ABSTRACT
During the 1980s and 1990s, race-based scholarship generally was viewed as a form of identity politics not worthy of serious discussion in academic and public policy discourse (see, for example, Chen, 1996). However, this notion was challenged by a number of works that have offered solid interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks on race in the U.S. context (Omi and Winant, 1994; Winant, 1994; Goldberg, 1997). Critical race theory (CRT) has contributed to the theorizing about race as it has garnered increasing attention from various academic circles and disciplines as an emerging perspective in jurisprudence scholarship addressing race (Crenshaw, Gotanda, Peller, and Thomas, 1995; Delgado, 1995; Solórzano, 1998; Tate, 1997). The main tenets of CRT are described in other parts of this book, so the purpose of our chapter is to point to ways in which education research and policy can be linked to CRT for the purpose of racial social justice in educational practice. We contend that relating CRT to education can indeed foster the connections of theory to practice and activism on issues related to race (as well as ethnicity, gender, social class, language, and the like). Through our analysis, we hope to facilitate an understanding of CRT as a valuable tool with which to view and analyze issues related to land, human rights, and nationalism and how these connect with Chicano / a and Latino / a civil rights and education. We will also attempt to show how the legal tools and framework of CRT can provide valuable racial discrimination “data” in ongoing legal 32struggles for equal educational opportunity and equity for the Navajo tribal nation in the western United States. The ultimate goal of this chapter is to give readers not only a sense of what CRT is but of what / how struggles for education equity and social justice can form the basis of critical race praxis. We hope to demonstrate what the field of education has to offer to the discourse on race and the law.
