Since the murder of George Floyd last May, the nation has grappled publicly with its racist legacy and, to a considerable degree, with the extent to which Trump and the G.O.P. had made matters worse in the preceding three years….

In response, many on the American right decided to change the subject. If they could not market themselves as racists, they could certainly make a profitable brand as anti-anti-racists. (They have oddly chosen to lump all things racial and contemptible under the banner of critical race theory, a school of legal thought concerned primarily with inequality and the failures of civil-rights litigation to ameliorate it.)

The objective here is not only to launder the G.O.P.’s reputation—though that is part of it—but also to facilitate the more overtly racist portions of the Party’s agenda. The left, in this light, is not simply advocating equality of people regardless of their backgrounds; it’s a cabal seeking to marginalize and browbeat white people for having created a bigoted society that does not actually exist.

A growing body of progressive white scholars and scholars of color have spent the past several decades fighting for, and largely succeeding in creating, a more honest chronicle of the American past. But these battles and the changes they’ve achieved have, by and large, gone unnoticed by the lay public until benchmark anniversaries occurred, and the scholarship collided with a public unsettled by how distinct that version of history was from the anodyne tales they imbibed in school. Claims of “revisionist history” greeted each of these moments, but this, too, missed the point. History exists in a constant state of revision, as we learn more about the present and the worlds that preceded it. This is why contemporary books about Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Harry S. Truman take a different, and far more laudatory, view of their subjects than do books written closer to their lifetimes. Revising history is the whole point of having historians.

The irony in all this is that, in attacking anti-racism for these ends, conservatives are validating the very contentions that progressives have been making all along: that racism remains a vital force in American life, that it is deeply rooted in the American past, and that our politics have been shaped, with disastrous consequences, by efforts to utilize racism for political profit. Thus, the current G.O.P. is seeking not only to absolve Americans of the worst practices of their history but to do so while resurrecting the very practices that were cause for indictment in the first place.

www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-republican-party-racial-hypocrisy-and-the-1619-project