ABSTRACT
The chapters of this book are the intellectual products of the New Race Group of Legal Studies, more commonly referred to as the critical race theory (CRT) movement. Originally a theoretical movement in the field of law, CRT has expanded over the past decade to include scholars in the social sciences, humanities and education. My colleague Gloria Ladson-Billings and I co-authored a paper, “Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education,” initially presented at the 1994 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in New Orleans, Louisiana, and ultimately published in Teachers College Record (Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995). The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief discussion of my thinking about CRT in educational scholarship more than ten years after the presentation of that initial paper and to offer recommendations for scholars interested in building on and moving beyond this theoretical project. My remarks are framed as a global response to the chapters of this volume. As background, I review part of my academic career as it relates to CRT and education. Specifically, my purpose is to provide history relevant to the development of the initial CRT and education paper co-presented at AERA in 1994.
