There is an effort underway to convince run of the mill people that CRT is nothing more than teaching the history of slavery and the civil rights movement: But nothing could be further from the truth. After all, the vast majority of adults born in the seventies and later were taught about both slavery and the civil rights movement in school. A reaction like this is not the result of a traditional, decades long part of the grade school and high school curriculum: This sort of reaction is reserved for something both novel and reckless.
CRT is nothing more than the belief that past racism must be countered by present racism and that all the problems of the black community are the fault of whiteness, a kind of original sin that pervades all European peoples and that is inexorable. In short, it is the teaching of permanent racial resentment—along with the inculcation of racial guilt into young whites.
Many leftists will argue that CRT is not being taught to children—that it is a university discipline. They will even argue that it refers narrowly to a movement in legal scholarship that applied ideas from Critical Legal Theory to the topic of race. Of course, Critical Race Theory is, indeed, the name of a school of legal thought—however, both that school of legal thought and its parent, Critical Legal Theory, have their origins in Marxism. These leftists, however, are taking advantage of a terminological ambiguity: Properly speaking, what is being taught to children in schools is Critical Philosophy of Race; however, because it grew out of Critical Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory, there are still those who refer to it as Critical Race Theory. The left is playing a semantic trick to make conservatives look unhinged and to avoid discussing the specifics of Critical Philosophy of Race (which I will hereafter call CRT or Critical Race Theory) with a public who is likely to reject it as antithetical to the ideal of a color blind society they were all taught to admire in their youth.
That CRT is an extension of Marxist thought should not surprise anyone who is familiar with the ubiquitous use of the word “Critical” by Marxists. But more importantly, it embodies both the class based analysis of society and the polylogism (the belief that different groups of people have different logic) that are essential components of Marxist thought. It seeks to foment racial division as previous incarnations of Marxism sought class warfare---in part because Marxists theorists had observed nationalism's and patriotism's ability to overcome class hostility during both the rise of fascism and in the liberal democracy's (and communists, to be fair) defeat of it. For further evidence of its Marxist origins and content, I suggest reading the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the topic. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-phil-race/#CritRaceTheo
While some inequities exist in our system that should be addressed (such as crack possession carrying a much heavier sentence than cocaine possession), no reasonable human being can believe that white legal conventions are the true cause of problems in black communities: After all, black communities were in much better shape while Jim Crow was still the law—how can racist law be the cause of problems in the black community when those problems have increased as the racism inherent in the law has been decreasing. Of course, it would be an absurd post hoc fallacy to claim that racism in the law was good for blacks, it goes against all reason to think racism is the cause of these problems if black crime, black fatherlessness, etc. have all increased while laws that allow discrimination against blacks have been systematically removed.
Critical Race Theory is both untrue and dangerous. Untrue things do not belong in grade schools or high schools and neither do dangerous ones. CRT should have no place in our educational system.