Starting with the caveat that I am rather sympathetic to the actual curriculum associated with proposals for teaching critical race theory in schools, I think it’s worth noting that many of the reshared social media explanations of what it “actually” is focus on the race part and leave out the academic history of critical theory. This article about four different Americas (which is long but interesting in its own right) has as concise definition as any I’ve seen of what critical theory is:
“Critical theory upends the universal values of the Enlightenment: objectivity, rationality, science, equality, freedom of the individual. These liberal values are an ideology by which one dominant group subjugates another. All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power.”
How America Fractured Into Four Parts
Reading this definition, I hope it becomes easier to understand why some people object to critical theory so strongly. (For a longer and more nuanced discussion, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good source.) Critical race theory is critical theory as applied to race, so it looks at race through the lens where objectivity, rationality, science, equality, and freedom of the individual are the causes of problems experienced by those who are subject to racial injustice.
I personally see critical theory, whether applied to race or any other topic, as a valuable lens to apply to see what I’ve been missing, but harmful when used as a totalizing worldview. Undeniably, the values of the Enlightenment have been used for subjugation; anything that can be used for subjugation will be used for it at some point (including the call for social justice) and we should understand the mechanisms behind it. However, these values are so much more than just tools of subjugation. When we reduce them to nothing more than that we risk throwing out the very foundation which provides the justification for saying that there should be justice for those who currently do not have it.
If you wonder how we can celebrate the values of the Enlightenment when they contain within them the seeds of racism and injustice, it may be worth inverting our perspective. Instead, we can observe that the world that preceded those ideas was rife with inequality and injustice (by modern standards) and the ideas of the Enlightenment tenuously planted the seeds of equality and justice. However, it is our failing if we believe the claims that those seeds were done growing at any point in history so far, be it the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, the Civil Rights movement, or whatever other moments might be seen as checkpoints on the journey. We need to keep growing them.