The Times Call For Courage

Courage is required to save our Republic.

Author’s note: this is the transcript of a speech I gave to the Hayward Fellowship of the North American Unitarian Association. It ties together a few themes I think about a lot: the dangers of Social Justice Fundamentalism, why I write, and the importance of courage. Enjoy!

If you would rather watch than read, here’s a video.

Hello!

I'm honored to be speaking to the Hayward Fellowship of the North American Unitarian Association. Today we're going to be talking about courage, and so I wanted to start by deeply commending you for your courage. Roy said that you're a breakaway group from the Unitarian Universalist Association, which has bought into Critical Theory and anti-racism and which has insisted, as happens in so many Critical Theory circles, that those were the only ethical principles.

Sometimes churches can fracture or divide over small things. In the Christian church, for example (of which I am a member), I've heard of churches splitting over issues like whether or not to allow dancing, or whether to play old hymns or new electric guitar. Those splits can reinforce the world's interpretation of us as fractious and divided.

But there are also important splits. Sometimes you need to stand up for the courage of your convictions, and refuse to say things that you don't believe in or to stand idly by while an organization tells the world that you believe things that you do not. In those cases, after deep and prayerful soul-searching, it can sometimes mean breaking away. That's what the North American Unitarian Association has done, and that's why I applaud your courage.

But I want to do more than just applaud you—I want to see if I can spell out just why your courage in this area is so important.

First, you're showing your community and the Unitarian Universalist Association that there's an alternative to Critical Theory and to so-called antiracism.

This matters. A lot of folks are drawn to antiracism because they genuinely want to oppose racism and they think this is the only game in town. Antiracists were really clever about what they named their ideology. I'm not saying they were nefarious; just that they were smart. After all, who doesn't consider themselves to be anti racism? Especially when people like Ibram X Kendi stand up there and say that if you're not antiracist, you must be pro racism.

Of course, Kendi's making a false dichotomy. And that's what you're showing; that there's more than one way to fight racism.

And this matters because the uncomfortable truth is that Critical Theory and antiracism, the ideology of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi and so many others, actually doesn't work. It doesn't work to reduce racism.

How do we know? Well for one thing, Robin DiAngelo openly admits it. In an interview a year or two ago, she said that "I don’t actually think I’m any less or more racist than anyone else, and that includes Donald Trump." 

Think about that. That's crazy, isn't it? DiAngelo has presumably been doing the work that she's telling all of us to do, and she's been doing it for decades. And after all of that, she still says that she's just as racist as anyone else.

The truth is that for some Critical Theorists like DiAngelo, the world can never really get better. The thorny problems of our time can never really be solved. It's a hopeless and defeatist ideology.

So why would we trust someone like DiAngelo to tell us how to fight racism? If I had a flu, I wouldn't go to a doctor who had had a persistent flu for the past 30 years and who told me that there's no good evidence that flus can ever be treated. It would be absurd.

Here's the truth: in the past decade since our society started to really adopt Critical Race Theory and antiracism, race relations have gotten worse. In 2011, 65 percent of African Americans thought that relations between white and black people were "very good" or "somewhat good." By 2021, that number had fallen to 33 percent.

And it's no wonder. Critical Theorists get on their bullhorns and tell us that literally everything is racist. The copper penny is racist because it's darker than the other coins (that's a real example; I'm not making that up). They say that the SATs are racist. Modern medicine is racist; as the authors of one article in the peer-reviewed biology journal Cell wrote, "today, Black scientists continue to suffer institutional slavery." That's right: institutional slavery. I'm not saying that racism has been fixed and is no longer a problem; but if you're saying that being a black doctor is just like being a slave working the cotton fields in the 1850s, that strikes me as a little bit of a stretch.

And then Critical Theorists and antiracists will insist that police have declared open season on African Americans. A recent study found that almost half of liberals believed that between 1,000 and 10,000 unarmed African Americans are shot to death by police every single year. The real number? About 17.

When Critical Theorists paint this apocalyptic picture in which everything is racist and nothing has gotten better, is it any wonder that African Americans are concluding that race relations are getting worse?

Antiracism (what Coleman Hughes actually calls "neoracism") also reifies and reinforces the distinctions between people of different skin colors. At many universities, black and white students have different graduation ceremonies. There's a graduation ceremony for black students, a graduation ceremony for Hispanic students, a graduation ceremony for Asian students. The underlying message is clear: we're separate people. We're too different to even go to the same graduation ceremonies, even when we graduated from the same school.

Some antiracists even oppose interracial dating. That was a real head-scratcher for me. Wasn't one of the big goals of the Civil Rights Movement to make a world where we could love and marry whoever we wanted, without worrying about artificial distinctions like skin color?

I always figured it didn't matter what your skin color was. What mattered was not how we look on the outside, but the deep and fundamental similarity we all share. We are all brothers and sisters, humans made in God's own image. 

But for a lot of antiracists and Critical Theorists, that's not how they see the world. The underlying theme of too many antiracists and Critical Theorists seems to be: the races are fundamentally separate, and never shall they meet. Or rather: they can meet, but only in narrow and tension-filled and stressful circumstances in which everyone walks on eggshells around everyone else. Does that sound like a vision for racial harmony to you? Because it doesn't to me.

So if antiracism and Critical Theory don't work to build the world of racial harmony, free from discrimination and prejudice, that we're all yearning for, is there another idea that does work? Yes. It's called liberal social justice.

What is liberal social justice? Rio Veradonir describes it like this:

"Liberal Social Justice can be summed up as the belief in the equality of individuals: equal treatment under the law, regardless of sex, race, sexuality, gender identity, religion, etc. This is what “social justice” traditionally meant, and it was how most abolitionists, civil rights campaigners, and LGBT rights activists used and understood the term, despite some internal disagreements within these movements."

Liberal social justice was what Martin Luther King Jr. talked about when he said, "As I stand here and look out upon the thousands of Negro faces, and the thousands of white faces, intermingled like the waters of a river, I see only one face—the face of the future.”

It's what queer black civil rights activist Pauli Murray advocated for when he said "I intend to destroy segregation by positive and embracing methods. When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them. When they speak out for the privileges of a puny group, I shall shout for the rights of all mankind.”

Liberal social justice works. It works beautifully. It's why we as a society have progressed in a mere few decades from the days of Jim Crow to having an African-American president. It's why we've progressed from the bad old days when white people tossed the n-word around like it was candy to today, when you can get fired for making racist remarks to your black coworker (and justifiably so).

It's why we as a society have come so far, so quickly, on gay rights. It's why a few decades ago, gay people were routinely smeared as pedophiles, including in government-sponsored PSAs; and now gay marriage is the law of the land.

Liberal social justice works for the precise reasons that Pauli Murray described. As humans, we're wired for tribalism. As author and persuasion expert David McRaney wrote, "we're a little bit pro-us and a lot anti-them." So when we see an outgroup, we're wired on some level to want to exclude them. Liberal social justice bypasses that tribalistic instinct by drawing a bigger circle to include the out-group. It doesn't tell us to think in terms of white Americans and black Americans, gay Americans and straight Americans; it just tells us to think in terms of Americans. It doesn't ignore our differences, but it focuses our attention on our shared similarities. That's a powerful bonding agent. It's a powerful antidote to prejudice.

Liberal social justice works. Antiracism and Critical Theory don't.

So how do we spread the message that Liberal social justice works? It takes courage. It took courage to split off from the Unitarian Universalist Association. It takes equal courage to stand up again and talk about what you've learned to other people who might not already agree with you.

And courage is in short supply these days. No doubt about it.

What is courage? Courage means choosing to follow our own discernment and our own convictions. Brene Brown says that to be courageous is "To speak one's mind by telling all one's heart." To have courage is to speak honestly and openly about our core convictions. And then to follow those convictions in search of a better world.

That's what you're doing. That's the courage that the Hayward Fellowship of the North American Unitarian Association has shown.

And, you're having courage in a way that matters. In a fight that matters.

One of the reasons that I care so much about this issue is that I was blessed to live in Kenya for a year. Nairobi is a cosmopolitan city, and that's where I lived. And our friend group comprised people from all over the globe. In our small Bible study, we had folks from Colorado and from Texas; from South Africa and from the Democratic Republic of the Congo; from the Netherlands and from Nigeria. We had people of all different races, backgrounds, and walks of life. And we got along beautifully. We recognized each others' differences, but our friendship and love was built on a deep foundation of our shared humanity.

I'm not saying that Kenya or Nairobi is perfect. But that group represented the kind of racial harmony that I think we're all striving for.

After a year in Kenya, I came back to the United States. And it was jarring. I saw signs at my local elementary school offering different back to school nights for white parents and black parents. I saw graduation ceremonies segregated by skin color. Two of my close friends are a woman from the Philippines and a man from Kenya. When they started dating, none of us thought anything of the fact that their skin colors were different. They're happily married now and trying to have what I have no doubt will be a beautiful baby. But in the US, I saw antiracist and Critical Theorist commentators casting suspicion on the whole idea of interracial marriage. As an article in Vice put it, "If you’re trying to start a mixed raced family, sit down and deeply interrogate your intentions."

This is not progress. It is regression. It breaks my heart to see our great country being riven apart along racial and gendered lines; to see it becoming more divided. To see separate graduation ceremonies for people of different skin colors, to see books like Ijeoma Oluo's So You Want to Talk About Race that insist that white people and black people can never truly understand each other. 

If some of the antiracist commentators who I've read saw my friend group in Kenya, I have no doubt they would label us "problematic."

But it's not too late to turn away from this regressive path that we're on. It's not too late to build a world of racial harmony. All it takes is something that you at the Hayward Fellowship of the North American Unitarian Association already have in spades: courage. The courage to speak up.

Because this matters too much to be silent.

Thank you for your time.

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