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On May 14th of this year, U.S. Representative Burgess Owens of Utah introduced a House resolution aimed at restricting the teaching of Critical Race Theory in federally-funded institutions of education. The full text of the resolution (H. Res. 397) is as follows: “Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that Critical Race Theory serves as a prejudicial ideological tool, rather than an educational tool, and should not be taught in K-12 classrooms as a way to teach students to judge individuals based on sex, race, ethnicity, and national origin” (Owens, 2021).
Owens is a Mormon and one of only two Black Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and his resolution is being sponsored exlusively by other Republicans, who, it seems, want and intend to censor this thing called Critical Race Theory. Being that the Republican Party is now the party of the traitor Donald Trump and American evangelical Christians, I find myself instantly intruiged by whatever they might want to censor, and so Critical Race Theory will be the subject of today’s essay.
For further context, the day before I recorded this episode, the Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight aired a segment in which host Tucker Carlson suggested that the teaching of Critical Race Theory would lead to a white genocide. Having specifically referenced Critical Race Theory as the causal ideology here, Carlson says, “How do we save this country before it becomes Rwanda?”
Carlson stated as well that the term Critical Race Theory itself “doesn’t mean anything” and that it is “designed to confuse you.” The thesis of Tucker’s segment is that broad accusations of racism against white people—which, he seems to believe, are founded in Critical Race Theory—are equivalent to scientific racism, the historical use of pseudo-science to describe and explain the alleged inferiority of non-white people. Curious that Critical Race Theory is then, in Carlson’s view, simultaneously meaningless and laden with the condemnation of white people. During the segment, Carlson played a clip of General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking military officer in the United States Armed Forces, who states that, just as one should read Marx to understand communism (to which he is inimical), one should read Critical Race Theory to understand such things as the January 6th insurrection, which was perpetrated almost exclusively by white Americans. Carlson’s rebuttal to this highly-decorated and distinguished war veteran is that General Milley “is not just a pig; he’s stupid” (Carlson, 2021).
Evangelical Christians and nationalist Republicans in America seem to want you to know exactly two things about Critical Race Theory: one, that it is an ignorant and hateful ideology which will lead this country to ruin; and two, that you should take their word for it and not confirm or deny point one by learning anything about it on your own. In which case, if you mean to take their advice, you should definitely not listen to today’s episode. I’ll be looking into the history and tenets of Critical Race Theory and the opinions of its critics, and seeking to determine whether it is indeed a “prejudicial ideological tool,” as the GOP suggests.
First a look into the general context surrounding the aforementioned legislation.
About a year ago, on May 25th of 2020, George Floyd, a Black American and resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was murdered by the police officer Derek Chauvin while being arrested on suspicion of paying for cigarettes using a conterfeit $20 bill. I discussed this incident in one of my essays last year: “Satanism, Religion, and Racial Hegemony.” The news, both prior and subsequent to George Floyd’s murder, has been rife with stories of unjustified killings of Black Americans by police, and that murder in particular sparked a wave of protests against police brutality—protests in which I participated—as well as public conversation about the status and legacy of racism in the United States. Critical Race Theory, which first appeared in the late 80’s, has become a central focal point of these conversations. Arguments both about Critical Race Theory and originating from within Critical Race Theory itself are quite varied and often very nuanced, but speaking very generally, activists argue that it’s a valuable tool for understanding and rectifying the American racial divide, while critics charge that it is fundamentally erroneous, opposed to foundational American principles, and actually serves to worsen racial tensions in this country.
I’ll start my analysis with a quick timeline leading up to the emergence of Critical Race Theory in public discourse. It’s going to seem largely irrelevant at first but bear with me.
In the late 18th century, Scottish philosopher David Hume denied the possibility that we can know anything purely through the use of reason, such as regarding matters of cause and effect. We throw a baseball at a glass window, and when the glass shatters, we say that the ball hitting the window caused it to shatter. But all we actually observe is the glass shattering at the same time the ball hits it; we must infer, through the use of reason, that the ball hitting the window caused it to shatter. Hume claimed that our beliefs on that point are a matter of natural impulse rather than a matter of knowledge. Believing in cause and effect in this way is simply the way that our minds are geared to work. This made Hume a radical empiricist, beliving that knowledge only comes from direct experience, as opposed to the rationalists, who believe that we are capable of knowing things through the use of reason beyond just tautological relations between ideas.
Hume’s contemporary, the Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, seized upon this notion that our mind actively structures our perception of reality and used it to reconcile empiricism and rationalism by suggesting that we can use reason know things about the phenomenal world—the world as it appears to us—because the mind structures our experiences according to certain concepts. He wrote his most famous work, Critique of Pure Reason, by way of critically examining the structure of reason and delimiting its power within this context (Grayling, 2019).
In the mid-19th century, the German economist and philosopher Karl Marx wrote what he called a critique of political economy. He used the dialectical method of another philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to apply Kant’s notion of critique to the prevalent economic system of his day and ours, for which he coined the term capitalism. Note that, with Marx, this Kantian notion of critique acquired an additional, normative dimension: the objective was not only to understand society but also to transform it.
Marx predicted that capitalism would necessarily self-destruct, leading to a communist utopia. When, after the communist revolutions of the 20th century, this failed to occur, and seeing that the whole project had gone quite badly and contrary to Marx’s predictions, a group of thinkers otherwised inclined towards Marxism started analyzing and responding to what had happened. This was the Frankfurt School, which included, among others, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Theodor Adorno. From the work of the Frankfurt School thinkers emerged Critical Theory, which took the Kantian/Marxian notion of critique and applied it to society as a whole: how is society structured? Why? How has it come to be this way? Whom does it benefit? Whom does it neglect or oppress? Can and should it be transformed in any way, and if so, how?
Critical Theory came to be applied to a myriad of specific social structures over the coming century, during which time it was also significantly influenced by the various philosophical and cultural movements broadly characterized as postmodernism, which is, speaking in the most general terms, a reaction to and critique of the values of modernity and the Enlightenment. Postmodernism is an intricate subject in itself and I’ll cover more details on that topic as needed throughout the essay.
The 1970’s saw Critical Theory applied to legal theory in the form of Critical Legal Studies, and shortly thereafter, several thinkers, primarily Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado, seeing that the civil rights movement of prior decades had largely stalled out or even, with regards to some policies and structures, reversed, applied Critical Legal Studies to the social concept of race, thus establishing Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017).
According to Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2017), written by Richard Delgado with Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory is a diverse field of thought but holds in general to the following presuppositions:
First, racism is normal rather than aberrational. This does not mean that racism is at all desirable, but rather that it is the default operational mode for our society and not any sort of unintended or unexpected malfunction in the system. For Critical Race theorists, it’s not weird or unusual or unexpected that incidents of racism occur or that racist structures and institutions exist; they believe, rather, that such things are baked into the cake of the Western liberal order, and that such incidents and structures are to be expected and will continue to be expected until foundational changes are made to the existing order.
Second, the racial hierarchies extant in our society serve this society’s dominant interests. These hierarchies are not coincidental or natural in origin but rather directly serve the interests of those with power. Beyond this, Derrick Bell has proposed the thesis of interest convergence, which states that apparent progress in racial issues and civil rights have historically occured only when such progress serves those same dominant interests.
Third, race is socially constructed. Racial distinctions made by society are not natural and biological but rather exist intersubjectively, within the realm of social perception and consensus. Something being socially constructed does not mean that it’s imaginary or relative, but rather that it arises as part of human social reality rather than as a direct consequence of biology, geology, or the laws of physics. Money is another example of a social construct: money is real, but only as a matter of social agreement.
Fourth, the history of the social construction of race is differentially related to other social factors, such as labor demands. Delgado and Stefancic write, “Critical writers in law, as well as in social science, have drawn attention to the ways the dominant society racializes different minority groups at different times, in response to shifting needs such as the labor market” (ch. 1, para. 19).
Fifth, a given identity classification (e.g. “Black” or “gay”) does not constitute one’s essential nature but rather exists at the intersection of one’s other identity classifications, which determine one’s social standing and circumstances only in combination. This is to say that a gay Black person, for example, experiences unique conditions that are not experienced by Black people who are not gay, or by gay people who are not Black. A gay Black person’s experience will be distinct from the mere sum of gay experience plus Black experience. This concept is called intersectionality.
Sixth, the “unique voice of color,” which posits that oppressed minorities have access to knowledge inaccessible to the dominant group. “Minority status…” Delgado and Stefancic write, “brings with it a presumed competence to speak about race and racism” (ch. 1, para. 22).
Additionally, according to Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory is fundamentally revolutionary: “Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law” (ch. 1, para. 6).
Taken in themselves, I find nothing among these presuppositions and attitudes that is objectionable or even very surprising. I’m certainly not seeing anything that I think would lead us to a white genocide, as Tucker Carlson suggested. I’ll note that I haven’t found myself in agreement with every idea, argument, or thesis that I’ve encountered within Critical Race Theory, but I can at least say that I agree with it at the foundational level. But given Critical Race Theory’s revolutionary nature, neither is it surprising that certain groups would want to oppose or censor it. Over the remainder of the episode, I’ll be looking at two recent books that take an oppositional stance towards Critical Race Theory. The first, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay (2020), is aimed at general audiences, while the second, Fault lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe by Voddie T. Baucham Jr. (2021), is targeted towards evangelical Christians.
Cynical Theories is a survey of various theoretical frameworks that have emerged in philosophy and the social sciences over the last half-century, including postmodernism, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and Critical Race Theory. The objective of the book, in its own words, is “to present a philosophically liberal critique of Social Justice scholarship and activism” and to argue “that this scholarship-activism does not further social justice and equality aims” (p. 20). By “philosophically liberal,” they’re not referring to liberalism in terms of the American Democratic Party, but rather the general political philosophy which places a high value on individual liberty. Liberalism, in this sense, is an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, and this is the standpoint from which Pluckrose and Lindsay critique postmodernism, Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory, and the Social Justice movement in general. Not that they are opposed to or critical of social justice as a general concept—indeed, they defend social justice as central to liberalism—rather, they oppose its particular contemporary manifestation. Their thesis is that contemporary social justice theories such as Critical Race Theory are, as a result of their unwarranted cynicism and skepticism, exacerbating the problems that they seek to alleviate, and that liberalism is the superior framework for addressing those problems.
Necessary to their argument is the claim that contemporary social justice theories are cynical and skeptical, and that their cynicism and skepticism is unwarranted. Neither word is ever defined, so we must assume they’re going off the dictionary definitions, cynicism being “an inclination to believe that people are motivated purely by self-interest” and skepticism being “doubt as to the truth of something.” In support of this assertion, Pluckrose and Lindsay identify two principles and four themes characteristic of postmodernism which they argue have manifested in contemporary social justice theories.
The first of these principles is the postmodern knowledge principle: “Radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism” (p. 31), and they define “cultural constructivism” as the claim that “all claims to truth are value-laden constructs of culture” (p. 32, emphasis original).
Let’s take a close look at this before moving on, because the assertion that postmodernism and contemporary social justice theories universally hold to this viewpoint is central to Pluckrose and Lindsay’s argument.
I’ll first note that the definition that they’ve provided for cultural constructivism entails an even stronger claim than the radical skepticism they’ve described. Skepticism is a suspension of judgement with regards to some claim or field of claims. If you make some claim p, and I am skeptical with regards to p, it does not mean that I reject p, but rather that I don’t think it’s justified to accept p; I accept the possibility that p may be true but I lack sufficient justification to make me certain about it. If it were true, as postmodernists allegedly say, that all claims to truth are value-laden constructs of culture, then one could actually bypass skepticism entirely and claim outright that neither objective knowledge nor truth are obtainable.
At this point in the essay, my original draft launched into a discussion of the postmodern knowledge principle itself, such as they describe it, but I quickly saw that there was no way I could contain a proper discussion of the matter within the scope of this essay. That will have to wait for another time. But it’s important to note that Pluckrose and Lindsay never actually argue against it themselves. This is the core of their overall rhetorical strategy: rather than making any substantive counterarguments, they state the claims they’re opposing and then move forward without further comment, apparently under the presumption that such claims are self-evidently absurd. They describe these claims using emotionally-loaded language (e.g. “cynical”), without argument, and confuse or draw false equivalences between the formal philosophical positions to which they are obliquely referring, creating straw man arguments.
To begin with, postmodernism is not really a proper philosophical position or school of thought in itself; when people refer to postmodern philosophy, they’re typically referring to what would probably better be described as poststructuralism, which often comments on or critiques postmodernism as an era of human history and as a broad socio-cultural movement. Pluckrose and Lindsay cite the French theorists Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida as being the central figures of postmodern philosophy, and, whatever terminology one uses to label their school of thought, their relationship to the concept of truth is complex, nuanced, intricate, diverse, and also warrants an essay in itself, but I’ll do my best to summarize.
We might look at the concept of truth purely in terms of its relationship to fact. Opening his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (2001; originally published in 1921), the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein stated that “The world is everything that is the case.” Further, he states that “The world is the totality of facts, not of things,” and that “The world divides into facts” (propositions 1, 1.1, and 1.2). This is to say that the world is a certain way, not just a collection of things but also a collection of their properties and relationships, and these various ways-that-things-are that constitute the world are called facts. My bed is not a fact, but my bed being in my bedroom is a fact. Whenever I say something that expresses a fact, such as “My bed is in my bedroom,” I have said something true. Truth, in this sense, is a property of claims, a property of the things that we say and write. My bed being in my bedroom is neither true or false; that’s just the way things are, but when I make a statement to that effect, the statement is true. Philosophers sometimes say that true statements correspond to facts. And if a certain claim is true, and if I believe and am justified in believing that that claim is true, then we say that I know that which is being claimed.
But truth also has a social function, one which is not equivalent to its relationship to fact. Consider someone who is being tried in court for having committed a certain crime. Whether or not this person is convicted and punished is ultimately dependent not on the truth of the matter as it relates to the facts of the matter, but on the truth of the matter as it is constructed by the social system of the court: it is possible that the person did not commit the crime but that they will be convicted regardless, and we see that this occurs in practice. Ideally, we want this social truth to align with the factual truth, but we also know that it doesn’t always work out that way.
Donald Trump lost the 2020 United States presidential election; tens of millions of Americans believe, to the contrary, that Donald Trump is the true President of the United States (Ipsos/Reuters Poll: The Big Lie, 2021). Many other Americans, including myself, believe that they are mistaken and insufficiently justified in this belief. Regardless, those who believe that Donald Trump is the true president speak, write, and act as though that claim corresponds to fact. Why? Why do they believe and act as if their claim is true when it isn’t? What it comes down to is that those who accept the claim and those who do not have different procedures for verifying whether claims are true. The claim has passed their verification procedures—for example, drawing spurious correlations between posts on Parler alleged to originate from QAnon with speeches made by Trump—but it has not passed our own verification procedures. We say that our verification procedures are superior, but this itself is a claim that we can only defend by recourse to those same verification procedures.
This does not mean that I am ultimately incorrect on this matter, or that I’m not justified in believing that I’m correct, or that Trump’s supporters are correct or justified in their beliefs about the election, or that no one can ever be correct or incorrect about anything, or that no one can ever know that they are, only that truth and knowledge operate for us in this social context in which it is constructed by us according to certain procedures, rather than simply existing for us as a universal, brute reality. For poststructuralists, it’s not that claims can never correspond to reality, or that we can never know whether they do (although individual poststructuralists or other philosophers may make that additional claim), but rather that, functionally, the word “truth” operates in such a way as I have described.
I have to admit that I’m not especially comfortable with this way of looking at truth. I find myself having to remind myself that the objective of framing “truth” in this way is not to get a better handle on the facts of the world, but to get a better handle on our social, intersubjective reality and the way that different groups construct what they call their knowledge of the world. I can idealize truth as correspondence with fact but that is not going to change the functional ways that the word is used by different groups, and that is the understanding of truth that the poststructuralists were interested in interrogating and deconstructing: if truth is socially constructed, then by whom? How? And for what purpose?
But as soon as we start asking those questions, we find ourselves interrogating the power structures of society, and Pluckrose and Lindsay assert that this is a mistake. Why? Nowhere in the book do they make a substantive argument on that point; it seems that their argument against interrogation of social power structures is that doing so would be cynical, though they don’t offer any argument that this is the case. But they’re also not wrong: poststructuralism and contemporary social justice theories often are cynical. But that doesn’t mean they’re mistaken. This is a recurring failure of the book’s rhetoric: the conflation of pragmatic concerns with the validity of the underlying argument. On page 131, Pluckrose and Lindsay state, “Always believing that one will be or is being discriminated against, and trying to find out how, is unlikely to improve the outcome of any situation.” They don’t make the claim that people aren’t being discriminated against, only that it is problematic for people to believe that they are, though they don’t specify exactly how. On page 133, they state, “…[I]nterpreting everything as racist and saying so almost constantly is unlikely to produce the desired results in white people…” They say nothing as to the validity of such interpretations; are they then suggesting that racism, even when truly present, should be ignored because to do otherwise would make white people feel bad? I doubt that that was their intention; the authors strike me as being rhetorically incompetent rather than malicious.
Pluckrose and Lindsay reject power dynamics as being significantly influential on the structure of society, but neither demonstrate that it isn’t nor offer any alternative explanation for why society is the way that it is. And since their arguments, such as they are, defend the existing social structure, what we have is dogma in defense of hegemony.
Cynical Theories has numerous other problems, but I’ve got another book on the chopping block: Fault lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe by Voddie T. Baucham Jr. Baucham is an American evangelical pastor presently working in Zambia, and, as I mentioned earlier, evangelical Christians are the target audience of his book. His thesis is that the Social Justice movement is a threat to Christendom because it presents an alternative gospel to the biblical gospel and an alternative justice to biblical justice. He supports this with a secondary argument, that contemporary social justice movements and theories are predicated on lies and falsehoods, that they are not what they claim to be, that they are not just, as justice requires truth.
After some preliminary autobiographical information, which I’ll return to further on, Baucham examines incidents of alleged racial violence against Black Americans by American police. With regards to individual incidents, he combs through them, using extensive citations to demonstrate that they have been misrepresented in the media. He is, in at least a few cases, apparently correct about this, but I don’t find these inaccuracies to be exculpatory, either of the police in the individual cases or of police violence in general. He then cites several examples of white people being unjustly killed by police under similar circumstances, by way of suggesting that cases of police murder of Black Americans are being cherry-picked to serve a narrative. This is a classic example of the fallacy of whataboutism; it may indeed be true that certain high-profile cases have been cherry-picked, but that does not necessarily mean that the narrative they support is false.
But by way of addressing that point, Baucham cites a paper by economist Roland G. Fryer Jr.: “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” the thesis of which is that the data do not provide evidence sufficient to reject the null hypothesis that there is, in general, no racial discrimination in officer-involved shootings. This paper, the history of its publication, and Baucham’s use of it are interesting in themselves. To begin with, Baucham cites the paper’s date as “forthcoming.” In itself, this isn’t unusual; academics often have access to their peers’ papers when they have been approved for publication but have not yet been published, and they will cite such papers in this fashion. What is unusual is that Baucham’s book was published this year and references events from 2020, while Fryer’s paper was officially published by the Journal of Political Economy in 2019.
What Baucham is citing, then, is Fryer’s working version of the paper, made public in 2016. Baucham quotes from the paper twice. The second of these quotes uses statistics that differ from the working version to the published version. The differences are minute and do not alter the paper’s conclusion, but do very slightly reduce the probability that the paper’s sample data are an accurate measure of the population. The first quote from the paper that Baucham uses is actually a partial misquote relative to the language in both the working version and the published version of the paper. The two versions of the paper, in their respective abstracts, both state “On the most extreme use of force—officer-involved shootings—we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.” Baucham’s quote states, “On the most extreme use of force, FOIS [meaning, “fatal officer-involved shootings”], we find no racial difference…”
Additionally, Baucham neglects to quote or mention the sections of the paper in which Fryer heavily qualifies his conclusions. One, Fryer’s data are “conditional on a police interaction,” which means that racial differences regarding whether police interact with someone in the first place are ignored. Two, Fryer’s paper found that there were “large racial differences” in nonlethal use of force by police. Three, Fryer found that those differences remain constant across escalations of force up to lethal use of force, at which point they, according to Fryer’s data, disappear. Four, Fryer spends over a page describing the numerous ways in which his data may be subject to selection bias and other biases and caveats. And despite all this, despite nothing in his paper suggesting anything of the sort, Fryer, who is himself a Black American, has no problem saying in his conclusion that “It is plausible that racial differences in lower-level uses of force are simply a distraction and movements such as Black Lives Matter should seek solutions within their own communities rather than changing the behaviors of police and other external factors” (Fryer Jr., 2019, p. 1259).
Fryer’s working paper was widely criticized. Baucham mentions this, stating that “…these findings and others have been attacked as biased, inaccurate, and downright racist. However,” Baucham continues, “they remain the best work on topic” (p. 50). I’m sure you won’t be surprised at this point to learn that Baucham does not substantiate this claim in any way. This is nothing less than intellectual malfeasance, and Voddie T. Baucham Jr., who claims that truth is the essence of justice and indeed the essence of God (pp. 41-42), is himself a liar and a fraud.
Recall that the thesis of Baucham’s book is that the Social Justice movement is a threat to Christianity because it presents an alternative gospel to biblical gospel, and an alternative justice to biblical justice. For Baucham, biblical justice means specifically atonement theology: humans are depraved and sinful as a result of the disobediance of Adam and Eve and thus deserving of eternal damnation, but God has rectified this by sacrificing himself on our behalf. “All other justice,” Baucham writes, “is proximate and insufficient” (p. 229). This is actually likely to be in accordance with the teachings of the historical Jesus, an apocalypticist who taught Palastinian Jews to get right with God and prepare for the coming Judgement. As to the biblical Jesus, for all that Baucham’s argument relies on that particular character, actual references to the teachings of Jesus are sparse. My copy of this book is a physical one and it lacks an index, so I haven’t been able to do a full search, but I’ve found in the entire book only three references to the speech of Jesus, and two of those are cited without quotation.
The one quote from Jesus that he presents is Matthew 10:34-36:
Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.
If Baucham (as well as Pluckrose and Lindsay) are right that Critical Race Theory and other social justice movements are creating or exacerbating divisions between people rather than healing them, then this quote would seem to be in full support of that, but Baucham interprets this quote to mean that “The Gospel is not something that merely sits on top of our identity. When we come to Christ, our identity is transformed completely” (p. 22). In other words, when one becomes a Christian, one’s other identity classes are… well, I’m not clear on that, exactly. Annihilated? Subsumed? In any case, Baucham is alleging that a Christian has no identity beyond being a Christian, but I don’t find his writings elsewhere in the book to be consistent with this.
Recall that one of the foundational presuppositions of Critical Race Theory is the “unique voice of color,” which stipulates that those of oppressed minorities have unique knowledge as a result of their unique experience. Baucham refers to this as “Ethnic Gnosticism,” Gnosticism being a heretical doctrine adjacent to early Christianity, and so this is in keeping with this thesis of Social Justice as a competing gospel. In the book’s fifth chapter, “A New Priesthood,” Baucham constructs several straw man arguments around this concept and then dismisses it. Curiously, however, the book’s first two chapters are autobiographical in nature, detailing Baucham’s experience as a Black American and a Black Christian, the message being that, if he was able to succeed as a Black man in America, then claims of oppression must be distractions or fabrications. This is fallacious, of course, but more to my point, if Baucham indeed believes that no one has access to unique knowledge as a result of their unique racial experience, why would he include two chapters expositing the unique knowledge he has access to as a Black man? He writes, in answer to those who might suggest that his views result from his being “out of touch with blackness and/or the black experience:” “…[T]hose people don’t know me. They don’t know my story. And, in fact, until you hear everything else I have to say, you don’t know my story either” (p. 20).
I don’t think it will surprise my audience to hear that defenders of the status quo use deception, straw man arguments, and hypocrisy to support their position, but why is this relevant to Satanism in particular? By way of answer, let us turn to the pages of John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost.
In the poem’s first book, Satan finds himself with his host in Hell, having been cast down and transformed into monstrous likenesses of their former selves for having rebelled against God. In the second book, a discussion ensues among the fallen angels as to what is to be done, and, open rebellion having failed, they seek a way to thwart God’s plans through guile and subterfuge. Satan then departs to learn what can be learned of Hell and of the world’s greater cosmology. Those demons remaining are charged to “render Hell more tolerable” (II:459-460) and to explore its geography and boundaries.
None of us chose who exactly we would be nor chose to be in this world in the first place. Our choices shape our identities but the circumstances of our birth were beyond our control. Nor did we choose the structure of the society in which we find ourselves, and we find our interests opposed to those of the hegemony, whose structural influence is much more substantial. Finding themselves in an analogous situation, the fallen host sought to understand their surroundings and circumstances so that these could be turned to their advantage. This is precisely the intention behind Critical Theory and contemporary social justices theories like Critical Race Theory. Using these tools, we find that society is structured so as to be profoundly racist, as racism is one of the tools used by the hegemony to serve their interests. This is indeed a cynical way of looking at society, but, I believe, an accurate one. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay suggest that liberalism is the answer to the racism that itself emerged from liberalism, but as activist Audre Lorde reminded us, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. And as her essay written under that title tells us, our differences must be “not merely tolerated,” as the traditional liberal view would endorse, “but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic” (2007). Voddie T. Baucham Jr. tells us that we should abandon all divisions between us and come together in Jesus, but this too is another tool of the hegemony, a way of redirecting our attention away from the means by which the hegemony oppresses us. Regrettably, I haven’t had space in this essay to cover actual praxis, the implementation of social critique towards social change. But that the hegemony is now seeking to ban certain critical discourses is strong evidence to me that they see those tools as threatening, and the tools that the hegemony finds threatening are exactly the ones that I want in my toolbox.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
Baghramian, M., & Carter, J. A. (2021). Relativism. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/relativism/
Carlson, T. (2021, June 24). Tucker Carlson: If “White rage” is a medical condition, how do you catch it? [Text.Article]. Fox News; Fox News. https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-if-white-rage-is-a-medical-condition-how-do-you-catch-it
Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. NYU Press.
Fryer Jr., R. G. (2019). An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. Journal of Political Economy, 52.
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