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Critical Race Theory Had A Serious Problem — Until Now
During the last two decades of the 20th century, two academic movements emerged out of the black intelligentsia, Afrocentricity and Critical Race Theory.
Afrocentricity was a historical movement that claimed the great achievements of Western Civilization originated in Africa. They also claimed Eurocentric scholarship suppressed Africa’s contributions to humanity in order to maintain white supremacy.
Critical Race Theory developed within legal studies.
CRT scholars questioned the “very foundation of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” Then CRT branched out into other fields — education, political science, ethnic studies, and so forth.
The textbook — Critical Race Theory: An Introduction — also stated, “Unlike some other academic disciplines, Critical Race Theory contains an activist dimension. It not only tries to understand our social situation (how society organizes itself along racial lines and hierarchies), but to change it.”
By the mid-1990s, Afrocentric scholarship was mainstreaming while CRT remained in academic obscurity. Then in 1996 Mary Lefkowitz published, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History…