Critical Race Theory in Higher Education: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go

Critical race theory (CRT), a legal theory of race and racism, is increasing in popularity throughout the academy and beyond. Higher education scholars, in particular, have employed CRT as a theoretical framework for decades. This chapter engages with two central research questions: (1) How is CRT being thought with in research and used in practice within higher education? (2) What can scholars do to enrich and exercise CRT analyses for higher education in the future? The author reviews how higher education scholars frame CRT, what tenets or propositions they employ, who they are citing, and how they use CRT to analyze data. The author argues CRT research in higher education will be theoretically enriched by greater engagement with its theoretical foundations in legal scholarship. Further, the author suggests that Kristie Dotson’s work on inheritance provides a generative approach to thinking about CRT in a manner more attuned to its theoretical foundations.