CRT has always been a weird loaded term. I always thought of it as the basic idea of being able to look at issues from different perspectives and understandings. It's one of those basic skills you pick up in life and/or get taught in college.
You would think the dipshits screaming that we don't understand "it's heritage not hate" or whatever might like people seeing it from their perspective.
I take a slightly more practical perspective. Though as a white male, I find that I need to stretch myself a bit to leave my privileged upbringing and perspective behind. Only late in life do I notice that it is confining.
The disadvantages of being nonwhite are papered over by my having lived almost entirely in the era of the civil rights movements, and the surface message that “we’ve fixed it”. Under the surface though, I am becoming aware of subtle (to the point of deniable) yet pervasive racist biases in how people actually get treated. To me, that is the core phenomenon of critical race theory, and the one that gets the big pushback from proponents of minority rule.
A cognate topic is affirmative action, which (if I understand correctly) is intended as a counterforce to the residual disadvantages that nonwhites carry into society and career.
I hear voices that excoriate affirmative action as inherently discriminatory. This is correct in the abstract, but it pointedly ignores the fact that to be born not white in US imposes a definite socioeconomic burden. Thus I mistrust the proponents of that argument — as defenders of the secretly cherished racial bias that CRT seeks to expose and remedy.
So if I read you right, embracing the warnings under the heading of CRT requires that white folk like me make the effort to leave my privileged comfort zone, and work at empathy with those who live their lives outside it.
However, to understand is only half the fight. The second half is to
execute. To deliberately take steps that restore the dignity and access of traditionally oppressed (however subtly) demographics. I see affirmative action as one attempt to seek that remedy.
Lately, a simple way to subvert the process is to vote Republican. They appear to have gone all in on social injustice. It’s a headscratcher.