The Republicans obsession over "critical race theory"

"Critical race theory" (CRT) is the faddish new Republican phrase for, "Scary black people! Scary black people!"

Florida just passed a law banning its teaching, without much effort to define what it is. Because, as Julia Craven explains in What Florida’s “Critical Race Theory” Ban Tells Us About Anti-Antiracism Slate 06/11/2021:

As the Florida law demonstrates, the goal of the anti-CRT effort is put the analysis of ongoing racism out of bounds—to treat any inquiry into the material inequities that define the color line in America as something equivalent to Holocaust denial, and to reframe discussion of ongoing injustice as an insult to “white persons.” Other campaigners go as far to equate CRT with Marxism, as if a true accounting of racism in America were somehow going to upend capitalism. Such intentional misreadings allow conservatives to create a dichotomy where considering how racism shaped the country is unpatriotic and anti-American.

There actually is a particular kind of academic analysis that constitutes critical race theory in the academic world. It's essentially a small but important sliver of Constitutional law. David Theo Goldberg gives us a capsule guide to the academic function of critical race theory (The War on Critical Race Theory Boston Review 05/07/2021):

Among CRT’s critics little distinction is drawn, in particular, between the academic disciplines of critical race theory and critical race studies. Critical race theory refers to a body of legal scholarship developed in the 1970s and ’80s, largely out of Harvard Law School, by the likes of Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence, III, among others. Though varied in their views, what unites the work of these scholars is a shared sense of the importance of attending explicitly to race in legal argument, given the perpetuation of racial and other hierarchies through the structure of colorblind law instituted after the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The framework has since been taken up, expanded, and applied more generally to social discourse and practice. As a jurisprudential and social theory it is open to critique and revision, even rejection with compelling counterargument — all notably absent from the current attacks. [my emphasis in bold]

Then there is the more vague category, "Critical race studies, by contrast, encompass a broader, more loosely affiliated array of academic work. Some far more compelling than others, these accounts have been taken up, debated, and indeed sometimes dismissed in the expansive analysis of race and racism in and beyond the academy today."

But - to state the obvious - Republicans are not concerned that innocent white high school students will find their delicate minds overwhelmed by the subtleties of the postcolonial theorizing of Achille Mbembe. As Goldberg sums it up, "The exact targets of CRT’s critics vary wildly, but it is obvious that most critics simply do not know what they are talking about."

Nor do most of them care.

This is related to the endless conservative whining about "political correctness" and "wokeism", including the crackpot far-right construction, "cultural Marxism." David Neiwert has been following the development of that notion, very influential among the Jews-will-not-replace-us far right internationally: How the 'cultural Marxism' hoax began, and why it's spreading into the mainstream Daily Kos 01/23/2016. See also: Paul Rosenberg, A user's guide to "Cultural Marxism": Anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, reloaded Salon 05/09/2019.

My favorite stereotypically stodgy source, Britannica Online, also has an entry on critical race theory 04/02/2021.

But it's a longtime conservative schtick to pluck some academic concept to offer up for ridicule of the Real (White) Amurcans. So it's important not to confuse the ideological use of such concepts as political polemics to the actual field of thought whose label they have borrowed.