Category: Systemic Racism

What is Intersectionality?

Scientific researchers still discover new, previously unknown species of animals as they explore our world. Believe it or not, hundreds a new species were discovered in 2020 alone.

Each new discovery requires study, weighing, measuring, and analysis in order to figure out where to locate this new creature within the current taxonomy of known animal life.

The biological description required is not inventing anything truly new, but is merely describing a creature that has always existed. The animal is only “new” to us.

No sensible person would read a scientific report describing a newly discovered creature and say, “I don’t believe this! I have never seen such a creature before; therefore, it cannot be real. The sphere of my current understanding encircles all that can be truly known. And my understanding does not include this!”

We would call that person a Luddite, an anti-intellectual, an obscurantist. Certainly, such a person has no business running or making decisions for educational institutions like Christian seminaries!

But, alas, certain qualities of “conservativism” never change. That’s why they are conservative.

Knee-jerk reactions against new ideas – especially if those ideas are developed by the dreaded “non-Christian secularists” – have always characterized conservatism, whether politically or religiously.

As I continue my series discussing Critical Race Theory (see the previous post here), you may recall that I have defined this Theory according to three analytical grids: White Privilege, Systemic Racism, and Intersectionality.

This post will briefly discuss Intersectionality. (For more explanation of Intersectionality, I suggest looking here and here for starters.)

The principle of Intersectionality recognizes that each person represents the intersection of different individual characteristics. In western society, the most pertinent characteristics are gender (male/female; I am not discussing transgenderism in this post), race/ethnicity (white, black, Asian, Arab, etc.), and class (rich, middle-class, poor, educated, uneducated).

Each individual instantiates, or incarnates, a different combination of these various characteristics. These distinctions are important to recognize because each of them, in their many combinations, can bring a different range of social and economic status to the individual.

For example, for several summers during college my wife worked in Alaska salmon canneries. When I recently explained Intersectionality to her, she immediately recognized it from the working conditions and payment schedule in Alaskan canneries.

She described a very rigid hierarchy of power and privilege, with white men at the top (with the most authority and highest wages) and Eskimo women at the bottom (with the least authority and lowest wages). Ranked in between (I don’t recall the exact order) were Japanese men, white women, and Eskimo men.

It’s not hard to see how the intersection of race and gender (and perhaps class) determined very different treatment for different people who were all doing basically the same work.

So, Intersectionality merely recognizes the obvious: that in many respects African-American women have had a much harder row to hoe than white women, and both have faced many more difficulties than white men.

It recognizes that white applicants from wealthy families of alumni have a far easier time getting into Ivy League schools than white (or black) applicants from lower-class families who are first generation college applicants. (That’s the reason for affirmative action, by the way.)

(I am reminded of the book The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein, which explains how the leaders of Ivy League universities insisted that the residential neighborhoods surrounding their campuses must all be segregated to exclude black residents.)

I could continue with more examples, but I think you get the point.

The principle of Intersectionality, as a tool in Critical Race Theory, simply describes the obvious. The theory does not create anything new. It only points out reality and tries to describe discriminatory processes more accurately. In this respect, Intersectionality helps to shed light on the complexity of Systemic Racism.

At the descriptive, analytical level I suggest that Christians ought to be thankful for the insights of Critical Race Theory and its application of Intersectionality to our social norms and relationships.

Every Christian organization and denomination ought to be applying these analytical tools to itself and learning from its own history, as we all work at understanding and correcting race/class/gender relations within the Body of Christ.

However, as with my previous posts on this subject, I also think that Intersectionality can be misused (Joe Carter provides a good analysis of such misuse in his article, “What Christians Should Know About Intersectionality. I think he gets it right when he writes, “The problem with intersectionality arises when it ceases to be an insight and becomes an ideology.”)

Intersectionality focuses on “power relationships” — who has power, who lacks power, who is the oppressor, and who is oppressed.

Evangelicals dislike this discussion of power relationships, and it becomes a major reason for their wholesale rejection of Critical Race Theory. Why? Because Karl Marx was the first social, cultural critic to describe human

Karl Marx

relationships in terms of power dynamics.

Conservatives criticize the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement for the same reason. Thus, both Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory are dismissed with a facile flick of the wrist as dangerous harbingers of “Cultural Marxism,” the latest, bogus boogie-man propped up by pseudo-intellectual, culture critics.

However, Marx was absolutely correct in his analysis. The problem today is not the fact that Intersectionality draws insights from Marx, but that certain advocates of Intersectionality see all human relationships as nothing but power contests between the exploiter and the exploited.

I encountered this often during my years as a university professor, especially when a feminist colleague explained some policy or curricular disagreement between two people (or groups) who happened to be (represented by) a man and a woman.

Invariably, the disagreement was reduced to a power contest where the man was trying to impose his authority over the female. Often, the actual content of the debate would be set aside.

I would hear the advocate of Intersectionality insist that the rational arguments involved merely provided cover for the imposition of white, male power over the woman “opponent.”

Of course, power and control may have been key issues in those debates. After all, such power contests are a perennial feature of human behavior.  But making that judgment first requires familiarity with the details of the debate. It cannot simply be assumed and imposed as THE explanation for all such disagreements.

When a critical, analytical tool is ossified in this way, reified into an ideological template that is universally imposed upon all human interactions, we have entered into dangerous territory. This transition from analysis to ideology is often reductionistic, and that’s a problem.

When this happens we have entered an anti-intellectual realm where evidence must always yield to the current theory; it becomes a totalitarian territory where understanding is governed by the conformist power of an immutable idea.

So, here is the challenge: thoughtful Christians must always walk a line between teachableness and cooption.

Unfortunately, too many Christian leaders (who ought to know better) fail to understand this difference.

On the one hand, Critical Race Theory together with Intersectionality provide important insights into the reality of human relationships. Wise Christians will take these insights seriously and respond accordingly, while always remembering that all people are created as the Image of God. Jesus Christ loves all people equally; he gave his life for all equally.

Critical Race Theory can help us all understanding the continuing challenges we face in dismantling discriminatory practices that run against the grain of Christ’s gospel message.

On the other hand, the Image of God is much, much, MUCH more than the sum total of each individual’s intersecting, distinguishing characteristics. The Image of God is essential, definitive for humanity.

As we acknowledge the negative, unjust situations often created for a person in response to her intersecting, distinguishing traits, we can never reduce that person to the theoretical social outcomes of those traits in today’s society.

Yes, life is filled with power games. But life is also much more than the combined outcome of intersecting power dynamics imposed upon me by others.

Yes, there is a great deal I cannot change or influence. But as The Original confronting my reflected Image, God holds me accountable for how I served others; how I worked to empower the disempowered; how I sacrificed my privilege so that the underprivileged might get ahead; how I lifted up those who had fallen; how I embraced the excluded; how I denied myself to serve others as Jesus has served us all.

What is Systemic Racism?

(This post is a continuation of my series on Critical Race Theory. The previous post appears here.)

Recently, I have been working my way through the book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (W. W. Norton, 2017), by Richard Rothstein.

Rothstein provides an exhaustive (and exhausting) account of racist housing policies in American history, up to the present time.

If you have ever wondered how and why dilapidated, inner-city ghettos got started in the major metropolitan areas of this country, then Rothstein has the answers you are looking for.

He describes both the historical developments and the many legal arrangements that have enshrined racial discrimination, by way of legalized

Richard Rothstein

segregation and violent enforcement, into the fabric of American society.

He also documents the continuation of such policies into the late 20th and early 21st centuries, long after the laws had been struck from the books.

These things have happened at every level of government, federal, state, and local. It appears in housing regulations, real estate boards, zoning laws, banking practices, tax valuations (which affects local school budgets), unequal wages, you name it. The list goes on.

As he writes in the book’s Preface:

We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies. Although most of these policies are now off the books, they have never been remedied and their effects endure. (xvii)

In unearthing this story as extensively as he does, Mr. Rothstein has produced a definitive history of only one component of Systemic Racism in America.

Earlier I explained that Critical Race Theory offers three specific principles to the modern discussion of race relations: White Privilege, Systemic Racism, and Intersectionality. I briefly discussed White Privilege here.

Systemic Racism and White Privilege are mutually reinforcing.

White Privilege supplies both the ideology (whether overt or hidden, conscious or unconscious) and the motivation (both individual and communal) for maintaining white superiority and dominance over people of color.

That domination is sustained through Systemic Racism, which appears in the social, cultural, and legal structures created, typically by white folks, in order to maintain White Privilege.

Systemic Racism is a fact of life in this country. It is impossible to deny, even though many still try.

Christians who deny the reality of Systemic Racism typically base their criticisms on the personal, individual quality of human sinfulness.

To put things very simply – since people are sinners, people are individually responsible for their personal sins. People are not “systems” or structures, so systems, as such, cannot be held accountable for the racist sins of individual people.

Thus, ideas like Systemic Racism are damaging because they shift the responsibility for evil away from guilty individuals, who need to confess and repent, onto impersonal structures/systems.

These Critical Theories  may also impute guilt to all members of “the system” regardless of their personal attitudes or behavior. And that is unjust.

These critics go on to say that rather than condemning impersonal structures, Christian people within those structures should be living Godly lives in order to make a personal difference for others. (At least, this is what I gather from the Christian critics I have read.)

That is how systems change, by changing the individuals involved first.

Finally, for these critics, Critical Race Theory is wrong because it is not biblical. It is guilty of “allowing secular thinking to overtake a biblical worldview.” (I will save my criticisms of “biblical worldviews” for another day.)

Unfortunately, the vagueness of the Southern Baptist statement quoted above is typical of this conversation. Here are my thoughts:

One: A few weeks ago, my pastor and I were talking about the human tendency to trap ourselves into binary thinking – stop/go, left/right, up/down, good/bad, secular/biblical . . . you get the picture.

In human relations, binary thinking is the favorite blunt instrument used for carving out tribal boundaries. “My way is good; your way is bad” – that’s just about all the Baptist “secular/biblical” binary has to offer to us, unfortunately.

Two: Every disagreement cannot be reduced to an either/or, binary answer.

There is often a third alternative, or the solution may require a both/and answer. So, I insist that the sin and guilt for American racism appears in both individuals and social systems. Both must be held accountable and both must be altered, as necessary.

It is the convergence of these two sources of America’s social ills that makes racism so powerful and long-lasting.

Three: This criticism is stereotypically Western in its analytical devotion to individualism, first and foremost. I am reminded of the absurd remark made by the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. When asked about the nature of society, she famously replied, “There is no such thing as society. Only individuals.”

Thatcher’s comment represents binary reductionism in the extreme.

Four: We cannot forget that human beings are created as the Image of God. That Image remains in all human beings. It was not eliminated by the Fall in Genesis 3.

This means that human beings, including those who do not believe in God, can still possess valuable insights into solving life’s difficult problems.

I insist that the insights of Critical Race Theory are evidence of the continuing benefits of that Divine Image which characterizes all human beings. I can learn from any number of “irreligious” thinkers in this world. Thus, the Baptist binary distinction between secular/biblical thinking is actually counter–productive to this discussion. (It’s also anti-intellectual, but that too must wait for another post.)

Five: When sinful people get together to do sinful things, especially sinful tribal things intended to protect one tribe’s interests against another’s, oppressive social norms and systematic evils are the result.

Societies are built by people. Sinful people build broken, flawed societies that exhibit their brokenness through rigged systems that produce creepy-crawly things like Systemic Racism (among other social ills).

It’s not hard to figure out.

Frankly, I am shocked at the blinding power of Southern Baptist ideology (and they are not alone in this) causing their denominational leaders to ignore such simple observations.

They offer a good example of how “secular thinking” can sometimes be more in line with truth and reality than the supposedly “biblical thinking” of avowed Christians.

Finally, I am convinced that the Christian church must share in the responsibility of undoing the horrendous damage done by centuries of Systemic Racism.

It is not enough — in fact, it is down right unacceptable — for white Christians to insist that personally rejecting racism and not discriminating individually is a sufficient Christian response.

As Mr. Rothstein concludes in his book, Undoing the effects of de jure [legalized] segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility (217).

The Old Testament prophets believed in collective responsibility. They condemned wicked rulers for the systemic evils they inflicted upon their people.

When Christians refuse to take the systemic dimensions of human evil seriously, they close their eyes to important biblical truths and excuse themselves from the important task of social/cultural transformation.

They also blatantly suggest that they are more interested in protecting their current creature comforts than they are in performing the hard introspective, anti-establishment work required of those who “seek to maintain justice and do what is right” (Isaiah 56:1).

No, benefiting from the rigged structures constructed and maintained for the survival of Systemic Racism does not necessarily make every white person a racist. On that score, I disagree with the more extreme proponents of Critical Race Theory.

But it does demand that we recognize the issues at stake; acknowledge the unmerited advantages we have and do receive as Caucasians; and commit ourselves to undoing the lasting damage confronting us today.

Another Example of White, Male Privilege as Republicans Tell Democratic Congress Women to “Just Move On”

I recently posted a blog entry describing the Southern Baptist Convention’s decision to issue a wholesale condemnation of Critical Race Theory without ever consulting a single African-American Southern Baptist (yes, they do exist).

How could that happen? It is astonishing.

I have a number of thoughts on this question which I will explore in a future post in this series on Critical Race Theory (for previous posts on this subject, see here, here, here, and here), along with my continuing observations

Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib

about the problems of systemic racism in America (for a recent example see here).

I am a huge fan of all the members of the group of junior congressional women the media have dubbed “The Squad.” This includes Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and now Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Each of them continue to demand that those involved in the Capital attack on January 6th must be held accountable. Anyone who understands the nature of justice must agree with them. There ought to be broad bipartisan support for their calls of accountability.

Instead, many members of the Republican party are telling these representatives, and especially the women, to “move on,” that they are making a mountain out of a molehill.

More than that, several Republicans have publicly denounced these women

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar

as liars, making easily refutable statements about them never being endangered at all.

I realize that a major factor in this argument is political partisanship, which teaches you to never give your opponent a break. Add a dash of simply bullying and we have a good explanation of the human behavior now on display.

However, I am convinced that there is another powerful factor involved — white, male privilege.

Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley

White, male privilege thrives in situations allowing women’s feelings and experiences to be minimized or dismissed. Admittedly, the deeply damaged and incompetent congresswoman from Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is not a man. But there are always exceptions to every rule. I won’t pretend to know how to explain her.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has recently told her story about being a rape survivor.

She, together with Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rahida Tlaib, and you

Congresswoman Cori Bush

can bet your bottom dollar that Cori Bush is now experiencing this as well, have received numerous death threats since arriving in Congress.

These women have good reason to feel traumatized after the events of January 6th. They are the physical embodiment of everything that violent mob of Trump supporters would love to eliminate from this country: emigrants, Muslims, people of color, and outspoken women who voice their disagreements loudly in public.

The heartless people now calling these female, public servants liars; accusing them of overreacting; or insisting that they just need “to get over it,” are behaving like abusers themselves. As AOC has said repeatedly, these are the things that abusers say to their victims.

It is no accident, then, that the majority of these voices come from white men. Men who have always enjoyed all the implicit and explicit advantages of being white men in American society.

Such men rarely have any reason to fear that they may be on the receiving end of a beating, or rape, or verbal assault from one of the other authoritarian men in their lives.

Such men are usually far too comfortable exercising power over others, especially when those “others” are powerless themselves.

Below is a video of the two, recent congressional speeches offered by AOC and Rahida Tlaib as they continue their calls for Congressional accountability.

If you can listen to these speeches impassively, without sympathy, without empathy, without concern, then I ask you to check your chest cavity, for you have no heart. I ask you to check your mind for your conscience has withered.

One of the primary qualities of a truly Christian life is the exercise of empathy.

It is the ability to see life from the other person’s perspective and to try to understand why they feel the way they do.

Jesus of Nazareth was extraordinary in the deep, deep levels of empathy that he possessed for the people he met. In fact, empathy is what led him to sacrifice himself on the cross at Calvary.

Let’s all pray for such divine-human empathy as we listen to these women describe their very legitimate fears on January 6th.

 

 

 

 

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.