Want to know what critical race theory is?
Well, so do I. All I'm seeing is gnashing of teeth and rending of garments by the good and the white in front of school boards afraid that Chad or Jenny will be taught that white people are abominations who should be eradicated.
"Critical Race Theory" is the hot new canard among the right wing. (It's not new. It's been around for forty years.) I haven't seen such a brouhaha since "freedom fries." One might have to go back to the John Birch-inspired holy war against fluoridation to get a sense of the insanity afoot.
What I do know is that I'm writing this on the centennial of the Tulsa Race Riots, when prosperous Black communities around Tulsa, Oklahoma were razed to the ground by frenzied white people because these communities were too prosperous. Black people did what they were supposed to do in the Land of the Free: they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, created wealth, and were on their way to economic independence. But, of course, it was never about bootstrapping yourself up into the middle class. Such a thing could not be allowed, because the point was to engender and perpetuate Black dysfunction so that it could be used as a cudgel against that community. Blacks had to be kept in their place. How dare they have a "Black Wall Street"?
None of these tearful mothers or frightened fathers getting up in front of legislatures has the foggiest idea what critical race theory is. But they know it's bad. It might make people think about the crimes perpetrated against people of color in this country, probably by the great-grandfathers of the people now bemoaning its divisiveness.
Like Anitfa and BLM, this is but another bogeyman for the right. The right has no ideas. It has no program to better the lives of this country's citizens. It is losing political market share day by day. All it can fall back on are scare tactics and demonization. A relatively obscure academic legal and social theory which is not much found outside of ivory towers is now the latest great threat to the American Way of Life™. Its obscurity among the mainstream serves the purpose well, because the mouthbreathers who follow Fox News and right wing talk radio have neither the inclination nor the intellectual curiosity to explore the issue for themselves. They hear "race" and "critical" in one phrase, and they tell on themselves. "Oh, they're criticizing me for race!" They assume they're being tarred as racists, and react accordingly in a defensive, denialist manner.
A bonus in decrying CRT and passing laws against it, as has happened in Oklahoma, is that it also strikes at academic freedom. Classes which incorporate critical race theory are being canceled due to these new laws. That the holy war against CRT targets universities is not ancillary. It enables the right to again depict universities as hotbeds of Marxism which will destroy this country's foundations as a Christian nation.
You can tell the fear pervading the right that everything is coming apart for them by the venom they've spat about this academic theory. CRT is for legal and social scholars, not for 10th grade social studies class. But as the country continues to move on for them, they will use any weapon at hand to maintain their power.
The problem with them beating this horse is that it's just not punchy enough. Their scapegoats are becoming more abstract, harder to define. They're at the point where they fear everything, and that has quickly diminishing returns. The Wurlitzer attracts fewer and fewer people to the show, until they've all wandered off.
As we're a day past the anniversary of the Tulsa race massacres, remember about the arc of the moral universe. We're seeing it played out in real time.