Many defenders of Critical Race Theory defend it on the ground that it is an examination of institutional racism. Criticism of CRT, thus, is a denial of institutional racism, they argue.
The first sentence is correct. The second, however, is tragically false. Liberals have been decrying institutional racism for centuries. Adam Smith and Frederic Bastiat feared it. Prominent liberals fought against the Progressive platform in the late 1800s-early 1900s as those policies were explicitly designed to institutionalize racism (see Thomas Leonard's 2016 book Illiberal Reformers). Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, Gary Becker, FA Hayek, and many more argued for freedoms like school choice in order to break institutional racism. More recently, Walter Williams made his career writing about the evils of institutional racism still promoted by the Left and Right (and the slurs he was called by some Left wing protesters and detractors would make a KKK Grand Wizard blush). Thomas Sowell continues the tradition.
It's easy to strawman critiques of CRT by picking up on one or two random arguments and consequently conclude that criticisms of it are denials of the cause it wishes to examine. But that would be like dismissing critiques of Young Earth because some detractors believe the world was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster.
CRT is also an incredibly shoddy examine of institutional racism - one marked by extremely low rigor and a propensity to conspiracy theorize.
It is akin to the argument that "astrology studies the movement of the planets. If you question astrology, you deny that the planets move."
The whole thing is an exercise in ad hominem masquerading as research. It's not a useful framework. But the take home point here is that there exists a vast empirical literature centuries old that's completely ignored. We don't need to start with a pile of biased anecdotes.