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The First Decade: Critical Reflections, Or "A Foot In The Closing Door", Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

In the introduction to Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, Gary Peller, Neil Gotanda, Kendall Thomas, and I framed the development of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as a dialectical engagement with liberal race discourse and with Critical Legal Studies (CLS). We described this engagement as constituting a distinctively progressive intervention within liberal race theory and a race intervention within CLS. As neat as this sounds, it took almost a decade for these interventions to be fleshed out fully. Reflecting on the past ten years of CRT, this Article explores the course of these interventions from the …