That’s not at all what CRT is, though. It’s opponents to CRT who use it as a catch-all phrase (much like the way “woke” is used) to mean “anything that talks about race.” CRT specifically looks at the ways political/economic/social/legal systems emerge from and continue to reflect the organization of racial (specifically anti-Black) hierarchy. So, for example, while Civil Rights organized around the idea that if black people could get access to the same rights as white people - such as voting, bank loans, education, professional opportunity -racism would effectively disappear, CRT recognizes that slavery wasn’t only a historic event that simply ended once a bill is signed - it organized society in particular ways that continue to impact us. This is why black people continue to be disenfranchised, but now through red-lining districts, voter ID laws, gerrymandering, etc. More black lawyers doesn’t change the way laws/the courts/policing etc. developed in specific ways to protect white property, for example.
Saidiya Hartman, for example, in Scenes of Subjection looks at how enslavement era laws meant a Black woman was properly and therefore she could not be raped nor prosecute her rapist nor serve as a witness, but if she killer her rapist, she could be prosecuted. In other words, she could exist as a perpetrator but not a victim. We can understand the ways Megan Thee Stallion is being treated right now as in line with the ways Black women’s bodies/rapes existed under slavery. The idea of CRT is that there are real historical choices and decisions that formed these institutions, and simply adding Black people to the existing power structure doesn’t address that underlying structure. The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, for example, argued that after enslavement, minor charges for things like trespassing or vagrancy began to be used to “re-enslave” Black people. Her argument is that once slavery is abolished, the prison system comes in its place to discipline and control black people.
Adolph Reed - who I’ve actually taken a course with - doesn’t disagree that structural racism exists, his argument is that he disagrees with what he sees as the ahistorical ways in which people say “nothing has changed.” His argument is from the radical Black tradition; it’s that elites use their experience of race within elite settings to argue that this is the same as Jim Crow, while ignoring the role of class. In other words, he doesn’t disagree poor black people are shot by the police; he just thinks that middle-class black people will use this to argue that they are equally subject to policing while ignoring the class-based element that means poor white people are also subject to enhanced policing. He sees the construction of the “black community” as a fiction created by white elites for black elites who are invited “to the table” under the myth they speak for all black people. His complaint with “identity politics” isn’t that race or racism don’t exist or aren’t systemic, it’s that the discourse of race is wielded by black elites to gain entry into white elite institutions and gain adjacency to white power themselves rather than actually doing anything for the oppressed black masses. He critiques this hyper-focus on racial identity - like asking Hillary Clinton if she accepts she has white privilege rather than challenging her on policy - rather than the material impacts of race. So people will cry over Megan experiencing racism from the Royal family, etc. as if this says anything about the experience of black women in the UK working as domestics, for example. Or focus on the experiences of black students in elite institutions while doing nothing to organize for those without housing - in other words, he objects to black capitalism and opportunistic politics. He objects to the superficial and performative representative politics that sees Obama being president as some kind of victory for radical struggle. But he doesn’t dismiss the need for radical struggle, he just sees it as requiring a class-based analysis that works in solidarity with other struggles internationally as well. He disagrees with Afro-pessimism as a philosophical formation, but it would be a mistake to think he dismisses the reality of race.