Yes, you are responding...but you don't have to, if you're a critical theorist, especially a critical race theorist. At any point, you can pull out your "lived experience" card, or your "incommensurate experiences and perspectives" card, or your "special identity group knowledge" card, and ignore any arguments I make. Depending on the flavor, you can also pull out your postmodernism-inspired "that's just a truth-claim" card or your "I am advocating for justice and you are advocating for systems of oppression" card.

These are all things that, with a straight face, have been claimed as valid rhetorical moves, by people ranging from Horkheimer through to DiAngelo (passing through Delgado and others on the way).

My criticism is not of being critical of liberal ideals. The liberal ideal, construed broadly, is to be critical of liberal ideals! My criticism is that CRT is epistemological rubbish. This is no path to knowledge--it privileges bias and ideology above reason to an extent sufficient to destroy even the possibility of knowledge if applied to the extent that it is allowed. The only saving grace is that people generally have not been able to stomach using this as much as is apparently allowed.

If there were long descriptions of "why and how lived experience is misleading, invalid, and at times just plain counterfactual--and how to reason appropriately from personal anecdotes nonetheless", then I'd be inclined to think that Critical Theory and descendants had some foundations to stand on. If I'm wrong, please link me to scholarly philosophical work (accepted by CRT scholars and the like) that explicitly lays out the flaws and limits of their approaches and how to work with them! The most I've seen is sort of an implicit retreat to the usual rules of logic and argumentation when called on it.

Standard liberals can point instead to giants in the field of epistemology and the scientific method for how they come to knowledge: Popper, Kuhn, Quine, and more.

Critical Theory explicitly stands on current society while blasting away at it--including blasting away the very tools it uses to evaluate arguments. To the extent that you're using reason, that's great, but you don't have to and in fact you'd better not if using them gets in the way of (perceived) justice. Many people who applied the tools of Critical Race Theory (including those who came up with it) were so steeped in the rational and evidential tradition that they did not stray particularly far, even while rhetorically embracing radical non-truth-based approaches to...um...emitting truth claims, I guess, because "understanding" is too generous at that point. So if you read Delgado and Stefancic, it's very thoughtful and well-argued...even if the exercises drift towards the "what do you think" rather than the "is this a matter of objective truth and if so how can we find out what the truth is".

I also think that CRT has got human psychology so badly wrong as to cause harm in many places where it means to help, but that's secondary to the point that if you scrupulously go by its own rules, you can't even establish any knowledge. If my lived experience is that dalmatians are funny and your lived experience is that dalmatians are serious, there is nothing more to do except see who can wield oppressive power over the other to enforce their side as the dominant narrative.