Reclaiming the Narrative About Critical Race Theory

Critical race theory was developed by Derrick Bell and other legal scholars in the 1970s and ’80s in part to explain how racism is embedded in legal systems and policies.

But in recent years, a conservative campaign against the discipline has worked to redefine it into something sinister, calling it “Marxist,” divisive and a form of discrimination against white people. That campaign has since widened to include diversity, equity and inclusion programs, paving the way for the Trump administration’s current crackdown on all things DEI.

Now, a new book, published last month, aims to tell a different story about critical race theory. In The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas That Created a Movement (NYU Press, 2025), Aja Martinez and Robert Smith mined Bell’s archive at New York University and “gathered the strands of people’s stories to weave the tapestry of CRT’s founding history,” as they write in the introduction.

Although Bell is a key figure in the book, chapters also explain the role of legal scholar Richard Delgado and his spouse, Jean Stefancic, as well as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Williams, among others, in shaping the concept and tenets of CRT.

Martinez is an associate professor of Latina/Latino studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Smith is an assistant professor of history at the University of North Texas. The two are married and this is their first book together, though more are in the works. They recently spoke with Inside Higher Ed over Zoom about their research.

“Our storytelling approach emphasizes dimension and texture; it results from a refusal to be extractive or flat,” they write in the book. “Recent opponents of CRT want the movement reduced to a few statements and commitments, a collection of dry bones or simple equations that can be picked apart or rearranged.”

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q: So what do you think about your book coming out at this moment when the federal government is waging war on DEI?

Smith: This is a cyclical reality, these histories, and what we’re seeing now is the fruits of the long game of the New Right since the very beginning of the 1970s through to the present and the New Right’s takeover of the Republican Party. So this has been a long game on their end that critical race theorists have been tracking since the beginning.

We hope that in this time, the origins provide tools for everyone to understand that we’ve been fighting this fight for a very long time, and we do have the tools that are effective to analyze this current moment and to push back, and that CRT is a central tool in the tool chest of resistance.

Q: How is CRT a central tool in the tool chest for resistance?

Martinez: CRT is looking hard at liberalism … and is saying, “OK, but in real life, when we’re on the ground and applying laws to human bodies, how does this work?” Part of the reason the attack is happening at all is because of how incisive CRT is as a tool. It really cuts through the muck [using] … story and personal experiences. When you go beyond those statistics, you humanize the data. Then, my goodness, a lot of these stories woven together are irrefutable in terms of how that good idea isn’t something that applies to all, and that’s dangerous.

Smith: One thing that’s important in a moment like this is to draw the distinction between DEI and CRT.

We’ve been really impressed with the work of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Elite Capture, this question of identity politics and DEI being absorbed into corporate life … CRT cannot be incorporated in the same way, because it has a fundamental critique of dominant ideology, and all those tenets of CRT matter in moments like this. DEI is HR-based compliance at work. It’s not CRT. CRT is the incisive analysis of all societal structures, and CRT can’t be captured in the same way, which is why it is such a target.

Q: If the political situation becomes such that it’s untenable for scholars to continue to practice or teach critical race theory, what would that mean for students, higher ed and the country more broadly?

Smith: In terms of curriculum, we lose fundamental knowledge. What CRT points out is that this turns into a suppression of knowledges, different people’s ways of knowing, and it homogenizes knowledge to only be what’s acceptable to straight white men in the end.

By denying the importance of diversities and diversities of experience, you therefore deny the importance of diversities of knowing. Once we cut ourselves off from other forms of knowledge, which has global implications for how we operate in the world, then we simply homogenize ourselves and work toward a technocratic homogeneity … It’s a flattening of existence in which all of us are made into subservient beings for this technocratic god, and that is fundamentally antithetical to the hope of diversity in this country.

Q: Aja, you wrote your first book about critical race theory in May 2020, before racial justice protests that summer and the ensuing backlash about critical race theory. Why did you want to write another book on the topic?

Martinez: You mentioned the mainstream narrative of corrective, which we were watching as well with our hands wringing.

Because so much of what we were seeing—even in terms of what was attempted as the corrective—was either wholeheartedly inaccurate from the left and the right, or it was just inaccessible and sometimes willfully so. There was almost the retort of, “Well, you just don’t know what you’re talking about” coming from academics, arms crossed, back turned.

And it’s like, if that’s our answer, that’s not great. The other side has a very provocative story that is lies. It’s a tall tale. However, it is accessible. It’s scary. People are able to get emotionally involved with what they’re saying. So we were just at our wits’ end of what do we do in this moment.

Robert, the historian, was the one who identified, “Well, if we go back to the source …”

Q: The book really revolves around the key people involved with shaping critical race theory. Why did you take this approach?

Martinez: The story of CRT humanizes some of the big names that people may know and some of the people that were just as important to forming someone like Derrick Bell, who didn’t come from nowhere.

We wanted to just humanize the data. When you humanize, you can’t make it into a boogie monster. You can’t make it scary. It’s no longer skeletal. There’s meat on the bones. It’s animated. And people love stories … That is what I think people are hungry for right now. Everyone’s asking the same question: What do we do? And it’s like, people have done it.

Smith: The fact that CRT is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, is an organic extension of the civil rights movement. It is not something that is foreign or strange to the American experience, and you don’t know that unless you know this particular narrative.

Q: So, how exactly is CRT an extension of the civil rights movement?

Martinez: It’s an organic outgrowth. The people who founded CRT were involved personally in the civil rights movement. So they got their foundation in what was happening in that era. They were directly informed by the different sorts of movement strategy and the heroes that we still hear about, like Medgar Evers and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And then by the time we get to the ’80s and the Reagan era, these scholars are starting to formulate what then gets coined as CRT.

So CRT was not just a scholarly topic but a movement. It was never intended to just be in Ivy League law schools. Otherwise, the pedagogy would not be storytelling. Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado and Pat Williams would never have written mass-market bestsellers if they just intended it to be for a narrow, elite law school audience. This was always intended for the masses, and we’re trying to carry that torch right in the type of writing we’re doing on it.

Q: Your book delves into this incident at the Stanford Law School in 1986. Derrick Bell was a visiting scholar at the university teaching constitutional law. As you describe in the book, students took issue with the way he was teaching, which led to a lecture series that left Bell humiliated but motivated to shine a light on how faculty of color were treated. Why is it important that we don’t lose this story to history?

Martinez: I think two main points to make is that the resistance was from the liberal academy, and so that’s a big point to make there. And two, it’s what got Richard Delgado to talk to us, because that’s one of the most important key moments for him. And him and Jean are very private, very guarded because of the moment that we’ve been in. They get death threats and they’re in their 80s, but when we were initially going to the archive and wanting to see if they would talk to us—since they’re still living founders around—that was what got him, because even the obituary that he wrote in tribute to Derrick Bell when he died was about the Stanford incident.

Smith: Yeah, it was a pivotal moment in their lives together … He was using the standard textbook that Stanford was using at the time, but he taught it differently, and that’s what created the problems. [Bell] had different forms of teaching in the classroom, where he would allow students to role-play. He would allow students to argue back and forth, a different pedagogical style that was based on historical storytelling. What happened is that white students in his course approached the administration and said, “We are not getting appropriately educated on the U.S. Constitution by this visiting Black scholar.”

What the administration decided to do was set up a series of “enrichment lectures” about the Constitution to supplement Bell’s “inadequate” teaching. And the administration agreed to this; the students even sent the invitation to provide the first of those lectures to Professor Bell. It wasn’t until the Black Law Student Association informed him that what was going on was actually a rejection of his pedagogy and expertise that he realized that the administration had betrayed him in this way. So what does he do?

He confronts this moment with an open letter. He writes a massive analysis for the Stanford Law student newspaper … And so that article was sent to the deans of every single law school in the country with a demand to respond with information about the law professors of color in their ranks, and a survey sent to every identifiable law professor of color to determine their working conditions … And that became the Bell-Delgado Survey of Law Professors.

Q: What do you hope people take away from the book?

Martinez: We hope that people understand that there are many access points to CRT. If you’re going to define it and understand it, who better to go to and through than the sources for what CRT is?

We even end our book with three separate definitions Derrick Bell gave on different occasions of what is CRT, and he always centralizes the story as being vitally important to how they do the work.

When you look at those definitions, and this happens with audiences all the time, they’ll be like, “This isn’t anything the media has been saying, and I can see its applicability to what I care about, the work I do, the family I come from, the story I’ve been told about what this country is and is not.”

We’re urging people to have this conversation in a way that is accessible to all literacy levels. We wrote it at an eighth-grade reading level because we want everyone, both proponents and opponents, to be able to have access to what this is. Because we think that that’s where we fight story with story.