Disability critical race theory (discrit): Past, present, and future - An overview

In this chapter, we discuss disability critical race theory (DisCrit) as an analytic lens to better understand the ways in which race and disability are mutually constituted in education and other aspects of society within the USA, such as public health and law. The chapter is purposefully broad in scope, explicating DisCrit in three realms - past, present, and future - to highlight its expansive possibilities in foregrounding and seeking to dismantle collusive forms of oppression. First, we narrate the origins of DisCrit forged, in part, from our own experiences teaching in public schools and educational facilities, and our discontent with the professional field of special education with its deficit-based conceptualisations of disability and race, and general race evasiveness. Second, we discuss the myriad ways DisCrit has been taken up as a theoretical tool by researchers and practitioners within educational research, illustrating examples of its expansive and nuanced uses. Third, we use a DisCrit lens to take a nuanced look at two recent forms of social inequality as evidenced by: (1) the Covid-19 pandemic and, (2) the murders of African-Americans by police. The pandemic has clearly illustrated the fault lines of race, disability, and social class in how communities of colour are impacted in disproportionate ways via various disabling conditions and access to healthcare. At the same time, the death of George Floyd in 2020, an African-American man murdered in plain sight by police, was an act that came to symbolise "the last straw" in the normalisation of systemic police violence against Black and Brown bodies. In contemplating both phenomena, we highlight how examples of historical and contemporary violence - directly and indirectly - are perpetrated against African-Americans (and people of colour in general) within the USA, currently manifest in many structural and systemic practices within education, including the juvenile justice system and school-to-prison pipeline. Finally, building upon the numerous issues raised by, and use of DisCrit to date, we discuss future ways this intersectional theoretical framework can be utilised to interanimate concurrent issues of race and disability, with view to envisioning and creating an anti-racist, anti-ableist, more socially just world.