Black History Month 2022: CRT Teach-In
Message from the Director
By Professor Alvin B. Tillery Jr, Ph.D
In honor of Black History Month 2022, I proposed a social media campaign that would spotlight an intellectual tradition that has been the subject of disinformation campaigns in the American news media: critical race theory. Our mission at the Center of the Study of Diversity and Democracy is to stimulate research, dialogue, and civic engagement about the relationship between diversity and democratic politics. Critical race theory aligns with our mission such that it defies the authoritarian political movement intent on erasing U.S. history.
As we will explain throughout this newsletter, the United States has a complicated and storied history of race relations which critical race theory (CRT) can help explain. While CRT was originally created and intended specifically for legal scholarship and training lawyers how to scrutinize the law in the spirit of reforming the U.S. legal system to take a hard look at America’s racist past (and present).
We believe that CRT transcends this original purpose.
We have developed this newsletter to educate the public on critical race theory’s foundations, core concepts, and historical contexts where you can see why and how these scholars developed their original framework. We hope that you will find this newsletter as a valuable resource to educate you on CRT and help inform your worldview by examining how past U.S. policy has affected our present reality.
View the entire Critical Race Theory Teach-In social media campaign here.