Many people refer to Derrick Bell as the father of Critical Race Theory (CRT). He worked tirelessly to promote a racially driven philosophy of law during his tenure as the first African American professor at the Harvard School of Law (1971-1990). He wrote books and articles. He spoke at conferences and even staged protests to seek to legitimize CRT in the American consciousness. Those who agreed to the presence of systemic racism in the United States were said to have “woken up” to the endless oppression of minority groups. Those who disagreed were dismissed as narrow-minded racists.
One political scientist named Adolph Reed Jr. heard Derrick Bell speak at a Harvard conference in 1991. He remembered that Bell made the audacious claim that African Americans had made no progress in society since the end of the Civil War. Mr. Reed dismissed Bell’s comments as “more a jeremiad than analysis.” A jeremiad is a “long, mournful complaint” made against a perceived injustice. In Bell’s case his complaint was negated by the fact that he was a tenured African American Harvard professor.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Derrick Bell’s teaching was lacking in logical clarity. You see the philosophy he believed in did not require it. Critical Race Theory is not like other social sciences that encourage analysis and critique. No, CRT is the opposite of analytical. It is subjective. It does not try to explain why something exists. It merely declares that systemic racism is real and then looks for ways to support it. Common sense is not needed with CRT. The only sense that is needed is one that looks for racism under every stone.
The Oxford dictionary of Critical Theory defines the theory like this, “The word critical should thus be understood to mean the opposite of analytical. It refers to a set of concepts whose reach is always greater than their grasp. Critical Theory is interested in why human society failed to live up to Marxist enlightenment and became what it is today, unequal, unjust and largely uncaring.” This pessimistic perspective on society feeds off a victim mentality. As long as people buy into the myth of the oppressed and the oppressor it can survive, but when the bubble of critical theory bursts, the subjective foundation of CRT crumbles.
The apostle Paul warned the church in Ephesus about false teachers who would promote “myths and endless genealogies.” He warned Timothy that they “do not understand either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.” (1 Timothy 1:7 ESV) The Bible reveals CRT to be a myth because the Bible teaches all humans belong to one race, the race that God created in His image (Genesis 1:27). If proponents of CRT would accept the bible’s unifying outlook on humanity then the divisive worldview of CRT would come to an end.
When Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) coined the term “critical theory,” Darwinian thought was very much in vogue. Race was not seen as a social construct, but as a scientific category that separated one group of people from another. Geneticists did not know that 99.9% of human DNA is shared by all humans, regardless of differences of skin color or ethnicity. The myth of racial division was maintained because people had been taught to think in terms of the color of their skin and not the content of their character.
Thankfully, geneticists are now calling for “race” to be disbanded as a category. Michael Yudell, a professor of public health at Drexel University in Philadelphia wrote, “It’s a concept we think is too crude to provide useful information, it’s a concept that has social meaning that interferes in the scientific understanding of human genetic diversity and it’s a concept that we are not the first to call upon moving away from.”
As with any myth, there comes a time when truth makes it fade away. I for one am tired of people referring to each other by the color of their skin. We need to realize race is not a helpful category for humans. Darwin had no problem referring to people by their skin color because he thought certain people came from chimps and others from gorillas! He promoted referring to people like animals because he thought that is where we came from!
I won’t be surprised if evolutionists continue to use racist terminology to describe people, but Christians should not. According to the Bible, there is only one race, the human race. We believe humans are made in the image of God! Let’s honor Him by referring to his creation in an honorable way. That will help bring an end to the myth of Critical Race Theory by reminding everyone that we all come from one race, the race of Adam and Eve!
