ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades, Critical Race Theory (CRT) has gained increasing attention among scholars as an analytical tool for examining ways in which race and racism shape policies and practices in education. Early transportation of CRT from legal studies to education, shaped by the seminal work of Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995), primarily focused on critiques of the elementary and secondary school systems. With a few notable exceptions, the first decade of CRT in education produced limited examination of the postsecondary system as an instrumental producer of racial inequality in the United States. In many ways, CRT directly contradicts scholarly traditions of higher education research, notably the perpetuation of meritocratic ideology and sociocultural neutrality (Conant, 1962, Rudolph, 1962). At the very least, CRT challenges the notion that, when considering development of a racial hierarchy in the United States, the postsecondary education system merely serves as a passive reflection of societal norms (Anderson, 2002).
