If you’ve ever gotten into any kind of argument online, you’ll know that a common debating tactic is to declare oneself exasperated with the other side’s ignorance, and then instruct the alleged ignoramuses to go “educate” themselves. I’ve sometimes been on the receiving end of this kind of maneuver, especially when I express any kind of skepticism about progressive positions regarding identity politics. In one recent discussion about an Ontario school board’s lurch into dubious “critical-consciousness” pedagogy, for instance, I was dismissed as a lowly yob who “lacks the proper background to offer critique.”

But the truth, which may surprise some of my critics, is that I was studying Critical Race Theory (CRT) as far back as in the mid-1990s, when I was still a student at Yale Law School—not so long after the term was first popularized by Roy L. Brooks and other leading black scholars. In the year I graduated, Yale held a ground-breaking conference on the subject, headlined by such CRT luminaries as Kimberlé Crenshaw (now Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw), Mari Matsuda, and Derrick Bell. In the lead-up to the conference, several of the presenting scholars appeared as guest speakers in my small seminar class on Critical Legal Studies (this being the umbrella “crit” term under which CRT was often classified).

In the progressive idiom, CRT and associated ideological movements (intersectionality, anti-racism, decolonization, etc.) often are approvingly described as inflicting “discomfort” on conventional, bourgeoise thinkers such as myself. And it is absolutely true that I initially found CRT discomforting—though not in the way readers might imagine. For a certain kind of young adult, one of the attractions of law school is the conceit that the complex social contract governing our lives can be reduced to legal doctrines, defined rules of logic, and important-sounding Latin phrases. The problem I had with CRT wasn’t so much that it took aim at my “whiteness” (to cite the more modern term of abuse), but that it called out my neat-and-tidy law-school worldview as flawed: While the law may appear race-neutral on its surface, CRT informs us, the real-life workings of the system serve to systematically perpetuate an oppressive power relationship between whites and blacks.