I took about 20 minutes to trace this word in the context of this OP. It comes from one of the authors the instructor cites as the inspiration for the course title James Baldwin. If you take the time (and it isn't much as I've said, about 20 minutes) you come to find what the word actually refers to and how much sense it all makes. Baldwin's point in the documentary from which it is derived is that "whiteness" is a construct that didn't really exist until America became a thing. Before, "white people" as a group didn't really apply to groups of people who were, physically, light skinned. They were Germans, French, Jews, Norwegians, Irish, Scotts, Danes, English, etc. It wasn't until the founding of America when "white people" became this homogenous group that seemed to ignore their own people group origins, much the same way "blacks" refer to people of varying African origins whose diverse and specific origins in culturally different people groups and tribes on the continent of Africa were erased by slavery.
This is why CRT is studied in colleges. This is deep stuff and it really all makes sense when you set aside your visceral response to the connotation of a word that you think you identify with or that identifies you and determine it to be "negative." It's way more complicated than that and it isn't what you think.