Do We Need Critical Race Theory?

Before I launch into my spiel, I want to recommend a timely and relevant book, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, An Introduction (New York, New York University Press, 2023.) Now to my spiel.

I find it both disquieting and reprehensible that one of the country’s two national political parties and the odds-on favorite to represent that party in the national election next year should promote an entire domestic agenda around the issue of race. Or to put it more directly, how did the political party of Lincoln wind up as the political party for which racism is the one issue which they promote above everything else?

If you think that alt-right attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT) are nothing more than an attempt by the GOP to find a quick and easy way to take sides in the culture war, either you don’t know how the Republican-led political coalition that gave us the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution transformed 4.5 million pieces of chattel property into human beings, or you’ve been asleep at the wheel since Nixon announced he would ‘go slow’ on enforcing civil rights laws in 1968.

We were then treated to Ronald Reagan, who held his first 1980 campaign rally in the Mississippi town where three civil rights workers were kidnapped and then murdered by the Klan. Reagan also got plenty of laughs during the…