If you have heard any of the following words or phrases the upcoming series of blogs is for you.
Black lives matter
Woke
Social justice
Cancel culture
Cultural appropriation
White privilege
Intersectionality
Systemic racism
Microaggression
Toxic masculinity
Fat shaming
I could list many, many more statements that have come out of what is called Critical Race Theory. (hereafter CRT) This ideology, religion really, began in academia approximately 30 years ago in legal studies which were concerned with civil rights issues. This thinking quickly made its way into sociology departments and the humanities in general and has now infected just about everything… and I mean everything. For example, even mathematics has been seen by some as racist, and governments in California and Oregon have sought to make massive changes in their curriculums to root out this problem. Things like objectivity, arriving at a correct answer, showing your work, and many other things that are common practice in mathematics are deemed to be white supremist and thus need to be jettisoned. Sound crazy? Check out the proposed changes yourself -- Mathematics Framework - Mathematics (CA Dept of Education)
At its core, CRT is the belief that our society is structured according to power dynamics. It is fundamentally Marxist but instead of economics being the manner in which these power dynamics are structured in our culture, the oppression is based on race and the oppressors are whites (white heterosexual males more specifically) while the oppressed are, well, everyone else. Racial inequality is thus built into our society which is why advocates of CRT talk ad nauseam about systemic or structural racism. To quote Morpheus from The Matrix as he is trying to convince Neo to take the red pill,
The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
The system that enslaves us is not the matrix run by machines, but a system of white privilege that subjugates everyone who is not white. As Michael Gonzalez observed, you may not know it, but most people (non white heterosexual males) are oppressed by a system that works against them in innumerable ways. CRT sees itself as the red pill that, when taken, awakens us (makes us ‘woke’) to the oppression all around us, even that of which we may be guilty ourselves.
CRT started with discussions about how our society is structured around race - particularly white power and black oppression - but is now used to expose power structures of all kinds. Simply put, you are either an oppressor or you are the oppressed. Let me list just a few of the ways this happens in our culture: (cf Strachan)
Whites naturally oppress nonwhites
Men naturally oppress women
Intellectuals oppress minority thought
Rich people oppress poor people
Physically able people oppress disabled people
Skinny or fit people oppress bigger bodied people
Heteronormative people oppress everything that is not heterosexual
And on and on I could go.
It is easy to see how CRT has infected everything we are told to think about the world around us. Your kids are learning it at school and on social media. Just about every place of employment is including some sort of sensitivity training based upon principles of CRT. It is also entering the church. Not the church out there, but right here at home, in the Bible-belt. (The churches that are pushing this stuff may not be the ones you think.)
CRT is dangerous; very dangerous. It is also anti-Christian. There may be statements made and positions taken by advocates of CRT which sound Christian but the worldview from which they originate and where they are headed are absolutely not Christian in any way. (cf Strachan)
Thankfully CRT is intellectually inconsistent and irrational, ethically contradictory, and socially impossible. If left to itself it will collapse under its own weight or destroy itself from the inside as CRT advocates argue against each other for precedence. (The inevitable result of intersectionality, et. al.)
But we cannot wait for this day for its effects are happening now and they are significant. We must heed biblical wisdom,
See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. (Colossians 2:8)
We are also told that we are to,
…destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, (2 Corinthians 10:5)
Because of the dangers of CRT and the instructions these texts, and others, provide, I want to look at CRT in more detail over the course of the next number of blogs. It needs to be answered. To that end I want to look more closely at what it is, why it is dangerous, how it is invading our thinking, and how we should respond.
Soli Deo Gloria
[Cover image source: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/487c7cf4e5c26a2a11da4a7b3573a52593921193/0_0_1280_551/master/1280.jpg?width=445&quality=45&auto=format&fit=max&dpr=2&s=3017a675eb20a9f633dd9770127b371b]