The term “paradigm” refers to large-scale and typically unstated beliefs about the way the world is structured and about how information about the world is collected. These beliefs, experienced as “common sense,” often determine what we expect when we investigate a phenomenon and how we perceive the world and collect information. Critical Race Theory, like Critical Legal Theory, or Critical Anything Theory, seeks to identify the assumptions and unstated but problematic beliefs that make a scientific theory or scholarly approach both focused enough to be useful and distorted enough to give rise to erroneous beliefs. Science progresses by the constant criticism of theories and the paradigms upon which they depend and the painful ruptures that arise when conceptual limits must be broken to answer important questions.