COMMENTARY: CRITICAL RACE THEORY: A COMMEMORATION: RESPONSE: Race . . . to the Top, Again: Comments on the Genealogy of Critical Race Theory

Gloria Ladson-Billings*

This Commentary Article ¹ is supposed to address Kimberle Williams Crenshaw's article in this volume, Twenty Years of Critical Race Theory: Looking Back To Move Forward. ² In reality it serves as yet another look back, another narrative of origin, this time from the field of education as well as a commentary. The discussion explains the introduction of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in education, its reception, and its future prospects given the current discourse of colorblindness and post-racial America. ³



In 1992, Willam F. Tate ⁴ and I were beginning our tenure at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Tate was a newly-minted Ph.D and the Wisconsin job was his first academic position. I had been out of graduate school for several years and began my post-graduate life as an academic staff person at Santa Clara University in California. I arrived at Wisconsin with an up-and-running project directed at documenting the expertise of teachers who were successful with African-American students. ⁵ This project was an outgrowth of my work on school inequity and racial discrimination in schools. During the early meetings of newly appointed faculty, Tate and I started talking about our research agendas. He indicated that, as a mathematics educator, he was working on mathematical functions; however, much of his casual conversation dealt with questions of inequality, race, and racism. When I suggested that he should consider moving his research agenda to those issues, he seemed genuinely surprised that such an option was available to him. After ...