Critical Race Theory and Education: Racism and antiracism in educational theory and praxis David Gillborn*

In this paper, therefore, I have set out the case for a greater awareness of CRT
and for its adoption within a revitalized critical antiracism. In this way CRT offers a
coherent and challenging set of important sensitizing insights and conceptual tools.
These provide a starting point for critical antiracist analyses that can avoid some of
the dangers inherent in the current situation—where antiracism risks being reduced to
the level of the worst kind of “multiculturalism”: that is, a slogan, evacuated of all
critical content, ritually cited but leaving untouched the deep-rooted processes of
racist oppression and exclusion that currently shape the education systems in many
nation states. Perhaps most significantly, Critical Race Theory offers a challenge to
educational studies more generally, and to the sociology of education in particular, to
cease the ritualistic citation of “race” as just another point of departure on a list of
exclusions to be mentioned and then bracketed away. CRT insists that racism be
placed at the centre of analyses and that scholarly work be engaged in the process of
rejecting and deconstructing the current patterns of exclusion and oppression.

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