Critical Race Theory: What It Claims, What It Abandons, and Why It Matters

Post 4 of 8 — The Inheritance: Western Civilization, Its Critics, and What Is Actually at Stake

Mar 24, 2026

green and white typewriter on black textile — Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Critical Race Theory is routinely described by its defenders as a natural development of the American civil rights tradition — an extension of the work done by the movement that produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This description is not merely imprecise. It is the opposite of accurate.

The civil rights movement appealed to the foundations of the liberal order: equality before the law, individual dignity, the universal application of constitutional principles regardless of race. The movement’s most powerful arguments were arguments from within the Western tradition — from the Declaration of Independence, from the Fourteenth Amendment, from the claim that America had promised something to all its citizens and needed to deliver it.

CRT does something structurally different. Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law [1]. This is not a reform of liberalism. It is an argument against it. And understanding that distinction is essential to understanding why CRT’s spread through American institutions represents something more serious than a policy disagreement.

What CRT Actually Claims

The Episcopalian Church’s definition of CRT, quoted by Murray, is reasonably representative: “a social and theoretical framework that understands race as a lens through which to seek understanding of the world. It insists, like critical theory at large, that social problems are created by structures and institutions, rather than by individuals” [2].

The three core claims follow from this foundation:

First, that racism is primarily structural and institutional rather than individual — that it is embedded in laws, policies, hiring practices, educational systems, and cultural assumptions in ways that persist regardless of the intentions of any specific person. Individual racists are less important than racist structures.

Second, that power is racially distributed in ways that determine who can be a racist. In the power structure that devotees of CRT remorselessly laid out, it was axiomatic that only white people had power. Therefore, only white people could be racist. Black people either could not be racist or, if they were racist, were racist only because they had ‘internalized whiteness’ [3].

Third — and most consequential for its epistemological character — that “lived experience” trumps conventional evidence. CRT’s assertions are based not on evidence, as it might previously have been understood, but essentially on interpretations and attitudes. While rarely announcing the fact, the rules of CRT had no need for normal standards of evidence. If a person’s ‘lived experience’ could be attested to, then the question of evidence or data had to find a place further back in the queue, if at all [4].

This third claim is where CRT breaks most decisively from the Enlightenment tradition. Post 3 identified the Enlightenment contribution as empiricism: truth discovered rather than decreed, with evidence as the mechanism of discovery and falsifiability as the test of claims. CRT substitutes identity-based testimony for evidence and renders itself structurally unfalsifiable. The more places scholars could see invisible racism, the more popular they became [5]. There is no observation that could, in principle, disprove the structural racism claim — because any absence of evidence is itself evidence of how deeply the racism is buried.

The DiAngelo and Kendi Problem

Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi are the two most institutionally influential popularizers of CRT in the contemporary United States, and both illustrate the unfalsifiability problem with unusual clarity.

DiAngelo’s framework: white identity is inherently racist, and a positive white identity is an impossible goal. White identity is inherently racist; white people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy [6]. Her prescription: white people should strive to be “less white” because being less white means being less racially oppressive. The solution to racism, in this framework, is for one racial group to systematically diminish its own identity while the framework itself defines that identity as inherently oppressive.

The evidentiary standard DiAngelo applies to her claims is illustrated by her assertion that “there is a kind of glee in the White collective when Black bodies are punished” [7]. No evidence is offered. The claim is presented as self-evident to those sufficiently attuned to the structural reality CRT describes. Absence of evidence is, again, evidence of how deep the problem runs.

Kendi’s framework produces what may be the most explicit illustration of the unfalsifiability trap in contemporary public discourse. “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” [8]. From this foundation, Kendi constructs a system in which disagreement with any of his specific policy positions constitutes racism: opposing reparations is racist, having no opinion on reparations is racist, opposing voter ID laws is right and supporting them is racist, referring to a ‘post-racial society’ is racist. Everywhere you turn, the other exits are blocked [9].

This is not analysis. It is a closed system designed to make dissent impossible without self-incrimination.

The 1619 Project: Ideology Displacing History

The 1619 Project, launched by the New York Times in 2019, presented itself as a corrective historical reckoning: the claim that 1619 — when the first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia — rather than 1776 represented the true founding of America, with the protection of slavery as the Revolution’s primary motivating cause.

The project attracted criticism not only from conservative commentators but from leading academic historians of early America, including Sean Wilentz, James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes. They wrote to the New York Times objecting that on “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or framing,” the project had got its history severely wrong. The historians said that the 1619 Project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology” [10].

Murray’s summary is pointed: the project’s team set out to ignore the historical record and scour the land for anything that could accord with their own preordained theory [11]. This is the deductive method Hanson identified in Post 3: beginning from the predetermined conclusion and working backward to the evidence.

Biggar on the Expansion of ‘Racism’

Nigel Biggar, approaching these questions as a trained ethicist and historian rather than as a polemicist, identifies what may be the deepest problem with CRT’s conceptual apparatus: the systematic expansion of the concept of racism to the point of analytical uselessness.

Nowadays the sin of ‘racism’ has been loosened and broadened to mean any negative judgment made by a member of one race upon the culture of another, but especially by a ‘white’ person upon a ‘black’ culture. This assumes a basic cultural equality and a radical moral relativism and is designed to contradict Western assumptions of superiority [12].

The consequences of this expansion are significant. If racism means any negative cultural judgment by a white person about a non-white culture, then the entire apparatus of cultural criticism — the basis on which any civilization assesses its own performance and argues about its values — becomes structurally impossible within this framework. You cannot argue that female genital mutilation is wrong, that honor killing is wrong, or that any cultural practice of a non-Western society is morally inferior to the standard the Western tradition has developed — without exposing yourself to the charge of racism.

Biggar also identifies the specific moral error involved: the sins of racism are two — first, the racial group is viewed in relentlessly negative terms, and second, the individual is not permitted to appear as anything other than a member of such a group [13]. CRT’s framework applies exactly these two errors, in reverse direction, to white people: viewing the group in relentlessly negative terms, and refusing to allow any individual to escape the group’s ascribed characteristics.

The Practical Outcomes

Murray’s verdict on the practical consequences of CRT’s application to social policy is blunt and, on the evidence, defensible: if the problem in everything is racism and the answer to everything is to disrupt the racist system, it produces only two verifiable outcomes: a lowering of standards in the name of antiracism and a rise in the need for racist policies in order to deal with a problem that is always said to be racism. The war against standardized testing, like the war against religion, philosophy, and everything else in the West, does not erase racial differences. It foghorns them [14].

This is the central paradox of the CRT enterprise. A framework that claims to diagnose and dismantle racism systematically creates new forms of race-consciousness, racial categorization, and race-based policy. It does not produce the colorblind society that the civil rights movement envisioned. It produces a society organized entirely around race, in which everyone’s standing, credibility, and moral status is determined by their racial identity. This is not the West’s inheritance. It is its repudiation.

Referenced Highlights

[1] “Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”