Tucker Carlson says he 'never figured out what critical race theory is,' despite repeatedly bashing it on his show over the past year

• Tucker Carlson said he "never" fully figured out what critical race theory is.
• But the Fox News star has repeatedly talked about it on his show over the past year.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday said he's still not sure what critical race theory is, despite repeatedly talking about it on his show.

"I've never figured out where critical race theory is, to be totally honest, after a year of talking about it," Carlson said.

"They're teaching that some races are morally superior to others," Carlson went on to say. "That some are inherently sinful, and some are inherently saintly, and that's immoral to teach that because it's wrong."

Over the course of the past year or so, Republican politicians and their right-wing media allies - like Carlson - have repeatedly suggested that children are being indoctrinated with critical race theory in America's schools. In the process, they've generated outrage from parents in a number of communities while misconstruing what the theory is.

-nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) November 4, 2021

This was a major theme in the recent Virginia gubernatorial race, with Virginia Governor-Elect Glenn Youngkin pledging to ban critical race theory from the state's schools on his first day in office. A number of states already have such bans in place.

But as Carlson highlighted, a lot of the theory's harshest critics don't really seem to understand it. Carlson is the most-watched host on cable news, raising questions as to how many Americans have been misled on this topic by the Fox News star and his network in general. A study from Media Matters for America found that critical race theory was mentioned on Fox News almost 1,3000 times between March and June.

Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider.

-Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) July 7, 2021

"Critical race theory is a practice. It's an approach to grappling with a history of White supremacy that rejects the belief that what's in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it," Kimberlé Crenshaw, a founding critical race theorist and a law professor at UCLA and Columbia University, told CNN last year.

In short, critical race theorists examine how America's history of racism continues to impact the country in the present day. Despite what Carlson and others like him have said, the theory is not designed to teach children to hate one another.

Experts say that the conservative backlash to critical race theory is part of the broader pushback to the expanding, ongoing conversation on racism in the US. This discourse has largely evolved out of the Black Lives Matter movement and concerns about police brutality. The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 sparked protests across the country and accelerated this discussion.

"The base of the Republican Party is offended by the political focus on racism and racial justice that has been apparent for several years now, but especially since the George Floyd murder," Andrew Hartman, a history professor at Illinois State University and author of "A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars," told Insider in June.

"So, GOP politicians and conservative media obsess over the issue to gin up outrage that might translate into future votes, but in the meantime definitely translates into donations and ratings," Hartman added.

"I am honestly confused why Critical Race Theory has become the specific target, except to say that conservatives have a LONG history of educational activism against secular and liberal trends in schools, and CRT checks a lot of boxes in that regard," Hartman went on to say. "It is an academic theory that emerged from elite universities (Harvard Law in particular). It seemingly indoctrinates students with the idea that racism is endemic and institutional, which flies in the face of conservative colorblindness."