Category: Race in America

The Black-White Wage Gap Is as Big as It Was in 1950. Why?

Last summer David Leonhardt, a writer at the New York Times, published the

David Leonhardt

results of several recent studies examining the historic rates of wage increases (or decreases) among white and black workers in America.

He states that “recent research indicates little progress since the Truman administration.”

Since the Truman administration!!!

The results of these studies point to two culprits.

One, the long-term effects of institutional racism.

And two, the growing income gap between the upper- and lower-classes of our society.

Here is Mr. Leonhardt’s article. (All emphases are mine). The original contains a number of important charts and graphs that will not copy to this post. (Probably because I am technologically impaired.)

If you can read the NYT online, I highly recommend checking it out.  The charts make the raw data jump off the page.

Government statistics suggest that the earnings gap between black and white men is substantially smaller than it was 75 years ago. It shrunk in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s and has remained largely stable since then.

But these statistics are misleading. A more comprehensive look at the data, based on recent academic research, shows that the black-white wage gap is roughly as large today as it was in 1950.

That’s remarkable. Despite decades of political change — the end of enforced segregation across the South, the legalization of interracial marriage, the passage of multiple civil rights laws and more — the wages of black men trail those of white men by as much as when Harry Truman was president. That gap indicates that there have also been powerful forces pushing against racial equality.

Before getting into the causes, though, I want to explain the difference between the best-known wage statistics and the more accurate version. The traditional numbers are incomplete in a way that many people do not realize: They cover only workers. People who don’t work are ignored. This group includes students, full-time parents, people who have given up on finding work and people who are incarcerated.

Excluding them wouldn’t present a problem if the percentage of nonworkers had remained fairly stable over time. But it has not. “There’s been a tremendous run-up in non-work among prime-age men,” says Kerwin Kofi Charles, an economist and the dean of the Yale School of Management.

One reason is that many middle-aged men — of all races, although disproportionately black — have dropped out of the labor force, and are neither working nor looking for work. The shrinking number of decent-paying blue-collar jobs has left many people who didn’t attend college without good job opportunities, and they have responded by no longer actively looking for work.

A second reason that more men aren’t working is that vastly more of them are incarcerated. Incarceration rates are especially high for black men — about twice as high as those of Hispanic men, six times higher than those of white men and at least 25 times higher than those of black women, Hispanic women or white women.

Becky Pettit, a sociologist at the University of Texas, refers to these incarcerated men as invisible. She has written a book titled, “Invisible Men: Mass incarceration and the myth of black progress.”

People considered “unemployed” represent a small — and declining — share of those out of work.

The traditional statistics on the black-white wage gap ignore these trends, because they examine only people with earnings. As social scientists put it, the traditional numbers ignore the “zero values.”
This means that the statistics on the wage gap are looking at a shrinking share of the population over time. They overlook the roughly 30 percent of black men and 15 percent of white men between the ages of 25 and 54 who had not been working in a given week during recent years. (Those shares are even higher now, given the economic downturn.)

“It’s a weird hole,” Mr. Charles says.

He and another economist — Patrick Bayer of Duke — undertook a research project to fill that hole. They collected census data dating back to 1940 and constructed wage statistics that included men who were not working. They are also conducting a follow-up project about women, Mr. Bayer said. The gap between black and white women may have narrowed, but only modestly.

The research by Mr. Charles and Mr. Bayer shows that once all men — working and not working — are included, the picture changes.

The black-white wage gap shrunk substantially from 1950 to 1980, and especially during the 1960s. Civil-rights laws and a decline in legally sanctioned racism most likely played some role. But the main reasons, Mr. Charles said, appear to have been trends that benefited all blue-collar workers, like strong unions and a rising minimum wage. Because black workers were disproportionately in blue-collar jobs, the general rise of incomes for the poor and middle class shrank the racial wage gap.

One law was especially important: the 1966 amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. When Congress passed the original law, during the New Deal, it deliberately exempted service and other industries with many black workers from the minimum wage. “Just expanding the minimum wage to those industries,” Ellora Derenoncourt, a University of California, Berkeley, economist, said, “boosted the relative wages of black workers substantially.”

Since 1980, however, the wage gap has increased again, and is now back roughly to where it was in 1950. The same economic forces are at work, only in the opposite direction: The minimum wage has stagnated in some states, unions have shrunk, tax rates on the wealthy have fallen more than they have for anyone else and incomes for the bottom 90 percent — and especially the bottom half — have trailed economic growth. Black workers, again, are disproportionately in these lower-income groups.

One nuance is that the racial wage gap has shrunk somewhat among higher-income men. That’s a sign that more African-Americans have broken into the upper middle class than was the case in prior decades.

This history also points to some of the likely solutions for closing the racial wage gap. An end to mass incarceration would help. So would policies that attempt to reverse decades of government-encouraged racism — especially in housing. But it’s possible that nothing would have a bigger impact than policies that lifted the pay of all working-class families, across races.

“Black people are concentrated in low-paying jobs if they have jobs,” Ms. Derenoncourt said. “This has been one of the most egregious forms of inequality over the last 40 years: There has been almost no wage growth for the bottom half of the wage distribution.”

David Doel Invites Us to Share in the Grief and Anger of Dante Wright’s Family

Canadian reporter David Doel of The Rational National shares the speech made by Dante Wright’s aunt at the family press conference held yesterday.

We all need to listen to her. Hear why she not only grieves the death of her nephew but is angry over the way he died. She points out details in the shooter’s actions that raised my eyebrows, too.

Afterwards, Mr. Doel goes on to provide excellent commentary, placing Mr. Wright’s murder in its historical context. His challenge must be taken seriously by everyone, please.

 

 

 

Pastor Raymond Chang on Why the Church Needs “Race-Conscious Discipleship”

This morning we learned about a mass shooting in Atlanta, GA. Eight people, most of them Asian women, were shot dead by a 21 year Southern Baptist man.

Raymond Chang is a campus pastor at the evangelical Christian school, Wheaton College and a leader in the Asian American Christian Collaborative organization. His article at the Religion News Service is entitled “The Atlanta massacre is yet another reminder we desperately need race-conscious discipleship.”

Below is an excerpt. All emphases are mine:

. . . Just like we address sin by targeting it in specific ways, we can’t lean on the mantra of “just preach the gospel” as though that hasn’t produced Christians who are also deeply racist. What we are learning about the Atlanta massacre suspect is that he was raised in a white evangelical, Southern Baptist Church and had described himself as “loving guns and God.” When you see these things together, you can often conclude white Christian nationalism is close by. 

Don’t hear me saying that we shouldn’t preach the gospel. Yes, preach the gospel in and out of season, but make sure you also shepherd people out of the patterns of the world (especially the patterns that perpetuate the racial hierarchies we see). You cannot treat every illness by giving it a chemotherapy treatment. In the same way, “just preaching the gospel” will not address the specific illnesses sin has caused. We also need to disciple people through and out of certain things.

In light of what we are seeing with the massacre in Atlanta, mourn with Asian Americans (and those from other communities), grieve with us, lament with us, pray with us and pray for us. For those who have their ears to the ground, these events weigh heavily on us. I am grateful for friends who have reached out as soon as they saw what happened. It was particularly special when they came from outside the Asian American community.

Preach to hearts and minds that need to get out of thinking that leaves them complacent when tragedies impact those they might not be proximate to. Call out racism whenever it rears its ugly head. Support churches and organizations doing holistic, race-conscious discipleship. Offer classes to help people learn about how the sin of racism uniquely manifests across different racial lines. Stand with us whenever you see injustice.

Racialization and racism impact different racial groups in different ways. Along the Black-white binary, racism against Asians and Latinos does not often register. It doesn’t register because we (Asians and Latinos) are racialized differently from white and Black people. If we want to address the sin of racism, however, we have to understand how it works. We have to understand that it often manifests differently for different communities.

In the ways we address specific sins with the gospel by discipling people through those sins, we need to do the same with racism. As long as the racial hierarchy of the world is unchecked in the church, we will see the same issues of the world in the church and lose our moral credibility as ambassadors for the eternal king, Jesus.

Book Review: Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers, by Miguel A. De La Torre (Eerdmans, 2020)

While writing my latest book about the Jewish-supremacist state of Israel, its ongoing decimation of the Palestinian people, and the role played by

Professor Miguel de la Torre

American, conservative Christianity (i.e., Christian Zionism) in perpetuating this Middle Eastern tragedy, I became convinced that two perspectives were crucial to understanding the Zionist-Palestinian conflict.

The first perspective requires grasping that the creation of Israel was the last venture of Western colonialism, launched – quite ironically – at the dawn of a purportedly post-colonial awakening in the West. (Actually, it was the beginning of a neo-colonialist era, but that’s a subject for another post). Israel is and always has been a settler-colonial state. This insight is key to understanding everything that happens there.

The second perspective developed as I explored the close affinity that Americans have long harbored for Israel – an affinity rooted in the colonial history, a white colonial history, that Israel and America hold in common. The power structures of both nations maintain and applaud this white, colonial heritage. Consequently, large swaths of their citizenry continue to maintain a white, colonial mindset that perverts their view of themselves and the rest of the world. The deadly results appear in the domineering policies directed by national commitments to American and Israeli exceptionalism.

Thinking about these matters made me eager to read Dr. Miguel A. de la Torre’s new book, Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers (yes, I object to the subtitle, too, for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here). Dr. de la Torre is the author of over thirty books and a professor of social ethics and Latinx studies at Iliff School of Theology. He is also an activist and a major voice crying out for justice on behalf of the Hispanic/Latinx/Immigrant community in the United States.

A more apt title for the book would be something along the lines of Ending White Christianity’s Addiction to Colonialism. As it is, the book’s title implies (intentionally or unintentionally) not that Christianity is inclined towards colonialism, but that Christianity itself has been colonized by some foreign, oppressive power. Perhaps that is the title’s intent, though it is unclear to me. If it is, then the title (remembering that author’s rarely get to select their own book titles) introduces a book that aptly and insightfully indicts white Christianity for allowing itself to become colonized by a demonic belief in white superiority and privilege.

Professor de la Torre argues (correctly in my view) that the Body of Christ has been infested with anti-Christian beliefs that have made white Christianity an eager agent of white supremacy throughout world history. One obvious consequence has been “missionary Christianity’s” collaboration with Western colonialism (including Jewish, political Zionism in Israel, curiously enough, but you’ll have to buy my book to learn about that); another is the contemporary power dynamics that entrench structural racism into American life.

Decolonizing Christianity offers a rigorous dissection of the crass immorality endorsed by white evangelicalism during the Trump presidency, exposing the many, pernicious ways in which “The Donald” brought the ugly reality of American race-consciousness to light for all to see. Nope, the Obama presidency did not prove that America had finally become a color-blind nation. Quite the opposite. Professor de la Torre rightly insists that Trump was not an aberration. He was/is the age-old, proverbial pig of historic, American white supremacy with all the fashionable make-up and lipstick wiped off its pasty mug.

More than that, de la Torre aptly excoriates white evangelicalism for abandoning Jesus Christ our Savior in exchange for Donald Trump our president. His lengthy exposé on the many ways church leaders compromised the gospel by extolling Trump as Christian America’s savior figure (supported with example after example) makes for shameful reading – even for an anti-Trump person like me. Professor de la Torre rightly argues that in making this exchange so fervently, white evangelicalism revealed its true nature: it is an apostate church body eager to embrace the latest anti-christ, primarily because it never understood Jesus and his gospel in the first place.

From this perspective, professor de la Torres offers a much-needed prophetic critique of American Christianity and the role it plays in normalizing some of our society’s worst characteristics. However, even though I deeply appreciate his prophetic message, I have several problems with the route he takes to arrive at his criticisms (that is, his methodology). Since my area of expertise is New Testament studies, I will focus my criticisms through engaging his troublesome use of scripture. (A related set of differences are foreshadowed in my recent survey of Critical Race Theory here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

Professor de la Torre roots his theology of social transformation in a long-standing (albeit totally mistaken) interpretation of Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31-46). By his reading of Matthew 25, caring for the poor, the naked, the hungry, and the imprisoned is the sole measure for determining who is and who is not embraced by the Lord Jesus on Judgment Day. It is hard to avoid the impression that, according to professor de la Torres, radical social transformation, prioritizing the marginalized and afflicted, is the Christian church’s #1 mission in this world.

Of course, de la Torres is not the first to make this particular reading of Matthew 25 central to his understanding of the church and the Christian life. Mother Teresa was also convinced of its centrality to her mission and never hesitated to say so. However, regardless of its ancient roots, this interpretation of Matthew 25 has always been wrong. Unfortunately, its errors have shaped the false starts in professor de la Torres’ analysis, marring an otherwise excellent dissection of the American church. I will explain what I mean by this in an additional post (coming soon — it is now here) that will focus on the proper way of reading Jesus’ parable within its Matthean context and the radically different view of the church which results. Stay tuned.

But here I can more fully explore a briefer example of how professor de la Torres misinterprets scripture by looking at his use of Matthew 15:21-28, Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman (69-78). Here Jesus initially refuses a woman’s request for help, and even likens her to a dog(!). De la Torres explains Jesus’ reaction by claiming that she was rejected because she came from a “mongrel race of inferior people” (69), just like modern-day immigrants at the southern border. Here de la Torres gives us an example of Biblical interpretation from the margins, as they say nowadays; that is through the eyes of the marginalized.

De la Torres argues that this uncomfortable encounter was pivotal in teaching Jesus to outgrow his parochial, Jewish chauvinism (77-78). He was being forced “to mature” in his humanity. The Canaanite woman taught him to become more inclusive and to reject his upbringing in Jewish, racial privilege. When Jesus suggests that the woman is like a dog begging for food (de la Torres prefers the word bitch) de la Torres draws from his own experience to make a connection with Latinx immigrants in this country who regularly are treated as dogs. For de la Torres, the Canaanite woman is a prototypical Latinx immigrant while Jesus exemplifies what the white Christian church ought to be doing – growing up and leaving its racial privilege behind.

Unfortunately, the professor does not recognize (or has deliberately rejected the idea) that Jesus initially rejects this woman because she is a Gentile, not because Canaanites were especially “mongrelized.”  This is an important theme throughout Matthew’s gospel. There is a tension, an unfolding development, between the initial exclusivism of Jesus’ early mission (recall that he sends out the Twelve only to the people of Israel, explicitly instructing them not to visit any Gentiles or Samaritans; see Matt. 10:1-6), on the one hand, and the emerging universalism that arises after Jesus is rejected by Israel’s leadership, on the other.

Regardless of what we modern-folk think about it, Jesus arrived as the Jewish messiah for the Jewish people first, just as the apostle Paul regularly went “first to the Jews and then to the Gentiles.” In rejecting the Canaanite woman, Jesus was not rejecting mongrelized Latinx farm workers or other marginalized groups, as de la Torre suggests.  He was rejecting all Gentiles at that point in his ministry as a feature of salvation-history. Gentiles needed to wait their turn, and their turn would come. Remember that the woman’s persistent faith quickly overcame Jesus’ reticence to help her. (Space limits prevent me from exploring this issue further here).

De la Torre’s twisting of Matthew 15 to his own political/social application illustrates several problems endemic to the current trend of racializing biblical interpretation. De la Torre regularly indicts what he perceives as the endemic racism of white Christianity as the inevitable result of “white, Eurocentric” philosophy and theology. Though he never fleshes out the specific intellectual connections he sees between white academic theology and the inevitability of white Christian racism, the clear implication is to highlight the importance of Latinx, Black, and Native American theology and interpretation. The fact that most academic theology has been written by white, Eurocentric men is (in de la Torre’s view) the prime facie reason to lay all responsibility for the racism of white Christianity at the door of Eurocentric white theology.

However, I suggest that more substantive evidence is required to demonstrate such cause and effect in this case. Perhaps the professor has fleshed this out more fully in his earlier writings. If he has, he does not refer to it here.

As an interpretive method, this racialization of theology and Bible reading is really no different than the subjective, impressionistic, reader-response approach to Bible reading so common in the average neighborhood Bible study. Failing to understand the difference between a text’s meaning (understanding it accurately within its original contexts) and its significance (making a contemporary, practical application) everyone proceeds to share their personal impressions of the biblical text and “what it means to me” (which is actually a misstatement referring to what its significance is to me). After an evening of communal, subjective impressionism, everyone then goes home marveling at the Bible’s magical ability “to mean” so many different things to different people. Thus, Dr. de la Torre’s misuse of scripture illustrates how the current emphasis on “reading from the margins” is actually no different than evangelicalism’s habit of “reading from the white suburbs.” The only difference is the change in neighborhoods.

Though I am not familiar with the full body of professor de la Torre’s writings, Decolonizing Christianity certainly demonstrates that his voice needs to be received and taken seriously by everyone in the white church in this country.

I must differ, however, in diagnosing the root cause of the American church’s crippling illness. In my opinion, the most basic problem of white Christianity and its scandalous love affair with Donald Trump is not that it is the product of white, Eurocentric theology, whatever that may be, but that it is not the product of sincere, sacrificial allegiance to the crucified Palestinian Jew, Jesus of Nazareth.

And that is an unavoidable, lifelong challenge for everyone who calls him/herself a Christian.

“How Republicans are Breaking Democracy”

Ari Berman has an informative article at Mother Jones magazine describing

Ari Berman

the ongoing efforts of the Republican party — which is the minority party in this country, by the way — to dominate American politics.

Making it more and more difficult for people to vote is only one of their tactics. Berman outlines the others in “The Insurrection was Put Down. The GOP Plan for Minority Rule Marches On: How Republicans are Breaking Democracy.”

Below is an excerpt:

. . . This isn’t about which party wins elections, but whether democracy itself survives. Some anti-democratic measures were deliberately built into a system that was designed to benefit rich white men: The Senate was created to boost small conservative states and serve as a check on the more democratic House of Representatives, while the Electoral College prevented the direct election of the president and enhanced the power of slave states through the three-fifths clause. But these features have metastasized to a degree the Founding Fathers could have never anticipated, and in ways that threaten the very notion of representative government.

In the past decade, the GOP has dropped any pretense of trying to appeal to a majority of Americans. Instead, recognizing that the structure of America’s political institutions diminishes the influence of urban areas, young Americans, and voters of color, it caters to a conservative white minority that is drastically overrepresented in the Electoral College, the Senate, and gerrymandered legislative districts. This strategy of white grievance reached a fever pitch when domestic terrorists emboldened by the president occupied the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s Electoral College victory. But that unprecedented attempt by Trump and his allies to overturn the election results is a mere prelude to a new era of minority rule, which not only will attempt to block the agenda of a president elected by an overwhelming majority but threatens the long-term health of American democracy. “The will of the people,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1801, “is the only legitimate foundation of any government.” And now that foundation is crumbling. . . 

Critical Race Theory and the Church, Part 3

Trying to Think Biblically About Tribalism, Prejudice, and Discrimination

As with most theories, different people have different evaluations, positive, negative, and in between about the value of Critical Race Theory (CRT).

In my discussions of American racism, prejudice, discrimination, and the place of Critical Race Theory within the Christian church, I will not take the time to define or explain CRT itself.  Many others have already done that work, so I will simply refer my readers to a few brief introductions.

I urge you to read these additional discussions in order to understand where we are going. (For informative and reasonably positive reviews, see here and here. For critical to middling reviews, see here and here. What I happen to think will unfold as we proceed.)

God creates Adam to bear His image, by Michelangelo (Genesis 1)

I begin with two important Christian theological positions: the biblical teachings about (1) how all human beings are created as the Image of God (all good theology begins with Genesis 1 & 2, not Genesis 3), and (2) all human beings are fallen creatures, corrupted by sin (the doctrines of original sin and total depravity).

So, all people are BOTH divine image bearers as well as corrupted image bearers who carry the twisted consequences of sin within us, which causes

The Serpent tempts Eve and then Adam into eating the forbidden fruit (Genesis 3)

us to commit specific sinful acts.

As a result of our sinfulness, all human beings have a natural (or, from God’s perspective, an Un-natural, post-Fall) inclination towards Tribalism.

Human selfishness, greed, fear, and possessiveness move all people, and the society’s that we create, in the direction of tribalism. We are suspicious, even fearful, of outsiders, The Other. We are protective of our own, most protective of those who are “our own” and of the things we know best.

Our Own are those who are most like us.

The Other, the stranger, aliens, an outsiders are those unlike us; or, at least, they are unfamiliar.

Fallen human nature tells us to be skeptical, fearful, and protective against unfamiliar Outsider. Since they are different from us, we are skeptical as to what we can expect of them. We may even be fearful because in facing the Outsider we face the Unknown.

Again, our sinfulness pushes this fearful distinction between Us vs. Them into the creation of imaginary qualitative distinctions.

Our group is smarter, better, kinder, more civilized. We can place every racist, prejudiced caricature about those who are unlike us and our tribe into this category.

The outsider is regularly measured in qualitative terms as dangerous, irrational, ignorant, criminal, and uncivilized. The Other can even be seen as subhuman.

All of these features of human tribalism have been universally prevalent throughout human history.

It was not uncommon for Native American tribes to identify their own people as “the True Human beings,” or “the Real People.” Meaning, of

About 85% of Rwandans are Hutus but the Tutsi minority has long dominated the country. In 1959, the Hutus overthrew the Tutsi monarchy and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries, including Uganda. Genocide erupted in 1994.

course, that the members of other tribes, which were often enemies to be feared and killed, were not as human as they, the Real Human Beings, were.

When I visited my daughter in Kenya, I was fascinated by the latent hostility that the members of different tribes held for one another. I was told by a number of the Kenyans I met such things as, all Kikuyu were dishonest; all Luo were lazy; and all Masai were violent.

It did not matter that all these people shared the same skin color. It was the tribe that made the difference, allowing for automatic generalizations, prejudice, and discrimination.

Throughout the course of history, in different times and places, human tribalism has appeared in a wide variety of different guises. Tribalism can wear a multitude of different masks, but it is always the same sinful problem.

Tribalism expresses itself through religion (Protestant vs. Catholic), race

Protestant martyrs burned at the stake in Roman Catholic England

(white vs. black, though to call this “racism” is a misnomer that I will return to later), nationalism (Spaniards

vs. Catalonians), and political partisanship (Republicans vs. Democrats). The list goes on and on.

Human beings are terribly creative in finding ways to draw boundaries around themselves, separating their own people (who are typically good) from “the other” people (who are typically bad).

With the coming of the Kingdom of God in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, our Father in heaven has been working towards the goal of eliminating the blight of tribalism that have has ripped and shredded humanity since the Fall in Genesis 3.

As soon as Adam pointed his finger at Eve and said to God, “It wasn’t my idea. SHE made me do it!” the problem of divisiveness has been working to sabotage God’s original desire for all-inclusive, human community.

Here is where I believe we must begin a Christian analysis of the problems at hand.

We will eventually talk about the sins of racism, discrimination, and prejudice. But in order to have an adequate Biblical foundation for grappling with the complexities of those issues, we need to understand that they are merely different dimensions, or expressions, of a single problem: human tribalism.

We must also remember that we all are guilty of tribalism in one way or

Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, “The Good Samaritan”

another, to one degree or another, because we are all fallen, sinful images of God.

We ALL share the same basic tendencies, which is why remembering the ethical instruction that Jesus left to us in the four New Testament Gospels is essential for us all.

Combating our own, as well as our society’s, expressions of tribalism is a non-negotiable responsibility of everyone who claims to follow Jesus Christ.

Remember, when Jesus told his listeners to love their neighbor as themselves, the Pharisees in the crowd asked him, “Ok, but who exactly is my neighbor?”

They were searching for some tribal distinctions that would allow them to love those who were like themselves, while ignoring Outsiders.

Of course, Jesus perceived the not-so-hidden motive behind their question. By answering them with the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus makes it clear that all tribalistic distinctions violate God’s intentions.

The Jew in the ditch and the Samaritan who stops to help were from two very different tribes of people that openly despised each other. Except that this particular Samaritan was an exception.

The “despised” Samaritan acted according to God’s intentions for all people — that loving neighborliness knows no bounds.

Members of the kingdom of God understand that there are no insiders or outsiders within the human family. All people qualify equally as worthy of our care and concern.,

Jesus tells us all to repent of our tribalism, no matter what it may look like; to renounce it as sin in our lives; to ask the Spirit for illumination that we may recognize the blindness created by own our tribalistic instincts.

And then to commit ourselves to change, to ACT in whatever specific ways are necessary for us become different people, living as citizens of God’s kingdom on earth.

I will have more to say about this practical application in the days ahead.

(Also, if you disagree or have different thoughts on this issue, send me a note and let me know that you think. Thanks for reading.)

Critical Race Theory and the Church, Part 2

Not long ago I posted a very brief history of how the Republican party devised its famous “Southern Strategy” for its election campaigns as well as its interminable “War on Drugs” model of policing (which quickly gained bipartisan support).

That history is another clear demonstration of the way white privilege and systemic racism continue to influence American society.

Lee Atwater (architect of the Southern Strategy) and John Ehrlichman (domestic policy advisor for Richard Nixon and creator of the War on Drugs policing strategy) were two white men who knew how to manipulate language as well as social systems (political campaigns and police departments) to target the white population’s fears of African Americans.

That fear is as real today as it was then.

By using language that they knew would heighten white folk’s apprehensions about the black community, they deliberately deepened the color  divide between these communities.

The white community implicitly understood that their privileged status was being safeguarded by Atwater and Ehrlichman’s new political strategies.

The result was the establishment of new ways to systematically accomplish racist goals for the benefit of white society – which is exactly what both men had hoped to accomplish, by their own admission (reread that post!).

A person does not need to be a Marxist (a common, specious charge leveled against Critical Race theorists) or a devotee of any particular critical theory to figure these things out.

All it requires is a bit of critical thinking, which everyone should learn to do by the way, and some knowledge about American history and politics.

In fact, I will go so far as to insist that every thoughtful Christian (which should also be an obvious redundancy) needs to understand that white privilege and systemic racism are integral parts of this nation’s story, past AND present.

Coming to grips with these facts is crucial if the Body of Christ is ever to embody the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, harmonious ideal that God’s kingdom intends for us here and now.

In my next post, I will begin to flesh out what I believe a biblical perspective on these sorts of racial issues teaches us.

I don’t offer this as a “Christian alternative” to CRT, but as one man’s approach to sifting the wheat from the chaff in any conversation about what should be the church’s approach to racism in America today.

 

Systemic Racism in the Capitol Police Force

As I focus on the problems of systemic racism and white privilege this month, ProPublica has a good article describing the problem of systemic racism in the capitol police force and its effects during the Capitol attack on January 6th.

The article is by Joshua Kaplan and Joachin Sapien. It is entitled “‘No One Took Us Seriously’: Black Cops Warned About Racist Capitol Police Officers for Years.”

I have excerpted the article below, or you can read the entire article by clicking on the title above.

Allegations of racism against the Capitol Police are nothing new: Over 250 Black cops have sued the department since 2001. Some of those former officers now say it’s no surprise white nationalists were able to storm the building.

When Kim Dine took over as the new chief of the U.S. Capitol Police in 2012, he knew he had a serious problem.

Since 2001, hundreds of Black officers had sued the department for racial discrimination. They alleged that white officers called Black colleagues slurs like the N-word and that one officer found a hangman’s noose on his locker. White officers were called “huk lovers” or “FOGs” — short for “friends of gangsters” — if they were friendly with their Black colleagues. Black officers faced “unprovoked traffic stops” from fellow Capitol Police officers. One Black officer claimed he heard a colleague say, “Obama monkey, go back to Africa.”

In case after case, agency lawyers denied wrongdoing. But in an interview, Dine said it was clear he had to address the department’s charged racial climate.

. . . Whether the Capitol Police managed to root out racist officers will be one of many issues raised as Congress investigates the agency’s failure to prevent a mob of Trump supporters from attacking the Capitol while lawmakers inside voted to formalize the electoral victory of President-elect Joe Biden.

Already, officials have suspended several police officers for possible complicity with insurrectionists, one of whom was pictured waving a Confederate battle flag as he occupied the building. One cop was captured on tape seeming to take selfies with protesters, while another allegedly wore a red “Make America Great Again” hat as he directed protesters around the Capitol building. While many officers were filmed fighting off rioters, at least 12 others are under investigation for possibly assisting them.

Two current Black Capitol Police officers told BuzzFeed News that they were angered by leadership failures that they said put them at risk as racist members of the mob stormed the building. . . 

. . . Sharon Blackmon-Malloy, a former Capitol Police officer who was the lead plaintiff in the 2001 discrimination lawsuit filed against the department, said she was not surprised that pro-Trump rioters burst into the Capitol last week.

In her 25 years with the Capitol Police, Blackmon-Malloy spent decades trying to raise the alarm about what she saw as endemic racism within the force, even organizing demonstrations where Black officers would return to the Capitol off-duty, protesting outside the building they usually protect.

The 2001 case, which started with more than 250 plaintiffs, remains pending. As recently as 2016, a Black female officer filed a racial discrimination complaint against the department.

“Nothing ever really was resolved. Congress turned a blind eye to racism on the Hill,” Blackmon-Malloy, who retired as a lieutenant in 2007, told ProPublica.

Critical Race Theory and the Church, Part 1

(This is the first in a series of posts I will make on the controversy surrounding something called  “Critical Race Theory” within the Christian church and the continuing problem of racism in America. Stay tuned…)

The Southern Baptist Convention’s condemnation of something called Critical Race Theory has made this particular approach to understanding racist behavior (both individually and collectively) a controversial issue in the evangelical world.

All six presidents of the Southern Baptist seminaries have gone  on record

Screengrab from the 2019 Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting as Danny Akin speaks while other seminary presidents and leaders watch, including Jeff Iorg, Adam Greenway, Al Mohler, and Jamie Dew.

denouncing Critical Race Theory as an expression of “the tide of theological compromise [that Christian’s face in] an increasingly hostile secular culture.”

The heart of this new addition to the SBC declaration of faith says,

In light of current conversations in the Southern Baptist Convention, we stand together on historic Southern Baptist condemnations of racism in any form and we also declare that affirmation of Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and any version of Critical Theory is incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message. (emphasis mine) (For a fuller statement see here).

All six seminary presidents added individual affirmations to the end of the document.

SBC President J.D. Greear speaks on a panel discussion about racial reconciliation during the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention at the BJCC, June 11, 2019 in Birmingham, Ala. RNS photo by Butch Dill

What is, sadly, most telling about the new Southern Baptist position paper is the fact that it was formulated by an exclusive group of white men.

No African-American Southern Baptists were included in this body; neither were any consulted as the group made its deliberations.

As an article in the Religion News Service (1/8/2021) puts it,

Southern Baptist Convention officials admitted it would have been better if they’d contacted Black leaders of their denomination before issuing a statement decrying critical race theory, which led to the departure of several Black pastors…

. . . In late November, the leaders of the six SBC seminaries — all of them white men — declared critical race theory, a set of ideas about systemic racism, was not compatible with the statement of faith of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

After the presidents issued their statement, several Black church leaders announced they were leaving the mostly white denomination.

Obviously, these are horrible optics for the SBC.

But even worse is the denominational reality these optics reveal: both white privilege and systemic racism are thriving within the Southern Baptist Convention, including its educational institutions.

The SBC is now Exhibit A proving the urgent relevance of the very observations, about white privilege and systemic racism, that Critical Race Theory is most helpful in uncovering and confronting.

Honestly, I cannot help but wonder if these white, male, Southern Baptist decision-makers (I am hesitant to call them “leaders”) have actually condemned Critical Race Theory because it holds up a mirror to reveal their true selves.

Perhaps we should not forget that the SBC was originally formed by Southern slave-owners in order to protect the institution of slavery.

I am sure that many Southern Baptists are ashamed of that particular piece of their story. But this recent action shows that it continues to cast a very long shadow.

However much the SBC may have renounced its slave-owning origins, this recent episode in church politics has highlighted both the importance and the validity of Critical Race Theory’s analysis of both white privilege and systemic racism within American society.

Given the fact that the SBC finds the concepts of white privilege and systemic racism as particularly offensive ideas in Critical Race Theory, it is almost comical (were it not so atrocious) to see how the SBC doctrinal committee has made itself the newest poster child (poster children?) for the important benefits that Critical Race Theory has to offer.

Loretta J. Ross on “The Nazification of the Republican Party”

History professor Loretta Ross published a provocative article at Counter Punch magazine yesterday addressing the increasingly anti-democratic

Professor Loretta Ross of Smith College

tendencies of the Republican party.

Four years ago I would have labelled her thesis a serious exaggeration.

But over the past four years, since the Republican party’s enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump, I have found myself saying more and more often that Republican politicians do not really believe in democracy.

The entire “stop the steal” movement was nothing but an hysterical eruption of antidemocratic values among white devotees of Donald Trump, the Republican president.

Truth be told, I am not convinced that today’s Democratic party really believes in democracy, either.

We need look no further than the party’s coordinated efforts to rob Bernie Sanders (twice!) of the Democratic presidential nomination to find prima facie evidence of this fact.

Bernie Sanders would certainly have become the Democratic presidential nominee had he not been the target of manifold dirty tricks from the Democratic National Committee.

So much for the absurd accusations of conservative pundits who describe the Democratic party as a bastion of Marxist, socialist, radical Leftist revolutionaries. I don’t know what planet those people live on, but it’s not earth.

The fact is that there is no such thing as a “far left” party/movement in this country.

However, nowadays I must confess that given the Republican party’s behavior over the past 4 years, including its scandalous actions (or inactions) during and after the January 6th attack on Congress, I have come to believe that professor Ross’s words are very, very pertinent to our current situation.

Below is an excerpt of her article entitled “The Nazification of the Republican Party.” Or you can read the entire article here:

. . . Global contempt for the word “Nazi” is a lesson for us today in the United

Neo-Nazi insignia at the capitol on January 6

States after the attempted criminal coup at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Anyone identified as sympathetic, supportive, or financing these seditious acts that attempted to deny the peaceful transfer of power in our country should be treated with the same public condemnation that the Nazis received after World War II. This includes Nazified people in Congress, in the media, in universities, in regular jobs, and throughout society because fascism is not the fevered dream of one delusional man. Trump is a white supremacist; that he is also a deranged narcissist is really incidental.

The Republicans are a morally bankrupt political party that supported a

Neo-Nazi flag at the capitol riot

deranged president who brought this fragile, evolving democracy to the brink of extinction simply because they can’t stand the glacially slow and righteous empowerment of people of color and any limits on their power to amass an immoral amount of wealth (my emphasis). To paraphrase noted Black educator Vincent Harding, we are citizens of a country that has yet to be realized.

The Republican brand as a legitimate political party will be forever associated

Confederate flag inside Congress

with far-right ideologies, including neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates. These so-called “respectable” leaders coddled and stoked a white supremacist insurrection by Trump for the past four years. Their transactional opportunism enabled Confederate flags to be defiantly paraded in the U.S. Capitol, a shame not even achieved during the Civil War. They proved they don’t want to share a pluralistic democracy with other political parties and interests.

If Republicans can’t permanently dominate this country with a demographically shrinking number of angry white people, they proved they are ready to blow it up, figuratively and literally. Now they want us to rush to forgiveness and reconciliation, and ignore that truth and accountability come first in the achievement of healing.

Hitler led an insurrection against the German government in 1923 and was sentenced to five years in jail, served one, and used that leniency to commit the

Trump supporter wearing a Camp Auschwitz shirt on capitol steps

Holocaust. Never forget that premature forgiveness before accountability is dangerous. Fascists are violent because of who THEY are, not what WE DO–like the ordinary Germans who underestimated the Nazis and thought they were just another political party on the right. Germans who weren’t Nazis passively went about their normal affairs by denying the realities of their Jewish neighbors, all for the sake of “unity.”

Republicans are no longer entitled to exist as a legitimate political party because this authoritarian backlash has been building since new Civil Rights laws were passed in 1964 and 1965 in response to white racist violence captured on TV that required the National Guard to quell. Then-President Lyndon Johnson predicted that most white people would flee the Democratic Party to join the pro-segregationist, anti-feminist, and anti-gay revanchist political movement

White nationalist insignia worn among pro-Trump rioters

of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Every undemocratically selected Republican president since the 1960s (by an electoral college designed to be disenfranchising) has failed to repudiate this neo-fascist wing of their party.

I’m through giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt after 50 years.

The term “Nazi” is not even strong enough to convey the opprobrium and disgust human rights activists feel for those who brazenly claim they are simply patriots with different opinions. From the White House, to the Congress, to the streets, they declared war on democracy. They are seditionists, co-conspirators, and neo-Nazis hiding in plain sight who chose to use whatever power, platforms, and microphones they had to overturn this system of government. Their apparent goal is an apartheid-like system in which an embattled minority of people rule over millions of people who oppose them. We must send an unmistakable signal that this will not be tolerated when a more competent neo-fascist seeks to gain permanent power in the Congress or White House in the future.

I’m calling them American Nazis, who adapted the playbook of the Third Reich. Trump may be gone but Trumpism is not. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, they prioritized their “whiteness over democracy.” This is highlighted by their

More neo-Nazi flags among rioters

implacable attack on voting rights. Republicans who encouraged this dangerous resurrection of fascism are already trying to erase what happened or describe it as simply a “First Amendment Protest.” These apologists trying to launder their shredded reputations should be denied jobs, media opportunities, publishing contracts, and all other opportunities to spread their contempt for democracy. As philosopher Karl Popper observed in 1945, “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.”

We must defend an open, democratic society against these forces of fascism disguised as a respectable Republican Party that encouraged a white supremacist insurrection that seeks to rule like kings above the law. They see calls for unity and civility as weakness, as all fascists do. They take advantage of an open society to undermine the incremental progress of the 20th century in race, gender, citizenship, national, and international relations. For over a century they’ve proven they can’t be trusted with military power, disrupting other democracies by fomenting wars and low-intensity conflicts around the world that have killed millions of people. They are unable to accept the complexity of a multi-cultural and multi-racial globalized world, so they stew in their resentments, and fight every effort to democratize the privileges and benefits of our world. They are at the natural demise of a political party that sought to hold onto power through a web of lies to their followers to enrich a small cabal of people.

America’s tattered global reputation is at stake in this unending Civil War. Instead of denouncing the traitors in 1865, we allowed them to be rehabilitated and enshrined in monuments across the country. Will our descendants look back and see that we flinched yet again when it was time to hold insurrectionists accountable? If not, we’ll have the shortest Reconstruction in history.

Our commitment to human rights, just laws, social welfare, global peace, and democratic governance is what authoritarians seek to undermine through abuse of the concept of freedom. We should call them all American Nazis and prevent them from hiding behind mealy-mouthed words because they’ve shown us who they are. Now we must believe them.