Critical Race Theory vs. Dr. King
A few days ago at our church council, I tried to present my views on support of outside organizations, and I appreciate the respectful hearing I got. But I don’t think I was very clear. If you are interested in my reasons, I will try to explain them here. Thanks for taking the time to read on. I am hoping for an ongoing discussion of standards for partnering with outside organizations.
I care deeply about racism, injustice, and disparity, for very personal reasons. I fully support addressing the significant, unresolved problems of this country. However, many well-meaning people and organizations concerned about these problems are distracted by an ideology that keeps them from any thorough attempt to look at the causes of complex conditions. You can’t fix a problem unless you address all the causes, or at least some of the right ones, and you can’t find the right ones if you are not willing to examine the possible causes. Any organization that addresses the causes of injustice and doesn’t blind itself looking through the glass of ideology darkly will have my support. Let me explain.
The civil rights movement was driven by a belief that each person is an individual and that “all men are created equal”, because all people are created in the image of God. The Rev. Martin Luther King summed this up, saying, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” This perfectly explains what should be our vision for justice.
Today, the popular discussion of race has reversed that. We’ve ditched Dr. King’s vision. Most approaches today believe the color of your skin is far more important than your character. We have returned to racial essentialism and racial determinism, and, unfortunately, have more in common with white supremacists than at any time since Dr. King’s death.
Thomas Chatterton Williams, a black author writing in the New York Times magazine, says:
“This summer, I spent an hour on the phone with Richard Spencer. It was an exchange that left me feeling physically sickened. Toward the end of the interview, he said one thing that I still think about often. He referred to the all-encompassing sense of white power so many liberals now also attribute to whiteness as a profound opportunity. “This is the photographic negative of a white supremacist,” he told me gleefully. ‘This is why I’m actually very confident, because maybe those leftists will be the easiest ones to flip.’
However far-fetched that may sound, what identitarians like Mr. Spencer have grasped, and what ostensibly anti-racist thinkers like Mr. Coates have lost sight of, is the fact that so long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes. We will all be doomed to stalk our separate paths.”
Racial determinism is the basis of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which explicitly sees everything through the lens of racism. Everything is about race, power, and oppression. Every disparity, every achievement gap, every police killing, can ONLY be attributed to racism and only racism. There is never a need to examine other possible causes. There is no complexity. Race and racism are assumed to be at the root of all injustice.
Granted there is much racism, which, beyond doubt, still causes a lot of injustice. But with this myopic focus on race and only race, don’t we risk sometimes missing other important causes? How will problems ever get solved unless we are sure of the causes?
And, increasingly, there is a drive to locate the cause of all these problems in one group: whites. When, in history, has locating evil within one group ever led to anything good? What, besides more injustice, oppression, war, and genocide, has ever come from that? How is this helpful to the cause of justice? When has racial determinism ever led to anything good?
I want justice, and I am willing to work with any organization that is willing to honestly work toward that. That involves not being driven by an ideology of racial determinism. This, to me, means any organization steeped in CRT. If an organization can show me they aren’t using CRT, I am all for them, and, if they have effective programming, I will fully support.
I submit that one of our standards for partnering be that they not be steeped in CRT.
