Critical race theory is a way of looking at race relations, particularly within the United States, in a broader context than the traditional civil rights approach. The theory began sometime in the mid-1970s, as a number of people in the legal profession began to worry about the slow rate at which laws were changing to promote racial equality.
Social inequality occurs when resources in a given society are distributed unevenly, typically through norms of allocation, that engender specific patterns along lines of socially defined categories of persons. Economic inequality, usually described on the basis of the unequal distribution of income or wealth, is a frequently studied type of social inequality.