This national CRT debate has just been a mess. A few points:
- CRT, as the term was traditionally understood, referred to a fairly specific approach to history and legal scholarship. Even at its peak which was decades ago, it was an approach that was more practiced (by legal scholars in their writings) than taught (as doctrine to students).
- CRT always has been a deeply problematic doctrine because it privileges subjective experience over objective reasoning. Objectivity and rationality have traditionally been the cornerstones of academic thought since the Enlightenment. CRT, on the other hand, is a closed system, and any critique of it can just be treated as evidence of its truth. It's sort of like traditional Freudian psychoanalysis in that regard. For a contemporary example of this phenomenon, just look at White Fragility, whose thesis is essentially that "if you disagree with this book, you're proving the book is right." This is what makes CRT more like a religion than a valid academic theory.
- Despite the flaws of CRT, it has still made a lot of valuable contributions. In particular, in an era after explicit legal discrimination became illegal, CRT effectively exposed many forms of "soft discrimination" that have been and continue to matter a great deal. That said, CRT isn't the only approach that can do this work. Plenty of important thinkers outside of the CRT tradition have made the same points, going well back into the 19th Century.
- A sort of CRT-lite went mainstream outside of the academy in the last decade. Mostly this has involved people citing books that they haven't read as a way of telling other people to shut up. This trend has amplified the biggest weaknesses of CRT, pushing it even more towards a religious dogma. Whether this new CRT-lite should even be called CRT or just "wokeness" or somethign else is a fair question.
Now, to the specific issue of banning CRT in schools:
- The left is absolutely right that CRT, as traditionally understood, is not really being taught in high schools. It's hardly being taught to undergrads. It's a high-level, theoretical discipline that's mostly the concern of grad students.
- The left is, however, being disingenuous when it claims that it has no idea what the right is talking about when it complains about CRT in schools. It's not real, academic CRT that's the issue, but a less precise indoctrination with vague "woke principles," some of which include the notions that white skin equals guilt and that any difference in outcomes between black and whites that favor whites is necessarily 100% attributable to discrimination. This stuff is, in fact, happening right now.
- The right is fighting a losing battle trying to ban CRT, particularly at the state legislative level. There's no way you can write a statute that effectively polices the ideology that's discussed in classrooms. One of the reasons that's so difficult is that CRT isn't a term with precise boundaries, where you can clearly say what's allowed and what isn't. Obviously you're not going to learn American history without talking about slavery, the civil war, reconstruction, northern migration, civil rights, etc. You're going to have to talk about race A LOT in order to teach history. So how do you police what kinds of discussions about race are okay and what kinds aren't? I used to assign Frantz Fanon to my high school students (and my politics are right of center). I don't really consider him to be a critical race theorist as that term is generally understood, but that's certainly debatable.
- Many on both sides of this debate are failing to distinguish between teaching what CRT is and teaching that CRT is correct. As I argued above, I happen to think that CRT isn't really a valid academic approach. That doesn't mean that I don't think people should read significant CRT texts. I think people should also read Althusser and Žižek, and I'm certainly not a Marxist.
- The left is way off base in arguing that laws banning CRT in schools are an affront to freedom of speech. The laws may be foolish and doomed to fail, for the reasons outlined above, but it's absolutely the prerogative of government to decide what gets taught to kids in public schools. A few decades ago, people on the left were happy to ban the teaching of "intelligent design" in school. They were right to do so, because it isn't real science. If they want to defend CRT in schools, they should do so on the merits, not on spurious free speech grounds.