Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis - Darrell Harrison - What is Critical Race Theory and Why is it Dangerous?

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis: Big Questions, Biblical Answers, is a series that seeks to provide biblical answers to some of the most prominent and fundamental questions regarding God, the Gospel, and the BibleIn this episode Darrell B. Harrison from Just Thinking Podcast answers the question: “What is Critical Race Theory and Why is it Dangerous?”Watch on YouTubeVisit Website

Hey guys, my name is Johnny Artavanis and this is Dial In. In this episode, I sit down with Daryl Harrison of the Just Thinking Podcast and ask him, what is critical race theory and why is it dangerous? Let's dial in. Well, Daryl, I'm so thankful to be sitting down with you today. Daryl, you have a podcast, Just Thinking Podcast, and it's been such a tremendous resource to so many people. I wanted you to break down and simplify something for us today, and that is, what is critical race theory? And then after you answer what it is, can you tell us why it's dangerous? Yeah, so Johnny, let me begin this way by, I like to describe critical race theory as an ideology, as a worldview. It's a generational worldview. And what I mean by that is it's not just critical race theory on its own. Critical race theory is the child of critical legal studies, which is a child of critical theory. So you've got three

quote unquote generations of worldviews there that you really have to walk through. So if you don't mind, I'm going to start at the earlier worldview and work our way back up. So critical theory, that term was coined by a German philosopher, sociologist by the name of Max Horkheimer in 1923 to describe the work that they were doing at the Frankfurt School in Germany. So Horkheimer was a Marxist. And then the Frankfurt School comes along in 1937, morphed into what you may be familiar with as known as the Institute for Social Research,

some call it the Frankfurt School. So you go from the early 1920s into the late 1930s with critical theory. And critical theory, the goal there was to expand Marxist principles and concepts throughout Germany. But as fate would have it, Hitler got wind of it. He shut down the institute, and the institute ended up moving to Columbia University in New York. So you have critical theory now in the United States, and we're into the 1960s and

1970s now, where this movement called critical legal studies comes out of critical theory. So CLS, abbreviatedly, is where a group of neo-Marxist scholars and legal academics got together to talk about, well, how can we apply Marxist principles and concepts to analyzing legal jurisprudence in America to see where inequities and inequalities may exist, especially as it relates to race and ethnicity? So if to understand a critical theory, we have to understand Marxist ideology. Yes. Tell us then, what is Marxist ideology at its core? Marxist ideology at its core is pursuing the pursuit

of social egalitarianism by dividing people into classes, into groups, and then you pit those groups against one another on the basis of the haves versus the have-nots, or more commonly these days, the oppressed and the oppressor class. What would be the difference between Marxism and communism as is typically understood?

Yeah, so Marxism and communism, they really don't vary very much, to be honest with you. Marxism is more of an economic-driven worldview, whereas communism is more heavy-handed, by which the classes are ruled through government and law and the weightiness of those two. But Marxism is more of an economic-driven worldview, whereas communism is more the state. You still have within Marxism, you still have capitalism at work, whereas communism you don't have that at all. So then critical theory then with Marxist ideology as a foundation or at least

part of it comes into the states and then how is that being translated in today's environment? It's being translated primarily, Johnny, through upper levels of academia. It's been that way going all the primarily, Johnny, through upper levels of academia. It's been that way going all the way back, as I said earlier, to the 1920s. It's your higher institutions of learning where you have really Marxist sympathizers,

those who sympathize with socialism and even communism who are teaching and advocating this worldview in upper levels of academia, especially in your Ivy League institutions. And I said earlier, the Institute for Social Research came out of Germany and found a home in Columbia University in New York. And now you have any number of liberal colleges and universities facilitating this worldview in their courses and even offering degrees in social theory, critical theory, gender theory, all sort of iterations and versions of critical theory. So hypothetically, Daryl, a mom comes up to you and says, I have a 15-year-old son who's in the public school system. What does this mean he's actually going to hear in a classroom?

Well, depending on his ethnicity, he's going to hear one or two things. You're either an oppressor or an oppressed. Your parents, you as a non-black person, you're an oppressor. And if you're a black person, or they may even get more detailed and say, well, if your skin is a certain shade of brown, you're an oppressed person. You're a victim. And those whose melanin does not match that category, they're your oppressor and you need to see them as enemies. Wow. So then we understand that as core, it has Marxist ideology.

It's put into an economic perspective of classes with either the oppressor or the oppressed. Now tell us then why, you know, we hear about this often, and I think increasingly so in today's environment. Why is this dangerous through a biblical lens? Yeah, through a biblical lens, let me just get right to the point. Critical race theory and all its various iterations is rooted in ethnic prejudices. It's rooted in economic prejudice. It's rooted in socioeconomic class prejudice. There is prejudice and partiality all over those worldviews.

And as we know from scripture, starting with God himself, scripture is clear that God shows no partiality. We're commanded it, for example, in James 2, verse 9, that to show partiality is lawlessness, is sin. So when you look at critical race theory at its most fundamental level, it is a worldview that is driven and given life by partialities of all different kinds.

So then how would you respond to the rebuttal? Well, then, Daryl, aren't we supposed to look out and care for the oppressed? Yeah, we are to do that. But again, we have to understand this. What the world calls, what the world is attempting to do and bring about gospel fruit through these worldly

philosophies and ideologies such as critical race theory, scripture calls that obedience. And there's one distinction between what the world is calling us to do versus what scripture calls us to do. Scripture calls us to do good works in keeping with repentance. Okay. The world is calling us to do good works for the sake of the works. And what that does is just reduce reduces the gospel to just moralism. When you take out repentance, when you take out regeneration, when you take out the good works that we're to do in light of those monogistic realities where God works in the human heart to change the heart first and then we do works out of that when you take that out of the gospel all you have is moralism and then the gospel becomes christianity becomes indistinct from every other religious worldview that exists which also each of them all of them also propagate doing good works so helpful now last question for you daryl is what is intersectionality's relationship with critical theory how are they How are they related? Are they

related? That's an excellent question, Johnny, because critical theory is intersectional. It is intersectional. So what I want to say to your viewers and listeners of this episode, never make the assumption that critical race theory is only about race, because it's not. When you read the resources that are out there that are produced by critical race theory proponents, especially the academicians who propagate this worldview, what you're going to find is that critical theory is distinct to ethnicity. It's also distinct to gender. It's also distinct to immigration status. It's also distinct to various categories of people that intersect with one another. So that's where the term that was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw comes from. Critical theory looks at how these different categories of people

intersect with one another, and they try to identify what they would call inequalities within those intersections. So they apply critical theory to try to remedy those inequalities and then come up with this sort of egalitarian nirvana that they hope to achieve. So if you're explaining intersectionality to someone on an elevator and it's 20 seconds, Daryl, what is intersectionality? How would you respond? Intersectionality is categorizing people into groups, into distinct groups, and then looking at those groups of people up against one another and how they intersect with one another in culture and society. And to the degree that they don't intersect, those are inequalities that need to be fixed. So me as a white male would be far differentiated from a black female that identifies as this.

Right. You could come up with any list of categories that you want. Check the boxes off of those. You've got you, Johnny, as a white male. You could even, there's even an intersectional for your height category, your hair color. Five foot eleven and a half. So, yeah, so just any category of your personhood, your existence, can be intersectionalized to your disadvantage because you're white

and to perhaps my advantage because I'm black. Well, Daryl, thank you so much. If anybody wanted to hear more about this, I would recommend your podcast, which cover these subjects in far greater detail. At least we can hope to whet the appetite and give them a little bit of understanding here. So thank you so much. Thanks, John.