I’m sure there’s probably something somewhere in the literature that comes close to the dangers you were talking about. But I think there is a reasonable response to both of these objections.

I think there are important differences between “no white member of society seems quite so innocent." And "white people are inherently evil because they are white”. For one thing the phrase “quite so innocent” implies that they are still to some degree innocent, even if not as innocent as they might think. Furthermore, innocence and guilt are by definition not inherent properties. In the usual sense of the word, one only becomes guilty if they have made wrong choices, and because guilt is a choice it is by its very nature something that is not inherent, something that could be otherwise. I know that there is a Calvinist idea of original sin that doesn’t require choice, but there is no reason to attribute that belief to this quote. I think what this author means is that even people who do not have explicit racist beliefs and feelings can still be complicit with racism, if they accept it and benefit from it. That’s an unpleasant truth that students should know about.

There are bloggers on medium who claim that White people are inherently evil. Here’s a quote from one:

“American whites became habituated to the dehumanising effects of wanton brutality, to the degree that they were changed at the genetic level. That genetic memory is now passed from generation to subsequent generation.”

That Blogger is claiming that Racism is literally inherent in Whites. But she is just one person with a blog who is mouthing off. Until I see something like that in a CRT text, I won’t equate CRT with the claim that white people are inherently evil.

There is also an important difference between saying that White people are evil and saying that Whiteness is evil. Whiteness is the concept that makes slavery and colonialism morally justifiable. A society that believes in Democracy for all people can only justify slavery and colonialism by saying the enslaved and colonized are less than human, and skin color was the marker that distinguished the enslaved from the enslaver. Rudyard Kipling’s poem “the White Man’s burden” express this attempt at moral justification with the greatest eloquence. The whole point of studying whiteness is to demolish this idea that there is some biological basis for whiteness; to show that even pasty-faced redheads like the Irish can be denied whiteness if there are economic reasons for doing so. In other words, the whole point of studying whiteness is to reveal that there is no such inherent property as whiteness, because it is nothing but a socioeconomic construct.