The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were the largest civil rights protests in American history, so it was virtually a given there would be a potent backlash. The only question was what it would look like. The answer caught most everyone by surprise: an attack on "critical race theory," which most people — including most of the 2020 protesters — had never even heard of.
But for those who did know, it made a lot of sense. Critical race theory was created in the late 1970s and early '80s as a framework for understanding why the civil rights movement's historic gains in the 1950s and '60s did not produce an enduring trajectory of progress, and how a successful backlash against them had begun gaining steam.
