About This Case Study

Critical race theory is a body of legal scholarship developed by a small group of law professors in the 1970s and 1980s. Beginning in 2020, "CRT" became something else: a name attached, by school boards, state legislatures, and federal officials, to a wide range of curricula, trainings, and conversations about race — many of which have little to do with the scholarship the term originally described. This case study takes that gap as its object. You will work with the CRT Forward Tracking Project, a database built by UCLA School of Law's Critical Race Studies Program that identifies, catalogs, and analyzes the measures introduced across the United States to restrict the teaching of and conversation about race.

The exercise asks you to do two things. First, to read one of these measures closely — to see exactly what conduct it restricts or requires, what language it uses, and how it would be enforced. Second, to set that measure against the unit's scholarly definitions of critical race theory, drawn from Delgado and Stefancic and from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and to ask a precise question: does the measure actually restrict critical race theory as scholars define it, or does it restrict something much broader? The analytical move is to test the relationship between a term as scholars use it and the same term as it travels through law and politics — to see, in concrete legislative language, what the distance between the two looks like.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• UCLA School of Law, CRT Forward Tracking Project — the interactive database (crtforward.law.ucla.edu)
• Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction — at least the chapter on the hallmark themes of critical race theory (or your notes on it)
• NAACP Legal Defense Fund, "What Is Critical Race Theory? FAQs" (naacpldf.org)
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group

Before you open the database, write down, in one or two sentences each, your working answer to two questions:

• According to Delgado and Stefancic and the LDF FAQ, what is critical race theory — where is it taught, and what does it claim?
• What would it mean for a law or policy to actually restrict that — the scholarship — rather than something else?

Keep these two answers nearby. The exercise will ask you to return to them.

The Exercise

Phase 1: Orientation (5 minutes)

Open the CRT Forward database in a new tab. The project, launched in 2021 and concluded at the end of 2024, gathers measures — proposed and enacted bills, resolutions, executive orders, attorney general opinions, school board actions, and other government instruments — at the local, state, and federal levels. Its focus is on formal government measures, not on media commentary or advocacy by private groups.

Scroll through the database once to get a sense of its overall shape and scale. Then go through it a second time using its filters, and note three measures that surprise you, confuse you, or seem to you politically charged. For each, jot down the jurisdiction, the year, and one phrase from the entry that caught your attention.

For groups: each member does this individually. Do not share yet.

Phase 2: Close Reading of One Measure (10–12 minutes)

Choose one measure to examine in detail. If you are not sure which to pick, choose one from each of these axes so that your selection is concrete:

• Level of government. A local school board resolution, a state legislative bill, or a federal measure (an executive order or agency directive).
• Sector. A measure aimed at K–12 education, at higher education, at private employers, or at government agencies and their trainings.
• Source of language. A measure that borrows the "divisive concepts" language derived from the now-revoked federal Executive Order 13950, or one that follows model legislation circulated by advocacy organizations.

For your chosen measure, write or discuss:

1. What it does. Be specific. What conduct does the measure restrict or require? What may a teacher, trainer, or institution no longer do — and what, if anything, must they now do instead?
2. What it names. Does the measure use the phrase "critical race theory" at all? If so, does it define the term? If not, what does it name instead — particular concepts, particular topics, particular feelings students might be made to have?
3. How it is enforced. What is the enforcement mechanism? Many measures rely on withholding funding or imposing penalties; some create a right for private parties to sue. Identify who bears the risk if the measure is violated.

You will not have complete information on every point, and some entries are richer than others. Note where information is missing or ambiguous; the gaps are part of what you are reading.

For groups: each member presents their measure in two minutes. Then choose one to develop further as a group.

Phase 3: Testing the Definitions (8–10 minutes)

Return now to the two answers you wrote in Before You Begin, and to the readings behind them.

Delgado and Stefancic describe critical race theory as a body of scholarship, developed largely in law schools, organized around a set of hallmark claims: that racism is ordinary rather than aberrational; that racial categories are socially constructed and that groups are racialized differently at different moments; that the law has often advanced racial interests only when they converge with white interests; and that the perspectives of people of color carry distinctive analytical value. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund likewise defines CRT as an academic and legal framework, taught at the level of higher education, holding that racism is embedded in laws and institutions rather than reducible to individual prejudice.

Holding your chosen measure against these definitions, ask:

• Does the conduct the measure restricts match critical race theory as Delgado and Stefancic and the LDF describe it — graduate- and professional-level scholarship about the structural operation of race in law? Or does it restrict something else: the teaching of history, the discussion of racism in a K–12 classroom, a workplace diversity training, the assignment of a particular book?
• If the measure restricts something broader than the scholarship, what is the effect of attaching the label "CRT" to it? What work does the name do that a more precise description would not?
• Where, in the specific language of your measure, can you locate the distance between critical race theory as a field and "CRT" as the object the measure regulates?

For groups: spend the first five minutes developing the chosen measure together against the definitions. Spend the last five on the third question — locating the distance in the actual text.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

The measure I examined restricts __________. Critical race theory, as the unit's readings define it, is __________. The label "CRT" does its political work in this measure by __________.

Write the most precise version of this sentence you can given what you have just read. The value of the sentence is in the specificity of what you name — and in what you find yourself unable to fit.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the three phases in order, writing brief notes at each step. The close reading you produce in Phase 2 and the comparison in Phase 3 are the central artifacts; keep them for reference when answering Question 3 (on Delgado and Stefancic) and Question 5 (on the NYU Keywords cluster and the LDF FAQ) in the unit's Questions for Reflection.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Members work individually in Phase 1, then choose one measure to develop collectively in Phases 2 and 3. If group time is short, the closing reflection can be assigned as individual writing after the session.

After the Case Study

• Return to Questions 3 and 5 in the unit's Questions for Reflection. Question 3 asks you to apply a tenet of critical race theory to a contemporary policy; the measure you examined here is exactly such a policy. Question 5 asks you to identify a way the public meaning of "CRT" has diverged from its scholarly meaning; the comparison in Phase 3 supplies the material for that answer.
• To extend the exercise, the CRT Forward team published a report, CRT Forward: Tracking the Attack on Critical Race Theory, analyzing patterns across the measures in the database, and the full dataset can be downloaded for quantitative analysis. Working with the aggregate — how many measures rely on the same model language, which sectors are most targeted, which enforcement mechanisms recur — adds a layer that reading a single measure cannot supply.
• The unit's OER readings — the NAACP Legal Defense Fund FAQ and the NYU Press Keywords Now: Critical Race Theory cluster — both distinguish the scholarship from the slogan. Reading them again after this exercise lets you test whether your close reading of one measure supports or complicates their general accounts.