A Letter to a Young Church Planter
RTS Papers / Pastoral & Social Ethics / Summer 2018
Marxism and Race
Marxism is materialistic-economic determinism attempting a comprehensive sociology. For Marx, the old social orders were props. Family, property, law, religion, and morality were all creations of the class in power to keep the lower classes content and fearful in their squalor. What was most real were materially defined classes: groups of people defined by material attributes. Now how does this relate to the matter of race? Remember that our working definition of racism was to judge “by the color of skin rather than by the content of personal character.”
Racial determinism is a species of materialistic determinism, focusing on racial differences as the chief determining factor to personal action. As a scientific model it would predict that if one belongs to x racial group, then any number of thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors follow along those population lines. Christianity views those as moral-spiritual attributes.
Three terms need to be understood to see how Marxist deconstruction takes us to the present moment. Critical race theory began in American law schools in the 1980s, but its foundations are older because it assumes the Marxist conception of class and power. Oppressed groups may hate and even be guilty of prejudice, but, strictly speaking, they cannot be “racist.” The formula is simple: Race + Power = Racism, originally, “prejudice plus institutional power.”
Whereas racism used to mean an idea of superiority-inferiority based on race, now racism became the exercise of power by the propertied class. Only such a power-over-class can be racist.
In Marxism, the idea of “power” is always equivalent to oppression. Individuals responding to morality is not real. What is real is material classes relating to power.
‘White privilege’ is not merely a label for a historical phenomenon. A classic example is suspicion for shoplifting. Blacks are often suspect; whites have no such anxiety. Any honest student of history would recognize that whites have had access to countless similar advantages in Western societies throughout the modern era. Seldom would one hear this term outside of an obscure academic discussion if this was the sole way that the term functioned. However, it is not currently used as an honest theoretical label. Instead it is used as a card in a game of identity politics. It projects a guilty “power over” status, so that to “have” white privilege is to be discredited in any conversation about race.
Further aggravating this phenomenon is the concept of intersectionality, coined by Columbia University law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. Group attributes such as race, sex, class, and sexual orientation all converge as an aggregate, one might say crassly, as “points” to be tallied on a spectrum of most to least oppressed. Members of victimized groups arrive at an “intersection with other forms of subordination,” and there find common cause. The upshot is that, whether in a legislative decision or public discussion or hiring practice, if the person or group with most of these “oppression points” is not recognized, then a further act of oppression has occurred.
Now how does this come home to roost in the present controversy in the church?
Consider a document from a recent social justice initiative which says: “Racialized outcomes do not require racist actors. Focusing on individual instances of racism can have the effect of diverting our attention from the structural changes that are required in order to achieve racial justice.” Pay careful attention to this point. On the surface, this creates a dilemma for repentance. How else can a white man repent but as an individual for specific instances of racism?
But now we are informed that “focusing on individual instances of racism” is unhelpful. If the traditional concepts of repentance are brought in as a response, attention is directed back toward a vague notion of structural complicity. But what is meant by “structural changes” to begin with? When we probe for an answer, we find that these are either institutional or economic. In short, “racial justice” equals social leveling.
This is why specific sins are rarely enumerated. If particular crimes of racism could be repented for, then the individual party is “off the hook,” so to speak. Interestingly, one concrete sin has been mentioned: namely, the assassination of Dr. King. No one is suggesting an elaborate conspiracy with James Earl Ray or the KKK or FBI or whatever. Rather the wider sin is our parents and grandparents being “complicit” in the hate that led to it.
Broad statements like “I’m saying the entire society killed Dr. King” are made, characterizing that society by white supremacy. The next moment, a careful verbal parachute descends: “I don’t need all white people to feel guilty about the 1950s and 60s—especially those who weren’t even alive. But I do need all of us to suspect that sin isn’t done working its way through society.” What Reformed Christian would disagree with that latter statement? If any white Christian replied, “But my parents had not yet immigrated to this country” or “But my parents marched in the Civil Rights movement on King’s side,” it is to no avail.
Do you not see that repentance on such terms is impossible? That is because atonement is not even possible. We cannot make the stains of slavery or segregation go away, nor resurrect ancestors for a fair trial. No one should understand this better than the Reformed theologian.
Atonement is particular or it is no atonement at all. Atonement means making things right - real, specific things - real justice meted out for real sins. Shall not the judge be aware of the charge?
If the defendant asks what he is on trial for, what do we make of a prosecutor who can only deconstruct his question as more “White Gaze,” and when the white defendant asks, “What on earth is white gaze?” to be met with the retort, “But that is exactly what a white person would say.” These are mind games, not overtures of peace.
The specter of a generalized “white supremacy” raises the question of worldview. Who gets to decide to what extent we must “disassociate” ourselves from the theology of the past? One academic remarks, “If we have been gagged and disempowered by theories, we can also be loosened and empowered by theories.” Worldviews, or “theories,” were a structure that the power class exerted over others. One overall intellectual construct may be replaced with others. Dabney is “easy pickins,” but what if the whole Puritan tradition could be lined up against the wall and white-shamed? And the power of deconstruction could be expanded from there.
Race versus Culture / Injustice versus Inequalities
Another crucial aim of deconstruction is to equate race to culture without remainder: If skin color x, then line-of-reasoning x. In a Christian worldview there is fundamentally one human race. In an evolutionary worldview, it is difficult to guarantee that the races evolved in one line so as to disentangle Darwin’s theory from racist theories. Thomas Sowell comments that, “Race is one of the ways of collectivizing people in our minds.” That is legitimate, so long as individuality is retained.
Now is culture tied to race or ethnicity? Certainly, but that is only the natural consequence of proximity and mimicry. People stick with people like themselves, and most do not analyze their worldview. The consequence of those two perfectly natural phenomena is that racial groups do tend to “have a culture,” or a set of norms. But notice that the moment we say that one “must have” culture x because they belong to race y, this brings us right back to our definition of racism. Piper mercifully states the obvious, “that there is more than one black perspective on the racial situation in America.”
But it follows from racial determinism to charge a black man who deviates from socialism for being “less black.” That is why the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court was not hailed as black advancement, and why Voddie Baucham was not invited to any of these recent conferences. They are disqualified as “black” because their ideas have transcended “that culture.” If too many people find out about “blacks like them,” then the Marxist use of race could be challenged.
Now if it is structural change that is required, we have more definitional mischief: inequalities equal injustice. Sowell remarked that, “Equality, like justice, is one of the most fateful - and undefined - words of our times … The abstract desirability of equality, like the abstract desire of immortality, is beside the point when choosing which practical course of action to follow. What matters is what we are prepared to do, to risk, or to sacrifice, in pursuit of what can turn out to be a mirage.”
John Murray wrote that, “Equality is not a fact of God’s providence … Unequal distribution of wealth is indigenous to the order God has established and to the natures with which he has endowed us.” Why should the natural abilities and proven merit of individuals not be chief controlling factors in hiring, promotion, and investment? Additional presuppositions lurk behind our most cherished utilitarian notions. Is social leveling more beneficial to persons than, say, reward for hard work and creativity? I do not know of anyone who has made such a case in a compelling way. It is simply assumed.
It is undeniable that equality of opportunity, as the principle behind Brown v. the Board of Education (1954), at some point became equality of outcomes by the 1980s. In between those two times emerged the program of Affirmative Action and the larger political-economic settlement called The Great Society. Note that the language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act speaks of rights “without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin,” whereas the newer demands are precisely with discrimination on these grounds. Moreover it has been persuasively argued that affirmative action hurts blacks.
Sowell has coined the term “cosmic justice” to refer to what is being called “social justice” in most quarters today. “Cosmic justice is not simply a higher degree of traditional justice, it is a fundamentally different concept.” It is egalitarian in orientation. It assumes “that some segments of society, through no fault of their own, lack things which others receive as windfall gains, through no virtue of their own.”
Borrowing from John Rawls’ notion of positive justice where “undeserved inequalities call for redress,” the traditional Western notion of negative justice is reduced to a defense of the status quo. On the contrary, “social justice” maintains that there is no genuine equality before the law if any inequalities exist. Consequently the label began to be used for “doing something” about any inequality-injustices. This explains the misleading way that models of “social problems” are juxtaposed. It is said that liberals tend to lay the blame at structural injustices, while conservatives tend to lay the blame at personal responsibility. So we have a battle of two warring sociologies: structuralism and voluntarism. The truth is that this dichotomy often assumes a Marxist definition of social justice up front.
The comparison begins with the assumption that if one focuses on the collective as the solution, one is concerned with “public justice,” but if one focuses on the individual as the solution, then one is concerned with “private morality.” But why should we accept these terms?
This ignores the possibility that mass societal structures are often socialist structures. They were designed to solve social ills by transferring wealth away from private institutions to the public sector. In other words, it is taken for granted in these debates that “structures” equal the private institutions upheld by the bourgeoisie, yet the actual structures that have been running the lives of minority communities for three generations now (socialist structures) are never included in the definition, and therefore never held up to scrutiny.
The numbers tell a different tale than the nebulous social visions. It seems to me that Christian ethics ought to balance claimed concern for “justice” with proven results: the existential and situational perspectives together, to use Frame's language. If we examine the data from the decades following Emancipation to the turn of the millennium, we find indicators such as intact marriages rates, employment rates, median income, and percentage of population over the poverty line all rising for blacks in direct proportion to minimal government interference. Why is it not assumed that advocates of capitalism are for “racial justice” and proponents of socialism “racists,” if the data shows that liberty has been much more beneficial to blacks?
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