It does seem true that Rufo & co have managed to mash together actual Critical Race Theory, political or activist ideas derived from Critical Race theory, unrelated anti-racist ideas, and outright fabrications, and labeled the whole mess “Critical Race Theory”.

On the one hand, this is badly wrong. On the other hand, there is a real thing to talk about that doesn’t have a name, which is anti-racism-which-is-at-least-loosely-inspired-by-Critical-Race-Theory. Rufo leaped into the terminological void and provided the name for the core set of ideas that rubbed some people the wrong way. Then he added in some compelling lies, because, well, I guess some elements on the right use lies like salt to make their cooking taste better?

I think the Critical Race Theory terminology has sailed — as far as I can tell, Rufo won this one. Every day I hear NPR reporting on this thing which “is not critical race theory”…without giving any other name for it, because there isn’t one, and thereby just reinforcing that this flavor of anti-racist education in schools is in fact best called CRT.

The best one can do now, I think, is to fiddle at the margins. Certainly the outright fabrications can be rejected as such regardless of what they’re labeled as — they’re just wrong, regardless of name. But I don’t think there’s any point in trying to label somewhat CRT-inspired stuff as “not CRT” especially since CRT explicitly includes a call to activism. One could argue (I would) that Whiteness Studies has diverged sufficiently from CRT to be its own thing…but if it gets lumped in, well, it’s not that misleading, as it tackles one of the core concepts that CRT grapples with, and in a similar vein. The original academic CRT can always be called “academic CRT” when it needs to be distinguished, so there’s no real harm to our expressive capacity.

I don’t think fighting over the terminology is worth it; we should save our breath for fighting over the concepts.

So, like you, I also have tried to find reasonable evidence that CRT is not being taught in K-12 — a difficult endeavor, akin to proving a negative by inspection. Instead, I’ve found K-12 ethnic studies curriculum goals like this:

Understand and analyze the impact of systems of power, including white supremacy, institutional racism, racial hierarchy, and oppression.

(Care to guess which grade this is for?) And I’ve yet to hear a compelling argument for why it’s an egregious error to label this “CRT”.

To my eye, things are not looking good for the “CRT isn’t being taught in schools” perspective. The argument against widening what CRT means doesn’t look compelling, and the argument that the perspectives advocated by CRT aren’t finding their way into K-12 seems actually false. But this is in the absence of a compelling defense of the position, which I have yet to see.

Regardless, I would think at this point the thing to do is talk about the issues and forget about the labels. Only talk about labels when they’re used precisely in order to mislead, not just when the labels aren’t as technically precise as one might hope.