At the Anxious Bench, historian Paul Thompson dreams “of a post-Trump world as the soil for a new and improved DEI 2.0 arising phoenix-like from the ashes of DEI 1.0.”
I find much to admire in his description of “DEI 2.0,” but also a few points where I disagree. Here’s Thompson:
My fantasy is that whenever that time comes, theologians and humanities and social science scholars at explicitly evangelical universities will finally be empowered enough to play a meaningful role in birthing a DEI 2.0 appropriate for American society in general (not just Christians) that is rooted in such concepts as 1) oppression is a real thing that results from the sinful abuse of power by the powerful, 2) that sin (including racism and sexism) can become systematized and woven into social structures and produce measurably negative impacts on communities and individuals, 3) the biblical/Hebrew concepts of mishpat, sedeq, and shalom, and 4) that seeks to work independent of America’s two-party system as a “third way,” but yet influence those holding elected office. Will you dream with me?
I’m encouraged by those first three points, but concerned about the fourth one. The phrase “third way” is always a red flag, but Thompson sets it off with quotation marks that may indicate he recognizes the many dangers it carries — whether as an unprincipled, Hegel’s-bluff meet-the-flat-earthers-half-way muddle or as the “above the fray” sophistication of those who steadfastly refuse ever to take responsibility by taking sides.
Thus while his fourth point sets off alarm bells, those mitigating scare-quotes make me willing to play along. So, OK, yes, I am happy to dream along with Dr. Thompson. What’s next?
Well, he offers 10 more suggestions toward this new approach to affirming diversity (I’d prefer pluralism, but OK), equity, and inclusion. The latter half of that list is sketchier — brief nods in the direction of some ideas. But the first few items are where he concentrates his energy, and I’m not sharing what he’s dreaming here:
1. reject (and reconceptualize) the premise of many critical theorists that “all oppressions (or oppressed peoples) are linked” and therefore must be treated as a unified whole. For decades, African American evangelicals like myself have been displeased by the way gender and sexuality movements have piggybacked on the political and legal legacies of the African American civil rights movement. Large numbers of those who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. would not recognize the ideology underneath much of today’s DEI/DEIA agenda, and vice versa.
Ugh. The problem here again involves the ambiguous use of quotation marks. “All oppressions (or oppressed peoples) are linked” is not a quotation, but a (clumsy) paraphrase that serves here, in part, to mask who it is that is being paraphrased-and-not-quoted. That would be people like Kimberly Crenshaw and Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, among others. (Marsha P. Johnson would also like a word.)
The unnamed people he’s paraphrasing here would also absolutely include Bayard Rustin — which, inconveniently for Thompson, disproves and destroys the claim he makes in the final sentence there.
It’s really not possible to “reject the premise” of intersectionality without rejecting the premise of subsidiarity and without rejecting the premise of the network of mutuality at the center of MLK’s theology and praxis. This hostility to intersectionality is especially odd coming from a historian whose focus has been on “the nineteenth-century African American experience with temperance and prohibition.” That’s not an area I have any deep scholarly knowledge about, but to this layperson, it has always seemed like the temperance and suffrage movements could’ve benefited greatly from not viewing themselves as in competition with/against civil rights for Black people and from refusing to understand or accept that “All oppressions are linked.”
We should also note that while terminology like “intersectionality” is relatively recent, the idea underlying this more recent terminology and critical theory and such is not at all new. It can be detected in that ancient biblical refrain that instructs us to see widows, orphans, strangers, and the poor as disparate, but interconnected, “oppressed peoples.”
And, of course, throughout history the idea of “intersectionality” has been understood and exploited by every successful oppressor, from Pharaoh to the local schoolyard bully. Oppressors rely on divide and conquer not unite and conquer, because their success depends on their ability to convince those they dominate and subjugate to “reject the premise” that all oppressions are linked.
Anyway, perhaps Point No. 2 will be more promising.
2. work to build consensus around standardized definitions of such terms as racism, anti-semitism, and of DEI that is rooted in sound historical scholarship. We must stop calling people racists! We must stop saying blacks and other minorities “can’t be racists!” People are not racists; people discriminate, but systems are racist, and racism describes what we see when policies create different outcomes that correlate strongly with racial identity.
This is both the quirkiest and most adamantly exclamation-pointed item in Thompson’s list. It’s also the one that has me swallowing back that “Amen!” I uttered in response to his first Point No. 2 up there at the top, when he called on white evangelical scholars to recognize “that sin (including racism and sexism) can become systematized and woven into social structures and produce measurably negative impacts on communities and individuals.” That excellent and necessary corrective — sin can and will become systematized — here seems to swing into overcorrection and the claim that these sins “racism and sexism” somehow exist exclusively in their systemic forms.
Coupled with the rejection of intersectionality and subsidiarity — the refusal to allow any consideration that “racism and sexism” are often linked injustices — I’m really starting to worry about the shape and coherence of Thompson’s proposed DEI 2.0. I’m particularly puzzled by the contradiction of insisting that “people” cannot be racist while also insisting that “blacks and other minorities” can be. (I’m going to chalk that one up to Thompson not succeeding in saying whatever it was he was trying to say there.)
There’s something deeply disorienting about Thompson’s claim here in that it is based on the opposite error to the one that has doomed decades of earnest evangelical talk of “racial reconciliation.” Those efforts had us desperately pleading with our evangelical brethren to understand that “racism” did not exclusively involve individual animus and individual bigotry, but that it was a structural, systemic aspect of the Powers That Be in this fallen world. Communicating that without sounding like a dense academic paper on critical theory could be difficult, but gradually we learned to address this without resorting to terms of art like “disparate impact,” which proved difficult to grasp for that target audience.
So it’s jarring, here, to read an explicitly evangelical condemnation of racism that contends it refers only to disparate impact and does not at all include sinful personal animus — that contends, instead, that there is no such thing as sinful personal animus.
This is, to be blunt, wrong. It’s just factually wrong. “We must stop calling people racists!” might be a defensible pragmatic case if the point was that focusing on individual attitudes might prove counter-productive to both overall outcomes and individual persuasion. But what Thompson asserts here is that individual persuasion — individual repentance — is not necessary because “people are not racists.”
This is, as a matter of fact, wrong. It is untrue. People are racists. Quite a few of them.
Steven Miller, for example.
Miller is a racist. He is an individual who carries and verbally expresses his animus toward whole classes and categories of his neighbors based solely on what he perceives to be their “race” or “racial identity.” Miller is also, as an individual, bound by and bound in racist systems — by “policies [that] create different outcomes that correlate strongly with racial identity.”
But also Miller has chosen, as an individual, to seek power to control those racist systems, and to ensure that its policies create even more extremely different outcomes. He has chosen to do this because he is, as an individual, racist (adjective) and because he is, as an individual, a racist (noun).
These terms are applied to Miller not as invective, but because they best and most accurately describe him.
The only way one could make an attempt to say that Steven Miller is not racist or that he is not a racist would be to theorize that he is, instead, merely a cynical political demagogue who is attempting to harness the populist political power that comes from making an explicitly racist appeal to voters who find such an appeal to be appealing. We can debate whether such a distinction would be meaningful in any way — he’s not racist, he’s just acting exactly as a racist would act in service of some other agenda. And we can debate the long-term prospects for success from such an approach — are there enough people who find this racist appeal appealing for this approach to succeed over time?
But what we cannot debate is that there are, in fact, some number of people who do, in fact, find this appeal to be appealing.
Those people are racist. The support of such people is how this sin gets embedded in systems and structures and laws and customs.
Those systems and structures cannot be wholly understood apart from individual belief and sentiment any more than that individual belief and sentiment can be wholly understood apart from those systems and structures.
(Do I have to quote that Orwell essay on Charles Dickens again? Don’t make me do it. You know I will.)
Thompson pads out the rest of his list with less energy and attention than he invests in those first two items, but the remainder of that list offers some worthy considerations toward his dream of “a new, improved DEI 2.0.”
I’m not convinced, though, that any of those positive contributions would be able to overcome the initial obstacles provided by a rejection of interconnection and the strange denial of undeniable individual sin.
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