ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the campaign of misinformation waged against it, in Britain and the US, as part of the coordinated-ordinated backlash against the antiracist protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The first part of the chapter offers a brief guide to CRT’'‘s tenets and explores some of the tools that critical race theorists apply to understand and oppose racism in society. This includes consideration of '‘business-as-usual racism’,'‘; critiques of the idea of neutrality and meritocracy,; the importance of the experiential knowledge of people of colour,; the interest-convergence principle,; intersectionality,; the use of storytelling; and the rules of racial standing. The second part of the chapter looks at the anti-CRT campaigns of the 2020s and shows how CRT is used as a receptacle for every possible fear and fantasy about anti-whiteness and race equity. The anti-CRT campaigns involve mainstream politics, the media, right-wing think tanks and numerous social media outlets. The chapter shows how these campaigns utilize tactics that were first perfected online by neo-Nazis. Although the campaigns purport to target CRT, their scale and repetition across multiple countries and media, effectively works to silence all critical discussions of race and racism.
