After Emancipation, many objected to the journalistic analysis and legal advocacy for African Americans, it was seen as unnecessary and divisive, ever as lynch laws and Jim Crow expanded its reach across the South. People like Douglas, Wells, Du Bois and more worked and fought.

This fight was continuous until the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s which integrated schools, disestablished Jim Crow with the Civil Rights Act, and finally gave the 14th and 15th amendments some life through the Voting Rights Act.

After that era, many felt that this work was now over and again resented journalistic investigation and legal advocacy into the "post Civil Rights" era for African Americans. In the 1980s in legal studies, this contested work gave birth to what is now called Critical Race Theory.

That specific work, like the work following Emancipation, called attention to the necessary work to be done after the Civil Rights era, especially addressing the ways legal change is historically met with legal adaptation to preserve the status quo closely looking at law schools.

This CRT body of work was not the only work being done at this time. Many, for instance, ignore Cornel West's *Race Matters* which brought race back into the center of public discourse or bell hooks' work between and even against Black and feminist activism. There are many more.

Fast forward to many developments and conversations that carried into the 21st century and produced some well worn language and desires for interventions and workshops. This has had mixed results, to be sure, but it has not slowed the critical conversation down one bit.

Suddenly folks want to pretend that CRT is some monolithic departure from an equally monolithic Civil Rights era form of Black thought on race and label it "Marxist" or "identitarian" which are very old and well known accusations to make.

The present day critics of CRT both have no idea what the Black Intellectual Tradition consists of nor do they realize that all of their accusations are contained in that same tradition with cogent and often devastating responses and rebuttals.

Until one has read from at least Ida B. Wells to Ibram X. Kendi with some variety and canonical counter points within the same tradition, a critic of CRT is like the New Atheist sophomore who thinks they can destroy religion from reading Dawkins. Nope. Get a library card.

Catholics should especially show some respect and caution in their knee jerk homemade critiques of CRT. We rightly run circles around others and even each other when our tradition is narrowed or oversimplified. That ought to at least teach us to not do the same to other things.