by John Ellis
One of the sleights-of-hand utilized by the anti-CRT crowd involves crowing that racism is no longer codified in America. They point to the Civil Rights Acts and SCOTUS decisions of the mid-twentieth century (even while attempting to reverse those Acts and decisions) and huff, “See, racism is now illegal in this country. Structural racism does not and cannot exist!”
Except, as CRT scholars patiently explain, structural racism doesn’t require contemporary codification. In his seminal book Racism Without Racists, the CRT scholar Eduardo Bonilla-Silva makes the point that, “racism forms a structure – that is, a network of social relations and practices at the social, political, economic, and ideological levels that shapes the life chances of the various races.”[1]
Bonilla-Silva’s point is one that Christians, of all people, should immediately grasp. Sin doesn’t occur in a vacuum and has wide-ranging effects. The Curse is active. Ergo, racism doesn’t occur in a vacuum – never had – and has wide-ranging structural effects. It’s baffling – and shameful – that many white evangelical’s doctrine of sin allows the belief that the deeply awful effects of centuries of chattel slavery and Jim Crow were suddenly wiped away by Lyndon Johnson’s pen. The effects of explicit, codified racism are built into our society and have yet to see justice.
One such effect is summed up by Victor Ray when he writes, “America’s history of racialized slavery and the theft and redistribution of native land created a tether between racial identity, economics, and property rights.”[2] In that section of his book, Dr. Ray was commenting on Cheryl I. Harris’ legal essay “Whiteness As Property” in which she argues that, “American law has recognized a property interest in whiteness that, although unacknowledged, now forms the background against which legal disputes are framed, argued, and adjudicated.”[3]
However, it’s not just the extreme obstacles Black people have had to overcome to be able to create generational wealth or lack of full access to the economic and educational trajectories that built the white middle and upper-middle classes. The result from this country’s deliberate efforts to deprive Black people access to money markets, home ownership, and educational opportunities is that of a stunning disparity in opportunities and wealth between the Black and white communities. That’s true, yet as impactful and shameful as it is, the racial history in this country silently shapes us, too. As white people, our epistemology of race and our anthropology are not our own, no matter how much we may embrace the nominalist lie of expressive individualism that tells us that we are our own epistemic masters.
To be clear, while it’s true that structural racism’s existence doesn’t require codification, it’s also a lie that codification no longer exists. And I don’t have to dig deep into dusty, forgotten legal codes still on the books. I simply need to turn on the news.
Earlier in the week, The Florida Board of Education approved new standards that dictate how Black history can and cannot be taught. Under the leadership of Ron DeSantis, the Board gutted and erased history in the service of protecting the feelings of white people and making sure that the white washing of history is legally enforced. One of the more egregious examples is the requirement that middle-school teachers, when talking about slavery, must also communicate to the students “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances could be applied for the personal benefit.”
You know what that reminds me of? This: “Reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves.”[4]
That quote is lifted from a manual written by Mildred D. Rutherford in 1920 at the request of the United Confederate Veterans. The manual was used by Boards of Education throughout the Jim Crow South to ensure that the racist Lost Cause Myth was taught in schools. Later in the manual, in the section giving teachers insights and quotes to enable them to better teach the Lost Cause Myth, Rutherford expounds on the rejection of slavery as “cruel and unjust.” Quoting the observations of Major General Quitman about enslaved people, she writes, “These n-[word], as you call them, are the happiest people I have ever seen. … They are treated with such great humanity and kindness.”[5]
There should be no confusion on this point: NOTHING about slavery was beneficial for enslaved people. To say otherwise is to repeat the pro-slavery arguments of the enslavers and the Jim Crow era propagandists promoting the Lost Cause Myth. It is an explicitly racist claim.
Moving back to the current re-embrace of Jim Crow era Lost Cause academic standards, teachers in the state of Florida are also commanded to make sure that when discussing things like the Ocoee Massacre in 1920 (the same year Measuring Rod was published) the students are made aware of the “acts of violence” committed by Black people. The State of Florida and Ron DeSantis wants to make sure that white kids know that Black people had it coming to them, at least a little bit.
What the State of Florida is doing is incredibly disgusting racist stuff. Florida is codifying racism into the academic standards of state schools. And many white evangelicals are lapping it up. This is exactly the type of situation that the psalmists wrote imprecatory Psalms about. Repentance and restitution is biblically required.
[1] Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America 6th ed. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), 38.
[2] Victor Ray, On Critical Race Theory: Why It Matters & Why You Should Care (New York: Random House, 2022), 72.
[3] Cheryl I. Harris “Whiteness As Property” Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement ed. Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: The New Press, 1995), 276.
[4] Mildred D. Rutherford, A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, and Reference Books In Schools, Colleges and Libraries (reproduction printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress), 5.
[5] Rutherford, A Measuring Rod, 10.
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