Those who feel a society-saving duty to ban what an unsympathetic parent or school board member could construe as “CRT” ought to understand that they’re empowering government bureaucrats to peer over the shoulders of classroom teachers. They should also have the humility to understand that any number of ideas they hold dear could also be defined as “divisive concepts.”

The actual connection between actual academic Critical Race Theory and any reading likely to be assigned in a Virginia classroom is tentative at best. But imagine that, for example, The Space Traders by Derrick Bell was regularly assigned in high school classes. Bell is one of the founders of CRT and the book’s story is designed to illustrate his understanding of ongoing structural racism through an analogy about aliens.

Would students reading and discussing this story really constitute a crisis? Are we supposed to believe that Virginia teenagers are so fragile that they can’t read about “divisive concepts” without automatically agreeing with the author’s point of view? Why not trust them to think it all through and make up their own minds?

I don’t claim that Christopher Hitchens would have reserved all his contempt for the conservative side of the race-related culture wars raging in 2022.