Critical Race Theory (Essay Sample)

Student's Name Professor's Name Course Number Date Critical Race Theory Critical Race Theory is contentious for its polarization of society into whites and non-whites. It divides the world between the oppressor and the other oppressed. This paper aims to analyze, evaluate and interpret the Critical Race Theory (CRT) and shed light on its origin, objectives and why it is controversial. CRT takes an intense position over the systematic racial divide in society while specifying the situations in which it should be applied. Critical Race Theory considers the systematic and macro-level aspects of race. Critical Race Theory considers the same issues brought up in the Civil Rights Movement and other ethnic studies. However, in CRT, the racial divide is applied to a larger and more systematic level where everything is explained from the point of view of racial identity (Delgado 3). CRT emerged in the 1980s, and legal scholars put forth it to address the racial inequality in society to address and identify the racism still left in the roots of the society after anti-discrimination laws. The CRT may highlight some important points, such as the systematic outcomes of racism in different forms. For example, it discusses how African-Americans are cornered in affordable housing programs, why they cannot get bank loans like their white counterparts, why the crime rates among blacks are high, why black children are less likely to be educated than white children, and so on. Such a viewpoint is important because racism is no longer considered problematic after the anti-discrimination laws emerged. It is important to know what CRT is and is not. According to Ladson-Billings, a study of the African-American students expelled from schools because of disciplinary issues is not a study of CRT but rather a quantitative study demonstrating adverse outcomes for ethnic minorities. The main tenets of CRT include racism as normal, a part of social construct, intersectionality, convergence of interest and counter-narrative or resistance (Ladson-Billings 37). Such criteria can rule out the potential misinterpretation of phenomena not part of CRT and help create a clear picture of the phenomena under study. One of the aims of the CRT is to challenge the persistent disadvantageous outcomes for certain races and take corrective actions to prevent such things from happening again (Christian, Seamster and Ray). CRT is controversial because its suitability for education, particularly for primary and secondary education, is being questioned. There is limited information about slavery in school education and how slavery is part of the history of the US. CRT fundamentally provides an ethnicity-based view of society and can...