ABSTRACT
In 1998 I published an article entitled, “Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?” (Ladson-Billings, 1998). This article was a follow-up to the article that William Tate and I (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) published that first introduced Critical Race Theory to the education research community. In the 1998 article I attempted to offer both caution and encouragement to my colleagues. I cautioned those who would jump headlong into Critical Race Theory (CRT) without doing the hard work of reading the legal scholarship in which CRT is grounded. Without those foundational perspectives and knowledge education scholars are likely to sound both uniformed and ignorant. Despite that challenge I also wanted to encourage young scholars to think beyond the narrow paradigms that have historically delimited education research and scholarship. I am happy to report that more scholars have taken up the challenge to use CRT as a theoretical lens and analytic tool. That scholarship has expanded to include what we now know as LatCrit, Critical Race Feminism, and a variety of other strands. This chapter focuses on the basic theoretical assumptions that ground CRT and raises questions about its future in education research.
