Theology in the Raw - S2 Ep1068: Black Dignity vs. Antiracism: Dr. Vincent Lloyd

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Dr. Vincent Lloyd is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and the Director for the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University. Dr. Lloyd has a B.A. from Princeton University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from UC Berkley. He’s the author of many scholarly books including Black Natural Law (Oxford University Press, 2016), Religion of the Field Negro (Fordham University Press, 2017), Break Every Yoke (Oxford University Press, 2019), and the recently released Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale University Press, 2022). Dr. Lloyd also wrote a provocative article for Compact Magazine titled: “A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell” (https://compactmag.com/article/a-black-professor-trapped-in-anti-racist-hell). 

Hey friends, have you been blessed or encouraged or challenged by Theology in the Raw? If so, would you consider joining Theology in the Raw's Patreon community? For as little as five bucks a month, you can gain access to a diverse group of Jesus followers who are committed to thinking deeply, loving widely, and having curious conversations with thoughtful people. We have several membership tiers where you can receive premium content. For instance, Silver Level supporters get to ask and vote on the questions for our monthly Patreon-only podcast. They also get to see written drafts of various projects and books I'm working on, and there's other perks for that tier.

Gold Level supporters get all of this and access to monthly Zoom chats where we basically blow the doors open on any topic they want to discuss. My patrons play a vital role in nurturing the mission of Theology in the Raw. And for me, just personally, interacting with my Patreon supporters has become one of the hidden blessings in this podcast ministry. So you can check out all of the info at patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Raw. That's patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Raw. That's patreon.com forward slash Theology in the Raw. Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. My guest today is Dr. Vincent Lloyd. Vincent is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and Director for the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University. He's the author of many books,

including Law and Transcendence, The Problem with Grace, Black Natural Law, Religion of the Field Negro in Defense of Charisma, Break Every Yoke, and his most recently released book, Black Dignity, The Struggle Against Domination. All of these books have been published by really high-powered publishers. So if you're not familiar with Vincent's work, he is a top-notch scholar. We talk a lot about race, racial relations, anti-racism, and we had just a fantastic conversation. I just love talking to Vincent. He just loves to engage in good critical dialogue. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Dr. Vincent Lohman. Vince, thanks so much for coming on Theology in Raw. We've never met, and so this is just us getting to know each other, but I'm really

excited to talk to you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, looking forward to the conversation. Yeah, it was a mutual friend of ours, another Vincent, who said, hey, you know, my buddy, you might want to have him on your podcast. I think you would enjoy talking to him. So that's, that's where this came about. So many thanks to our mutual friend, Vince. Why don't you just tell us a little bit about you? How'd you get into academic work? And in particular, it looks like, it looks like political theology is kind of one of your main overarching areas. We'd love to know how you got into that. theology as kind of one of your main overarching areas. We'd love to know how you got into that. Sure. When I was a college student, some of my friends and I noticed that the janitors and dining hall workers were not being paid very well, that the student workers were actually

being paid more than the professional workers on campus and in some of these jobs. And we thought, you know, we should do something about that. And, you know, it started an organizing campaign trying to improve the working conditions and wages of the workers on campus. And through that, I got to engage with religious communities on campus and off campus. And, you know, I didn't grow up religious. I didn't have parents who had particularly strong religious commitments, but seeing the power of religious communities and visions and feelings to motivate struggles for justice got me intrigued, both at an intellectual level and a personal level.

And ever since then, over the last couple of decades, I've been thinking more about those ways that religious communities can have justice seeking as part of their core set of commitments. Yeah. And are you, I don't even know, are you religious yourself? Are you, I mean, I know you do, you're a theologian, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a Christian. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think like many academic people around religion, I have mixed feelings about personal stuff. But I certainly am not comfortable in a secularist context and find meaning in the Bible and in the figure of Jesus Christ. Okay. Okay. Now you've, within political theology, I'm just looking at your CV, you've written a lot on race. I mean, most of your book, your recent one, Black Dignity, Break Every Yoke,

Religion of the Field Negro, Black Natural Law. I mean, there's a lot of racial related books. What got you turned into that part of the conversation? Yeah. So I, uh, you know, I had, uh, gone to college on the East coast and then a graduate school on the West coast. And then, uh, my first job was in Atlanta, Georgia. Uh, and, uh, Georgia, you know, is, uh, different from anywhere I'd been before, uh, in terms of the unavoidability of thinking about race. I grew up Black, but in a multicultural kind of environment where everyone was sort of welcoming people from different countries, different backgrounds. And there wasn't a lot of talk about the distinct harms that black folks in America face, uh, or the distinct sort of discrimination that, uh, that, that we face in the U S in retrospect,

you know, I, uh, a lot of that was there, right. I was, uh, being targeted at various times because of, because of my race, but I didn't really have a language to understand that. When I moved to Georgia, it was unavoidable, right? I had to think about being a Black in Georgia. And that, again, sort of piqued my academic interest and my personal interest at the same time and got me thinking more deeply about questions of race, together with the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, which is so often presented as only nominally religious. Martin Luther King, yes, he was a reverend, but it was really just a message about love and everyone getting along. That struck me as missing something at the heart of King's vision and animating his, you know, how he thought about justice. So I wanted to dig into that sort of nexus of religion, theology, race, justice, um, all together there.

Can you expand, can you unpack that a little more? Like, so are you saying King's, the assumption that King's vision was just nominally kind of kind of Christian is, is not going far enough that it was more explicitly Christian or? Yeah. I mean, King had a PhD in theology, right? His ideas about political movements came about from being formed in the Black church, from being the son of a minister, being someone who had to organize a congregation, right? Organizing a congregation gave him the skills and experience and vision for organizing a community in struggles for justice. And that really gets erased if you look at the monument to King in Washington, D.C.

They have all these sayings that King made at different times, all these sort of famous quotations that he said. But there's nothing there about God, nothing there about Jesus, nothing there about the, nothing there about Jesus, nothing there about the depths of his faith. It's all about basically everyone getting along by loving each other, which really erases the complexity and depth of Christian love as it's understood in the Christian tradition. Some people don't understand that. I mean, like you said, he had not only a PhD in theology, but a PhD from Boston College, which is one of the top schools.

This is before he got thrust into the civil rights movement. I couldn't get into Boston College theology. I mean, he was primarily not just a preacher. Obviously, he's an incredible preacher, but he wanted to be a theologian, like an actual preacher, but he wanted to be a theologian, like an actual high-powered academic theologian, which I think his preaching power sometimes eclipses his theological acumen. Yeah, yeah. And he was wrestling with the big issues of the day, neo-orthodoxy and Christian realism and all these sorts of debates. What know, what's wrong with liberal theology? What's wrong with forms of more conservative or evangelical-ish theology at the time?

And, you know, he was, you know, he is a sensitive thinker. So he was able to both appreciate the strengths of the various theological strands around him, particularly those that he was encountering at Boston University among white theologians and say, some of this works and some of this doesn't for the context that I'm rooted in, for my church community, for the Black church community more generally, and for the Black church community as engaged in justice struggles. And that, yeah, it seems like it's a really important model of being formed in a tradition, but also critically appropriating different theological strands rather than just aligning

oneself with one side or another. I'm curious just on, because I've been dabbling in political theology. It's not my main area. Where would you find yourself most at home in the kind of different perspectives on political theology? I'm thinking like the kind of Niebuhr approach versus maybe, I don't know, like a Yoder. He's more of a biblical studies guy. And I'm sure there's lots of other names and kind of movements. Where would you find yourself? And maybe you can explain what that even means for our audience.

Sure. And the political theology space is one that's expanded really rapidly in the last, well, two decades and then a decade as well, and means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. There are secular philosophers who say that they're doing political theology because they're thinking about questions of the sovereignty of a king and how that's related to the sovereignty of God, which is an interesting question, but which isn't necessarily taking the complexity of religious ideas that seriously if it's just looking at the sort of surface-level analogies. Wearing a more administrative hat, you know, I co-edit this journal, Political Theology, and do help with a website, politicaltheology.com, that tries to facilitate these conversations. So

wearing that more administrative hat, you know, I try to be pluralistic, try to welcome different voices, try to expand the conversation. You know, when I'm speaking in my own voice, you know, I'm very suspicious of those both within theological spaces and outside who want to flatten out the content of theology before it goes into politics, right? To say, let's choose three Christian concepts and bring those into the political sphere. Let's say,

faith, hope, and love, and figure out how those work out. I think, and maybe this is leaning toward the Yoder direction, but not with lots of asterisks there. Okay. Yeah. You know, thinking about Christian community, thinking about Christian history, thinking about the force of tradition as something that's inescapable, those all seem essential for, you know, as a prerequisite for political uh political engagement that sort of uh diving into the richness of tradition is um you know probably where i would locate myself i should have also said oliver o'donovan he's one of the main like is he kind of like one of the main figures like if you're doing political theology you have to wrestle with o'donovan would that be accurate

or he seems to be a main player yeah so certainly there's a corner of the the space it's it's very uh invested in uh wrestling with the ideas of o'donovan you know it it is a an expansive space you know there's a whole world around uh drew university and katherine keller and sort of liberal approaches to uh political theology that are drawing heavily on uh political theory and continental philosophy of a more secular stripe and some engaging with Derrida and Foucault and so on. That's another sort of corner of the world. There are other Catholic and sort of Anglo-Catholic corners. O'Donovan has his own sort of world maybe adjacent to that. So an exciting and growing space, but one that can be challenging to navigate because there isn't even a really

clear definition of what is political theology. Everyone has their own kind of definition. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've gotten lost in that literature and I got kind of bored with it or just like a hundred pages on what is political theology. And I'm like,

yeah, it's a, well, that's like any discipline though. I mean, that's in biblical studies or theology or, or systematic versus dogmatic. I mean, there's all kinds of different, as you know, once you like any discipline, though. I mean, that's in biblical studies or theology or systematic versus dogmatic. I mean, there's all kinds of different, as you know.

Once you open up the door of a certain discipline, you get lost in all the methodology conversations. Your book, so your most recent book that just came out a few months ago, Black Dignity, The Struggle Against Domination by Yale University Press. No slouch of a publisher. Congratulations, first of all. Oh, and your last one before that was with Oxford University Press. So you'reouch of a publisher. Congratulations, first of all. Oh, and your last one before that was with Oxford University Press. So you're not just a scholar, you're like a scholar scholar. I mean, I don't know if people know, these are incredibly hard. They only publish a few things a year. And so when they do, they take the top tier. So goodness. Tell us about Black Dignity,

your most recent book. What's that book all about? What are you trying to argue in that book? Whether or not it was seriously religious people maybe are quiet on, but at least led by religious leaders, clerics, you know, wearing a clerical collar in the front of the protest line. Whereas Black Lives Matter, you know, is youth led, maybe anti-Christian. That's the standard narrative. But what I was hearing in activist spaces among young black folks, especially young black women, was that there's a lot of moral language, a lot of spiritual language that's circulating around Black Lives Matter. Language explicitly of spirit, of love, of faith,

of struggle, of righteous indignation. Language that at least rhymes with, if doesn't exactly map with, religious and specifically Christian sorts of ways of thinking about, you know, ethical and political life. So, you know, I wanted to think more about that. You know, is there a way we can tell a story of Black Lives Matter that puts that moral, spiritual, religious framework at the center rather than as a kind of stretch that we might have to do to bridge religious communities and the Black Lives Matter-related activism.

And the concept that I thought would be most helpful to do that was dignity. And the first line of the Movement for Black Lives Matter, Movement for Black Lives platform is an affirmation of human dignity. a matter of movement for black lives platform is an affirmation of human dignity uh and you know i heard all around movement spaces of a commitment to dignity and particularly black dignity uh does it mean what the un says when it's affirming dignity uh but it's a dig into that in the context of black theology but uh also taking seriously the you know what you hear on the street what you hear on social media uh from from activists interesting i would love your help with this because i've heard somebody explain you know even the phrase black lives matter can mean many different things

that you have just a bare assertion that black lives matter which hopefully everybody or 95 people should agree with. That's not really debated. Then you have on the other side, maybe the specific... I don't know if we want to call it an organization, but with the website and the movement and the funding, that specific maybe organization. And then you have maybe a broader people who, especially in the wake of George Floyd and even going back to Michael Brown and others, that it is still a movement, but it's far beyond just a specific kind of organization called Black Lives Matter. Am I on the right track there to think about when we talk about Black Lives Matter, there's a spectrum of what that even means? Yeah, I think that's really helpful the way you're laying that out there, that there is a slogan.

really helpful the way you're laying that out there, that there is a slogan, there's a national organization, there are a bunch of local organizations, some of which call themselves Black Lives Matter of such and such city, some of which, you know, call themselves different things, right? Movement for Black Dignity and Power in Los Angeles or something like that, right, that, but are sort of loosely affiliated with each other. But, you know, I think what is signaled by all of these different things, right, is a new way of thinking about race in America, right, that whether it's the national movement, whether it's local groups, whether it's, whether it's folks who just sort of are showing up at a rally and feeling called to be part of a protest, there's a recognition that there's something specific about anti-Blackness, which isn't just another kind of racism, another kind of oppression that we haven't been attending enough in the U.S., particularly over

the last 40 or so years, to what makes Blackness different and what makes anti-Black racism different. That seems really important. And now I think sometimes there's a discussion in the media of, you know, is Black Lives Matter good or bad? And, you know, that works in that sort of abstraction, which doesn't appreciate these complications you're pointing us to, you know, when I think of black lives matter, I think of folks, uh, you know, black folks, uh, and, you know, uh, their, their friends and allies who, you know, have a relative who was pulled over by the police and, and saw something racist with their own eyes who have a, you know cousin in jail uh who's um black and you know whose blackness probably has something to do with them being in jail why they were uh

were caught and and imprisoned rather than someone else why they were in prison for that length of time rather than someone else so you know i really think of it in that sort of personal and and local sense right it's about people who know who things around them, who see that the people they love being harmed by anti-blackness. You met a couple of questions. Number one, you mentioned there's something unique, unique about anti-blackness versus anti other maybe people groups. Can you, can you expand on that more? I mean, I can probably, I think I can guess, but I'd rather have you say what you mean by that. Sure. Yeah. So I think one of the great insights of academic black studies and these activist movements, black justice movements in the last few years, is that slavery seemed as if it ended a long time ago in the 19th century. To get a human to treat another human as non-human, right, which slavery was doing, to get a human to treat another human as an animal, as a machine, you need to change how they think, how they feel.

You need to change institutions. You need to change social norms. You also need to change laws. So once the laws of slavery an acknowledgement that all that stuff is still with us right uh whether uh and we see its effects showing up in the economy and you know who gets affected who's hurt by environmental um problems uh in you know who gets jobs uh in you know who the police stop who's in prison who who has to struggle for an education for their children the most. All of this, I think, is the sort of afterlives of slavery, as it's sometimes put. Thank you for that. How would you describe, I'm curious, because I've read a lot of different

perspectives on this from Black thinkers, how would you describe our society, our, our progress, lack of progress and or regress since the civil rights movement with regard to this conversation, specifically the conversations around race as it pertains to the black, black people, black, the black community? Yeah, I think that's a tough, a tough question because on the surface, it seems like there's a lot of improvement, right? You don't see a lot of people anymore in public saying, I'm a racist, right? I hate black people. I want them to all go away or, you know, be subordinate or something. And it's just not part of public discourse anymore. And, you know, that's good, right? It's good that, you know, there aren't people who are being racist in public

anymore. That doesn't mean that underlying patterns are improving, right? It's that they're taking a new form. When the bad stuff can't happen in public, it's happening in private. It's showing up in data, right, that's sort of aggregated rather than in the statements that are reported in the newspaper. So, I mean, I think if one looks at things like wealth inequality, if one looks at things like segregation of schools, there hasn't been a huge degree of improvement over the last half century, you know, frustratingly. And yet there is something quite different, right, because the public discourse has shifted so much. So I think that's part of the trickiness of our moment. How do we respond to anti-black racism when it's no longer on the surface like we were used to seeing it a half century ago? Sorry. Every time you talk, like, oh, man, I want to dive deeper in every sentence. Because I think it was Ibram Kendi who said it's almost worse today because it's more sinister when something's buried into the very systems and it's harder for people to see that that's almost a worse situation than before, even though we can acknowledge, obviously, some level of progress. But then, you know, then I would go read Thomas Sowell and he's got a whole

another, you know, way of thinking about it. And I'm not, I don't have the qualifications to agree or disagree with either one. I just read and listen and learn. What would you say is maybe the cause for, say, the lack of, on the lack of progress side, you know, the inequalities, the segregation that still exists, the school system, like what would you say? Yeah, is is is a reason for that? Yeah. So we do have these really deeply entrenched racist habits that don't don't get spoken about and yet manifest in all sorts of places, right? I guess, you know, I'm not great with the medical metaphors, but there's something, somewhat one of these cancers that shows up in unexpected places. It starts one place and then, you know, you get rid of that organ, but then in all sorts of other places, you're finding these sites of cancer. Just in the last couple

of weeks, the New York Times had pieces on anti-Black discrimination against real estate developers, right? Which you think, you know, surely in this sphere where only money matters, you know, it would be colorblind. But actually, you know, Black developers have a really hard time getting bank loans, starting new projects. Same with appraisals, housing appraisals, right? The appraisals of Black-owned homes are systematically lower than appraisals of white-owned homes and homes owned by folks of other races. So we are in this sort of tricky moment where we know that something is happening, and I think the most plausible story is that it has to do with the afterlives of slavery. That's what's different about Black American communities. But it's much harder to sort of track, was it this particular developer who refused to work with this other developer that made this thing that resulted in these statistics

where Black developers are not doing well? It's harder to track, but we still see the effects when we aggregate the data. So we have to think really subtly about how to respond. generally speaking, more conservative thinkers put more responsibility on individual decisions, home life, single parent households, whatever. And people typically more on the left would say, no, it's yes, of course, that might play some role. But more importantly, it's structures built into the system. It's not just simply individual decisions. It's like, okay, what are the systems that lead to single parent households?

You know, people just wake up one day and say, I want to be a single parent, you know? So on that, first of all, am I summarizing kind of the discussion slash debate? And I would love for you to help us navigate that briefly. Sure. Yeah, I think that hopefully captured some of the dynamics. that hopefully captured some of the dynamics. Uh, and I, you know, I would approach, uh, that landscape that you're laying out from a perspective of, you know, a Christian community, right? How do, how, how do Christians think about, um, you know, what, what matters, you know, uh, community matters, practices matter, uh, histories matter. My intention matters,

but my intention is shaped by those who have formed me, those exemplars that I have in my life, those communities that have nurtured me. So I need to be held accountable for my actions and we need to think about my intentions, but we also need to think about all of those histories and facets of, uh, facets of community, uh, that, that are, are shaping me and that we collectively can, can do things about, right. We can, uh, change them for the better, uh, in order to advance justice. That's helpful. Um, so I do want to jump to this article you wrote because I think somebody listening in might already have kind of maybe put you in a little box, whatever, but this, this recent article you wrote, wrote i guess i don't want to say gives a different perspective but just like is yeah it gives

another side i guess anyway the article is called a black professor trapped in anti-racist hell which you wrote this is last month february 10th that came out where in this i'm going to let you describe it but like well actually let's start here. I would love for you to kind of walk us through just that story, because I thought it was, it gives, yeah, it's really powerful and gives a different perspective. Can you describe what anti-racism is? Because some people hear that and they just think, well, yeah, I'm against racism, but anti-racism has taken on kind of a specific meaning. And so I would love for you to unpack what you mean by anti-racist hell in this article. Thanks. Yeah. So this has become a sort

of a package of beliefs anti-racism has rather than, it's not just, I don't like racism or I don't do racist things, but through the growth of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and through the growth of managers and bureaucrats whose job it is to ensure that workplaces and educational institutions are not doing bad things, you know, there's developed a quite technical language and set of dogma around what we can and can't say around race and what we can and can't believe, including some quite laudable commitments. We should listen to Black women, right? We should, but taking that as a piece of dogma can be unhelpful, right? It's something that we have to learn over time and internalize rather than just

be told that we need to repeat in order to be on the right side of history or something like that, with a whole other set of beliefs in there as well. This episode is sponsored by Biola University. Biola is consistently ranked as one of the nation's leading Christian universities. It has over 300 academic programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, which are available both in Southern California and online. With leading academic programs like business, film, science, and more, Biola's biblically integrated curriculum and spiritual formation also helps students grow closer to God and gain a deeper understanding of Scripture.

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This isn't a crisis line. It's not self-help. It's professional counseling done securely online. So you can log into your account anytime and send a message to your counselor. Plus, you can schedule weekly video or phone sessions. So you don't have to be on camera if you don't want to. Faithful Counseling is more affordable than traditional offline counseling and financial aid is available. We all need to talk to somebody and Faithful Counseling can help. You can go to the website and read the testimonials. For instance, I read one viewer who said that his counselor is, quote,

a great counselor that truly listens. He gives you the space to talk through your emotions and provides concrete solutions and action steps to help you improve your mental health. So visit faithfulcounseling.com forward slash theology and get the professional faith-based counseling that you deserve. theology and get the professional faith-based counseling that you deserve. Theology Neural listeners will get 10% off your first month by going to faithfulcounseling.com forward slash theology. What was your anti-racist hell? Can you tell that story and take as much time as you want? Because I mean, the way you unpack it's really interesting. Sure. So I was teaching this past summer, 2022, in a program for elite high school students. So

these are some of the best and the brightest of high school students in the U.S. and from abroad who were chosen for an all-expenses-paid six-week experience where they take a college-level seminar. In my case, I was teaching at University of Michigan. They also do this at Cornell. The students all live together in a house. The community of students self-governs, so they vote and deliberate on what the rules of their community are going to be. But the centerpiece of this experience is this college-level seminar. I was teaching a course called Race and the Limits of Law in America. So we were reading Supreme Court cases like Brown versus Abortive Education and Dred Scott,

sort of famous Supreme Court cases on questions of race as well as cases on immigration and indigeneity, incarceration, other issues related to race and oppression in the U.S. But the core of the course was on the issues of anti-Black racism. We were also reading some literature, some cultural analysis, and some other texts as well. And at first, it seemed as if this would be just a regular college seminar, albeit with students who are a bit awkward. They're 16 or 17. They're away from their families sometimes for the first time. It seemed as if this would be just a regular college seminar, albeit with students who are a bit awkward. They're 16 or 17. They're away from their families sometimes for the first time.

And, you know, in this quite intense experience, trying to figure out how to how to live together. Very quickly, I came to realize that something something strange was going on. You know, the students were not just generally curious about the things we were reading. This program that runs the seminar, the Telluride Association, had started having the students spend their afternoons. I would be co-teaching the seminar in the morning. In the afternoons, the students would be taking anti-racism workshops, which were structured, it seemed, in a quite dogmatic way. They were lectured at to say these are the things that you need to believe to be a good anti-racist uh and given all the sort of information uh and and told that uh you are a bad person right if you say things that deviate from

this orthodoxy to the point where students were um sort of breaking down emotionally and in some cases mentally because they were being accused of being racist in these workshops. So that atmosphere was happening in the afternoon that started to enter into the seminar when we were spending a week talking about Native American genocide and dispossession. Students said, why aren't we talking about anti-blackness? and dispossession, students said, why aren't we talking about anti-Blackness? They'd been hearing in these anti-racism workshops that everything needs to be about anti-Blackness. And so they were frustrated that we were talking about another issue in my seminar. We were trying to do a mock court exercise where some of the students are on a team of lawyers for one side of the case. Another group of students are on a team of lawyers for one side of the case. Another group of students are on a team of lawyers for another side. But the students said, you know, we don't we think it's harming

harming us to argue for a side that we don't believe in, for a side that's unjust in our view, based on these beliefs that they were being told in these anti-racism workshops. So it became very, very hard to conduct a regular seminar where you're exchanging ideas, you might be frustrated, but that's part of the thing, right? You get frustrated and then you think more about it, you try out other ideas, other people inflect the comments and thoughts that you have in new ways, and you're working together to figure things out. comments and thoughts that you have in new ways, and you're working together to figure things out. To make a long story short, the thing degenerated. Two of the students were kicked out of the program by some sort of discussion or vote of the students who were living together. These were the

two students who had heterodox views, who were never, they were Asian American students who just didn't buy the anti-racism dogma that they were being told in these workshops. And then eventually the students mutinied against me and said, unless you will only teach us about anti-Blackness and only do it in the way that is defending orthodoxy and calling out heterodoxy, calling out heresy to this anti-racism dogma, we will be harmed. This class will not succeed. And the class collapsed. Yeah, that's fascinating. Can you, when you say the orthodoxy and the dogma that they were being taught,

can you unpack some of those ideas that they were told that you're not allowed to think through a question, just you have, this is two plus two equals four, kind of like you have to believe it? of experience. If someone is a Black woman, then when we're talking about issues related to Black women, we need to defer to them absolutely. Whatever they say stops the conversation because they have knowledge that no one else could have about the issue. So that's one sort of example. Race trumps everything else and that blackness trumps everything, every other sort of question of race. And not in a way that means we can learn from blackness how to think about multiple questions of race.

But if we're talking about discrimination from blackness uh how to think about multiple questions of race but you know once uh you know if we're talking about discrimination against asian americans we're necessarily missing important conversation about anti-blackness uh that was another sort of component of this kind of dogma that was that was being conveyed where does that where does this dogma come from like are there um it doesn't again and it's been a while since I read Kendi. It doesn't, I mean, he wrote, you know, how to be an anti-racist. So, I mean, any anti-racist conversations are going to include him. Is it his, is it partly his work?

Is it deeper than that? Is it a certain? No, it's a good question. And I think it is a little bit amorphous. So, there is a sort of white fragility, Ibram Kendi stuff, right, that's circulating. But, you know, I think what's happening post-2020 and even before that, corporations and organizations were realizing that they need to say more about questions of race, which is probably right, right? They should think in more careful ways about questions of race, but then they want to do that in the cheapest, most efficient way, the fastest way. So sort of distill some ideas that are the most palatable or to their organizational cultures from folks like Kendi, folks like Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility and a few others.

Pre-package that into morsels that can you know you can convey in a workshop to a at a corporate retreat or you know at a university orientation meeting or uh whatever it is um and i think that's that's bred its own sort of culture uh as that's happened more and more okay yeah that's i remember yeah i read d'angelo's book a while back. I mean, we were kind of right when it came out. I mean, gosh, that was like the talk for a couple of years or a year or so. That was like everybody was talking about it. And I read Kendi.

I read other people. I listened to a lot of like Coleman Hughes, Glenn Lowry to get kind of another perspective. Oh, who's the linguist? John McWhorter. Yeah, John McWhorter, Thomas Sowell. So, I mean, a wide range. perspective and um oh who's a linguist um john mcwarder yeah john mcwarder thomas soul and others so i made a wide rant i thought of all that i've appreciated a lot of what everybody's saying um i thought d'angelo's book was could have used some more editorial attention i didn't

think it was argued or i thought i mean yeah i thought it was kind of a terrible book honestly i think maybe she's right. I don't know. I just thought the book itself, all these leaps. I don't know. It was just a bizarre book for me to read. But again, maybe that's me and not, you know. Yeah.

I mean, there is a sort of industry. And then on top of that is all the social media dynamics, right, where people want to retweet the thing that is correct, right, and want to be, you know, liking the charismatic figure who is saying truths about racism that resonate with them, which, you know, that sort of culture, that dynamic doesn't give itself to complex discussion or, you know, understanding multiple sides of an argument or sort of digging deeper. You've used a phrase, and I saw you kind of give a little bit of an eye roll on people being harmed. I'm curious, can you unpack, can ideas be harmful? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but do you think that, what do you think about the claim that being exposed to alternative ideas, um, are harmful and that, you know, maybe even trigger

warnings, right. You know, I, I was, I'm, I'm for, you know, I mean, told by you, you know, to argue the different side, just for the sake of an educational experience in that very process is harmful. Can you expand on that? Sure. And I think this is another site where Christian communities have a lot to offer, right? There's an appreciation that as humans, we harm others.

We all harm others. We all are harmed by others. And that's something that we need to take seriously and reflect on. But it also doesn't mean everything has to stop as soon as there's a sense of discomfort. When there are grave harms, we need to figure out how to make things right, how to reweave the fabric of our community and of ourselves once those grave harms occur. But this language of harm, which, you know, started off with good intention, right, that it's supposed to be an alternative to policing, that it's about laws and violating laws and getting punishments,

and instead we'll talk about harms and making right those harms. Now, this language of harms has turned into, yeah, I think often a conversation stopper where people say, I'm uncomfortable. Therefore, you know, I interpret that as being harmed. Therefore, you know, we need to stop what's happening right now. And you need to apologize for the harm that you committed knowingly or unknowingly. the harm that you committed knowingly or unknowingly, that strikes me as, as unuseful and unfruitful for the kind of conversation that we ought to have if we want to explore questions of justice and goodness and truth. I do find, I mean, I travel quite a bit to different countries. I've been to many majority world countries, have friends in majority world countries, and they just don't talk like it's not, this does seem to be kind of a first world

conversation where ideas are described as being harmful. At the same time, I'm a fellow academic and I know that some of the worst massacres of humanity began with a really bad idea. The rise of Nazi fascism was a really bad idea at the beginning. at the beginning. So I don't know. I'm living in this balance of recognizing that, no, I mean, I think evil from humanity arises from bad ideas and it is fueled by bad ideas. On the other side, this idea that being exposed to something you disagree with, or even maybe something you see is, I think that's unjust. Or like you were saying, and I would love for you to expand on this if you want. i'll let you do it i'm not gonna do like you know saying if you're a black woman

then you're then you basically have it's i hear i'm hearing you say like whatever you say kind of needs to be accepted like there's no kind of push back to that which to me that feels a little that's in a roundabout way it was almost dehumanizing. You're almost stripping someone of agency when you say, no, I can't push back to anything this person is saying because of their experience or whatever. That doesn't seem – I wouldn't feel humanized if I said something. Everybody's like, okay. I'm like, well, no, no. I'm human too.

I've had mistakes. Push back. Help me to improve. I would feel dishonored if somebody didn't just simply believe everything I said. I don know where i'm going with that so so um yeah can you i don't know i would love for you to help us think through legitimate ideas that do cause harm ultimately and other maybe the claim that certain ideas cause harm that that maybe are actually not helpful how do we distinguish between those two sure yeah and yeah. And I don't find the harm language that useful myself. I think there are other languages that have a more sophisticated, that bring about a more sophisticated analysis. So I think the language of domination is really

useful because it refers back to something that we can all think of very clearly, right? A master and a slave, right? One person who can arbitrarily assert their will over another right uh we see that in laboratory conditions in uh you know the middle passage right the slaves being brought uh to uh the the the americas and you know domination yes involves harms but the thing that is the problem is the mastery, right? Human setting themselves up as a god, right? In this role as a master over the enslaved. Looking for that kind of dynamic strikes me as much more useful than thinking about harm. what people sometimes call epistemic privilege, like listening, uh, you know, uh, taking the authority of those who have particular experiences or, um, you know, are, are marginalized on the one hand, you know, that sounds right. And it also sounds, uh, like a lot of things in religious and particularly Christian traditions, right. That, you know, uh, Jesus is with those who are the,

who are the most marginalized. That's right. The Jesus is with the poor and the weak, you know, uh, and that means that there's particular knowledge of the good, the true and the beautiful to be found in those spaces and among those among those people. That's that seems right. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that we should just stop talking and revere those who have suffered, right? It means that, you know, that should open a conversation. You know, what can those who have experienced suffering or marginalization or oppression or domination, how can they contribute to a conversation that we're having that maybe wasn't attuned enough to their voices or to our own experiences of suffering and domination that we sometimes repress when we come into discussions about intellectual or political life. So yeah, I think using those experiences, taking them seriously, treating them with

a deep respect, but using them to open conversations seems really important to me. I've just seen, and maybe it's in social media, I don't know, using them to open conversations seems really important to me. I've just seen it. Maybe it's in social media. I don't know. Like the kind of harm pushback is, at least in some cases, maybe many cases, it does seem to be almost it can be, I don't know, a lazy way to not interact with somebody's ideas, too. Like if it just seems to shut things down. Like if I say, hey, here's what I think. And they say that's harmful.

Like they don't have to deal with the content of what I said. You just accuse it of being a harmful idea, which is really – I don't know. Again, I want to take seriously the potential of ideas harming. I want to emphasize that again. But I feel like in some cases, it can be just a cop-out, a way of kind of like siloing yourself off from people that disagree with you or, or, or, you know, uh, cause nobody, I didn't, I felt like there was an extra sensitivity, at least among a certain population to be causing harm. Like, I don't want to cause harm, you know, I don't know. It's just, I don't know. I don't know how to point that out, but. Yeah. And it, I mean, it strikes me that, that, you know, that's the kind of discourse that,

that can run wild on social media because it's at a level of abstraction and at a level of distance from real life and real relationships. When you're dealing with your neighbor or dealing with a concrete problem, like there's water leaking on the street across the way, you need to fix it. across the way, you need to fix it. We have to deal with all sorts of people who have all sorts of quirks, who are saying all sorts of things, some of which are more on planet Earth than others, right? But you deal with it because you want to address a problem. And I think that sort of localness and concreteness is the best antidote to some of this free-floating social media language that we get. You mentioned early on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and seminars. These are pretty widespread, right, in various companies. Do you find – I mean, are they – your example, it seemed to be kind of like,

I think these aren't either too helpful. Would you say these aren't really accomplishing what they're trying to accomplish? Or is there enough on diversity and how they go about them that it's hard to say all of them are this or that? Yeah. And I think this is a particularly tricky issue in that there are all sorts of aspects of life in the US and beyond that have been insensitive to questions of diversity and inclusion on lots of, not only on race, but on gender, on all sorts of other issues where, you know, those who are, you know, on class, those who are coming from, you know, I went to college on the East Coast, but I came from

a small town in Minnesota. You know, there were a lot of cultural things that around the East Coast that made me feel excluded. There were all sorts of students who came from private schools with lots of money. And, you know, I didn't know how to talk to them or how to know what their lives were like. There are all sorts of issues, real issues of inclusion and diversity that we need to address. layers of management, creating sort of prepackaged solutions that are really just convenient for corporations or convenient for those corporations to check off a box. You know, it doesn't seem like the right way to do that. And, you know, it also seems like a problem when they're presented as salvific, right? If we do this diversity training, then the problem will be solved. Then we will be honoring the

memory of George Floyd or, you know, whatever the sort of framing is. You know, it seems to me that, you know, these need to be ongoing conversations that go deeper and deeper and deeper and that interrogate, you know, what is the mission of an organization? You know, how can we strengthen that mission as we're thinking about questions of diversity? Universities have, you know, missions that involve intellectual inquiry to to do diversity work in a university means to do intellectual work better in ways to do that intellectual work in ways that are taking account of questions of diversity, rather than adding on a layer of staff people who are trying to create a buffer against protest in the name of diversity rhetoric. What would be some key ingredients for a healthy diversity inclusion seminar that maybe isn't happening as much? If you were to lead one, what's the culture you would establish in that kind of setting? Yes, yeah.

So I do think there's a difference between a seminar and a workshop. So a workshop tries to convey information in a about a particular topic in a finite time and thinks, you know, you'll you'll leave this workshop with this set of tools that I've given you. The workshops can be useful for various things where you can get skills, you know, that's useful. I'm not sure if they're the most useful on these questions of diversity and inclusion. You know, the seminar, in contrast, at least as it's engaged in a university setting, but also, I think, in reading groups that folks have and, you know, other sorts of formations in the world outside of the university, involves an ongoing conversation that's always getting deeper, that's always

asking questions that might be occasioned by a particular reading or a text, but that goes from there into what does each person from their own perspective, what questions are they asking? How can they complicate what someone else is saying? How can we, with a sort of common set of interests and purposes of pursuing justice or making better, more faithful our organization, how can we pursue these questions occasioned by this material without a preordained end, right? Not knowing what it's going to look like at the end of the day. That's helpful. That's really helpful. I'm curious. So your book came out just last,

well, a few months ago, November, I believe. Are you working on something else? I had books come out typically like a year after you actually finished a manuscript. So it's been a while since you've been writing it. Are you working on something else right now? Yeah, it was 2020 that I finished that manuscript. So it's been sitting around the supply chain shortages. I've been bad for publishing there.

Yeah, I'm working on a new project about abuse. It seems like abuse is a language we use really loosely now. It's almost used interchangeably with trauma, violence, harm, but it strikes me that there's something very particular about what abuse is that, you know, involves privacy, involves relationship, involves skewing morality. And, you know, even though we use abuse in quite different domains from substance abuse to child abuse, to clergy, you know, clergy abuse, to, you know, forms of political abuse, these all might have something in common. And I want to think together about, you know, what, you know, what this thing that we call abuse really is and how we can respond better to it. What gave rise to that topic? Yeah. So some of it was thinking about what we were talking about earlier in terms of the changes in race in the U.S. post-civil rights that, you know,

you can't be a racist in public, but you also can't be a bully in public anymore, right, since the 1960s, right? It's just not cool to be a bully. Maybe the last few years have seen some slight changes around that, but, you know, in general, public discourse has changed. And yet, we're still harming each other a lot, right? We're still, you know, there's all sorts of meanness and forms of domination and, you know, forms of violence in our culture, but it's gone below ground. It's gone into this sort of private realm, in this relational realm, and in a realm that's, I think, skewing morality and truth in ways that are quite distinctive and that go by the name of abuse. So that's part of the motivation. Oh, that's interesting.

One more question. Sorry to kind of dance around here at the end, but responses to your article that you wrote a month ago, what's been the feedback like? Yeah, so people do have strong opinions about this from lots of directions. So, I mean, one direction is from conservatives is, uh, from conservatives saying, you know, this is what we told you all along. Now the, now the liberals are figuring out that the anti-racism

stuff is bad, which no, it really isn't my point, right. That we need to just, you know, we're at a moment where we're experimenting with, um, how to confront anti-blackness. And some experiments work. Some don't need to be self-critical about that. Some responses were frustrated with the way that I characterized the students or thought that I should have respected the intentions of the students more in the seminar, in the way I was writing, which is probably true, right? We ultimately agree that there's bad stuff happening in the world and we want to pursue justice, right? It was just a question of how to do that better. And I think it is important in writing, and I want to do this more in the future, to be sure to make alliances, right? Be sure to welcome others in our writing, in our public engagements and say, yeah, we all want to pursue justice. We all want to make the world a better

place. We all want to find truth, goodness, and beauty. And, you know, we just need to talk together to figure out together the most effective ways to do that. And that's going to be frustrating, but, you know, it's a project that we need to engage in collaboratively. Well, Vincent, thanks so much for your time on Theology in a Row. Where can people find you and your work if they want to check out more? You know, I don't do social media, but I guess I'm on the Villanova University website, and the book is available from Yale University Press. Well, many blessings to you and your work, and yeah, thanks for the really fascinating conversation. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. Take care. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.