ABSTRACT
Cornelius Fredericks had been a ward of the state since the age of 11 after his mother died and his father was incarcerated. DisCrit’s intellectual lineage is kindred with critical race theory, both in the law and education. Critical Race Theory (CRT) provided the source because of what it offered in terms of shared assumptions, what united CRT scholars, how they defined racism, and what an academic commitment to intersectionality looked like. DisCrit built on the tenets of CRT and drew from disability studies, incorporating how racism and ableism are interdependent, as this understanding provides affordances for clarifying the processes by which inequities occur. Young people are not protected from the impacts of interlocking subordinations of racism and ableism. Critical Resistance, an abolitionist organization, describes abolition as a project not just of tearing down but of rebuilding.
