Republicans want to divide us with Critical Race Theory. Don’t fall for it.

Murray State University historian Bill Mulligan says he’s yet to hear an opponent of Critical Race Theory explain what it is.

That reminded me of the western Kentucky school board which unanimously voted to ban a William Faulkner novel without reading the whole thing. A board member dismissed “As I Lay Dying” as a “filth book,” and “the kind of book you would pick up in a back-ways place and read.”

Anyway, proponents of CRT say continuing to downplay racism as a central factor in American history does a disservice to the country.

“Isn’t telling students lies a greater danger than telling them the truth?” asked Mulligan, who earned a Ph.D. from Clark University. “How does writing the experience of a large part of the population out of history accomplish anything good? How can we end the harmful results of racism if we deny its existence?”

Added Mulligan: “CRT is a legitimate way to look at U.S. history -- more valid than the Consensus School or those who want to whitewash things. Those who oppose CRT have no interest in refining an understanding. There is a denial of reality.”

Slavery was legal before the Revolution and lasted until the end of the Civil War, whose root cause was slavery and its expansion. “That slavery was not central to the development of the American colonies and then the United States economy cannot be supported by reality,” Mulligan said.

After the postwar Reconstruction era, race discrimination became the law in the South and the social order almost everywhere else. It took the Supreme Court in 1954 and Congress in the 1960s to end segregation and to restore the ballot to African Americans in the old Confederacy.

Nonetheless, white resistance to Black equality has continued on through the Trump administration and beyond. In 2016 and last year, Trump ran the most overtly racist presidential campaigns since George Wallace’s in 1968. Some of Trump’s most fervid fans are white supremacists and white nationalists.

Perception is reality in life and politics. Republicans want white folks to perceive CRT as a dastardly and divisive assault on American history and heritage. They see it as a winning issue at the polls next year. So move over God, guns and abortion; make way for CRT.

“It’s hard to get within shouting distance of a Republican at present without hearing about critical race theory as a threat to national unity (and more quietly, as a key to GOP success in the 2022 midterms),” wrote Ed Kilgore in “New York Magazine” last month. “This is a classic phantom menace.”

Republican lawmakers in close to two dozen states, including Kentucky, are pushing measures to ban CRT from public schools. “While CRT is a legitimate approach to understanding American history and society, it was never meant for K through 12 or even college undergraduates,” Mulligan said. “It is mostly taught and discussed in grad school.”

Of course, American history is replete with “phantom menaces” that grifter politicians have conjured to con voters. But race-baiting has always been the stand-by scam. Naturally, Trump is cheering on state anti-CRT and minority voter suppression laws, joining Republican governors and legislators in falsely claiming “voter fraud,” which is another “phantom menace.”

Kilgore said that CRT is “a convenient myth for Republicans…The war on CRT takes an abstract white nationalist concept and makes it viscerally immediate for white middle-class voters who might not otherwise be too agitated about cultural changes,” he added.

Some people might dismiss the right-wing wig-out over CRT as transitory. But Kilgore warns against this-too-will-pass thinking: “Self-identified Republicans already believe to an alarming extent that white Americans suffer discrimination as much as or more than their Black fellow citizens. Spreading that belief beyond the ranks of the already committed GOP partisan is, unfortunately, a logical if evil ‘outreach’ strategy for those whose goal is to restore an American ‘greatness’ closely associated with a time when women and minorities knew their place and only subversives doubted the nation’s essential virtue.”

Kilgore grew up in Georgia, one of the first Confederate states to secede. I’ve lived all my 71 years in the Jackson Purchase, Kentucky’s far west Confederate corner.

Kilgore confessed that his Peach State rearing might have made him “unsympathetic to fears of critical race theory.” He recalled “being taught via schools, textbooks, and popular culture that slavery was a quaint and misunderstood institution; that the Civil War was a quarrel over constitutional law; that Reconstruction was an unmitigated disaster; and that Jim Crow made it possible for the North and South to reconcile and live in peace.”

He concluded, “Personally, I could have used some CRT in my own public school education.” Me, too.

A Mayfield native, Berry Craig is a journalist, historian and author who lives in Arlington, almost as far west as Kentucky goes.