#CRT: The Critical Race Theory of Social Movement-Making
As part of its virtual First Thursday series, the BUSSW Online MSW Program will host Dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig of BU School of Law for a presentation contending that the 2020 protests against racialized police brutality and their successes were facilitated, in part, by the combination of two factors: Critical Race Theory and social media. The event is co-sponsored by the BUSSW Equity & Inclusion Committee and is open to students, staff, faculty and alumni at BUSSW and BU Law.
Thursday, December 2
7:00–8:15 pm ET
Virtual (Zoom)
Event Description
The murder of George Floyd ignited large protests against racialized police brutality across the globe during the summer of 2020. Led by millennials and Generation Z—the two most racially and ethnically diverse generations in the nation’s history—these racial equity protests resulted in reforms that had previously seemed unimaginable. Indeed, many scholars pondered what forces had helped to enable those protests to emerge and take effect.
This lecture seeks to answer that question, contending that the protests and their successes were facilitated, in part, by the combination of two factors. The first is the emergence of Critical Race Theory (CRT), specifically, exposing CRT to millennial and Generation Z students in college classrooms, enabling these students to develop a sophisticated language and expectation for what they should expect in an equitable society and how they can mobilize to achieve it. Using the Black Lives Matter Movement as an example, Dean Onwuachi-Willig discusses how core tenets of CRT are embedded throughout the stated values and principles of the movement, including the related Say Her Name Movement.
The second factor is the development of social media and its impact on the resource mobilization component of social movement-making. Dean Onwuachi-Willig highlights classic sociological models concerning the “how” of social movement theory, meaning the formal and informal means through which people develop social movements. And explains how CRT, plus technology, have changed social movement-making by creating new avenues for those who did not previously have access to power or traditional media networks to mobilize their own social movements.
Speaker
Dr. Angela Onwuachi-Willig is Dean and the Ryan Roth Gallo and Ernest J. Gallo Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. Previously, she served as Chancellor’s Professor of Law at UC Berkeley. She is author of “According to Our Hearts” from Yale University Press and numerous articles in leading law journals such as the Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Georgetown Law Journal, and Virginia Law Review, to name a few.
A graduate of Grinnell College (B.A.), the University of Michigan Law School (J.D.), and Yale University, where she earned her Ph.D., Dean Onwuachi-Willig is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers. She is the recipient of numerous teaching awards, a former Iowa Supreme Court finalist, a recipient of Law and Society Association’s John Hope Franklin Award, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and the first professor (along with her co-author Dean Mario Barnes) to receive both the Association of American Law School’s (AALS) Clyde Ferguson and Derrick Bell Awards. More recently, she was one of five black women deans to receive the inaugural AALS Impact Award in recognition of their work in collating the Law Deans Antiracist Clearinghouse Project in 2021.