Welllll.

"A version of white privilege sometimes appears in discussions of affirmative action. Many whites feel that these programs victimize them.... By contrast, critical race theorists and social scientists hold that racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained. If we take this perspective, then no white member of society seems quite so innocent." (Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (3rd ed.); Delgado & Stefancic, 2017).

(Emphasis mine.)

That's sure flirting pretty hard with "white people are inherently evil because they are white", especially given Delgado and Stefancic's scholarly and restrained tone throughout the book.

Maybe it was just clumsy wording, but the argument wasn't that affirmative action was needed to redress past and ongoing harm. The argument is that white people aren't innocent.

There's also the name "whiteness studies" being applied to a field focused almost exclusively on colonialism, slavery, and other atrocities...a field named by people with roots in Critical Discourse Analysis, which studies how the choice of language and phrasing affects the wielding of power (so unless they're utterly inept, we can treat them as if they know exactly what they're doing). You just can't call the study of evil actions by white people "whiteness studies" and disavow the idea that you're implying that white people are evil by virtue of being white, any more than you can call the study of inner-city murder and rape by black men "blackness studies" and then act all shocked when people think this is offensive.

So, no. I think there's a subset of CRT--the Whiteness Studies bit especially, which I was willing to consider a separate field except that Delgado and Stefancic explicitly claim it--that is pushing the white = evil line about as hard as it possibly can be pushed while having any hope left of being able to deny flat-out bigotry.

You make lots of other good points...this one just stuck out as not quite as true as it ought to be. It certainly isn't a central tenet of CRT that white people are evil (it is only a central tenet that they're selfishly indifferent even when it seems like they're promoting justice, the "interest convergence" tenet), but under its self-appointed umbrella you can find a lot of winking and nodding in that general direction.

Winking and nodding generally doesn't do much damage, though, especially if you start from a position of being able to count on basic human rights. However, distilled to a lesson comprehensible at a K-12 level, I don't think we can rule out damage quite so easily (especially at the lower end of that range).