Tag: John McWhorter

Maybe President Obama was the Exception and Jeremiah Wright was the Rule

Published on by D. G. Hart4 Comments

Matt Lewis thinks the Trump campaign is foolish to use Obamagate against Joe Biden and the previous administration since no one is more popular (especially among African-Americans) than President Obama. But if you read then Senator Obama’s Philadelphia speech about race (in response to inflammatory statements by his United Church of Christ pastor, Jeremiah Wright), the former president’s ideas have not aged well. You might even think he was living in a never-never land about race. Timelines are again important and the 1619 Project has swept away President Obama’s hopes for national unity:

I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs – to the larger aspirations of all Americans — the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

…The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

That was 2008. By almost the end of Obama’s second term as POTUS (2015), Jeremiah Wright was still making the rounds and his “static” view of the United States made sense:

Wright is a flawed messenger with a flawed message, but the message feels far more suited to the times in 2015 than it did to 2008. Back then, the prospect of an Obama election set off giddy daydreams of a post-racial America. Today, nearly three out of five Americans say that race relations in the United States are bad. Wright’s argument in those sermons more than a decade ago, that the United States was structurally racist and conceived in white supremacy, are now commonly voiced, by those like my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates, Black Lives Matters activists, and white liberals. Another cause he championed back then has come to draw adherents from across the political spectrum—the dangers of mass incarceration. Wright said in 2003:

The United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on the reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating the citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of the racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing “God Bless America”

It could be that Obama didn’t really have a chance. The major media outlets and universities had not really agreed with his understanding of the United States. As David Graham added in his story about Wright:

much of it sounded very much like what you might hear from liberal professors in university classrooms across America: the emphasis on structural racism; skepticism of imperialism in many guises; sympathy for Palestinians and even antipathy toward Israel; praise for interdisciplinarity; the plea for multiculturalism and alternative viewpoints. Adding to the professorial vibe, Wright peppered his talk with repeated “assignments” for reading: the pioneering black historian Carter Woodson; C. Vann Woodward’s classic The Strange Career of Jim Crow; A. Leon Higginbotham’s In the Matter of Color: The Colonial Period; academic monographs in various disciplines. (The parallels between Coates and Wright were amusing: an interest in the study of white supremacy; a deep immersion in academic literature; a reverence for Howard University as an intellectual Mecca.)

For confirmation that President Obama did not change the minds of many Democrats and progressives about race, (trigger warning) read Adam Serwer on the Pulitzer Prize winning 1619 Project:

The most radical thread in the 1619 Project is not its contention that slavery’s legacy continues to shape American institutions; it’s the authors’ pessimism that a majority of white people will abandon racism and work with black Americans toward a more perfect union. Every essay tracing racial injustice from slavery to the present day speaks to the endurance of racial caste. And it is this profound pessimism about white America that many of the 1619 Project’s critics find most galling.

Not the hope of 2008 but the despair of 2019/1619 is prevailing.

Is It Wrong to Read John McWhorter?

Published on by D. G. Hart5 Comments

I understand that German-Welsh-Americans may be selective in the African-American authors they read and quote, but since some of those who ridicule white evangelicals also recommend black conservative intellectuals like Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell, maybe an opening exists for appealing to John McWhorter for a brief moment. Here, the instruction has less to do with how African Americans make their case for racial injustice than with the way that white Americans receive arguments about racism’s persistence and depth:

Coates is a symptom of a larger mood. Over the past several years, for instance, whites across the country have been taught that it isn’t enough to understand that racism exists. Rather, the good white person views themselves as the bearer of an unearned “privilege” because of their color. Not long ago, I attended an event where a black man spoke of him and his black colleagues dressing in suits at work even on Casual Fridays, out of a sense that whites would look down on black men dressed down. The mostly white audience laughed and applauded warmly—at a story accusing people precisely like them of being racists.

This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. It qualifies as a kind of worship; the parallels with Christianity are almost uncannily rich. White privilege is the secular white person’s Original Sin, present at birth and ultimately ineradicable. One does one’s penance by endlessly attesting to this privilege in hope of some kind of forgiveness. After the black man I mentioned above spoke, the next speaker was a middle-aged white man who spoke of having a coach come to his office each week to talk to him about his white privilege. The audience, of course, applauded warmly at this man’s description of having what an anthropologist observer would recognize not as a “coach” but as a pastor.

Parallels between anti-racism and religion are particularly telling since McWhorter has repeatedly argued that opposition to bigotry has turned into a form of orthodoxy and people who question are heterodox at best, but likely heretics:

I have seen whites owning up to their white privilege using the hand-in-the-air-palm-out gesture typically associated with testifying in church. After the event I have been describing, all concerned deemed it “wonderful” even though nothing new had been learned. The purpose of the event was to remind the parishioners of the prevalence of the racist sin and its reflection in themselves, and to offer a kind of forgiveness, this latter being essentially the function of the black people on the panel and in the audience. Amen.

Some might see all of this as a healthy sign of moral advance. And I suppose if I had to choose between this performativity and the utter contempt most whites had for any discussion of discrimination 50 years ago and before, I’d choose our current moment. But goodness, it piles high and deep, this—well, I’ll call it fakeness. The degree of fantasy and exaggeration that smart people currently let pass in the name of higher-order thought on race parallels, again, Biblical tales.

Coates, for example, argues in one article after another that America’s progress on race has been minimal, despite pretty window dressing here and there, and that there is no reason to hope things will get any better. Yet one can be quite aware of the prevalence and nature of racism in America while also understanding that the recreational pessimism of views like Coates’s is melodramatic and even unempirical. To insist that Starbucks or even Dylan Roof define America’s progress on race is as flimsy as treating certain young black men’s misbehavior as embodying the black essence. Perfection is ever a dream; we are, as always, in transition. Everybody knows that.

The very fact that the modern equivalent of the graduate student I knew reveres Coates’s writing is a sterling indication that America has grown up quite a bit on race even in the past quarter of a century. The fact that this brand of enlightenment has not made it to every barstool and kitchen table in the country hardly disqualifies it as influential. Anyone who really thinks that on race America has merely rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic isn’t old enough to realize that most smart white people as late as 1978 would have found The Wire about as interesting as Chinese opera.

In which case, social media banter about race these days (which also shows up in books that describe how much white churches have perpetuated racial hierarchy) has more to do with the purity of each person and less to do with those people who still experience some of the real consequences of racism in the United States:

This new cult of atonement is less about black people than white people. Fifty years ago, a white person learning about the race problem came away asking “How can I help?” Today the same person too often comes away asking, “How can I show that I’m a moral person?” That isn’t what the Civil Rights revolution was about; it is the product of decades of mission creep aided by the emergence of social media.

What gets lost is that all of this awareness was supposed to be about helping black people, especially poor ones. We are too often distracted from this by a race awareness that has come to be largely about white people seeking grace. For example, one reads often of studies showing that black boys are punished and suspended in school more often than other kids. But then one reads equally often that poverty makes boys, in particular, more likely to be aggressive and have a harder time concentrating. We are taught to assume that the punishments and suspensions are due to racism, and to somehow ignore the data showing that the conditions too many black boys grow up in unfortunately makes them indeed more likely to act up in school. Might the poverty be the key problem to address? But, try this purely logical reasoning in polite company only at the risk of being treated as a moral reprobate. Our conversation is to be solely about racism, not solutions—other than looking to a vaguely defined future time when racism somehow disappears, America having “come to terms” with it: i.e. Judgment Day. As to what exactly this coming to terms would consist of, I suppose only our Pastor of White Privilege knows.

If You Can Give Up KJV English in the Bible, Why not the Confession of Faith?

Published on by D. G. Hart41 Comments

The recent General Assembly of the OPC established a special committee to study the value of producing a modern English version of the Westminster Standards. Here‘s a little window into the OPC’s deliberations from the daily GA report:

As part of the work of the Committee on Christian Education, on motion, the body approved this: “That the Eighty-fifth (2018) General Assembly notify the member churches of NAPARC and other appropriate church bodies with which we have fellowship that it has erected a special committee to propose linguistic updating of the doctrinal standards of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and include details of the specific mandate, and that it welcomes any input that such churches might desire to give with respect to such proposed linguistic revision.”

Speeches for and against may have depended too much on how deeply commissioners had dug in their heels. For advocates, a modern version would seem to promise a millennium of broad and popular acceptance of Reformed Protestantism. I’m not so sure. For opponents, the arguments sounded a lot like reasons to retain the King James Version. I’m not so sure. If we can welcome modern English versions of the Bible, why not our Standards? One reason is that they come in English, not German, French, or Dutch. Which is to say that CRC and URC Synods have had no trouble updating English versions of the Heidelberg Catechism, for instance, because those communions are not invested in English the way Presbyterians are. If the original is in English, English-speakers tend to think the text is sacrosanct. Same goes for the Bible. If we talked about modern Hebrew versions of the OT, or modern Greek versions of the NT, after scratching their heads (what’s the point?), commissioners would likely object.

A related concern is a teaching device as opposed to a theological standard. If the Confession were like the chemist’s chart of elements, we would likely not want a modern version, better life through chemistry and all. People using the Standards as a benchmark for theological clarity don’t mind requiring users to suffer with the alien words and forms. “Eat your broccoli.” But if you have a chemistry textbook from the 18th century, revising the language for contemporary use in the classroom makes some sense. In which case, the appointed committee may propose a modern language version of the Standards that functions as a teaching device while recommending the old English version for theological exams and the Constitution. I say “may.” I have no direct access to the committee (which hasn’t even met!).

I would recommend to the committee and everyone else, though, a podcast I heard this week. It is an exchange between linguist, John McWhorter and Mark Ward, a Bible software engineer for Logos, on King James English. Ward is also the author of a book on the KJV which goes through fifty examples of how modern readers, even ones who are well educated, don’t understand the Bible (if only because the only way to discern seventeenth-century meanings is by consulting the Oxford English Dictionary, an expensive addition to any family or church library).

The podcast is a bit of a love fest because McWhorter’s arguments for updating Shakespeare convinced Ward to revise his arguments about the KJV. Here‘s part of McWhorter’s argument (beware the Jesuits):

Most educated people are uncomfortable admitting that Shakespeare’s language often feels more medicinal than enlightening. We have been told since childhood that Shakespeare’s words are “elevated” and that our job is to reach up to them, or that his language is “poetic,” or that it takes British actors to get his meaning across.

But none of these rationalizations holds up. Much of Shakespeare goes over our heads because, even though we recognize the words, their meaning often has changed significantly over the past four centuries. . . .

It is true that translated Shakespeare is no longer Shakespeare in the strictest sense. But are we satisfied with Shakespeare’s being genuinely meaningful only to an elite few unless edited to death or carefully excerpted, with most of the rest of us genuflecting in the name of “culture” and keeping our confusion to ourselves? Should we have to pore laboriously over Shakespeare on the page before seeing his work performed?

At the same time, the exchange has the advantage of listening to a sophisticated New Yorker, professor at an Ivy League university, who seems to have no religious preferences, talking respectfully, even warmly, to an avowed evangelical with a terminal degree from Bob Jones University. You almost think you’ve gone back to the 1950s.

Catching Up

Published on by D. G. Hart8 Comments

Mark Galli thinks evangelicals have opened a new chapter on race. But I wonder if it is the chapter that mainline Protestants opened — oh — fifty years ago:

We are currently experiencing a new “God moment,” when God is shining his burning light on how our nation and our churches are fractured by racial division and injustice. In the past two years, we’ve seen image after image of injustice perpetrated against black Americans. We’ve studied the statistics. And most important, we’ve heard the anguished cry of a suffering community that is understandably hurting, angry, and demanding progress.

Moderate white evangelicals, who make up the bulk of our movement, see more clearly than ever how racism is embedded in many aspects of our society, from business to law enforcement to education to church life. We have been slow to hear what the black church has been telling us for a while. And in all that, we hear God calling his church to seek justice and reconciliation in concrete ways.

To be evangelical now means to be no longer deaf to these cries or to God’s call. In 2012, only 13 percent of white evangelicals said they thought about race daily (41% of black evangelicals did so). Today, we’re thinking about race more than daily—due partly to the news cycle, and partly to our rediscovering biblical teaching.

I used to hear a lot about how evangelicals were always about 10 to 15 years behind the times.

So I wonder when evangelical Protestants like Galli will get around to reading John McWhorter whose book, Winning the Race, came out ten years ago:

It’s not that there is “something wrong with black people,” but rather, that there is something wrong with what black people learned from a new breed of white people in the 1960s. . . . The nut of the issue is that [people who see racism everywhere] want neither justice nor healing. What people like this are seeking is, sadly, not what they claim to be seeking. They seek one thing: indignation for its own sake. . . .

Two new conditions were necessary for alienation among blacks to so often drift from its moorings in the concrete and become the abstract, hazy “race thing” that whites just “don’t get.”

One condition was that blacks had to be prepared to embrace therapeutic alienation, and ironically, this could only have been when conditions were improved for blacks. When racism was omnipresent and overt, it would have been psychological suicide for blacks to go around exaggerating what was an all-too-real problem.

Second, whites had to be prepared to listen to the complaints and assume (or pretend) that they were valid. This only began during the counter cultural revolution, within which a new openness to blacks and an awareness of racism were key elements. . . . Many whites were now, for the first time, ready to nod sagely at almost anything a black person said. And in that new America, for many blacks, fetishizing the evils of the White Man beyond what reality justified was a seductive crutch for a spiritual deficit that we would be surprised that they did not have. It was the only way to feel whole. Even blacks less injured were still injured enough to let the loudest shouters pass, as bards of their less damaging, but still aggravating, pains. (4, 5, 7)

What will Galli’s successor write about evangelicals and race in twenty-five years when she discovers John McWhorter?

Third-Degree Racism

Published on by D. G. Hart19 Comments

I was listening to Glenn Loury and John McWhorter yesterday on whether Donald Trump is racist. During the podcast, Glenn threw out the notion that something Trump said was third-degree racism, but not the full blown variety.

That got me thinking about why it is the case that when conservative Presbyterians talk about race, racism is an all or nothing proposition. Think back to Leon Brown’s post (discussed here) about racism in NAPARC communions after the shooting of Michael Brown:

This is why we need a movement of the Holy Spirit. Amid the horrific realities of Mike Browns all over the United States, and even the incidents that occur which are not broadcast (e.g., unjust acts taken against poor whites), we must demonstrate that the church is different. We are unlike the world, which can segregate, almost immediately, based on the color of one’s skin and other factors. Have you noticed that is what has occurred in the death of Mike Brown? Why do you think the pictures and quotations from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. have newly surfaced on the internet, largely from ethnic minorities? Why do you believe pictures from the 1950’s and 1960’s have been newly awakened? For many, history continues to repeat itself, and that angers African-Americans and other minorities. Perhaps we, specifically Christians, are also angry at the lack of representation in the ‘Christian’ blogosphere from others in the majority culture. Robin Williams is okay, but apparently Mike Brown is not.

Without dodging or answering the question of whether blacks and whites should necessarily worship together (since historically black communions are such a part of the African-American experience), is it possible to distinguish what transpires among the Ferguson, Missouri police force from what happens on a Sunday morning in your average PCA congregation in the middle of Tennessee? Is one perhaps first-degree racism and the other third-degree? If we can make distinctions when it comes to the loss of human life, can’t we distinguish among the levels of prejudice that humans manifest?

So here’s the proposal:

Banning students from attending a Reformed seminary on the basis of race is first-degree racism.

A search committee at a white congregation placing an application from an African-American licentiate is second-degree racism.

Church members choosing on their own to worship in congregations where the majority of members are the same race is third-degree racism.

Do any of the overtures before the PCA reflect such differences? I’m merely asking.

Maybe He Needs MmmeeeeeEEEEEE

Published on by D. G. Hart38 Comments

Scott Sauls may have spent too much time with Tim Keller, the author of Center Church, because Pastor Sauls seems to think that he is at the center of Presbyterianism. The reason for saying this is that he admits that he needs to hear from those with whom he differs. Here’s his list:

I don’t know where I would be without the influence of others who see certain non-essentials differently than I do. I need the wisdom, reasoning, and apologetics of CS Lewis, though his take on some of the finer points of theology are different than mine. I need the preaching and charisma of Charles Spurgeon, though his view of baptism is different than mine. I need the Kingdom vision of NT Wright and the theology of Jonathan Edwards, though their views on church government are different than mine. I need the passion and prophetic courage of Martin Luther King, Jr., the cultural intelligence of Soong Chan Rah, and the Confessions of Saint Augustine, though their ethnicities are different than mine. I need the reconciliation spirit of Miroslav Volf, though his nationality is different than mine. I need the spiritual thirst and love impulse of Brennan Manning and the prophetic wit of GK Chesterton, though both were Roman Catholics and I am a Protestant. I need the hymns and personal holiness of John and Charles Wesley, though some of our doctrinal distinctives are different. I need the glorious weakness of Joni Eareckson Tada, the spirituality of Marva Dawn, the trusting perseverance of Elisabeth Elliott, the longsuffering of Amy Carmichael, the honesty of Rebekah Lyons, the thankfulness of Anne Voskamp, the theological precision of Kathy Keller, and the integrity of Patti Sauls, though their gender is different than mine.

In the world of hipster Protestantism this is cool but not Snapchattingly trendy. If I were to assemble my own list of those with whom I disagree theologically but who have shaped my thinking in profound ways it would include: Orhan Pamuk, Joel Coen, Tom Stoppard, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H. L. Mencken, Aaron Sorkin, Wendell Berry, Michael Oakeshott, Edward Shils, David Simon, John McWhorter, Andrew Sullivan, Louis Menand, David Hackett Fischer, Henry May, Richard John Neuhaus, Joseph Epstein, and Ethan Coen. See what I did there? I went outside Christian circles with most of that list. Do I get points for being really cool and cosmopolitan?

The thing is, none of those writers really helped me understand the nature of the Christian ministry as Presbyterians understand it. I’ve learned greatly from these figures about being human, which comes in handy for overseeing a congregation or participating in a church assembly. But I don’t look to these people for my life in the church.

But here’s the kicker for Pastor Sauls: what if he learned from those with whom he disagrees about Presbyterianism like Old Schoolers? What might his ministry look like then?

My sense is that because Pastor Sauls via Keller thinks he is in the heart of Presbyterianism or conservative Protestantism or evangelicalism, he already has his Presbyterian bases covered.

And in that case, boy does he need to understand the nature of disagreement.

Where is the PCA's Glenn Loury?

Published on by D. G. Hart108 Comments

Recent travels sent me again to the inter-web in search of podcasts that inform, provoke, and keep me awake. My latest favorite source for vigorous exchanges is The Glenn Show at bloggingheadstv.com. You can watch the discussion on-line — it’s the weird images of talking heads in Skype session. Or you can download a show as an audio recording. (Who knew that mp audio formats had climbed to 4?)

Glenn Loury is an economist who teaches at Brown University, an on-and-off-again black conservative intellectual who broke with the Republic establishment (as I understand it) over the reception of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. A frequent guest on Glenn’s show is John McWhorter, an African-American linguist at Columbia University who wants to defy political categories but because he is often critical of the left he gets pigeon-holed a conservative. (Full disclosure: the missus and I heard McWhorter at a book festival in Philadelphia a few years ago and from the audience I asked him if he had seen The Wire and if so who is favorite character was. He became enthusiastic about The Wire in a George Whitefield way and declared Omar his favorite character. I was delighted in my frigid Old Life way.)

The reason for asking about the PCA is that the sort of ideas about race relations you hear from Glenn and McWhorter you don’t hear in NAPARC circles. Consider, for instance, a couple of columns that McWhorter wrote this summer at the Daily Beast. First, McWhorter opines that all the talk of structural racism may be well meaning but it doesn’t actually do anything (and whenever I read the African-American pastors I am left wondering what I’m supposed to do):

No, the fact that Hillary Clinton is referring to structural racism in her speeches does not qualify this as a portentous “moment” for black concerns. Her heart is surely in the right place, but talking about structural racism has never gotten us anywhere significant. Hurricane Katrina was 10 years ago; there was a great deal of talk then about how that event could herald some serious movement on structural racism. Well, here we are. There was similar talk after the 1992 riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict and, well, here we are.

The old-time Civil Rights leaders did things; too often these days we think talking about things is doing something. But what, really, are we talking about in terms of doing?

Who among us genuinely supposes that our Congress, amidst its clear and implacable polarization, is really going to arrive at any “decisions” aimed at overturning America’s basic power structure in favor of poor black people?

So instead of merely talking about structures that to abolish would require a slate almost as clean as the one the Puritans encountered when the landed at Massachusetts Bay (and yes, I know they weren’t the first ones there), McWhorter recommends real policy. Reformed Protestants won’t like these but they do give specifics to those who want to know what might be done:

1. The War on Drugs must be eliminated. It creates a black market economy that tempts underserved black men from finishing school or seeking legal employment and imprisons them for long periods, removing them from their children and all but assuring them of lowly existences afterward.

2. We have known for decades how to teach poor black children to read: phonics-based approaches called Direct Instruction, solidly proven to work in the ’60s by Siegfried Engelmann’s Project Follow Through study. School districts claiming that poor black children be taught to read via the whole-word method, or a combination of this and phonics, should be considered perpetrators of a kind of child abuse. Children with shaky reading skills are incapable of engaging any other school subject meaningfully, with predictable life results.

3. Long-Acting Reproductive Contraceptives should be given free to poor black women (and other poor ones too). It is well known that people who finish high school, hold a job, and do not have children until they are 21 and have a steady partner are almost never poor. We must make it so that more poor black women have the opportunity to follow that path. . . .

4. We must revise the notion that attending a four-year college is the mark of being a legitimate American, and return to truly valuing working-class jobs. Attending four years of college is a tough, expensive, and even unappealing proposition for many poor people (as well as middle-class and rich ones). Yet poor people can, with up to two years’ training at a vocational institution, make solid livings as electricians, plumbers, hospital technicians, cable television installers, and many other jobs. Across America, we must instill a sense that vocational school—not “college” in the traditional sense—is a valued option for people who want to get beyond what they grew up in.

Note that none of these things involve white people “realizing” anything. These are the kinds of concrete policy goals that people genuinely interested in seeing change ought to espouse. If these things seem somehow less attractive than calling for revolutionary changes in how white people think and how the nation operates, then this is for emotional reasons, not political ones. A black identity founded on how other people think about us is a broken one indeed, and we will have more of a sense of victory in having won the game we’re in rather than insisting that for us and only us, the rules have to be rewritten.

In another column, McWhorter explains why we don’t hear specific policy proposals in church circles but instead hear a lot about the vagueries of white supremacy. He argues that anti-racism is a religion (and that plays directly to the Reformed case against racism) and it is dogmatic:

The Antiracism religion, then, has clergy, creed, and also even a conception of Original Sin. Note the current idea that the enlightened white person is to, I assume regularly (ritually?), “acknowledge” that they possess White Privilege. Classes, seminars, teach-ins are devoted to making whites understand the need for this. Nominally, this acknowledgment of White Privilege is couched as a prelude to activism, but in practice, the acknowledgment itself is treated as the main meal, as I have noted in this space. A typical presentation getting around lately is 11 Things White People Need to Realize About Race, where the purpose of the “acknowledgment” is couched as “moving the conversation forward.” A little vague, no? More conversation? About what? Why not actually say that the purpose is policy and legislation?

Because this isn’t what is actually on the Antiracists’ mind. The call for people to soberly “acknowledge” their White Privilege as a self-standing, totemic act is based on the same justification as acknowledging one’s fundamental sinfulness is as a Christian. One is born marked by original sin; to be white is to be born with the stain of unearned privilege.

The proper response to original sin is to embrace the teachings of Jesus, although one will remain always a sinner nevertheless. The proper response to White Privilege is to embrace the teachings of—well, you can fill in the name or substitute others—with the understanding that you will always harbor the Privilege nevertheless. Note that many embrace the idea of inculcating white kids with their responsibility to acknowledge Privilege from as early an age as possible, in sessions starting as early as elementary school. This, in the Naciremian sense, is Sunday school.

This will keep you awake on a long drive to Baltimore.

No one has to agree. But if some folks want us to have a conversation about race in the Presbyterian and Reformed churches, are those same people calling for the conversation willing to listen to the comments of Glenn Loury and John McWhorter? And if others are wanting the church to confess their sins, might they want to consider Anti-Racism as the religious source more than the gospel?

Let the conversation go on but make sure we include all the voices. They are only a download away.

What Would John McWhorter Say?

Published on by D. G. Hart71 Comments

For one, he might say that this afternoon’s conversation about race, sponsored by the Gospel Coalition, is not really necessary:

Despite frequent claims that America “doesn’t want to talk about race,” we talk about it 24/7 amidst ringing declamations against racism on all forms. Over the past year’s time, I need only mention Trayvon Martin, Paula Deen, Cliven Bundy, and Donald Sterling. Over the past few years, three of the best-selling and most-discussed nonfiction books have been Isabel Wilkerson’s chronicle of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, Rebecca Skloot’s book about the harvesting of a black woman’s cancer cells (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), and Michelle Alexander’s invaluable The New Jim Crow. And let’s not forget recent major release films such as The Help, 12 Years a Slave, and The Butler.

Can we really say that these are signs of a nation in denial about race, racism, and its history? . . .

In exactly what fashion could 317 million people “reckon” or come to certain eternally elusive “terms” with racism? Especially in a way that would satisfy people who see even America’s current atonements as insufficient?

The haziness here recalls doctrine more than proposal. The reality is something less proactive than reactive, not an initiative but a condition—a matter of identity. Four-hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow left us unwhole, and unfortunately susceptible to a baseline sense of existential grievance as a keystone of being black.

The only question is why things would not have come out this way. But, because we are faced with a matter of identity, a sense of self, we have to ask: would the “coming to terms,” once it had happened, be enough?

Imagine: “Okay. The acknowledgment has been expressed. I accept it, and now, finally we can move on.”

I just can’t see it. More likely would be “They better not think they can just say sorry and be done with it.” One imagines the tweets: “400 years and it’s all over with a Conversation? #ItsNotOver.”

So perhaps the real conversation should be about policies about which the Gospel allies have little to say (unless they are moonlighting as think-tank wonks after exegeting Habakkuk by daylight):

The War on Drugs must end, since with its demise, acrimonious and often lethal interactions between the police and young black men would cease as a foundational experience of being black. In schools, few are aware of how magical the effect would be of reading programs that actually work for poor kids, as I have written about here. We must utilize the reality of Obamacare to bring black America into a new relationship with the health-care system. Efforts to coach poor black parents on child care, having results in programs such as the Harlem Children’s Zone, should be taken to scale.

All of those things can happen—and in fact, are happening . . .

McWhorter might also remind Jemar Tisby when he brings up the subject of the microagressions of racism that today’s slights are of a different order from what Civil Rights advocates experienced:

To be a concerned black person, many have internalized, requires harboring a feeling that something large-scale is just out of our reach; that we exist as a people eternally unfulfilled; that a shoe has yet to drop. Our identities, so battered by 350 years of brutality and dismissal, feel incomplete. We seek a true sense of nobility, and we find it in the ironically comforting status of the underdog.

Make no mistake—we must protest where it is called for. I reject the “black bourgeoisie” argument that we must quietly wait things out while keeping our chinny-chins up. But today it’s increasingly difficult to characterize black America’s problems as a matter of a single problem or cause, in the way that desegregation was. The efforts that today’s problems require can’t create an identity as easily. One seeks something larger, something that, crucially for us with our history, heals. Hence the idea of something as large-scale as an ever-elusive, overarching conversation America somehow “never” has. The concept has an operatic sense of catharsis in it. It’s even true that some Americans think race plays less of a role in black people’s fate than it does. None of this, however, belies the fact that what is being proposed is a kind of stage-managing of social change that no human group has ever sought—and which, I submit, black America needn’t seek, either.

I suspect that civil rights leaders before, roughly, 1966 would be perplexed by today’s calls for a conversation about race, especially one that imagines all Americans taking and passing some kind of national history test on institutional racism, past and present. The old heroes fought against segregation and discrimination because it was impossible for any but a few black people to get ahead otherwise. But Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, and the others did not seek a perfect society. Today, we seem to be doing just that: we cannot be whole as long as nonblack Americans are going about with their summer snacks, unmindful of our past. But are human societies ever so exquisitely mindful? Could they be?

I wish the Gospel allies had invited McWhorter to the discussion but I doubt he would have accepted.

Back to the Regularly Schedule Outrage

Published on by D. G. Hart39 Comments

So as I was cooking yesterday morning in preparation for last night’s congregational hymn sing and December (near Christmas) pot providence supper, I had NPR on with Diane Rehm leading a group of men through a discussion of the Senate’s report on CIA torture. And I’m thinking, first Ferguson, then Ray Rice, then Eric Garner. How do I manage my outrage?

Well, in the world of grief followed by getting on with life, the way Diane decided to ease her listeners back from a view of the CIA far too close to Homeland was by devoting the second hour to Mr. Rogers? Imagine how African-American listeners might have felt if Diane had decided to follow an hour-long discussion of Ferguson with a segment on holiday weight-gain. Would that topic trivialize the injustice?

Maybe you devote two hours to U.S. intelligence and its abuses.

Or perhaps, if you have a job to do and you put together roughly 250 programs a year, you don’t feature outrageous events all the time. After all, with all the sin, misery, and injustice in the world, we could be outraged most of the time (as the missus suspects I am). The fact that we are not more outraged more of the time may be an indication of how relatively good life is this side of glory. As anyone who grieves the loss of a loved one knows, the world doesn’t stop and you don’t get a day off from adult responsibilities just because dad died. Maybe even the day after you observe the burial of your father you clean the bathrooms. Does that trivialize the grief? Or is it possible to live a life based on intense grief (or outrage)? Experimental Calvinists please don’t answer.

Upon further reflection, though, with help from Ross Douthat, John McWhorter, and Diane Rehm, I have come to wonder whether the extensive discussions of race relations and police brutality disguise a much bigger problem — the use of force by people whose self-interest coincides with justifications for it.

Ross Douthat, for instance, thinks that Ferguson does not make the case for improved policing policy that many do:

Ferguson is turning into a poor exhibit for the policy causes that it’s being used to elevate. We will never know exactly what happened in the shooting of Michael Brown, but at this point the preponderance of the available evidence suggests that this case is at the very least too ambiguous, and quite possibly too exculpatory of the officer involved, to effectively illustrate a systemic indictment of police conduct. Meanwhile, while I continue to believe that the looting and vandalism in Ferguson do not, by their mere existence, prove that a full-metal-jacket police response to the protests was wise or productive — quite the reverse; I still think it contributed to a dynamic of escalation — the fact remains that if you’re trying to make a case to anyone on the center-right (or the non-ideological public, for that matter) that American police forces have become too aggressive, too armored-up, too bullying, a story in which they ended up failing to prevent the destruction of businesses and property is not necessarily the ideal exhibit to introduce.

Douthat points to John McWhorter, always a good read, who thinks the Brown and Garner incidents point to a problem about police-community relations:

The right-wing take on Brown, that he was simply a “thug,” is a know-nothing position. The question we must ask is: What is the situation that makes two young black men comfortable dismissing a police officer’s request to step aside?

These men were expressing a community-wide sense that the official keepers of order are morally bankrupt. What America owes communities like Ferguson — and black America in general — is a sincere grappling with that take on law enforcement that is so endemic in black communities nationwide. As Northwestern philosopher Charles Mills has put it, “Black citizens are still differentially vulnerable to police violence, thereby illustrating their second class citizenship.”

This is true. It is most of what makes so many black people of all classes sense racism as a key element of black life, and even identity. Now, some suppose that the reason for what Mills refers to is black people’s fault, that black people are just too dumb, lazy, and immoral to understand what it is to be decent citizens. Most would disagree, however, which logically implies that something has gone terribly wrong from the other end — from law enforcement itself. The President’s statement on the verdict got at this point: what we must get past is larger than the specifics of what happened between Wilson and Brown.

And in that vein, as someone who has written in ardent sympathy with the Ferguson protests, I find this hard to write, but I have decided that it would be dishonest of me to hold back. As I have written endlessly, America will never get past race without a profound change in how police forces relate to black men.

The one point of disagreement I have with McWhorter stems from the reality that today U.S. police forces include many African-American men and women. This is not like the televised incidents of white police beating up protesting blacks in urban neighborhoods on fire. African-Americans are now — can you say President Obama? — on both sides of the law. In which case the issue of race may actually cloud the matter of privilege. Do Bill Cosby or Jesse Jackon’s children face the same relations with people who enforce the law as do Michael Brown and Eric Garner? And do the poor white residents of Hillsdale, Michigan fare better with the local police than the children of African-American University of Michigan professors do with Ann Arbor’s finest? Of course, in some parts of urban America, African-Americans are disproportionately situated in communities that police treat differently. But is that merely a function of race or is it much more a case of wealth?

Irrespective of the incidents in New York and Ferguson, the United States faces a much bigger problem — perhaps the granddaddy of them all — a branch of the federal government that has almost unlimited power (in the name of national interest) to brutalize people. But before we let ourselves off the hook as innocent bystanders to these incidents, Noah Millman has a useful reminder that many of us asked for this after 9/11:

I’ve written before about the overwhelming fear that afflicted the country in the wake of 9-11, and how, perversely, exaggerating the severity of the threat from al Qaeda helped address that fear, because it made it acceptable to contemplate more extreme actions in response. If al Qaeda was really just a band of lunatics who got lucky, then 3,000 died because, well, because that’s the kind of thing that can happen. If al Qaeda was the leading edge of a worldwide Islamo-fascist movement with the real potential to destroy the West, then we would be justified in nuking Mecca in response. Next to that kind of response, torture seems moderate.

Willingness to torture became, first within elite government and opinion-making circles, then in the culture generally, and finally as a partisan GOP talking point, a litmus test of seriousness with respect to the fight against terrorism. That – proving one’s seriousness in the fight – was its primary purpose from the beginning, in my view. It was only secondarily about extracting intelligence. It certainly wasn’t about instilling fear or extracting false confessions – these would not have served American purposes. It was never about “them” at all. It was about us. It was our psychological security blanket, our best evidence that we were “all-in” in this war, the thing that proved to us that we were fierce enough to win.

You can probably make a similar point about the police and community relations. Lots of Americans, black and white, vote for candidates who will be tough on crime. When that toughness becomes something from which we would prefer to avert our eyes, do we side with candidates who say, “let’s treat criminals charitably”? I don’t think so.

And maybe that is why Diane Rehm has a nationally syndicated radio show and I don’t. You program both outrage and sunny-side up sentimentality. That’s how we get through the g-d day.