Following the gains of the Civil Rights era, African American political thought entered a period of reconstitution and reimagination in response to widespread backlash. While the violence of post-Reconstruction Jim Crow was not replicated, the retreat from racial egalitarianism was evident in conservative political ascendancy, the reshaping of public discourse around freedom and equality, and bipartisan efforts to minimize the significance of racial injustice. This political and social environment prompted African American thinkers to reconsider traditional liberal and socialist frameworks, shifting attention to questions of identity, culture, history, and narrative.

Amid declining organized political agitation, African American thought diversified. On the right, Black conservatism and Afrocentrism emphasized personal responsibility, moral virtue, and cultural reclamation as tools for empowerment. On the left, Black feminists, critical race theorists, and prison abolitionists interrogated structural inequality and exposed the limits of liberal institutions. Across ideological divides, these thinkers shared skepticism of the welfare state and multiracial democracy, focusing instead on alternative strategies for justice, including ethical community formation, narrative, and historical memory.

Chapter 6 explains how school board elections have transformed in two phases. First, in places like Los Angeles, campaigns shifted from candidate contributions to IE-dominated contests, often structured around a union versus charter coalition fight. Second, the pandemic era accelerated the nationalization of school politics and turned many school board races into culture-war battlegrounds. This led to higher turnout and drew local, state, and national organizations into races that were once low salience. Using Los Angeles as a strategic battleground, the chapter shows how IEs operate as enhancers of candidate viability and as catalysts of grievance-driven cultural conflicts. It tests vote-share effects while arguing that the low-complexity, polarized nature of these debates often confines IE influence to reinforcing rather than reshaping voter preferences. The chapter concludes with lessons for districts nationwide as targeted messaging expands in an era of declining local media.

This volume offers the first collection of Critical Evidence scholarship. By using the moniker, “Critical Evidence,” we mean to denote a school of thought that is quite broad but shares certain features. First, Critical Evidence scholars maintain that social conditions matter to what an ideal system of evidence will look like. The quality, depth, and breadth of knowledge inputs affect the quality of the knowledge produced through the application of rules in an adjudicative process. Critical Evidence thus questions one fundamental assumption of the rationalist tradition in evidence, namely, that the system generally achieves “rectitude of decision through correct application of valid substantive laws” and “rational weighing of evidence” by an “impartial decisionmaker.”

This chapter posits that evidence law is best understood, developed, and advanced by examining it through the prism of race. By the same token, our understanding of race and racial hierarchies can be greatly enhanced by considering race through the prism of evidence law. Race informs evidence, and evidence informs race. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to the latter premise. Previously, I have written about race as evidence in the context of racially biased rules of evidence and racially biased actions by state actors, such as the police and prosecutors. This chapter goes well beyond my previous work in the sense that I am freeing myself from the confines of the courtroom and the activities by state actors and others that might lead to courtroom processes.

The poet Maya Angelou once said that there is “no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” The agony of an untold story seems particularly acute when a person is unheard or disbelieved in a courtroom. When one cannot testify or have their testimony believed, the facts of their story – their truth – for all practical purposes, do not exist in the determination of their case. When a person’s story relates to racism and they have been silenced or not fully believed due to structural bias in evidence rules, attorneys’ evidentiary practices, the judge’s gatekeeping of evidence, or fact finders’ conclusions, it constitutes a profound legal epistemic injustice that warrants evidentiary intervention.

Intersectionality looks at the ways different identities intersect with one another. The concept forces us to move beyond a single view of individuals, and to explore how those who sit at the margins of different identities experience different aspects of life. For example, the intersection of race, gender, and nationality can compound the experiences of a Black, female, immigrant in academia. Academia has largely been a "white space,” both in terms of the Eurocentric perspective from which content is taught and the predominantly white faculty and students that occupy campuses. Furthermore, it is a space that few immigrants, especially Black immigrants, occupy. Although Black women in academia are marginalized relative to their white counterparts, adding an immigrant status to those identities increases the level of complexity. The experience of faculty sitting at the intersection of race, gender, and nationality reveals several themes that characterize their unique journey. These themes include: questioning of their qualifications, feeling invisible, having their immigrant journey be misunderstood, variation in the saliency of their identities, simultaneously experiencing privilege and oppression, experiencing intersecting stereotypes, and feelings of isolation. An awareness of these experiences can fuel academic spaces to develop strategies to help members of intersecting minoritized groups thrive in academia.

This chapter situates reflexivity and positionality as central to critical race social work praxis, centering the role of storytelling and counterstorytelling in dismantling dominant narratives. This chapter challenges social work’s historic alignment with neutrality, professionalism, and liberal reform while exposing its entanglement with racism, capitalism, and colonialism. By engaging first-person narratives and counternarratives, the section emphasizes how social workers can critically interrogate power, privilege, and positionality across micro, mezzo, and macro levels of practice. Ultimately, this section invites readers into an ongoing practice of reflexivity, self-disclosure, and communal care, positioning social work as a deeply political and justice-oriented profession.

Intersectionality is an analytical tool that both stands on its own, and is considered a key tenet of critical race theory. This chapter details how intersectionality can serve three roles in social work: it can serve as an important analytic tool for self-reflexivity, a prism through which policy and research can better understand oppression, and a technique through which social workers can develop critical race praxis. Emphasis is placed on the depth of intersectionality, for instance, it is not solely about identity but is about oppression based on complex social identities and positionality. Case examples and illustrations from social work situations are provided.

This chapter introduces critical race praxis as a process-oriented approach for integrating Critical Race Theory (CRT) into social work practice, education, and research. Arguing that prevailing color-evasive frameworks inadequately prepare social workers for antiracist practice, the authors position CRT as a set of analytic tools that deepen understanding of racism as structural, pervasive, and intersectional. They present the Critical Race Praxis Guide, which links reflection questions with implications for practice across the tenets of CRT, including racism as ordinary, race as a social construct, differential racialization, interest convergence, critique of liberalism, intersectionality, and counter-narratives. The guide also emphasizes supporting concepts such as brave space, positionality, and critical reflexivity as essential to antiracist action. Illustrative examples show how practitioners can identify racism within policies, institutions, and everyday practices, and then move toward action that interrupts white supremacy and advances racial justice. In doing so, the chapter provides a flexible and adaptable tool for fostering critical reflection, dialogue, and antiracist interventions across micro, mezzo, and macro levels of practice. Ultimately, the authors encourage social workers to view praxis as a dynamic process of linking reflection and action to build more racially just practice and pedagogy.

Critical Race Theory provides a lens through which we can examine and unpack the role of rest, self-care and community care in social work spaces. The Rest is Resistance movement, coined by Tricia Hersey of the @napministry encourages us to “disrupt and push back against capitalism and white supremacy by connecting to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming and naps as a foundation for healing and justice.” This chapter provides a counternarrative to traditional notions that burnout can be prevented by individual efforts of social workers and students to better care for themselves, positing that the professionalization of social work, by design, continues to perpetuate inequity and exploit emotional labor.

This chapter examines how platformed media shape youth identity by analyzing TikTok content through a Critical Race Theory (CRT) lens. Working in a faculty–student partnership with Baltimore high school researchers, the authors created race-marked user profiles and sampled 40 TikTok videos, then conducted reflexive discourse/thematic analysis. Coding drew on core CRT tenets to surface how racialized, gendered, and sexualized meanings are produced, circulated, and normalized in everyday micro-narratives. The observation resulted in four dominant themes: (1) social construction – stereotypical representation of Black gender expression, (2) differential racialization – hierarchical valuation of phenotype and skin tones, (3) intersectionality – the interaction of identities shaping agency and vulnerability, and (4) whiteness as property – inheritable privileges that structure safety, access, opportunities, and presume innocence. The authors also observed background conditions consistent with racism-as-normal and interest convergence. Findings illuminate how “ordinary” short-form videos can scaffold youths’ self-concept and belonging – often in ways that intensify stigma and material hardship – while also revealing counter-narratives that resist dominant scripts. The authors outline implications for social work pedagogy (trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and digitally literate instruction), youth mental health supports, and policy/advocacy aimed at platform accountability. CRT offers a rigorous framework for decoding platform logics and co-creating equity-centered interventions with young people whose voices are too often marginalized in research and practice.

This chapter critiques the limitations of liberalism as a guiding political philosophy for social work and social justice. While Rawlsian liberalism frames justice in terms of fairness and distributive equality, its emphasis on individual rights often obscures the racialized foundations of US democracy and fails to account for structural oppression. Liberalism’s language of equality and freedom has historically coexisted with racial domination – from slavery and Jim Crow to contemporary attacks on affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, interest convergence, and historical analysis, this chapter argues that liberalism is not simply flawed in practice but fundamentally implicated in sustaining racial hierarchies. It highlights how appeals to fairness can be mobilized to both expand and restrict rights, often reinforcing white supremacy. Moving beyond liberalism, the chapter introduces race-conscious frameworks such as Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, sociopolitical development, and deep canvassing as tools for reimagining political institutions. It concludes by advocating for political social work to center human dignity, collective well-being, and structural change, rather than abstract rights, as the foundation for advancing racial and social justice in the United States.

This chapter explores intersectional organizing in the US immigrant justice movement and how social workers can apply this framework in their community work. In the past two decades, the intersectional identities of many immigrant organizers have driven strategies and campaign goals. Immigrant youth have shed the DREAMer identity, leaving behind the symbolic caps and gowns, while taking up the fight for a bolder vision of equity, inclusion, and liberation. Those who are most impacted are centered in the organizing campaigns. Many organizations and coalitions are rooted in the intersection of the criminal legal and immigration systems, also known as crimmigration. And deportation defense campaigns include those less desirable – the day laborers, the car wash workers, the street vendors, the criminal legal system impacted immigrants – not only the "good" model immigrants. The analysis developed in this chapter builds on the community and policy organizing led by undocumented organizers and allies on the streets.

CRT is a plausibility structure that explains why and how racism persists, and society’s disregard for health, educational, and welfare discrepancies between white and minoritized peoples. It explains why a profession like social work has not seriously addressed racial injustice, instead content to treat gross disparities applying whitesplanations and colonized theories to those suffering from socially unjust systems. This chapter provides a history of CRT and five theoretical tenets applicable to social work, each of which will be developed further in the text, and argues that CRT is an appropriate transformational framework for social work.

Liberalism and interest convergence influence all aspects of our socio-political world, and, in turn, social work practice, including social welfare policy, practice, and pedagogy. This chapter first defines the critical race tenets critique of liberalism and interest convergence, then examines how the entanglement of settler colonialism, racism, and capitalism are mutually constructed with racism and intersectional oppression. A global system of white supremacy created a racial hierarchy through notions of inferiority in order to maintain the dominant power structure, such that when white interests do not align with the interests of non-whites, it is nearly impossible for systems change to occur. Turning specifically to social work, the author outlines how social welfare policies and belief systems allow racism to flourish despite ideas of equality, freedom, and rights, and uncovers how social work conceptions of social welfare and social justice have aligned with the interests of the dominant group, rather than liberation and communal support, by supporting incrementalist reform rather than transformative change. Finally, the chapter envisions social worker roles that dismantle liberal notions of justice and create practices that support expansive views of merit, communal values over individual success, and equitable outcomes over equal rights.