Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the newest bogeyman, useful to rile people up. Most of the opponents are reacting viscerally to something that isn’t CRT at all.
CRT is about systems, not individuals. Systems are developed as shortcuts for lengthy processes so that we don’t spend all our time trying to figure out how to hand multiple situations and not have disparate outcomes.
For the system of racism in America (and this is the most strongly disputed point, that racism is only individualistic and felt/known by everyone who might be so extreme as to say the “N-word”), there is very little day-to-day involvement by most people in following racist policies, rules, and laws, not because the people following them are cognizant of what they’re doing, but because they’re “normal” and “default” and ordinary.
Black American citizens must jump through many more hoops to be able to vote, for example, but all the steps that thwart a Black voter from exercising their God-given civil rights are done so that they seem innocent or beyond reproach. “You just need a voter id” and we close the state locations where you can get voter ids in heavily Black districts. “You just need to drop your ballot off at an official ballot box,” and we reduce the number of ballot boxes to one per county, so that white rural counties with a low population have a single box but so do large urban districts with a majority Black and Brown population of voters. “You just need to vote in a previous election,” and we send reminders to previous addresses, then claim the voter didn’t vote in the election (valid; they weren’t notified). “You just need to stand in line to vote,” and we deliver broken machines, machines without power cords, malfunctioning machines, or we don’t deliver ballots, or the polling station volunteers don’t show up, or there are too few polling booths . . .
The system that allows this is following the law, yet the outcomes are predictably racist. It doesn’t take active participation. We just follow along.
The law is helpless against this, because the system is really within us, deeply, to where we consider these things to be just the cost of living in America as Black citizens. Good intentions, such as the requirement that districts fairly represent the population, are turned to create grossly gerrymandered districts.
Critical race theory doesn’t point out individuals and doesn’t even point out people as a group except to say that the privileged people are given way more opportunities to exercise power and dominance than the people with stolen privilege and freedom. Critical race theory doesn’t hypothesize conspiracy and planning as much as it points out that without direct confrontation on what is going on, the system will continue to produce racist outcomes because what is “normal” and “expected” will be accommodated. The racist outcomes are not an aberration of individuals; the systems are designed to produce the outcomes, and they do so with stunning success.
The dominant people group in America get to be ignorant of their dominance because the system enforces the freedom to be blind. I don’t have to have a single bad thought in my head or motive in my heart, and I can participate in racist systems to produce racists results because they benefit me.
This gets most dominant people upset because they think that racism is what you feel, not what you do. And as long as I’m not actively cursing at non-dominant people, I can’t be racist, even though I vote for candidates who want to establish a white ethnostate with white people in control in perpetuity. I’m just protecting my family, my business, and my faith.
What’s so wrong about that, right?