Critical Race Theory and Education: Qualitative Research in the New Millennium

Abstract

A century after the great American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois predicted that racism would continue to emerge as one of this country’s key problems, educational researchers, practitioners, and students are still in need of a language that will provide the necessary tools for effectively analyzing and coming to terms with the impact of race and racism on education. In part because of the reemergence of conservative pseudoscientific discourses in the 1990s and the predominance of class and gender epistemologies, discussions about race and racism in education have been either pushed to the margins or effectively destabilized. As faculty of color seeking to do transformative work that addresses issues of race and racism in education, we sometimes struggle with the limited ways in which our work and the work of other scholars concerned with race is interpreted and viewed by our colleagues. We have been fortunate because although the field of education has not wholly embraced race discourse, we have benefited significantly from the work of scholars in other fields such as ethnic studies, sociology, and law. We have borrowed heavily from and actively situated our work within these rich traditions—particularly ethnic studies (e.g., African American and Chicano studies). Even still, we continue to seek to find ways in which to create a discourse that engages larger questions of racial inequality in education and in society. For many of us, critical race theory (CRT) has begun to meet this growing need.