ABSTRACT
Critical Race Theory (CRT) arose as a legal approach to address racial invisibility, exploitation, and injustice in the early 1980s and 1990s. It emerged in dissension with the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement. CLS, which came into existence alongside the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, took issue with the notion that law was marked by historical progress. Methodologically, CRT emerges as a framework to challenge several problems that have long held in politics and law. Crenshaw's approach to intersectionality fits well with a CRT approach to oppression and discrimination, since, like CRT, intersectional approaches assume that hierarchies of power influence how people cognize and identify marginalized populations, whether through production of their identity or through racialized, gendered focus of legal structures that either recognize or render certain subgroups invisible. It is important to note that the conceptual framework known as intersectionality names a number of different phenomena that span a broad range of thinkers and historical epochs.
