An important context for Faces at the Bottom of the Well is critical race theory (CRT), a school of legal scholarship focused on how institutions and systems reproduce outcomes that advantage white people and disadvantage people of color. It has gained increasing attention in contemporary American political culture as the target of activists who believe culturally sensitive education in K-12 educational systems is a form of CRT. At its heart, however, CRT is a critique of the law and legal education. Although there is a long history of African American critiques of the US legal system, this school of thought emerged in the 1970s as scholars like Bell began to systematically use a racial lens to examine the law and other fields. In the next decade, civil rights scholar and law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw identified race as central lens rather than incidental in understanding the law in the United States.

CRT is based on several core premises about race in America. First, race is not a natural thing. It is a made thing (social construct) that emerges from the way we think about the significance of things like skin color in a social context, and we can understand its workings by looking at the impact it has on real-world outcomes, such as health and economic disparities between white people and people of color, and by listening to what people of color have to say about their experiences with racism.