LatCrit: Where is the Afro in LatCrit?

Complicating Latiné experiences: Afro-Latiné students’ perceptions of campus climate and sense of belonging.

“…In centering Latinés within the broader critical landscape, LatCrit has been utilized to advance consideration of racial equity policy in public school finance (Alemán, 2006) and the (co)construction of knowledge among Latine students (Bernal, 2002). Yet, in the construction of LatCrit, theorists reify a monoracial framing of Latinidad (Díaz, 2024); LatCrit neglects to incorporate a critical examination of the role of anti-Blackness within Latinidad (see Busey et al, 2023; Díaz, 2024, for exceptions). Thus, while LatCrit centers Latinés broadly, LatCrit has been underutilized in understanding the complex intersection between Latinidad and Blackness, captured through research on Afro-Latinés.…”

“…I. Harris, 1993;Matsuda, 1993). Building on this foundational work, CRT scholars emphasize several interlocking elements that articulate how experiences of racism should be understood as common occurrences rather than one-off incidents; a racial hierarchy serves important purposes for the dominant (white) group, thus racial progress is made when the dominant group benefits from it; race is socially constructed rather than biological; each racial group has its own origins and ever-evolving history; and having a minority status provides people of color with unique perspectives on race and racism, given their positionality and lived experiences (Bell, 1980;Crenshaw, 1991;Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). Though CRT began with a focus on the legal system, this theory has been applied to numerous social institutions, including the education system (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995;Solorzano, 1997), to explain and challenge continued racial disparities.…”

Guest editorial: Moving beyond antiblackness: from critical race theory to BlackCrit

“…During the last 40 years, critical race theory (CRT) has grown beyond the field of critical legal studies to expand its reach toward educational studies with Ladson-Billings and Tate’s (1995) the IV’s seminal work, “Toward a critical race theory of education.” Since then, CRT has proliferated into more group-specific articulations – such as AsianCrit (Museus and Iftikar, 2013; An, 2016), LatCrit (Solorzano and Bernal, 2001; Solorzano and Yosso, 2001; Díaz, 2023), DisCrit (Annamma et al , 2018; Annamma et al , 2013) and TribalCrit (Martinez-Cola, 2020; Sabzalian et al , 2021) – to more explicitly address the racial(ized) concerns of Asian-American and Pacific Islanders, LatinX peoples, disabled persons of color and Indigenous peoples, respectively. These articulations of CRT were, in part, created in response to the fact that most CRT work engaged with race through a narrow Black/white binary approach.…”