I’m not trying to discuss the merits of the body of beliefs that you call “CRT” — that’s too big a topic for right here.

What I am pointing out is that in labeling it “CRT”, you are coming very close to engaging in the behavior you’re calling out regarding slurs. It’s less bad to target ideas than people because ideas don’t get hurt, but they do get ignored and dismissed, and that matters when there’s some baby in there with all that bathwater that gets added in. (“Maybe if we add in enough bathwater, we can just throw out the baby and not worry about it.”) To be very clear, there absolutely is some baby: if you notice some difference between races and set up “impartial” rules that “accidentally” favor one over the other, it’s absolutely racist in the old conventional definition of racist, and complaining “but those are just the rules!” doesn’t make it any less so — this is the fundamental insight that Critical Race Theory brings to legal analysis. It’s not the only thing it brings, but it does bring that, and that wasn’t particularly appreciated before.

The people who advance the ideas that you’re criticizing generally did not call that “Critical Race Theory”. For instance, in her paper White Fragility (International J. of Critical Pedagogy, 3:54–70, 2011: https://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116), DiAngelo does not once use the term, nor does she heavily cite what are now regarded as seminal papers in CRT. Instead, she refers to the people as “Whiteness scholars” and though she doesn’t refer to it by name, the area is “Whiteness studies”. There is some link between CRT and Whiteness studies, but it’s relatively modest from what I’ve been able to tell. (This is not terribly surprising because CRT has legal origins, but Whiteness studies tends to appear in some sort of humanities or social science setting. They’re linked mostly, I think, through the adoption of CRT in thinking about higher education, which dovetails with the humanities/social science angle.)

Widening the use of “CRT” to describe a movement that solidly encompasses ideas like DiAngelo’s is mostly a right-wing phenomenon, probably because it’s just such a juicy term — you can really rail against “critical race theory” because, well, who knows what it is, but it sure doesn’t sound like anything else, so you know when you hear it that you’re against it (or for it). And of course they’re very quick to tag the most fringe beliefs with that label (or even better, unfair characterizations of said beliefs!)— that’s just good politics. (DiAngelo, as a scholar of Critical Discourse Analysis, should appreciate the deft maneuver here.)

Now, at this point I think the right wing has probably won this linguistic battle; people who favor the ideas from Whiteness studies are starting to warm to categorize that as “CRT”. So under normal circumstances if someone says “I’m against CRT” or “I’m for CRT” and mean it in a very broad sense, I don’t have much objection. As long as it’s clear from context what is meant, it’s possible to have a discussion about merits and drawbacks. The original probably now has to be relegated to being called “critical race theory of law” or somesuch.

However, when you’re writing a post about using words to levy unfair attacks, it’s just a wee bit hypocritical to use the term “critical race theory” in the new not-fully-accepted right-wing-counterattack-motivated sense rather than the older legal sense and not even point it out.