WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT...
An unlikely spectre is haunting the right. Last year, Donald Trump attacked it as “toxic propaganda” that would “destroy our country”; its mentions on Fox News have shot up from 132 times in 2020 to 1,860 this year and counting. And the furore around it has been picked up here too. Last October, UK equalities minister Kemi Badenoch decried “an ideology that sees my blackness as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression,” and insisted: “I want to be absolutely clear that the government stand unequivocally against critical race theory.” This August, academic Aysha Khanom began a case against Leeds Beckett University seeking to establish critical race theory as a protected belief under the Equality Act.
So what, exactly, is it? Critical race theory is a longstanding academic field that emerged out of Harvard Law School. It is less interested in stories of individual victims and oppressors than how institutions have a role in reproducing racial inequality.