ABSTRACT
Considering that race has always been a part of the Asian American experience in the United States, the scholarship on critical race theory (CRT) is a productive space to explore how racism has shaped the making of the master narratives on who an Asian American is and what an Asian American should be. The legal framework advocated by critical race theorists enables the critique of the racialized norms that perpetuate violence against Asian Americans (Chang, 1993). It is the commitment to documenting everyday experiences, analyzing the impact of racial structures, and the commitment to social justice that make CRT transformative as a theoretical construct. In the field of education, the infusion of CRT legal scholarship has engendered productive dialogue on how race continues to play a significant role in shaping school inequities. Scholars who utilize CRT as a lens to analyze educational research argue that class and gender analysis cannot fully explain why students of color continue to face academic challenges and continue to be racialized as the Other (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Tate, 1997). By situating race as a compelling analytical category, CRT “can be used to theorize, examine and challenge the ways race and racism implicitly and explicitly impact on social structures, practices and discourses” (Yosso, 2005, p. 70). “The CRT legal literature offers a
necessary critical vocabulary for analyzing and understanding the persistent and pernicious inequity in education that is always already a function of race and racism” (Dixson & Rousseau, 2005, p. 18). Educators who utilize a CRT framework advocate how questions of curriculum, pedagogy, and school culture cannot ignore how race shapes questions of privilege, racial violence, and exclusion. As an extension of U.S. society, the schooling process and in general the discipline of education are deeply implicated in racialized discourses. Linking Asian American educational issues and CRT concepts, Teranishi et al. (2009) argue that CRT scholarship enables educators: (1) to analyze Asian American voices that have been historically silenced in education settings; (2) to critique how interest convergence supports dominant ideas about Asian Americans; and (3) to enable praxis that supports social justice projects within Asian American communities.
