Darrow Miller and Friends

Postmodern Racism: Ideological Social Justice

  1. Racism and Black Lives Matter: Worldview Reflections
  2. The Human Race, Antidote to Racism!
  3. Two Forms of Racism
  4. Postmodern Racism: Ideological Social Justice
  5. What is “Whiteness”?
  6. Racism Is in the Human Heart
  7. Three Important Distinctions Regarding Racism
  8. Hope in the Midst of Racist Despair
  9. Envy, Emulation and Racism
  10. Envy, Emulation and Racism, part 2

In the 21st century the definition of racism has radically changed. The old definition of racism was the inferiority or superiority of a group of people based on their skin color or race. Black Lives Matter and others are promoting a new definition, prejudice plus power, which sees racism as systemic or structural where the laws and institutions of a society create unequal outcomes between whites and people of color.

This second form of racism, Ideological Social Justice, is based in Critical Race Theory or Social Marxism. It is manifested most powerfully today through the organization Black Lives Matter. This racist anti-racist group professes to oppose racism, yet their methodologies often demonstrate a postmodern racist ideology. Working from Critical Theory, they deny the modern understanding of reason and science as “white race” ideology, and see everything in terms of social construction.

As DNA president Scott Allen has written,

They believe science, reason, and evidence are a ‘white’ way of knowing and that storytelling and lived experience is a ‘black’ alternative. I’ve found it very hard to reason with people who have absorbed critical race theory. They always come back to personal stories and anecdotes, for which they feel very strongly. Emotion is a huge part of this. These personal experiences cannot be challenged. Yet from these, they extrapolate to the whole (the system, the institution, etc.), but if you make the case using evidence and reason that that extrapolation can’t be supported, they just discount the effort. In the past, reason and evidence seemed to carry some weight in disputes. Not so much now.

“We are trained Marxists”

The underlying framework of Ideological Social Justice reveals it for what it is: Cultural Marxism. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors was asked in an interview if BLM needed a more clear ideological structure. She responded that “we actually do have an ideological frame … we are trained Marxists” and “super versed on ideological theories.” (You can watch her saying that here.)

Black Lives Matter exemplifies this “new” racism. Let me explain.

Intersectionality was popularized by civil rights advocate and lawyer, Kimberlé Crenshaw. Adia Harvey Wingfield writes that Crenshaw, “introduced the theory of intersectionality, the idea that when it comes to thinking about how inequalities persist, categories like gender, race, and class are best understood as overlapping and mutually constitutive rather than isolated and distinct.”

In other words, society is encouraged to subdivide and frame one’s identity at the narrower point of the intersection. No longer is it simply black and white, straight and homosexual, men and women. Now, a black lesbian is differentiated from a white lesbian. An Hispanic, homosexual male is a different class of person from a transgender Asian.

Instead of a framework that unites people, we are witnessing divisions of people into smaller and smaller aggrieved groups. This is the application of Cultural Marxism and, tragically, marks the rise of what can only be called a “new tribalism.”

What unites people in the intersectionality framework is oppression. These people are victims of white privilege. They are all oppressed by the systems white European males have created. It is white European males who are the racists. What makes them racist? Their whiteness. In today’s climate, the way to become nonracist is to be woke, to admit that because you are white, you are racist, and you are expected to literally bow the knee to the ideology of BLM.

Victimization accrues power. The more victim categories you can accumulate, the higher your “intersectionality” score.

A new tribalism

In the biblical worldview, all lives matter. No one is defined by victimization. But the mantra “Black Lives Matter” does not mean all black lives matter. For example, the lives of black youth killed by other black youth do not matter. Only the lives of young, unarmed, black men killed by white cops matter. And their lives matter, not because they are made imago Dei; that is a racist idea. No, they matter because of their high level of victimization, their intersectionality score.

Herein is the new tribalism, an example of microtribalism comprised of very small intersectional victim groups. To BLM, the organization and the movement, not all black lives matter.

BLM does not care about all human life. It does not even care about all black lives. It does not care about the 1000+ black babies killed every day in the United States by the racists at Planned Parenthood, or the 7,500 black youth killed every year by other black youth.

Why do they not care? Because these deaths do not support their narrative, which is only concerned with the very small victim class of young, unarmed, black youth killed by white cops. But the contrast in sheer numbers is too great to ignore. As Scott Allen writes in Race in America: Two Opposing Narratives,

In 2019, according to the Washington Post database of police shootings, in a nation of 330 million people, a total of 14 unarmed black Americans were fatally shot by police. These were not innocent bystanders gunned down by racist cops; most were attacking police officers at the time.

According to the Washington Post, halfway through 2020, 8 unarmed black men and 11 unarmed white men have been killed by police.

What is a human?

Do the lives of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, George Floyd and others matter? A resounding yes! Why? Not merely because they represented unarmed black men killed by white cops. Their lives matter because they are human beings.

But why do only their lives matter? Why don’t the 363,705 black babies killed every year by abortion matter? Again, it’s about the BLM narrative. The stories of these young black men killed by white cops accrue power for the BLM organization. They are very visible “symbols” of the police brutality that is the primary leverage point of the organization.

BLM has learned how to weaponize this particular victim group to promote their narrative. Their goal is to destroy Western civilization (which, in their view, was created by racist white, European males). If you are white, by definition, you are racist. A white cop is a racist cop. Herein is the anti-racist racism.

In this frame, what is a human? An expendable pawn in an ideological movement, a slave to groupthink. A human has no individual value, is not free to think or speak independently. The group must think and speak as one.

The lie: Your individual life means nothing. The victim class to which you belong is used to promote a Marxist  ideology rooted in Atheism and denies Judeo-Christian theism (a moral God and moral universe) and the Western Civilization founded on that theism.

Consider another excerpt from Nancy Pearcey’s Finding Truth.

[Cultural Marxism] reduces individuals to puppets of social forces … it implies that individuals are powerless to rise above the communities to which they belong. It … dissolves individual identity into group identity.

Individuals are little more than mouthpieces for communities based on race, class, gender, ethnicity and sexual identity.

The new racism

We see this every night: protests on the one hand and the riots on the other. (For more on this go here and here.)

The new definition of racism is prejudice plus power. It applies only to white people by virtue of their monopoly on cultural power. Only white people are racists. Victims are nonracist. Thus the new racists are “nonracist.”

Human beings are without substance. Our identity has neither transcendence nor physical reality; it is simply a social construction. Race is institutional. It is the system constructed by white, European, Christian males to maintain power.

In When Marxist Mobs Come for the Liberals Daniel Greenfield writes,

The radicals tearing down statues see religion as enslaving, not liberating. That’s one possible reason so many churches and synagogues were vandalized during the Black Lives Matter riots across America.

Emancipation once meant that slaves were freed from slavery and that the nation was freed from the sin of slavery. That 19th century political theology has long since been discarded to argue that emancipation, for the former slaves or for the nation, is impossible. The conjunction of critical race theory and black nationalism contend that the original sin wasn’t really slavery, but whiteness.

America will be as racist and oppressive as it is white. The only way to advance is through destruction.

  • Darrow Miller

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About 
Darrow is co-founder of the Disciple Nations Alliance and a featured author and teacher. For over 30 years, Darrow has been a popular conference speaker on topics that include Christianity and culture, apologetics, worldview, poverty, and the dignity of women. From 1981 to 2007 Darrow served with Food for the Hungry International (now FH association), and from 1994 as Vice President. Before joining FH, Darrow spent three years on staff at L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland where he was discipled by Francis Schaeffer. He also served as a student pastor at Northern Arizona University and two years as a pastor of Sherman Street Fellowship in urban Denver, CO. In addition to earning his Master’s degree in Adult Education from Arizona State University, Darrow pursued graduate studies in philosophy, theology, Christian apologetics, biblical studies, and missions in the United States, Israel, and Switzerland. Darrow has authored numerous studies, articles, Bible studies and books, including Discipling Nations: The Power of Truth to Transform Culture (YWAM Publishing, 1998), Nurturing the Nations: Reclaiming the Dignity of Women for Building Healthy Cultures (InterVarsity Press, 2008), LifeWork: A Biblical Theology for What You Do Every Day (YWAM, 2009), Rethinking Social Justice: Restoring Biblical Compassion (YWAM, 2015), and more. These resources along with links to free e-books, podcasts, online training programs and more can be found at Disciple Nations Alliance (https://disciplenations.org).
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