Critical race theory grew out of US law schools in the 1970s and 1980s. Scholars including Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Alan Freeman, Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda argued that civil rights laws had not ended racial inequality because racism is built into legal and social structures. The first workshop under the name was held in 1989 in Madison, Wisconsin.
Its core ideas include that race is a social construction, that racism is ordinary rather than rare, and that legal rules that look neutral can produce racist outcomes. Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality came out of this work.
Since 2020, critical race theory has become a political label applied to almost any teaching about racism. In September 2020, a federal executive order restricted diversity training in agencies. UCLA's CRT Forward project counted hundreds of state and local measures introduced to restrict teaching about race from 2021 onward. Most target K-12 schools, where the academic theory is rarely taught. Anti-Racism Daily reads the backlash as an effort to limit honest teaching of US history.