Marxism is in CRT's DNA.

The two most important questions about critical race theory are still "What is it?" and "Why are people confused about what it is?"

I'm going to answer both questions.

CRT is Marxism that uses race rather than class as the point of contention.

CRT in action is as simple as people seeing something that they want to control and calling it "racist" until they control it.

As for why people are so confused about what CRT actually is, well, that's by design.

Strategic equivocation (aka a Motte and Bailey fallacy) is usually something that a bad advocate of a given philosophy accidentally stumbles on; but, CRT is all about strategic equivocation. They use words like "critical" and "diversity" while using different meanings for those words when they're on the attack then they use when they're retreating.

Most people who advocate for CRT, like Crenshaw who coined the term, are perfectly happy to lie about it. She's a smart enough person to know that, when Joy Reid asks her the question about CRT being linked to Marxism, it's best to not answer truthfully in the affirmative and she can count on most of us plebeians to not read her books or listen to her when she peaches to the choir. When we do, she can just make fun of us for being Republicans (I'm not) and the plebeians on the left will just take her word for it.

All of this combines into a directly Marxist strategy. Marx said that only a socialist man could understand his philosophy. That was his attempt at a philosophical judo move. He built it into his philosophy that any opponents of his philosophy just didn't get it. For him, it wasn't possible that you understood his philosophy and rejected it. The same goes for the preachers of CRT.