The front page of Monday’s NY Times featured a story that was both distressing and infuriating.  It told of the travails of Andrea Kane, the supervisor of schools in Queen Anne’s County Md., who tried to raise with the parents in her district the subject of racism in their community.  Dr. Kane, a black woman, met with a flood of protests, some explicitly racist, that drove her from her job.  Her experience is symptomatic of a wave of resistance to the reinvigorated drive for racial justice that was catalyzed by the George Floyd killing. Much of that resistance has swirled around the alleged influence of something called “critical race theory” in American life, particularly in our schools.

To understand the clamor over critical race theory, it helps to recall how George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager, the late Lee Atwater, explained the evolution of dog whistling to white grievance:

You start out in 1954 by saying, Nigger, Nigger, Nigger.  By 1968 you can’t say Nigger, that hurts you, backfires.  So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff…”

The latest iteration of “all that stuff” is critical race theory.  The furor over the noxious influence of CRT is nothing more and nothing less than another contrivance by the right to inflame and exploit the racial fears and resentments of white America. “Those people”—blacks and their white enablers—are teaching our children to hate America and hate themselves because they’re white!  Don’t let them!

The reality is that CRT is an intellectual framework developed mainly by legal scholars for analyzing the continuing consequential presence of racism in American institutions, particularly in our laws. CRT is found in academic journals and scholarly books, not in public school curricula. But that doesn’t matter: the controversy over critical race theory isn’t actually about critical race theory. For the right-wing propaganda machine, “critical race theory” is a wonderfully useful scare phrase, a catchall to demonize practically all efforts to raise awareness of the legacy and continuing reality of racism in America. Right-wingers are generally loath to acknowledge that white racism remains a serious problem in our country.  That’s understandable: most of them are part of the problem, either because they are themselves racist or because they choose to pander to a racist base. So, deny the problem exists and find a scary catchphrase to discredit efforts to address it.  At the same time, use the alleged presence of CRT in the schools and other institutions as one more pretext in the culture wars that the right tirelessly wages.

Until a couple of years ago hardly anyone had heard of critical race theory outside of a relatively small school of academics.  Credit for the invention of the CRT controversy goes to Christopher Rufo, an associate of the right-wing Manhattan Institute. But it was Fox News that made Rufo a star. Soon after the George Floyd protests reached their height in the summer of 2020, Fox began airing segments featuring Rufo, who claimed that a pernicious new “cultural revolution” was being carried out through corporate HR, government diversity trainings, and public school curriculums. Rufo’s appearance on the Tucker Carlson show on September 2 made an impression on Carlson fan Donald Trump.  The result was an executive order restricting implicit bias and diversity training in federal government agencies. (The order was rescinded by Biden.)

Since then, Fox has relentlessly promoted CRT hysteria, with considerable success. At least 10 states have passed laws restricting the ways race can be taught in the public schools.  School board meetings across the country have seen acrimonious public hearings with emotional pleas from parents to protect their children from CRT.  And conscientious educators have been harassed or, like Kane, pushed out of their jobs. It’s to be seen how much staying power CRT has as a weapon in the right-wing arsenal. Most of us have probably forgotten the ludicrous campaign, 10 or 12 or so years ago, to whip up fears over Sharia law coming to these United States. Unfortunately, I’m afraid CRT will be a more resilient bogeyman than Sharia law.