The Theology of Identity Politics

[Chris]

Well politics and emotions have always been going together. As for BLM, there is no cohesive organization and no chapters; they are a spontaneous word of mouth movement. Them getting any sort of centralized power just isn't going to happen. I just don't see how it could.

You misunderstand my words when I posit the contrast of MLK seeking equality and BLM power, power over those they paint as oppressors. Both are examples of movements, the former civil rights, the latter identity politics.

[Chris]

Another difference between what MLK achieved and what identity politics tears down. This one shows just how far identity politics has dug into our culture. The MLK comparison will follow.

Teaching ‘white fragility’ is bad for kids of color

The good...

Last month, my 8-year-old sister came home from school deflated and torn. She told me that a young boy in her class was making fun of her because of her skin color, comparing her brown skin to fecal matter....

When she asked me what was “wrong” with having brown skin, I told her “nothing.”

“Your skin color doesn’t define who you are.”

...Thankfully, her school took the incident seriously, and the boy ended up writing a letter of apology to my sister, saying he was “sorry for being mean” and that he “will work harder at being a better friend.” ...

The bad...

...But then, in that same week, my 15-year-old brother told me he is learning about the concept of “systemic racism” in his English class. His teacher instructed her students that white people in our society are privileged and people of color are marginalized and disadvantaged. She went on to divide the class into groups and told them to discuss “white fragility” — the feeling of discomfort white people experience when forced to confront racial inequality.

But the lesson actually left my brother, one of five people of color in his class, feeling awkward and discomforted. What he had been raised to see as a trivial and unimportant trait — the color of his skin — was suddenly spotlighted and politically charged, and all his white classmates were implicitly being told to see him as different from them, and vice versa.

In the wake of protests after the police killing of George Floyd, the influence of Robin DiAngelo’s 2018 book “White Fragility” has spread far and wide. It has dominated Amazon and New York Times bestseller lists. It has been discussed on late-night TV, in workplace diversity seminars, and now even in children’s classrooms. Seattle Public Schools held training for teachers in which they were told the US is a “race-based white-supremacist society” and white teachers must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgment of [their] thieved inheritance,” according to documents recently obtained by journalist Christopher Rufo. This summer, KIPP schools — the network of free, open-enrollment college-prep schools in low-income communities in America — abandoned their classic slogan “Work Hard, Be Nice” because it “supports the illusion of meritocracy,” which “is not going to dismantle systemic racism.” Last November, Megyn Kelly revealed that she is pulling her kids from their private Upper West Side school after a letter distributed to faculty members stated, “There is a killer cop sitting in every school where White children learn.” These so-called “anti-racist” teachings have even made their way to my brother’s classroom in the small British Columbia town of Chilliwack, population 83,000....

The ugly...

...The most troubling aspect of the White Fragility doctrine — and the broader “anti-racist” movement — is that race is considered the defining feature of human experience....

[DiAngelo's] belief that “individualism,” “objectivity” and “rationalism” are pillars of “whiteness” is functionally indistinguishable from a Ku Klux Klan member’s white supremacist handbook. Both progressive “anti-racists” and those we would conventionally define as “racist” see people as members of racial tribes rather than as individuals with unique circumstances, values and merits....

...Martin Luther King once wrote that “the important thing about a man is not the color of his skin or the texture of his hair but the texture and quality of his soul.” By today’s perverse standards, King’s sentiment would be considered racist in itself — antithetical to the progressive pursuit of “racial justice.”...

[MMC]

Well politics and emotions have always been going together. As for BLM, there is no cohesive organization and no chapters; they are a spontaneous word of mouth movement. Them getting any sort of centralized power just isn't going to happen. I just don't see how it could.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/black-lives...
Black Lives Matter. Global organization working to end white supremacy and the oppression of Black communities.