Critical race theory (CRT)

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What is critical race theory (CRT)?
Critical race theory (CRT) is a set of ideas, theories, and principles that can influence the understanding of race and racism. These include the idea that racism is embedded in legal and social systems. The term can also refer to activism based on this framework or specific conclusions, opinions, or policies attributed to CRT. Definitions and interpretations of CRT vary.

Why does it matter?
The term came into widespread use outside of its original legal context around 2020, particularly in debates about K-12 curriculum.

Twenty states had enacted legislation to restrict or ban the teaching of CRT-related concepts in public schools at the beginning of the 2025 state legislative session. Eighteen of those states were Republican trifectas, and two had divided governments; no Democratic trifectas enacted legislation to prohibit CRT-related instruction. The controversy around CRT instruction is part of a larger debate about public education curriculum and how public schools should teach about history, race, racism, and social issues.

What are the key arguments?
Critics of CRT argue that it promotes a divisive worldview that overemphasizes race at the expense of individual agency and merit. Opponents of CRT-influenced curricula in K-12 public education argue that it uses specific language to manipulate and distort conversations to push a particular set of cultural ideas that are harmful to students and society.

Proponents of CRT argue that racism is not only found in the prejudice of individuals but is embedded in society's legal systems, institutions, and structures and that embedded or structural racism is responsible for continued racial inequity. They argue that CRT provides an effective framework for understanding and addressing racism in American society. Proponents of allowing CRT-influenced ideas to be included in public education curricula argue that laws and policies restricting how race and racism are taught about in public schools negatively affect students and prevent accurate teaching about history and race.

To read more, visit Ballotpedia's taxonomy of the arguments surrounding CRT.

What's the background?
The term critical race theory first came into use in the mid-1970s as a term to describe a method of legal inquiry that developed following the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The framework developed from critical legal studies, which argued that the law does not function according to neutral, objective principles. CRT expanded this idea, focusing specifically on race and racism. Since its inception in legal scholarship, CRT has been incorporated into other academic disciplines, including sociology, public health, social work, and education.

Dive deeper
Click the links below to jump to the section:

• Background. This section provides an overview of how the term CRT originated.
• The ideas, theories, and principles of CRT. This section provides a summary of the core tenets of CRT.
• CRT-related legislation. This section provides an overview of states with CRT-related K-12 instruction legislation.
• Arguments about CRT. This section provides an overview of both sides of CRT-related arguments.

The following pages provide more information about critical race theory:

• Use of the term critical race theory
• Main areas of inquiry and disagreement related to the history, theory, and practice of critical race theory
• Overview of trends in K-12 curricula development related to critical race theory (CRT) and CRT-adjacent issues

Background

Origin of the term

The term critical race theory first came into use in the mid-1970s as a term to describe a method of legal inquiry that developed following the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The critical race theory approach to legal analysis developed in part as "a response to the notion that society and institutions were 'colorblind,'" according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Legal scholars at the time, including Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (who first coined the term critical race theory), rejected the notion of colorblindness. Crenshaw and other scholars argued instead that racial disparities "have persisted in the United States despite decades of civil rights reforms, and they raise structural questions about how racist hierarchies are enforced, even among people with good intentions."

Relationship to critical legal studies

Originators of the new analytical framework, including Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Mari Matsuda, and Richard Delgado, among others, derived the term critical race theory from critical legal studies—an approach to legal analysis popularized during the 1970s that argued that the law does not function according to neutral, objective principles. Proponents of what became known as critical race theory, like those of critical legal studies, considered the law to sometimes function in a way that subverts, rather than upholds, what they called social justice, according to Delgado.

Wider use in academia

The term critical race theory gained a foothold in legal scholarship during the 1980s. The term referred to a legal analytical framework that aimed to analyze and evaluate the role that race has played in shaping the law in the United States. By the late 1990s, legal scholar Daniel Subotnik observed in the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy that the term had experienced rapid growth in popularity: "Scarcely fifteen years old, Critical Race Theory (CRT) has generated a passion among its adherents, mostly minority academics, that has already fueled at least a dozen books, probably 250 law review articles and a half-dozen conferences."

Since its inception, other academic disciplines have incorporated critical race theory into their analytical frameworks, including sociology, public health, social work, and education. In more recent years, scholarship and policy analysis concerning immigration and international law has also referenced the term critical race theory. By 2011, the term had roughly 3,500 legal citations, according to Delgado.

Mainstream use of the term

The term critical race theory came into widespread use around 2020, particularly in debates about K-12 curriculum. Google searches for the term spiked in all 50 states.

Ideas, theories, and principles of CRT

According to Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, the following are the core tenets of Critical Race Theory. Delgado and Stefancic write, "What do critical race theorists believe? Probably not every member would subscribe to every tenet set out in this book, but many would agree on the following propositions."

• Race is socially constructed: This is the idea that race is best understood as a social construct, not a biological reality. CRT argues that racial distinctions exist not because of inherent biological or physical characteristics, but because society agrees that they exist and treats race as important. And different societies and cultures define race differently and organize people by race in different ways.
• Structural or systemic racism: This is the idea that racism is not only found in the prejudice of individuals but is also embedded in legal systems and other societal institutions.
• Racism as ordinary and common: This is the idea, which is tied to structural racism, that racism is not a rare occurrence isolated to an individual but is the normal state of things and underlies opportunities and experiences for everyone in ways that are not always obvious or easy to identify.
  • CRT holds that laws and policies are not necessarily neutral or objective and equal treatment under the law does not address racism and can perpetuate structural or systemic racism when the law reflects the interests of the dominant racial group. Delgado and Stefancic write, "Color-blind, or 'formal,' conceptions of equality, expressed in rules that insist only on treatment that is the same across the board, can thus remedy only the most blatant forms of discrimination."
• The convergence of interest: Also called material determinism, this is the idea that civil rights progress tends to happen when it aligns with the interests of the dominant group not solely because of altruism, virtue, or rule of law.
• Intersectionality: This is the idea that different forms of social identity such as race, gender, class, and sexuality overlap to create unique experiences of privilege or discrimination.
• Unique voice-of-color thesis: According to Delgado and Stefancic, this is the idea that "because of their different histories and experiences with oppression, black, Indian, Asian, and Latino/a writers and thinkers may be able to communicate to their white counterparts matters that the whites are unlikely to know. Minority status, in other words, brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism."

CRT-related legislation

See also: Local school board authority across the 50 states, Authority of local school boards in each state

Twenty (20) states have enacted legislation opposing or prohibiting CRT-related curriculum or curriculum topics frequently associated with the concepts of CRT, as of July 2025, and 20 states have vetoed, overturned, or stalled such legislation. The map below shows which states have enacted, vetoed, overturned, introduced, or not attempted to introduce legislation opposing CRT. Ballotpedia has not tracked any legislation specifically supporting or requiring CRT-related curriculum.

Ballotpedia tracks school board authority and constraints on their authority, including statewide curricular prohibitions on CRT-related topics. Click here to learn more about the project; click here to navigate to a specific state.

Arguments about CRT

This section presents an overview of the main arguments related to the history, theory, and practice of critical race theory (CRT). Ballotpedia has identified four types of arguments regarding what is meant by the term CRT, seven types of arguments opposing it, and five types of arguments supporting it; click here to navigate to Ballotpedia's in-depth taxonomy of arguments.

Competing definitions of the term

Many media sources, academics, activists, and organizations have published definitions of the term critical race theory. A selection of these definitions can be found below:

Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Legal scholars and founders) in 2017: "The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, setting, group and self-interest, and emotions and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law. [...] It not only tries to understand our social situation, but to change it; it sets out not only to ascertain how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies, but to transform it for the better."

Christopher F. Rufo (Senior fellow, Manhattan Institute) in 2021: "Critical race theory is an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to universities and obscure academic journals, over the past decade it has increasingly become the default ideology in our public institutions. It has been injected into government agencies, public school systems, teacher training programs, and corporate human resources departments in the form of diversity training programs, human resources modules, public policy frameworks, and school curricula."

American Bar Association in 2021: "Crenshaw—who coined the term 'CRT'—notes that CRT is not a noun, but a verb. It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice. It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers. CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others. CRT recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation."

James Lindsay (Author, mathematician, and political analyst) in 2020: "Critical Race Theory—

• believes racism is present in every aspect of life, every relationship, and every interaction and therefore has its advocates look for it everywhere
• relies upon 'interest convergence' (white people only give black people opportunities and freedoms when it is also in their own interests) and therefore doesn’t trust any attempt to make racism better
• is against free societies and wants to dismantle them and replace them with something its advocates control
• only treats race issues as 'socially constructed groups,' so there are no individuals in Critical Race Theory
• believes science, reason, and evidence are a 'white' way of knowing and that storytelling and lived experience are a 'black' alternative, which hurts everyone, especially black people
• rejects all potential alternatives, like colorblindness, as forms of racism, making itself the only allowable game in town (which is totalitarian)
• acts like anyone who disagrees with it must do so for racist and white supremacist reasons, even if those people are black (which is also totalitarian)
• cannot be satisfied, so it becomes a kind of activist black hole that threatens to destroy everything it is introduced into"

The Brookings Institution in 2021: "CRT does not attribute racism to white people as individuals or even to entire groups of people. Simply put, critical race theory states that U.S. social institutions (e.g., the criminal justice system, education system, labor market, housing market, and healthcare system) are laced with racism embedded in laws, regulations, rules, and procedures that lead to differential outcomes by race."

Should CRT be allowed in public education?

Opponents of including CRT in K-12 curricula argue that CRT's assumptions and framework should not influence school curricula because they are divisive and promote anti-American ideals. Proponents of including CRT in K-12 curricula argue that assumptions of CRT can guide the development of school curricula that produce better outcomes for students and that they teach students to recognize and address systemic racism.

• Opposing

  Reporter John Murawski in 2021

  “Because of its influence on equity training, anti-racist workplace policies and K-12 education that blame racial disparities on racism and advocate for equal outcomes, CRT faces widespread resistance from conservatives and others who say the critique of ‘whiteness’ and relentless critique of the United States is extremely one-sided and borders on anti-American and anti-white bigotry.”

• Opposing

  Professor Erec Smith in 2021

  “However, putting this theory into practice, especially in primary and secondary schools, is causing more harm than good because it is actually a divisive, debilitating, and racist teaching practice. Unfortunately, when people try to blow the whistle on it, all they hear is, ‘That’s not really CRT, so we don’t care about what you’re saying.’ A divisive, debilitating, and racist teaching practice, by any other name, is still a divisive, debilitating and racist teaching practice.”

• Opposing

  Scholar Jeff Zorn in 2018

  “Crowding out more rounded inquiry, CRT depicts children of color as perpetual victims, their learning problems of interest only as markers of white supremacist conspiracy. To these children CRT offers little more than a noble-sounding excuse not to try, in school and beyond. Trained to scorn all forms of ‘majoritarian’ success, they will instead practice race-first oppositionality ... At eye level, CRT education serves less salutary purposes. It prompts students with poor academic skills to make no priority of improving them. It conditions students to see others merely as race members, then interact along some Byzantine scale of comparative oppression. It beckons nonwhites to judge ‘White Culture’ as opprobrious and their own flawless. It baits the nation into fuller, angrier fragmentation.”

• Supporting

  Writer Matthew Lynch in 2021

  “Conner (2021) found in her studies that two-third of active youth organizers from the lowest-performing schools in Philadephia showed significant improvement in their grades. This is endorsed by the findings of other scholars who found that youth organizers mostly receive A or B grades in high schools and attend college for four years at a higher rate. Ironically, the more young people become aware of the prevalent inequalities at schools, the less alienated they are and more committed to academic excellence.”

• Supporting

  CEO of Liaison Educational Partners Tanji Reed Marshall in 2021

  “Educators use this framework to deepen students’ critical thinking skills by asking them to probe the singularity of the perspectives being advanced in our history. Students ask questions about missing voices look under our historical hoods, so to speak, and challenge the power dynamics at play when events are slanted toward an Eurocentric point of view. Educators have the opportunity to build students analytical, evaluative, and critiquing skills in ways that go beyond just learning the basics. Too often, students are taught history that is devoid of its impact on Indigenous communities, formerly enslaved communities, and other communities of color. And they are fed a steady diet of factoids without the opportunity to consider the far-reaching implications on current events.”

• Supporting

  Director of National and State Partnerships for The Education Trust Lynn Jennings in 2022

  “Every student in the United States deserves a rich and complete education that helps them understand the story of their country and how their families are part of that story. This learning helps students digest current events in the context of history, develop critical thinking skills, and distinguish truth from falsity. It helps them recognize the big patterns in society and lets them make judgments about whether America’s struggle for democracy has been successful or has been hobbled by stubborn systems of racism and oppression.”

See also

• Overview of trends in K-12 curricula development
• Arguments about critical race theory (CRT)

External links

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