The Marxist roots of critical race theory

"Critical race theory (CRT) was officially organized in 1989, at the first annual Workshop on Critical Race Theory, though its intellectual origins go back much farther, to the 1960s and ’70s. Its immediate precursor was the critical legal studies (CLS) movement, [which is] an offshoot of Marxist-oriented critical theory. "(Britannica)

"Critical theory (CT) is the Marxist-inspired movement (1920s) in social and political philosophy originally associated with the work of the Frankfurt School (also influential for National Socialism, aka the Nazis). Drawing particularly on the thought of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, critical theorists maintain that a primary goal of philosophy is to understand and to help overcome the social structures through which people are dominated and oppressed.

 
Believing that science, like other forms of knowledge, has been used as an instrument of oppression, they caution against a blind faith in scientific progress, arguing that scientific knowledge must not be pursued as an end in itself without reference to the goal of human emancipation. Since the 1970s, critical theory has been immensely influential in the study of history, law, literature, and the social sciences." (Britannica)

The Germans involved in the Frankfort School left Germany and found positions of power in America's most prestigious universities in the 1930s-1940s from which many of the current problems stem.