Critical Race Theory: Truth or Theory?
Critical Race Theory: Truth or Theory?
As an educator, Christian and American, I care deeply about America, the education of our children and the principles on which our country was founded. On January 20th, 2021, newly inaugurated president Joe Biden signed an unprecedented number of executive orders, including the cancellation of the 1776 Commission, created to research and promote patriotic education. Some people state that this commission was created to counteract the 1619 project which revisits the country’s history with a focus on slavery. Whether it was written to counteract the 1619 project or not, the fact remains that the 1619 project does not consider all relevant facts of American history. My purpose in writing this paper is to share facts about Critical Race Theory (CRT) obtained from various sources and to conclude with my opinion of what I believe is the true status of all mankind.
In September of 2020, President Trump announced a ‘Patriotic Education’ Commission to be formed. At the time of his announcement, it was apparent that there was a push by some schools to focus on slavery and systemic racism in order to promote a view that conflicts with a more standard and historical view of America. Around this same time, we started reading and hearing about “cancel culture”. “Let’s cancel history!” some people chant. How do you cancel a historical event that actually took place? Some of these same people who want to “cancel culture” will tell you that black people are still enslaved to white people. Yet, how will you know the truth of that statement unless you know the real history of black people and America? In an effort not to make this too lengthy, I will try to condense my points using various sources.
Robert Woodson, an American civil right activist and community development leader, has this to say about black history:
“Each year, as Black History Month arrives, there are those who focus on the grievances and injuries of the past, with speeches and films featuring archived photos of slaves in the fields and video clips of oppression. In fact, the history of the black community is replete with models of achievement that were accomplished, in spite of injustice and disparity. But those stories have been ignored and the sagas of those victories have not been passed on to the generations who hunger for them. Most Americans - black and white - are unaware of the number of slaves who, by virtue of their genius, determination and effort, rose to become millionaires and made important contributions to society. Among these models of awe-inspiring achievement against the odds was Biddy Mason, whose entrepreneurial instincts and skills enabled her to become the wealthiest African American woman in Los Angeles in the late 1800s. Entrepreneurship was a key element of the successful rise from slavery and rested on the values of thrift, temperance, steadfastness and economic enterprise.”
Furthermore, he states that: “Reparations is yet another insult to black America that is clothed in the trappings of social justice. Because their declarations were strategically timed during the waning days of Black History Month, it is important to examine the issue of reparations fully through a clear lens of history. Please read the following excellent article written by Robert Woodson in defense of Black people and the truth about their past and the issue of slavery.
The modern CRT movement started at a 1989 Wisconsin conference meeting hosted by Harvard professor Derek Bell. Proponents of CRT view the social condition of inequality as being driven by racist humans. Previous to that meeting, critical race theory was generally confined to law school classrooms and law journals. CRT was brought into national debate by Lani Guinier who was nominated by Bill Clinton to be assistant attorney general. She used legal techniques to expand voting rights and to diversify students and faculty within colleges and universities. It then became a discussion on a larger scale of what constituted racial justice in the United States. Critical race theory became an academic discipline, formulated in the 1990s, built on the intellectual framework of identity-based Marxism. Equality—the principle proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified into law with the 14th and 15th Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—is rejected by critical race theorists.
Following the Leninist Marxist Russian Revolution in 1917, a new generation of Communists believed that for Communism to spread in Europe, Christianity must be destroyed or discredited and social issues should be given more priority as a tool to overthrow Western governments. Black Lives Matter (BLM) was founded on CRT and antiracism ideology in 2013 by three members of the Neo-Marxist Black Liberation Movement. CRT and BLM are both blatantly anti-white and anti-Christian. What the media and educational establishments have today accepted as social justice is strongly influenced by CRT and contrary to Biblical justice and often common sense.
“When I say that critical race theory is becoming the operating ideology of our public institutions, it is not an exaggeration—from the universities to bureaucracies to k-12 school systems, critical race theory has permeated the collective intelligence and decision-making process of American government, with no sign of slowing down.” (https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/critical-race-theory-fight/)
Voddie Baucham is a reformed African-American pastor, born in Los Angeles, who is presently Dean of the School of Divinity at African Christian University in Zambia. He is a former SBC minister and has been active in the battle to keep unbiblical Marxist distortions of social justice out of the Church. In his book, Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe, he makes a plea to the Church:
“I believe we are being duped by an ideology bent on our demise. This ideology has used our guilt and our good and godly desire for reconciliation and justice as a means through which to introduce destructive heresies. We cannot embrace, modify, baptize, or Christianize these ideologies. We must identify, resist, and repudiate them. We cannot be held hostage through emotional blackmail and name-calling.”
Voddie further states that “when the antiracist speaks of ‘racial injustice,” he is assuming a definition inherent to CRT. When he speaks of inequities, he believes they can only arise from racism and oppression. Therefore we need to re-engineer society in order to erase inequities. There is no solution for white privilege except to make reparations.” There is what Baucham describes as a “dizzying” list of departments, commissions, programs and laws designed to address so-called racial injustice.
It’s sort of like believing in “good works” to get to heaven. The problem is defining just how many good works are necessary to get into heaven. Fortunately, the biblical view of restoration and being “good enough” is defined by the work and cross of Jesus Christ. Since he paid the full price of our sin, we only have to believe in his redeeming work.
I encourage you to read the books and listen to the podcasts of Robert Woodson (referred to above), a former civil rights activist who headed the National Urban League Department of Criminal Justice, and has been a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Foundation for Public Policy Research. He is also a community development leader, author, and founder and president of the Woodson Center. The Woodson Center is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and demonstration organization that supports neighborhood-based initiatives to revitalize low-income communities. Woodson once said, “The reason you don’t hear much about me is because I’m usually in the trenches helping my people.”
Woodson told a reporter, “I don’t know what systemic racism is. Maybe someone can explain what that means.” Woodson shares that he left the civil rights movement because he realized that many of the people who suffered most - poor blacks - do not benefit from the change - that they’re demographics were used by some of those same leaders. He also went on to say that “now race is being used to deflect attention away from the failure of people running those institutions. The question is ‘why are black kids failing in school systems run by their own people?’”
“When Eric Holder was a U.S. Attorney in Washington D.C., a lot of young people were shot by the police, but they were black police shooting black kids and no one was prosecuted. But there was no public outcry because as long as illegality or evil wears a black face, then it escapes detection and that’s what’s wrong with looking life through the prism of race.”
Perhaps the CRT supporters are led by confirmation bias. Are they focusing only on what might support their theory and denying or blocking out other facts? The definition of confirmation bias: the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs. This biased approach, whether intentional or unintentional, often results in ignoring information that needs consideration.
In conclusion, I would like to propose that white people (and all races) are systematically sinful, not systemically racist. The Holy Bible points out that “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Roman 3:23) The good news is that Jesus Christ paid for our sins with his death and resurrection, thereby cancelling the need to “make reparations''. He made the reparations for us. To believe Robin D’Angelou’s ‘white privilege’ theory is to buy into a never ending cycle of repentant actions that will never provide justification or relief from ‘whiteness’. To promote CRT in the classrooms is to downgrade all the white children of America. In the classroom, at least during my years as an educator, I have never seen or experienced the degradation of a child because of his or her skin color. To now put down white children in an effort to build up black children is a most heinous act against mankind. So let us simply return to the freedoms that our forefathers fought for and gave their lives to so that we might live as a free people.
Mandisa, Toby Mac and Kirk Franklin wrote some lyrics (in their song “We All Bleed the Same) that speak clearly of the inappropriateness of judging others based on external differences and the beauty of unity:
“Tell me, who are we
To judge someone
By the kind of clothes they're wearing
Are you black? (black)
Are you white? (white)
Aren't we all the same inside? (the same inside)
Father, open our eyes to see!
We all bleed the same (we all bleed the same)
We're more beautiful when we come together.”
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