How Critical Race Theory Can Help Us Understand the Church of England Much Better

This chapter introduces Critical Race Theory (CRT), as the theoretical framework deployed in this study. CRT has been shown to be fluid and versatile, such that it has been used in different contexts, such as in education research, nursing and other social sciences (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Leonardo, 2009; Giles, 2010; Hylton, 2010; Crenshaw, 2011; Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Chapman, 2013; Capper, 2015; Gambrell, 2016; Dixson, 2018; Dixson & Anderson, 2018). In the field of education, the applicability of CRT was popularised by Ladson-Billings and William Tate (1995), about 20 years ago. What Ladson-Billings and Tate did show was how race was undertheorised in educational policy and practice (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Taylor, 2009; Gillborn, 2015). In other words, issues that perpetuate racial subordination were not highlighted in educational discourses. In addition, the curriculum was not culturally relevant to marginalised groups, and people from other cultural groups found it challenging to engage with the curriculum, since they could not see themselves represented in it (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Solorzano & Yosso, 2009). Due to its ability to uncover racial inequalities (Gillborn, 2005), its use in this book will help to understand how racialised issues in the CofE are perpetuated. This chapter builds on Chap. 2 , which has identified the role of religion in organisations such as the CofE. The next section will provide a synopsis of the evolution of CRT from legal studies and will then look at its central tenets, and at how they can provide tools to study religion and analyse racialised dynamics in the CofE.