Rejecting the racial contract: Charles Mills and critical race theory

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the deep roots and long history of the attacks on Critical Race Theory in education, while at the same time savoring the equally long and eminently venerable and presently visible traditions forged by “the insights of generations of anonymous ‘race men’ [and ‘race women] who, under the most difficult circumstances” developed ‘the concepts necessary to trace the contours of the system oppressing them, defying the massive weight of a white scholarship that either morally justified this oppression or denied its existence’ (1996, 131). I identify Critical Race Theory as the product of a long history of Afro-diasporic autonomous learning centers and parallel institutions as well as the producer of new ones.