We argue that the current multicultural paradigm functions in a manner similar to civil rights law. Thus, without disrespect to the pioneers of civil rights law, critical race legal scholars document the ways in which civil rights law is regularly subverted to benefit whites.
To make parallel the analogy between critical race legal theory and traditional civil rights law with that of critical race theory in education and multicultural education we need to restate the point that critical race legal theorists have “doubts about the foundation of moderate/incremental civil rights law.” The foundation of civil rights law has been in human rights rather than in property rights. Ladson-Billings and Tate used an analogy with critical race legal theory to help defineCRT. AlthoughCRTderived primarily from the work of Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001) and is grounded in critical legal studies (CLS),CRThas become a distinct “method of analysis in educational research” and “to fully utilizeCRTin education, researchers must remain critical of race, and how it is deployed” (DeCuir & Dixson, 2004, p. In their ground breaking article, Ladson-Billings and Tate introduced critical race theory (CRT) to education and explained how usingCRTas a conceptual framework could be “applied to our understanding of educational inequity” (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995, p.