Richard Delgado, one of the founders of critical race theory, has said that he and his wife have been receiving threatening emails and voicemails over the past twelve months regarding critical race theory (CRT).
The 82-year-old University of Alabama law professor told the news website Axios that they "get some of the grossest telephone messages that you can imagine".
"Some of the stuff is hard to believe. It's full of venom", Deldago, a Mexican-American, added.
According to him, he has been accused of eating children, hating white people, and seeking to destroy the US. The professor said that he had never received such threats in his 50 years of teaching until this past year. His wife Jean Stefancic is white.
"Before then, critical race theory had had a pretty easy glide path. We wrote our books. We developed our theories. We taught our classes. We published law reviews", Delgado said.
Apart from creating the basic idea of CRT, Delgado and his wife, published a study in 2001 called "Critical Race Theory: An Introduction", research that has served as a major guide for those school boards that sought to implement the theory into their curriculum.
Critical Race Theory
CRT, which originated in the 1960s and further developed in the 1970s, is based on the idea that race is not a natural and biologically grounded feature but a socially constructed category used to oppress and exploit people of colour.
The theory specifically argues that US laws and legal institutions are "inherently racist" and function to create and maintain social, economic, as well as political inequalities between whites and non-whites, most notably black people.
CRT has long been criticised by GOP voters, who complain that the theory is controversial, divisive, and unpatriotic, with Republican lawmakers moving to ban it from grades K-12 in their states. The term K-12, used in the US and Canada, pertains the to grade level system in schools prior to college or university.
In September 2020, then-President Donald Trump prohibited the federal government and its contractors from instructing their employees to follow CRT tenets. However, his successor, Joe Biden, rescinded Trump's executive order restricting CRT training.