Arguing With Idiots

Occasionally I'll see some right wing politician vow to ban "CRT" in the schools and some well-meaning progressive will chime in with some variation of "Foolish Republican, no high school is teaching CRT" as if the argument was won. But what does a right winger mean when they refer to Critical Race Theory?

Critical Race Theory is a specialized college level "...cross-disciplinary examination...of how laws, social and political movements, and media shape, and are shaped by social conceptions of race and ethnicity". See the Wikipedia article on Critical Race Theory for more information. It is assuredly not a monolith of beliefs about race, and critiques liberal views as well as conservative. It's a process, not a belief. And the hypothetical progressive cited above is right, Critical Race Theory isn't being taught in any elementary or high school, and in very few colleges. So what do Republicans and rightists mean when the say Critical Race Theory, or CRT?

Most people, no matter their political views, have no real idea what CRT is, but right wingers have constructed a straw man version of CRT. To them CRT is an insidious plan to convince White children to hate themselves because they are White, to paint all White people as racists and that there's nothing good or admirable about American history. They then lump anything that suggests that slavery was anything but a passing anomaly in American history, or that racism persisted into and beyond Reconstruction into their fantasy version of CRT. The straw man CRT is any courses that shine a spotlight on Black achievement or that even suggest that racism exists. For the right, it's a blank canvass on which to paint anything that's race-related. They have framed CRT as dangerous, using their own incorrect definition, then connected everything race-related to that distorted definition. They don't know what it is, so they construct their own imaginary definition, then cram in everything that they don't like about race relations into that definition. This allows anyone with the power to determine school curriculum to remove references to post Reconstruction disenfranchisement of Blacks or even the 1960's civil rights movement, just by calling it "CRT". 

So, just proclaiming that "no school is teaching CRT" doesn't go far enough. We have to address what they're actually saying, because they're not saying that they want to ban something that doesn't exist, they're really saying that they want a fairy-tale version of whitewashed history, and to not address very real horrors that took place in this nation.