Introduction: CRT in Higher Education: Confronting the “Boogeyman” Bans, Censorship, and Attacks on Racial Justice

It took only a year after 2020’s racial justice uprisings for legislatures in half the states to attempt to ban teaching about systemic racism in US public schools, colleges, and universities. The boilerplate legislation disallows the teaching of “divisive concepts,” including the reality that systemic racism benefits white people. In what Patricia Williams calls “definitional theft,”