Book Review: Handbook of Critical Race Theory in Education

Abstract

I came to Critical Race Theory (CRT, hereafter) during my teacher preparation program in undergrad. However, my teacher preparation program was not remotely interested in CRT or the ways in which race, power, politics, and the prevailing configurations of inequity and stratification had a deleterious impact on our students, their families and communities, our teaching, and more intimately my life as a Blackman 1 ; these topics were palpably absent. With conversations about race, hinging on deficit theories, divorced from critiques of racism and structural issues, I became frustrated. From this frustration I first began reading culturally relevant pedagogies and then critical race theory-both of which have a genesis in the intellectual labor and scholarship of Gloria Ladson-Billings. In 1995, Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate IV wrote the germinal CRT article in education, Toward a Critical Race Theory in Education, in which they argued that race was not only analytically salient and significant, but also it was under-theorized in educational research. These scholars posited that property rights as opposed to human rights was the foundational premise upon which "the franchise" and broader considerations of citizenship and civil rights were organized, and that the nexus of race and property is a useful analytical tool for unpacking inequality. Moreover, Ladson-Billings and Tate's (1995) work takes up the ways in which seemingly progressive approaches, such as multiculturalism, can be co-opted and uprooted, used as veneer, masking issues of injustice and racism.Almost 20 years after the publication of Ladson-Billings and Tate's (1995) germinal article, issues animated and informed by race and racist practices and policies structure education. 2 It stands that CRT still has something to say to and do in the "nice" field of education. As such, Marvin Lynn and Adrienne D. Dixson's edited volume, comprised of 28 chapters, is the past, present, and future of CRT in education, adding an impressive body of scholarship to CRT literature. This text can serve as a useful handbook for scholars of social studies.This volume serves as a much-needed intercessor, perhaps a guidepost of sorts as scholars make their journey through CRT. This volume is not only a survey of the current terrain of CRT scholarship in education, but also an illustration of exemplary critical race scholarship. One would think the distinction need not be articulated, however, as the editors note,