It doesn’t help that many of the people who advocate for this milquetoast definition (and CRT more generally) also drive the blurring of lines by persecuting ordinary people as though they were conventional white supremacists, invoking Nazi and KKK imagery, etc. Roughly the same group did the same thing with “feminism” earlier in the decade (“‘feminism’ just means ‘gender equality’”) and then again with “racism” (“you are against racism, aren’t you?”). It’s really remarkable how often so many CRT folks stumble into motte and bailey rhetoric relative to the wider population.
You say “unfortunately it’s hard to communicate”, but I think it would be absolutely trivial to avoid overloading words in the first place or failing that, to use words consistently. It definitely feels like the confusion is a feature of CRT discourse rather than a bug.
> You say “unfortunately it’s hard to communicate”, but I think it would be absolutely trivial to avoid overloading words in the first place or failing that, to use words consistently. It definitely feels like the confusion is a feature of CRT discourse rather than a bug.
It is a feature. If the ideology is splintered into many subfields, and has a legion of names, but all have broadly the same thrust, it's hard to talk about the phenomenon in a way that's easy to grasp. And in any case, you will have to give it a stable name you can refer to because the advocates themselves will just switch what name they're using, while the underlying ideal and methods stay the same.
This is one reason people are so angry at Rufo for pulling the CRT stunt and calling related things CRT. Is it wrong? Yes, in detail, but not in substance. And importantly, it is right in the part that matters and caught on, so people are losing their minds over it. Notice how they're not in the least visibly upset about, say, Wesley Yang calling wokeness "the Successor Ideology" - it never caught on, never managed to give people a name for the wrongness they could see with their own eyes.
There is a rhetorical strategy coined the motte and bailey, which gets its name from the motte and bailey fortification setup with a fortification (the motte) in the center and a broad, lucrative field around it. The idea is you can live in the lush bailey and expand it, and if attacked retreat to the more defensible motte to frustrate attackers. Once they are defeated or leave, you resume work in the broader field that can't be defended as well.
The motte and bailey rhetoric works the same way: When not pressed, you advance shakier, ambitious claims people might want to challenge, but when pressed equivocate that you're just talking about something unobjectionable.
As one example, second and third wave feminism unquestionably had an entire history and culture around them, with detailed theories of society w/ patriarchy, sex vs. gender and all - this wide, deep culture and spreading it is the bailey. Press people on some of the more tenuous aspects of this, and they'd retreat about "feminism being about equality" - this is the motte fortification, since barely anyone in the West is against equality at least in some form or another. Once the attacker goes away, back to spreading theories of patriarchy and oppression it was.
The modern wokeness runs this strategy all over the place. Want to curtail what you see as a blinkered approach to teaching history? You clearly don't want people learning about slavery or segregation, and so on. Racism is simultaneously the ordinary state of affairs in a country people actively want to immigrate to, and Klansmanship.
You say “unfortunately it’s hard to communicate”, but I think it would be absolutely trivial to avoid overloading words in the first place or failing that, to use words consistently. It definitely feels like the confusion is a feature of CRT discourse rather than a bug.