power are constructed and represented in American legal culture and, more generally, in American society as a whole.