Please correct me if I’m wrong but synopsizing my readings into CRT has led me here: CRT began as an intellectual movement in the 1970s among scholars at HBCs [historically black colleges] to examine the intersectionality of the Civil Rights movement and its aftermath. More specifically, how the Civil Rights legislation of the mid-1960s, intended to mitigate systemic racism in America leads instead to even more racism. [E.g., Nixon’s successful Southern Strategy.]

One can recognize this trend broadly throughout American history. The abolitionist movement led inexorably to the Civil War. Reconstruction and the Civil War Amendments gave rise to the Klan, Jim Crow laws, and Plessy vs. Ferguson. Examples of Black American advances met with legislative backlash are myriad. SCOTUS’s gutting preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 led directly to new laws in affected states that targeted Black voters with surgical precision.

If we deny America’s history of systemic racial discrimination, we are doomed to propagate it. CRT does not teach that America is bad or that Caucasians are hateful. On the contrary, time and again America has recognized that we are not living up to our raison d'être and America has attempted to reinforce that foundational principle. Jefferson and Lincoln, the founders of our major political parties respectively dedicated and rededicated us to that proposition: All people are created equal.

CRT is asking America to examine itself with great impartiality as to whether or not we believe this to be true. If we do hold this to be a self-evident truth, then we should do everything in our power to make it so.

"Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”