I actually do share the concern that fairly far-right wing people are politicizing education.

But - CRT in it's applied form ultimately turns into 'propaganda' and there should be some legislative parameters around it.

The basic CRT premise of 'Minorities who live in Majority Culture are suppressed in systematic ways, and that we should be more sensitive to that and it's historical impact' ... is definitely fair.

So there's a legit grounding in aspects of CRT.

If that were it, then then this would be a good thing.

But the rhetorical application of CRT gets pretty vicious, pretty quickly, and it turns to the language of 'race war' almost instantly.

In particular, using terminology such as 'White Supremacy' which is normally associated with 'Men in White Pointy Hats' as purposefully toxic language, the tactic of castigating anyone who doesn't support their cause as 'upholding White Supremacy' and therefore racism etc. are common.

Controversial foundational elements such as rejecting liberal and enlightenment values (literally objective truth) in favour of one's own 'realized or expressed truth' in addition to issues such as rejecting the foundation of the written word etc..

There's been a few debates here on HN, but there is documentation from school boards on 'how the teaching of Math upholds White Supremacy' because it ostensibly implies 'linear thinking', 'predicate knowledge' and other artifacts of supposed 'White Supremacy'. The response to this particularly bad form of CRT on HN usually comes in the form of discounting classical teaching pedagogy as being possibly too 'stifled' - but that has absolutely nothing to do with race and there is no evidence whatsoever to back it up. In reality - certain groups (Hispanics, Blacks) do poorly, and other groups - including minorities/people of colour (Whites, Asians) do just fine under the same pedagogy and what's more likely is that kids who show up for class, who have good parents, who want to learn etc. (i.e. the obvious things) do just fine. CRT 'in practice' in this situation is unsubstantiated, anti-scientific, anti-progressive ideological rubbish in making excuses for kids who don't do well in math. It's 'good intentions run ideologically wild'.

Last week a New Jersey school board opted to remove the names of all holidays from their calendar and replace them with just 'Holiday'. This one is actually a pretty good example of the intersection of CRT and the effete values of school administrators: July 4, Easter, Memorial Day are just 'too controversial' for our kids to be exposed to, therefore, we'll just mark them as 'Holiday'.

That to me represents a kind of ideological 'crossing of the line': if our educators are interested in making sure kids hear about slavery and segregation, that seems reasonable. Important, actually. But erasing civic holidays because of concerns of CRT is I think 'radical', and there are people in every school board in America who would like to follow suit and CRT gives them basically the impetus to 'Be on the right side of history' (in their view) despite the 'Ugly, angry, overtly traditional parents' (again view of the teachers).

There's a little bit of a postmodern aspect to CRT - it's a 'turning inside out' kind of ideology, allowing adherents to basically refute anything and everything part of he 'conventional narrative' and replace it with ... well whatever they want. This is what makes it scary.

CRT has some valid intellectual underpinnings, but it ends up being like ugly Red Hat Trumpism for the Left. I actually support some aspects of it but I have no trust in the education system to use it responsibly.

Unfortunately, I think the 'sides' are talking past each other I don't see any consensus developing just yet.