Critical race and ethnicity studies remained marginal until late in the twentieth century

Evidence

Over the past two decades or so, the shifting boundaries of race and ethnicity as categories of social analysis have become increasingly evident. Despite a history that can be traced back to the 1920s and 1930s, explicit critical study of race and ethnicity remained a relatively small subfield in disciplines such as sociology and anthropology until late into the twentieth century. Yet there can be little doubt that in the past 20 years work on race and ethnicity has flourished, becoming one of the most intense areas of academic and political debate across a whole range of societies (Back and Solomos, 2000; Cohen, 2000). Perhaps the most notable feature of this new work is that it can no longer be reducible to any single discipline in assumption or methodology, scope or content. The multidimensionalities of ethnoracial definition and experience as well as of racist expression have prompted the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of the analytic work necessary to understand them. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 100

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader history of critical race theory and postcolonial studies gaining institutional ground only in recent decades, echoing discussions in US legal scholarship on CRT’s late-1980s emergence. — connects to: Critical Legal Studies originated in the late 1970s among progressive white male academics — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1151