Brad speaks with Dr. Charles McKinney, a historian of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Church in the South. Dr. McKinney puts the conservative war on Critical Race Theory in historical perspective, explaining how it works as a deflective strategy to demonize racial justice phenomena without directly demonizing Black people and other people of color. They finish by analyzing how White Christians have framed Rafael Warnock as neither a real Christian, nor a real American--the same tact used to castigate Martin Luther King Jr. and other Black Christian leaders before him.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty in religion at Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And I'm joined by someone who has a connection to UCSB, who grew up in its shadows, along with many other places.
And that is Dr. Charles McKinney, who is the Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies and the Director of Africana Studies at Rhodes College, where he is also Associate Professor of History.
Dr. McKinney is the author of Greater Freedom, the Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina.
He's also the co-editor of An Unseen Light, Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee.
And I will also add my former colleague at Rhodes College and one of the people who was nicest to me day in and day out, which oftentimes just meant saying hello, but then extended all the way to actually conversations and getting to know one another and all kinds of things.
So, Dr. McKinney, Chuck, as I know you, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for taking the time to be here.
So very happy to be here with you, brother.
Thanks for the invitation.
So I wanted to have you on because I've seen you tweeting about the sort of demonization of critical race theory.
This is something that's in the news.
I think a lot of people are hearing about it.
I also think this is maybe something that I know for sure that most of the evangelicals on my Facebook timeline, the white evangelicals on my Facebook timeline who are raging against critical race theory, have no idea what it is.
And I think there's probably a lot of other folks out there who are a little bit confused as to how and why this has become such a hot-button issue.
So let me just open by reading something from NBC News that is from just a couple days ago by Char Adams.
A group of House Republicans on Wednesday took recent attacks on critical race theory a step further by introducing a pair of bills to ban diversity training for federal employees and the military.
Some 30 GOP reps have signed on to support both the Combating Racist Training in the Military Act and the Stop CRT Act, Rep.
Dan Bishop of North Carolina said at a news conference in Washington.
The first bill is a companion to legislation introduced by Tom Cotton of Arkansas that aims to prohibit teaching, quote, anti-American and racist theories, such as critical race theory, at any academic institution related to the U.S.
armed forces.
Here is a quote from Dan Bishop, representative from North Carolina.
Critical race theory is a divisive ideology that threatens to poison the American psyche, Bishop said.
For the sake of our children's future, we must stop this effort to cancel the truth of our founding and our country.
Wow.
Yeah, pretty clear where those GOP reps stand.
And I guess I just want to, you know, you're a historian of the civil rights movement, you're a historian of the black church in the South.
I guess I want to contextualize this in a historical frame and ask if you can help us to understand how the demonization of critical race theory fits into larger historical patterns.
But if you don't mind, could I just ask you to this very simple question in a minute or two, what is critical race theory?
Sure, so critical race theory is a theory, a mode of thought Conceptualized primarily by Derek Bell, who was an American legal scholar, spent a lot of time at Harvard and some other places.
And so Bell is kicking around this idea, the beginnings of this idea in the 1970s.
He and a coterie of legal scholars, right?
So the first caveat here, right, is the idea That critical race theory is sort of this sort of illegal cabal, this cabal that disregards the law.
It's kind of laughable because it's literally created by a bunch of legal scholars, right?
So legal scholars coming together in the late 70s, early 80s, and they start to cohere around a set of ideas.
And sort of the central principle of this idea Right?
The central principle of the theory is that the nation's history of slavery and segregation and discrimination, racial inequality, is embedded in our legal structure, right?
Is embedded in the laws.
It is facilitated not by bad people committing bad acts, right?
It's facilitated not by individuals, but is buttressed by laws, right?
By the legal infrastructure of the country.
And then goes on to suggest, right?
The theory goes on to suggest that those laws have a legacy, right?
And they play a continuing role in the marginalization of black people, of black Americans, and other non-white and marginalized groups of people.
Women, LGBTQI folks, so on and so forth.
So that's, in a nutshell, that's what critical race theory is.
So one of the things that I think is threatening to those who actually understand what critical race theory is, is that if you acknowledge that these kinds of racist policies and impulses are embedded in our legal structure, then you have to change our legal structure and you have to sort of acknowledge that there's a lot of work to do in reforming it.
The easier thing to do is to demonize critical race theory as racist, as divisive, as whatever, As a historian, I guess here's what I'm wondering.
How does this fit into a larger pattern?
You know, if you have something like critical race theory that pops up and is sort of making inroads, is becoming more known in some sense by a wider audience.
How does the demonization of that, critical race theory in this case, relate back to other instances where similar phenomena might have been pointing, you know, the American public and the American public square to acknowledging everything you just talked about in terms of oppression, racism baked into the DNA of the country, and so on and so forth?
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