What the moral panic about ‘critical race theory’ is about

Whatever Republican politicians and rightwing media are referring to when they talk about “critical race theory”, it has little to do with critical race theory as an actual discipline. Developed in the 1970s and 80s by law professors – notably Derrick Bell and his acolyte, Kimberlé Crenshaw, at Harvard – the real CRT is analytic framework through which academics can discern the ways that racial disparities are reproduced by the law, and how the legacies of historical racism can persist even after discriminatory policies are revised.