Much ink will be spilled in the next few months or even years about the topic of Critical Race Theory (CRT), both by those who think they support it and those who think they oppose it. We are going to hear the wildest claims about what it is, how it is either a blessing or a curse, how it either reinforces religious teachings or threatens them, how it brings freedom or chains. Emotions are going to drive 99.25% of this discussion, and that is not a surprise, for emotions drive most of our decision-making, with our minds coming up for excuses afterward to justify our actions. This is the way it is in our world as humans, and sometimes we are lucky enough to catch ourselves responding with emotional thinking rather than careful study and analysis.
But if I wanted to know about CRT, I would listen to an expert who studies CRT as part of their legal education versus the random YouTube channel or preacher who frankly has neither the education nor skills to understand the genesis of Critical Theory in general and the manner and method that Critical Race Theory was developed.
Because “lightning” and “lightning bug” both contain “lightning” does not mean that either is a derivative of the other. Conflating “Critical Theory” and “Critical Race Theory” as related in any significant way is a similar confusion based upon words. English is full of these traps, and it’s helpful to know this in advance before we create etymonic histories of ideas that are only vaguely related.
And confusing people with uneducated polemics is not only unhelpful, it is destructive. It is foolish to throw out charges of “Marxism” and “socialism” and “communism” when speaking of these topics because these are not the primary influences upon the creation of either of these studies.
If you really haven’t studied Critical Race Theory, then instead of saying “but it’s obvious that CRT is this,” it would be better to say “I haven’t really studied it, but when I listen to this YouTube speaker then I think it means this . . . “
That would be honest—and scary.
Critical Race Theory itself could be replaced by another word: facts.
As a Christian believer of some 55+ years now, I am completely unconvinced that a legal theory that examines the virulence and strength of racism has anything to say about how we think about and worship Our Lord Jesus.
I have to look at the world as it is. Much of what we experience in this world is not a direct physical thing. Some people are affected by disease or circumstances such as natural disasters, but so much of what we think is the “real” world is really the working out of our social systems and our attitudes, biases, education, and soul-ish/spiritual formation.
Racism qua racism isn’t real. There is no way to measure the physical weight. It has no color or odor. It cannot literally affect anything because in the physical world it doesn’t exist.
But we would be the most foolish of people were we to say that racism itself is not powerful, does not affect the lives of hundreds of millions of people for good and for bad, and cannot be looked at objectively and with the eye to extirpating it.
We can look at how we think about money, which is also an imaginary thing. No, not that gold and precious metals are not valued. We do value some things above others. But that is because we put value onto these things.
Tulips are a relatively cheap flower to plant, for example. You can get the bulbs at a garden shop and plant them in the fall for spring blossoms. They survive maybe a year or two if they’re not planted, and if they are planted and bloom, they’ve expended their potential. But at one point in our Western history, tulip bulbs became worth far more than gold or platinum or silver because of mass hysteria among men and women who otherwise were noted for their prudence and sobriety. People made and lost fortunes in the space of a few days. And then suddenly it was over, most people lost money, and tulips became an ordinary thing again.
“Money” isn’t a thing. It’s an imaginary construct, a value that we as human beings impute into things that themselves are nothing more than substances.
No one would be so foolish as to say that because money is imaginary it has no meaning. We all know that money drives our politics, our religion, our education, our biases, and our power. We can look at how the love of money corrupts the souls and spirits of people, and work to break the unholy fascination it has, but we don’t get people free from greed by claiming that money doesn’t exist.
So it is with racism. Refusing to deal with racism as a real thing that exists right now in our social systems is foolish talk. It is not something minor that just happens to affect a tiny few. Racism is a tool for white people to extend their supremacy, both in ways that are known by the people who do so and also in more subtle, hidden ways that appear to be normal to us white people because we are trained not to see what is visible to others who are from the BIPOC communities.
Telling BIPOC communities that their focus on racism is wrong because we white people don’t see it and don’t think it’s all that bad is an egregious and monstrously unloving thing to say. This refusal to face racism head-on and with our full integrity is based upon pride, fear, ignorance, and the self-satisfaction that we have reached our place in life entirely by our own hand, refusing to see that much of what has given us our position is that we are, as white people, generally not stopped in trying to achieve our goals.
It is beyond tiresome to see white men–the most privileged of privileged people in world history–attempt to deny the very racism that has kept us elevated for more than 500 years. But I can understand how it happens because the very thing that keeps us elevated also keeps us blinded. The fear of losing our position is so existential to our being that most attempts to examine ourselves fail because we simply cannot look at ourselves objectively without a ginormous sense of “My god, what have we done?”
Too bad. White men of all people are the most isolated from human connection because of this. We need to be loved and have intimate relationships, and we are locked out from that because we are trained to put our whiteness and maleness above anything else in our lives. The rate of self-inflicted death by white men has been skyrocketing not because white men are unduly weak, but because we have been told for so long that we are strong due to our whiteness and maleness, and when that veil is ripped away by the reality of change, we have nothing left to live for.
I have pity for white men. We are so, so lost.