To some extent CRT is correct that laws that do not mention race were indeed used to target and suppress some races at the benefit of others.
Several years ago, during the public debate on a ballot proposition in Missouri on the subject of concealed carry, one group in St. Louis carried an article that recalled the long and sad history of Missouri law and indeed laws in southern states that were passed to prohibit carrying of concealed weapons but at the time were never meant to be enforced against white people.
It quotes legal scholars Robert Cottrol and Raymond in a 1995 Chicago-Kent College of Law article, titled “Never Intended to be Applied to the White Population: Firearms Regulation and Racial Disparity— The Redeemed South’s Legacy to a National Jurisprudence?”
These scholars, and others, show that over time those laws began to apply to every citizen and now those who champion the right to self defense must claw their way back to a legal way to carry a concealed weapon.
The article ends by asking that isn’t this what Blacks wanted all along, that we must have law that applies to everyone in the same way? This is why “may issue” laws are so dangerous to the civil rights of everyone, in that it institutionalizes disparate treatment. We see this in New York and LA where celebrities can get a concealed carry permit but the little people are routinely turned down.
Would that none of our laws were every cryptically designed to give disparate advantage or deny rights to anyone any more.
However, in closing, let me point out that Critical Race Theory was developed as a vehicle by which to justify socialism in repairing the defects of our present legal structure. The proof is in how CRT was used and in what disparity that advocates of CRT complained of.
They complained about the disparate number of blacks suffering from drug laws tailored to the drugs that blacks were more likely to use than whites. I am very sympathetic to that complaint. However, champions of CRT were not at all concerned when laws that were meant to prevent blacks from exercising their rights under the Second Amendment also came to prevent everyone from enjoying those rights. The truth was they only cared about some rights and not all rights. And in that bias, we see the real reason that CRT was so popular with the left. It was yet another way to bash our Constitution and our unalienable rights in the same overarching way the ACLU does.
Neither prohibitions on carrying guns nor “may issue” laws are in line with the character of the Constitution and Bill of Rights so Critical Race Theory is not supported by pointing to them. If anything the un-Constitutional nature of those laws proves the opposite about our founding principles than what Bell espoused. That is it is necessary to try to by-pass founding principles in order to pass discriminatory laws.