Tag: Critical Race Theory

More Evidence For the Practical Importance of Critical Race Theory

Colin Gordon is a history professor at the University of Iowa who specializes in the history and long-term effects of American public policy.

Professor Colin Gordon

Professor Gordon recently wrote a highly informative article for Dissent Magazine which asks the question, “Who Segregated America?”

In this article he demonstrates the pernicious role played by private business interests in pioneering the highly discriminatory methods that would eventually be used by public, government policies to permanently entrench racial segregation through America’s neighborhoods.

Here is one more example of why an understanding of American racism and its dissection though tools like Critical Race Theory are so important to our educational system.

Frankly, it is impossible to understand either our history or our current racial predicament without it.

Below is an excerpt of “Who Segregated America?”:

Federal housing policies contributed to the segregation of American cities in the twentieth century. But it was private interests that led the way.

Recent scholarship and reporting on racial disparities in the United States have emphasized the role of public policy—especially federal policy—in the creation of what the 1968 Kerner Commission famously dubbed “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” This is especially true of housing policy. Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White (2005) skewers the stark exclusion of African-American veterans from the benefits of the GI Bill. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) offers a damning synthesis on how the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) embraced Jim Crow. More recently, the digitization of the infamous “residential security” redlining maps prepared by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the late 1930s has spurred academic interest in the connections between the HOLC’s bluntly racial assessments and contemporary disparities.

This condemnation of federal policy is certainly warranted. Even the constraints of the New Deal coalition (in which the Democratic majority was, as Katznelson observes, a “strange marriage of Sweden and South Africa”) cannot excuse the FHA’s slavish deference to racial prejudice in private realty. One can and should expect more of a public agency, wielding billions in housing subsidies in one hand and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause in the other, than a set of underwriting guidelines that “could well have been culled from the Nuremberg Laws,” as housing activist Charles Abrams observed in 1955.

But is it true, as Rothstein’s subtitle suggests, that “government segregated America”? Not really. As new work on the scope of private racial restrictions underscores, racial segregation in American cities (especially Northern and border cities) was largely accomplished by private interests and private action long before the FHA spent a dime or the HOLC opened its first bottle of red ink.

Race-restrictive deed covenants and agreements reserved the occupancy of individual lots or entire residential subdivisions to those (in the phrasing preferred by developers in St. Louis County) “wholly of the Caucasian Race.” The result was a sort of pointillist apartheid, filled in parcel by parcel, block by block, and subdivision by subdivision, on a scale sufficient to quarantine existing pockets of African-American residency and mark new developments as largely off limits. . .

(Observe in the following graphic how “Race-restrictive deed covenants and agreements reserved the occupancy of individual lots or entire residential subdivisions to those (in the phrasing preferred by developers in St. Louis County) ‘wholly of the Caucasian Race.'” In other words, private racial regulators orchestrated the creation of black ghettos and white suburbs with all the damaging consequences.)

. . . More to the point, the FHA and other federal housing policies were always—and remain—little more than a poorly regulated trough for private housing interests. They exist not to secure homeownership but to sustain the residential construction and home finance industries with direct subsidies, socialized risk, and tax breaks. In that role, they have always parroted the goals, motives, and prejudices of private interests and deferred to their assessment of what boosted—or threatened—the value of private property.

The segregation of the American city was conceived, accomplished, and justified largely by private action in response to the demographic upheaval of the Great Migration. Federal housing policies unconscionably doubled down on both segregation and its assumptions, but the damage was already done.

Read the entire article here.

What Is ‘White Privilege’?

(This is installment 5 in my series discussing Critical Race Theory. From here on out, I will only provide the immediately preceding post. For all previous posts on this subject, see here, here, here, here, and here.)

Critical Race Theory has advanced three key concepts that help to identify and critique the ways in which racism works in society. They are the notions of White Privilege, Systemic Racism, and Intersectionality.

In this post, I will only talk about White Privilege. The other will have their turn.

Many Christians, like the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention, have condemned all three of these ideas, for reasons will we explore as this series unfolds. Though I am not a sociologist, and am happy to be corrected by my readers, I suspect that only the idea of Intersectionality may be new – although that is probably debatable.

But what is most important is not whether these are new concepts, but how they are applied to illuminate (or to confuse, perhaps) how different people relate to each other in American society.

To put things simply, White Privilege identifies the fact that America is the product of (primarily) white, European culture and society.

Colonialism was a deeply embedded component of that European culture. As a result, having white skin as opposed to having dark skin became an encoded principle of Western, racial superiority.

After all, the white colonizers were always superior to the colonized, dark skinned natives.

Even though we now live (theoretically) in a post-colonial world – albeit with numerous exceptions, beginning with Jewish Israeli colonization of 5 million native Palestinians – in which the majority of Caucasian (white-skinned) people would (probably) deny the idea of racial superiority linked to traits like skin color, ethnicity, or physical morphology, the social/cultural norms and  structures (erected in order to enforce or “protect” those norms) generated by that white culture continue to exist.

Many researchers have demonstrated the reality of White Privilege today in such areas as business hiring practices, and mortgage approval or interest rates. Even now, white people continue to benefit in many ways that black people do not.

Numerous white folks have experienced this for themselves while temporarily “passing” for black.

More tellingly, there are profound historical reasons explaining why light-skinned, African Americans have sometimes chosen “to pass” as white.

While many white folks, especially conservatives, remain loath to admit this, White Privilege is a fact of life. And the sooner white America as a whole comes to grips with this fact, the better for everyone.

Frankly, for any segment of the Christian church, whether Southern Baptists or anybody else, to deny the reality of White Privilege is unconscionable. It reveals an area of life where Jesus’ call to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” has been in short supply.

In fact, the Christian church ought to be taking the lead in working creatively to identify, address and undo the practical effects of White Privilege in our world.

Our God is not a God of favoritism.

The Creator is a God of equality. He loves everyone equally. He values everyone equally. Everyone is equally sinful. Everyone is equally in need of Christ’s redemption. Salvation is equally available to everyone, and equally beneficial to all who will believe.

The kingdom of God is a realm of equality, which will be recognizable oh this earth where God’s multi-racial community of faith can be observed by all.

Ironically, the fact that no African-Americans were included on the Southern Baptist Convention committee, which wrote the document condemning Critical Race Theory is itself a rude example of White Privilege at work among Christian people.

In his letter to the Philippians, the apostle Paul tells us that the preexistent Son of God willingly set aside his divine privileges; in fact, “he made himself nothing, taking the very form of a servant” in order to elevate and to redeem people like you and me (Phil 2:7).

Every Caucasian who claims to follow Jesus Christ is obligated to live a Christ-like life, the life of a servant.

We need to acknowledge our privilege, identify it, and do whatever we can to share that privilege by rejecting it; to reconstruct a society where everyone of all colors stand on a level playing field – with some even being given an advantage where necessary – until our Creator’s vision of human equality is the norm.

One proviso: I suspect that the main reason the Southern Baptists rejected the principle of White Privilege was due to the way it has been misused by certain advocates of Critical Race Theory. (Another reason to remember that the abuse of an idea offers no necessary critique of the idea itself.)

Some intemperate anti-racist activists use the principle of White Privilege to define all white people as inherently racist. To be white is to be racist, no questions asked.

As a Christian, I must draw a line here and say that THIS application of the principle is wrong. It’s wrong morally and it’s wrong theologically.

Such a misuse of the White Privilege principle is, I believe, one of the reasons that certain older members of the Civil Rights movement (!) have also publicly denounced Critical Race Theory.

Regardless of their personal theologies, they too identify the moral problem at the root of any such blanket condemnation of an entire class of people.

Sadly, it is one more expression of human tribalism (and its many defects) which excels at taking good ideas and twisting them until they only shed light on my neighborhood.

Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream anticipating a day when black children and white children will all be judged “not on the color of their skin but by the content of their character” continues to ring true for these pioneering Civil Rights activists, as it also does for me.

Perhaps it is true that a very high percentage of US Caucasians remain blind to their privilege while happily enjoying its benefits without giving any thought to the related (even consequential) difficulties and discrimination faced by our dark-skinned brothers and sisters.

No. What every Christian can and must say is that all people everywhere are guilty of being sinful. Consequently, all people everywhere are intensely tribal. Thus, all people everywhere think and act selfishly.

Meaning that all people everywhere need the redemption and personal transformation available through Jesus Christ – which can ONLY work properly in integrated communities of faith where men, women, and children of every color share themselves, their histories, their stories, their personal experiences, and their hopes with each other.

I have more say on this topic, but I think I have gone on too long already!

Until next time…

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.