I've been following this conversation because "critical race theory" is a topic I've been hearing a lot about without ever hearing anyone explain precisely what they mean by that term. From what George is saying, it sounds like I'm not alone in that -- that the definition is kind of nebulous and squishy.
Frankly, I wish there weren't such a thing as critical race theory. It's too important a topic to be left to academicians, and this is a good example of what happens when they hijack a conversation. My experience with academics in the social sciences is that they try to develop frameworks for understanding large, complex issues like this. Some of these frameworks are better than others, but all of them are artificial constructs that should not necessarily have to define the conversation. The problem is that, once you start talking about some scholarly framework, the discussion becomes defined by the merits of the framework rather than by the actual topic the framework was meant to address.
And I would argue that you don't need the framework of CRT to understand or talk about this issue. In fact, some of these frameworks actually make the issue HARDER to understand, because many academics interject their own interpretive lens (such as Marxist theory, to cite one example) where it's not necessary and doesn't belong.
Therefore, I would scrap the whole CRT framework as unnecessary and unhelpful. This, however, does not mean that the issue that CRT was meanto address isn't real. If CRT was meant to shed light on institutional racism, then let's just talk about institutional racism.
Here's my two cents on that: Institutional racism is real. That doesn't mean racism is everywhere, even if it is ever present. It doesn't mean that everyone who works within systems that have helped perpetuate racism is a racist. It just means that we should think about how racism has become institutionalized in this country. Then, once we recognize what happened, it means we should consider what we can do about it.
Three quick examples:
Did you know that the GI Bill (which enabled my father to become the first in his family to attend college) originally excluded black veterans? I didn't know that until a few years ago. That shameful bit of institutional racism has since been rectified, of course, but we still feel the effects of it. For example, the network of connections my father and uncle made in college, thanks to the GI Bill, were instrumental in helping me get an interview that led to my first job. But a black kid with my same skills and experience probably would not have had that advantage when I graduated from BU in 1979, because his father wouldn't have been able to go to college on the GI Bill.
Did you know that most black people originally weren't eligible for Social Security? As the bill was working through Congress, it faced serious opposition from Southern representatives. To get the support that would ensure passage, FDR agreed to a compromise -- all domestic and agricultural workers would be excluded. That meant a majority of African Americans at the time would be excluded, and that was the intent.
Did you know that, in many parts of the country, black people were excluded from buying houses in certain neighborhoods thanks to informal agreements by banks and Realtors? And when they could get loans, they usually were on less favorable terms than white people with the same income could get.
One result of all of these examples is that they made it harder for black people to accumulate wealth and pass it to their children than it was for white people with the same skills and financial means. And those are all examples of how institutional racism has distorted opportunities for Americans. There are many more examples, but these will do for now.
I would argue that the first step is simply to acknowledge what happened. Acknowledging it doesn't mean that it's my fault or your fault, or that we supported such things. We just need to confront the truth.
The second step is to talk about how, if possible, we address institutional racism, both the lingering effects of past racism and current examples of institutional racism. That is surely the harder part of the conversation, and it is possible to have reasonable and honest disagreements about what should be done. But we still need to have the conversations.
Let's just do it minus having to deal with all the baggage and mess of some artificial construct like critical race theory.
And, yes, I believe that churches both contributed to institutional racism (actively and passively) while many churches also led the right against racism. We don't need to be binary in thinking about this. Acknowledging the anti-racist efforts of many US Christians does not absolve American Christianity as a whole, however. Our faith is rooted in the premise, articulated repeatedly by Paul, that within the body of Christ there can be no artificial distinctions between male/female, slaves/free persons, cultural Jews/Greeks -- and, by obvious extension, no distinctions based on race. And yet, far too often, American churches, which enjoyed religious freedom that the early Christians did not have, nevertheless violated this basic organizing principle, both through active enforcement of segregation and by too frequent failure to use their freedom to speak out forcefully as American churches have done on so many other social/moral/political issues from abolitionism to temperance to abortion. In my own United Methodist denomination, it goes back to a decision in the early 1800s to make black congregants in Philadelphia sit in segregated balconies; they took the hint and formed the AME Church, which remains separate to this day. When the North-South breach that erupted over slavery in the 1840s was healed in 1948, all black Methodist churches, regardless of whether they were in Texas or Illinois or New York, were put into one segregated jurisdiction called the Central Conference. I abhor those decisions; I accept no responsibility for them and feel no personal guilt over them. But I cannot ignore that these actions, made by others of the "favored" skin color, created effects that built walls of separation between me and many of my African American brothers and sisters who claim the name Methodist, and those walls of injury and mistrust are hard to tear down. But it's up to me and other white Methodists to work toward tearing down those walls and repairing the damage our white Methodist forebears created, because the alternative is just to let it fester by saying that it's not my responsibility since I'm not responsible for creating the problem.
"Free your ass and your mind will follow." -- George Clinton
R version - CRT is just Marxist philosophy with the word "class" replaced with "race," and the word "capitalism" replaced by "white supremacy."