Critical race theory significant person Richard Delgado
Definitions
In his introduction to the comprehensive 1995 publication of critical race theory's key writings, Cornel West described CRT as "an intellectual movement that is both particular to our postmodern (and conservative) times and part of a long tradition of human resistance and liberation." Law professor Roy L. Brooks defined critical race theory in 1994 as "a collection of critical stances against the existing legal order from a race-based point of view".Gloria Ladson-Billings, who—along with co-author William Tate—had introduced CRT to the field of education in 1995, described it in 2015 as an "interdisciplinary approach that seeks to understand and combat race inequity in society." Ladson-Billings wrote in 1998 that CRT "first emerged as a counterlegal scholarship to the positivist and liberal legal discourse of civil rights."In 2017, University of Alabama School of Law professor Richard Delgado, a co-founder of critical race theory, and legal writer Jean Stefancic define CRT as "a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power". In 2021, Khiara Bridges, a law professor and author of the textbook Critical Race Theory: A Primer, defined critical race theory as an "intellectual movement", a "body of scholarship", and an "analytical toolset for interrogating the relationship between law and racial inequality."The 2021 Encyclopaedia Britannica described CRT as an "intellectual and social movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis based on the premise that race is not a natural, biologically grounded feature of physically distinct subgroups of human beings but a socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of colour."