Given that social, legal, and economic systems do not just sprout from the ground naturally like plants, but are human created historical and contingent artifacts, then we must necessarily offer moral justifications for the way things are. 1/
2/ Now, given that our own system has produced/allowed for/maintained VAST and ever increasing inequalities—some with hundreds of billions and MANY MANY more completely broke—we either need to show the moral justification for our chosen system or change it.
3/ A very common justification (NOT THE ONLY POSSIBLE) is that our system simply rewards the smartest and hardest working individuals, therefore huge disparities in income and wealth are fully justified as they reflect individual merit.
4/ This, I’d argue, is BS on any possible account and ignores the enormous public, social, familial, political, legal, geographical, etc., web of real life interconnectivities and distributed advantages, access, and what have yous, that go into any individual’s outcomes—not to
5/ mention the graft and shenanigans of those who have already achieved power employed to maintain and increase it (including VAST publicly funded infrastructure systems created for the powerful, a complex legal code to ensure barriers to entry, monopolistic price setting, and
6/ duress participation, very friendly tax arrangements both nationally and locally, public welfare system to allow thousands of laborers to be paid below subsistence, etc., etc.) Hence, my original post was not primarily an objection to people being hella rich (though I could),
7/7 but to parody the "individual merit" concept, telling people they’re just 100,000,000 times stupider than Bezos—no need to question the system we’ve chosen and created just because some starve and some own countries.
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2/ “CRT teaches x, y, z, so it is actually incompatible; but we don’t’ need CRT to oppose racism anyhow, and the bad folks are illegitimately calling everything CRT in order to avoid dealing with racism.”
3/ While I get the draw to this latter position, so long as it is based on plain slander of CRT scholars—incessantly claiming that they teach what they do not and deeply distorting the arguments based on pure ignorance and/or malice—then it is just as unchristian and
In my opinion, I think it is important to recognize that there are a few different groups (I’ll suggest 4) of people at odds in this whole Critical Race Theory (CRT) debate in the Church.
This is a long thread, I apologize, but I truly think we need to make these distinctions:
2/ The 1st group are just your run of the mill racists. You know the crowd. They are loud and all over the internet.
3/ They believe that slavery and Jim Crow are ancient history, the racists were the KKK types who are now hard to find, the sexual revolution and Great Society—even the CRM itself—destroyed the Black family and led to degenerate behaviors that explain the VAST racial disparity
"Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. 1/
2/ "We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The first consists of overt acts by individuals, which cause death, injury or the violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded by television cameras; it can frequently be observed in the process of
3/ "commission. The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in the society,
Was rereading a section of Kendi's How to be an Antiracist and was reminded of this section on personal responsibility:
"Indeed, I was irresponsible in high school. It makes antiracist sense to talk about the personal irresponsibility of individuals like me of all races. 1/
2/ "I screwed up. I could have studied harder. But some of my White friends could have studied harder, too, and their failures and irresponsibility didn’t somehow tarnish their race.
3/ "… How do we think about my young self, the C or D student, in antiracist terms? The truth is that I should be critiqued as a student—I was undermotivated and distracted and undisciplined. In other words, a bad student. But I shouldn’t be critiqued as a bad Black student.
If COLLEGE EDUCATED MARRIED White women have anywhere from 2 to 12 times the wealth (depending on age) of COLLEGE EDUCATED MARRIED Black women, tell me what supposed "race culture" traits account for that persistent delta? Is it the music? The food? C'moooon, get off it already.
There is SO much wrong with the stupid "it's the culture!" argument that I can only believe it persists because it's the current legacy of the "inferiority due to climate" type arguments of the past. They didn't think that was racist then either. Bleh.
And upon ANY level of inspection, it becomes immediately clear that they really just mean that supposedly race-wide inferior BEHAVIORS are to blame; "culture" is just the wave of the hand word to make it all seem sociologically grounded. But it's not. It's BS.
Brother, when you say such things as in the attached image, you show your hand. It is clear you haven't yet even been persuaded by MLK's original message, nor the Civil Rights Movement itself.
For example, Dr. King wrote,
"Our hope for creative living in this world house 1/
2/ "that we have inherited lies in our ability to reestablish the moral ends of our lives in personal character and social justice."
Or how about,
"Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. There is no other answer. Constructive social change
3/ "will bring certain tranquillity; evasions will merely encourage turmoil. Negroes hold only one key to the double lock of peaceful change. The other is in the hands of the white community."
Or,
"We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical