‘A bright future’ for ‘something new and highly significant’ or a bit of a damp squib?: (neo-) Marxist reflections on recent theoretical developments in ‘BritCrit’ in the journal Race, Ethnicity and Education

Critical Race Theory
(CRT)
has a relatively
long history in the United
States,
from where it originated
, datin g back to the 1980s. Its presence in
UK academic literature, however, is
more recent
, having
surfac ed in the
first dec
ade of the twenty
-first century.
I focus in this paper
on
developments
in CRT
in the UK
from Janua
ry 2012
to January 2018
, as
part of an ongoing attempt to evaluate CRT from a (
neo -) Marxist
perspective
. My argument is that while ‘Brit
Crit’ analysis employs (a
limited number of) CRT concepts, there is a clear tendency for UK
-based
Critical Race Theorists to deploy a range of other theoretical
perspectives, including Marxism.
Thus, a distinctive
ly British CRT has
failed to take off in the way its founders had hoped. I speculate that this
may well be related to CRT’s inability to theorise the multifarious nature
of racism in the UK, specifically those forms of racism that are ei
ther
non-colour -coded or hybridist.