Critical Race Theory (CRT) is, at root, an American phenomenon. So thoroughly is this the case that although its ideas have been used outside the United States for some time, they are often highly flavored by U.S. racial history. CRT holds that race is a social construct that was created to maintain White privilege and White supremacy. This idea originated long before postmodernism with W.E.B. Du Bois, who argued that the idea of race was being used to assert biological explanations of differences that are social and cultural, in order to perpetuate the unjust treatment of racial minorities, especially African Americans.
There are good reasons to accept this claim. Although some average differences in human populations—such as skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and relative susceptibility to certain diseases—are observably real, and an individual’s geographical heritage can be discovered via DNA tests, it is not clear why this has been regarded as so significant as to divide people into groups called “races.” For one thing, biologists don’t. Biologists talk of populations, which can be identified through genetic markers as having had slightly different evolutionary heritages, but reducing this to what we usually call “race” is so often wrong as to be nearly useless in practice.