In September 2020, Trump forbade government organizations from teaching CRT.

According to the article “Critical Race Theory, Race Equity, and Public Health: Toward Antiracism Praxis,” CRT is a: “transdisciplinary, race-equity methodology that originated in legal studies and is grounded in social justice. CRT’s tools for conducting research and practice are intended to elucidate contemporary racial phenomena, expand the vocabulary with which to discuss complex racial concepts, and challenge racial hierarchies.”

The Federalist, a conservative-leaning website, posted an article that posited that CRT makes people more racist.

However, the Federalist article makes many assumptions based on misleading graphs, misunderstandings, and errors in logic. The article doesn’t present enough evidence to come up with a sound conclusion.

The article makes it argument based on two graphs. The first shows that the number of articles about CRT have been increasing. The second shows how “white indicators” have been changing in political parties. White indicators are people who recognize the significance of their own skin color.

The article makes the classic mistake of assuming that correlation equals causation. Even if these two were correlated, being aware of how one’s race affects them doesn’t automatically make them more racist. In fact, one of the main aims of CRT is to make white people realize how their whiteness grants them privilege. Several studies indicate that CRT helps quell racially biased practices, particularly in schools and the justice system.

The author of the Federalist article also did a follow up survey that didn’t reveal anything substantial. He only gave specifics of conservative reactions to CRT articles and said that “white leftists usually feel the opposite.”