I have wanted to make a transition in my Perspectives to consider the role of intellectuals and elites in our current climate, but I’d like to pause and reflect on what has happened during the past 15 months since I started writing.
In the Fall of 2020, I wrote several Perspectives about Critical Race Theory and intersectionality. Earlier that summer, George Floyd’s death unleashed a striking collection of events, good, bad, and troubling. The good was the outpouring of distress and even outrage over the deaths of George Floyd and Adam Toledo of Chicago; I still protest daily. BLM came to the streets, engendering great sympathy until some other aspects of BLM appeared.
White America took stock and realized that there was more reason for people of color in America to be very distressed than we had thought. Shame on us. Critical Race Theory (CRT) helped people see this distress and most responded with sympathy. The social and governmental racism in America was highlighted by all of this, though the governmental racism in housing, welfare, and education has barely been recognized. The downside, however, was violence in 100 cities, unwise calls to defund the police, and a broad insistence that the 1619 Project’s narrative of American history be considered normal. These were overreaching and detrimental to good progress.
We have not struck the balance of recognizing the structural problems without buying into a worldview and a socio-political plan that are harmful and useless. Has there been progress beyond the posturing and victories of various politicians? Sure, but only where people have quit screaming at each other.
CRT, a framework for thinking based on the power conflicts of oppression, was more overkill. Combined with intersectionality CRT teaches that oppressors oppress whether intentionally or not and that the victims of oppression alone have worthy thoughts, ideas, and plans. This is difficult for white woke people who seem to refuse to believe people of color if they do not agree with the ideology of CRT. “You ain’t black” is a clue from white politicians and intellectuals that it is ideology, not race, that reveals ‘of color.’ Woke white approval is essential.
Politicization: Efforts to achieve diversity, equity and inclusion have been politicized. The right has over-resisted, and the left has allowed only one definition of DEI. The gospel is the cornerstone of DEI, as Jesus broke out of Judaism and presented the gospel for the whole world. Mission agencies and efforts have faced many challenges, but they have been willing and effective at crossing cultural and racial lines and, in recent decades, have done much better at sharing leadership. The woke’s disapproval is not a valid veto.
In the world of politics, it is almost impossible to have a conversation about racism, impeachment, the media, education, or the church without running into inconsistencies that are astounding. I struggle to find any author willing to write about both deep resistance inside the government in 2016 and outside the government in 2020. I struggle to find any article that talks about voter fraud and voter suppression in terms that are not polarizing. I struggle to find any criticism that recognizes the harm caused to black and brown children in urban areas who have lost at least a year of education (and maybe of human development). What’s more racist than that?
I’m glad to see my Christian friends sympathetic to the plight and current realities of African Americans and other people of color. I’m surprised, however, at the willingness of many to throw over the goals and methods of Martin Luther King in favor of a coercive woke agenda. CRT of the woke fosters a justice that is contrary to a biblical integrated justice and an understanding of human nature. It creates a great deal of fatalism even as it closes the door to forgiveness. The legitimate sympathies about racism do not mean that we need a different gospel.
We all have favorite speakers on this: I’d add Dr. Tony Evans to any list, along with Christopher Brooks.
Over the past year, I have learned much beyond what I have posted, and I am grateful. A new friend has urged me to spend a bit less energy on CRT and its diverse errors because even a victory there would not bring the unity in Christ that we need. CRT will not get us where we want to go, and licking it will not, alone, bring a solution.
We must show the pathway to the gospel solutions of grace, forgiveness, repentance, and a new identity as part of a new family in the new church of Jesus Christ. I see hope and want to see more hope.