YOU SEE, HONEY, IT ALL STARTED IN THE GROUND ZERO MOSQUE...:

Critical Race Theory came out of a law school movement called Critical Legal Studies in the late 70s and early 80s. The key ideas that connected CRT to CLS were that (i) the law is much less coherent and much more indeterminate than scholars, judges, and lawyers like to admit. (ii) This indeterminacy both obscures and abets the laws' real purpose, which is to protect the interests of those who created and enforce it. (iii) The law is racist, therefore, but how it is racist is not always obvious, and that's the most important question. And so (iv) we should be more concerned with systematic, institutional racism than the fact that individual people hold racist beliefs or attitudes. [...]

The problem is that the debate about CRT has little or nothing to do with CRT. A think-tank political operative name Christopher Rufo encountered the phrase "Critical Race Theory" and decided it was the perfect label for everything anti-anti-racists wanted to go after. Why? The label is obscure, a little pretentious, it also sounds intimidatingly technical - like something a superior-acting liberal might say. Most importantly, since almost no one had ever heard of it outside of law or graduate school, you could get away with claiming it meant whatever you wanted it to mean. It was a convenient label to slap on everything related to race that worried more conservative Americans - and it narrowed everything down to just one thing to be against. If you think I am being unfair to Rufo, I can assure you Rufo himself admits that's what he meant to do - though it's clear that, even at this late date, he still does not know what CRT actually is.

But, if that's so, and here we get to the question we started with, why are people going after CRT so ferociously?

Here's why. The majority of Americans say that they are not personally racist, and agree that institutional racism was, and is still, a problem in America. Yet, there's a big gap between what kinds of actions and policies white Americans, as opposed to people-of-color, endorse to address racism. How does that play out politically?

Well, here are some strategies you could employ if you favor policies likely to be, or to be perceived as, racist. You could just be racist and endorse racism. For the most part, I don't think that's a winner politically at this point (see, Lee Atwater on "the Southern Strategy").

Instead, you could, as Atwater suggested and arguably the  Republican party has done for the last 40 years, justify policies that had disparate racial effects on other grounds and dismiss any signs of overt racism in your ranks as an aberration. Especially, since our last president supercharged the issue, that approach is becoming less tenable. So, you could do this.

Be an anti-anti-racist. Offense not defense. Of course, we're not racists, we just oppose the excesses of anti-racism. But not one at a time, like "whac a mole". Let's count it all as one thing. Name it after something that sounds scary and banal at the same time. Then we can argue against that.

Instead of focusing on racial disparity in wealth or police shooting people of color - let's focus on the claim that grade school children are being taught that white people are evil and/or that they should chant to cannibalistic Aztec gods. (I wish I was making that last one up.)

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