It's in the Code ep 161: “Social Justice Is Justice, Pt. 1”
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In the final chapter of her book, Allie Beth Stuckey takes on “social justice.” Specifically, she puts forward her argument that demands for “social justice” are not only expressions of “toxic” empathy, but they are actually unjust, and incompatible with Christian notions of justice. But her arguments depend on the idea that White Christians are the real victims of social injustice and on fundamental misperceptions of social reality. In what ways, and why does this matter so much? Check out this week’s episode to find out!
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www.feyyaz.tv Welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Happy as always to be with you, and as always want to start by saying thank you for taking the time to listen for supporting us for the ideas that flow in.
Keep them coming.
Daniel Miller Swagge, Daniel Miller, SWAJ at gmail.com.
This series, of course, is driven by you and depends on you and your ideas and your topics and your themes.
Winding down a series, got ideas for new ones, but always welcome feedback and ideas for additional series topics, what have you.
Please keep those coming.
I want to dive right in this week because you know my notes are long.
They need to get longer every week.
And so we're gonna we're gonna dive in here.
We are continuing our deep dive into the right-wing attack on empathy and exploring the discourse that claims that what ails American society at root is just too damn much empathy.
Americans, it turns out, just care too much, and that's what's driving America in the wrong direction.
And we've been exploring this by looking at Ali Beth Stuckey's book Toxic Empathy and reading her work because in so many ways it is completely typical of the discourses in contemporary.
And again, I'm reading the book so you don't have to.
And just as a reminder, I have been reading it kind of week by week and and had not read the whole thing before I started this series.
And we are now in the final chapter, the final so-called lie that she addresses in her book.
And what she takes as the final lie is that social justice is justice.
Again, I take this as a truth.
I am happy with the concept of social justice.
I think it is just, but she sees it as a lie, and then this is the chapter where she will tell us why that is.
It is her attempt to show why a concern for so-called social justice, by which she means almost entirely and solely racial justice.
We're gonna see that as we go along to the next few episodes here, because she conveniently ignores how this might relate to gender or sexuality or economics or class or anything else.
But this is her chapter where she's gonna try to explain to us why let's say racial justice is not really justice at all.
That's the aim.
So let's dive in here.
And one of the things that I'm I'm conscious of as I I come to this, this last chapter is that as I look back at this book on a whole, it strikes me that Stucky has in many ways saved her worst for last.
Her last two chapters deal with immigration and social justice.
The three episodes before this, looked at her chapter on immigration.
Now we're coming into social justice.
But these two chapters come after the chapters related to abortion, gender, and sexuality.
And what's noteworthy to me is that those three issues, abortion, gender, and sexuality, they've been mainstays of the religious right since its emergence in the 1980s.
They've always been there.
And when conservative Christians want to claim that their views are based on the Bible, they can find some passages to support their views on abortion and gender and sexuality if they rummage around in the Bible enough.
Okay.
But when it comes to issues like immigration and social justice, there are dozens, probably hundreds, of Bible passages commanding that we care for the foreigner among us.
We discussed that in an episode about immigration.
And even more passages demanding social justice for the downtrodden, the marginalized, the economically disadvantaged, those who suffer at the hands of power and so forth.
So she saves these two chapters for the end of her book, and for me it's significant.
And because the reason is that those two chapters, these two, they hit topics about which it is almost impossible to put together a so-called biblical defense that she claims she's doing.
Right.
And we saw that in the last chapter.
Last chapter of Discussion of the Bible is all about basically how to ignore the passages that talk about the foreigner.
We'll get to what she says about the Bible in this chapter.
But in many ways, then it's not it's significant to me that this chapter is at the end because it is the very worst of the book.
And that's saying a lot.
Because I think it shows to a fuller extent that almost than almost anything else in the book has the lengths to which Christians on the right will go to simply deny realities that make them uncomfortable.
And it runs through this chapter.
It runs through the whole book.
The chapter is so bad, folks, it is hard to know how to come at it.
So here's what I want to do in this episode.
Here's here's our sort of way into this chapter.
I want to look at the tone that Stucky sets.
I want to look at the way that she structures her discussion to keep complex issues from coming into view and to make her views sound more reasonable than they are.
And I'm also going to get, as we go through the episode toward the end here, I want to look at her philosophical or theological anthropology.
That is her understanding, which again is completely typical of conservative Christians, her understanding of sort of what the human person is, what you know, sin or immorality is, what it means to be morally or ethically responsible, and start looking at how that's going to tie into questions about racial justice.
And we'll see that more fully, how that unfolds as we go through the rest of this chapter in upcoming episodes.
Okay.
So with all of that, talking about the overall tone, I actually want to start by returning to the introduction of the book.
And I want to look at what some of she says, some of what she says, excuse me, that has bothered me from since I first read it.
Because she works hard from the outset of the book, literally in the introduction.
It runs through the book and it hits a crescendo again in this final chapter.
It's like the pieces of bread on a sandwich or bookends.
She hits a tone of a of just being aggrieved.
And in the introduction, she goes into great detail about how she, a straight, white, Christian, middle class blonde woman, bravely stood up to the hordes of people who pressured her to give in to the demands of quote unquote social justice.
In fact, her discussion makes it clear that it was her bravery in standing firm against calls for social justice that led her to recognize the dangers of empathy run amok and of toxic empathy, the the title of her book.
So in the introduction, in a section called The Black Square on the Right Side of History, she starts talking about the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, the emergence of Black Lives Matter, the posting of black squares on social media and so forth.
And she says this.
She says it wasn't difficult to see what was happening.
Someone somewhere had started the movement to post all black photos to mourn the death of George Floyd and to condemn the racism they claim enabled it.
Should I post too?
I wondered.
Of course I should, right?
People I respected, friends, pastors, authors, and influencers were all joining in.
These were thoughtful, sincere people, people who loved Jesus.
Except for maybe the addition of a Bible verse in their caption.
Their posts were identical to those of the people who were not Christians, whose worldview is in stark contrast to my own.
Maybe the fact that both sides were posting the same thing was a good sign.
Maybe something was finally uniting us.
So in a pattern that we know she she repeats throughout the book, she talks about this temptation to empathy.
Maybe I should do this.
Maybe I need to do the same thing.
Maybe this, maybe this is a you know a real issue around which we can unite.
Maybe I show into social justice.
She goes on to the next page to talk about what absolutely appeared to be undue for she used on George Floyd.
And she talks about the the killing of Ahmad Arbury.
But then she starts to make her turn.
Okay.
This is what she says.
She says, in the wake of Ahmad Arbury, I knew the optics of a white officer pinning down a seemingly helpless black man was going to cause even more of a stir than usual.
See, now we hear her.
Uh-oh, she's saying, uh-oh, here it comes.
All the black people are going to make a really big deal out of this.
All the qualifiers, the optics of a white officer pinning down a seemingly helpless black man, who's a white officer pinning down a black man, a helpless black man, is going to cause even more of a stir than usual.
Oh, those people, those people are going to make a big deal out of this.
You can hear it.
You can feel the shift.
So she says that.
She says it's going to cause even more of a stir than usual.
And then she goes on to say this.
She says, I just didn't realize how much more the reaction online was seismic and swift.
While many shared my horror, the conversation on social media almost immediately graduated from what's going on here, and that doesn't look good to we need systemic change and abolish the police.
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We can hear she goes on to say that she understood the sadness and even the anger.
I mean, do we hear the privilege dripping from this of somebody who will never be affected by police violence in this way because of her identity and social location?
Do we hear that?
Well, gee, I understand why they'd be sad, and I guess it's okay to be angry, even.
But she says she couldn't get down with the calls for revolution.
And then we get to a statement that she makes that lies at the heart of her whole treatment of this issue, a treatment she's going to return to in the final chapter.
Here's what she says.
I couldn't get on board with the transition from mourning what appeared to be inhumane treatment of a fellow image bearer of God to an indictment of America itself and the police as a whole.
Folks, I just I can't get past the qualifications here.
Right.
When she talks about, you know, mourning with the appearance of inhumane treatment, somebody was murdered.
But ultimately says, no, start criticizing America.
It's too much.
I can't do it.
Criticizing America and the police, that's just too much.
But it continues on.
We get to the victimization.
Here's what she goes on to say.
She says, furthermore, and this was the thing most people were too scared to ask aloud.
How did I know the situation had anything to do with race?
She asks us, we hear it.
She was brave enough to boldly hold on to the idea that race was not a factor in the killing.
She would ask what most people were too scared to, and she builds from there.
She goes on to say that we can't know Derek Chauvin's heart, so we can't know it was about race.
But she says she was pressured to signal her sympathy with the movement.
She says, despite the fact we just can't really know it was about race, there was this pressure to align ourselves with calls for social justice.
And even worse, she says, the people advancing these ideas were on the left.
As a conservative Christian, she tells us, quote, I'd never agree to uphold values I see as destructive, end quote.
What is she saying?
Saying, well, you know, there's a temptation here.
You know, that looks bad, and he killed a guy and stuff, but you know, these are the same people who support LGBTQ plus people and abortion access.
I can't be part of that.
So this just must not be justice.
She goes on to say that straight white Christian middle class Alibeth Stuckey, she couldn't, she couldn't just say that.
No, she says it was forboten to suggest such things.
Let's just pause here and note that of course it was there was nothing and no one actually preventing her from saying whatever she wanted.
She has written a goddamn book about it.
Nobody is stopping her.
She is cashing in on it.
No, she's just a conservative snowflake crying about peer pressure applied from all those who just have too much sympathy for people of color.
This is just standard.
This is an attack on Christianity, crybaby rhetoric, and it structures her entire discussion.
And from there she goes to standard both and arguments that we get on the right all the time.
She says the pressure was on to say the correct things on social media at the time.
She goes on to describe her pushback, and she says a few days later, I shared a video of an older woman who is black, expressing through sobs her experience of watching her community devastated by rioters.
The point of my post was to ask, why not both?
Why can't we be upset by the footage of George Floyd and condemn the riots?
If the goal is justice, the protection of life, shouldn't we care about both?
There's the both and stuff.
We have talked about this on the podcast more times than I than I can probably count.
The equivalence on the right between, say, property damage and the extrajudicial killing of an innocent person.
That those are just taken as equivalent.
Okay.
But we get the both and argument.
Yeah, it was bad, but, and there we go.
Now, we could go on, but this makes the point.
This makes the point, okay?
So to be clear, the entire orientation of Stuckey's take on these issues is an aggrieved white person who has suffered at the hands of the hordes of social justice activists.
She is already framing the issue this way.
The real victims are straight white Christian Americans.
She is the victim.
She felt like she couldn't just say stuff on social media without people clapping back at her.
Whoof, victimization.
People are dying, but she's worried about like, you know, social media backlash.
She's the victim.
And she makes the most typical white move imaginable here to position herself as the voice of the real victims who are the white Christians of the radical calls for social justice.
And as we've seen before, her real issue here isn't empathy as such, it's that we're feeling too much empathy for victims of police brutality, to use this example, and not enough for the poor beleaguered white Christians.
We've seen this over and over that she doesn't actually reject empathy, she just thinks it should always go for those that are on her side of the issue.
And this orientation is crucial, not just in Stuckey's treatment, but the discussion of them typical of the right.
If you talk to anybody on the right about these issues, you are going to hear this victimization and the sense of agreed status.
The real victims are the white Christians who feel they're being accused of something.
This is the orientation that always drives the discourse of the right.
Anytime issues of economic or social justice come up, they make it about them.
It's the ultimate expression of privilege, which is a topic they can't acknowledge, as we will see as we go along to look more deeply at her treatment of this issue.
So with that general orientation in view, I want to look at the second issue that structures her discussion, which is her description of what is meant by the quote unquote social justice she rejects.
So I'm jumping now.
We're now in chapter five.
We're in this final chapter where she defines what she calls the social justice hypothesis of those she opposes.
And this is how she sums up the hypothesis.
She says, quote, every American institution is infested with racism, transphobia, and sexism.
Our inherently oppressive system costs the lives of innocent people at the hands of those in power.
That's what she says.
Now, as far as she goes, as it goes, that's not a terrible definition.
I would tinker with the last sentence somewhat, and I would suggest this.
I would say our inherently oppressive systems, plural, cost the lives of innocent people at the hands of those who benefit from those systems.
Not necessarily those in power, but those who benefit from those systems.
What's the difference?
We're going to talk about that next episode.
The point is, okay, it's not a bad description.
But she smuggles more into it.
Okay.
Two pages later, we get the shift.
Two pages later, we get the move past what she calls the social justice hypothesis to what she thinks is really going on.
Two pages later, she goes on to criticize what she calls the assumptions of the social justice hypothesis.
And this is what she says.
She says the social justice hypothesis asserts that, quote, white people today bear collective guilt and responsibility for the racial injustices of the past, end quote.
This is quite a shift.
I want to note when she stated the social justice hypothesis earlier, she doesn't say anything about the past.
She doesn't say anything about collective guilt, nothing.
But here she smuggles it in.
I'm going to say it again.
Quote, white people today bear collective guilt and responsibility for the racial injustices of the past, end quote.
This is quite a shift.
And it feeds off that sense that white people are the real victims when it comes to social justice.
You're accusing us of actions in the past that we didn't undertake.
And there are a few observations to make about this.
Again, a move that is absolutely typical.
First, again, she says nothing about like that in her first statement of the hypothesis.
She just smuggles it in here.
But second, as someone who has studied and taught and written about and presented on and debated these issues for years, I can tell you honestly, I have never heard anyone advance an idea like this.
It is trite truism on the right, that this is what social justice activists believe.
I've never heard anybody put forward with this view.
I have never actually encountered the argument that, for example, white people born hundreds of years after the imposition of slavery in American colonies, are somehow responsible for that slavery.
It is the ultimate straw person argument, and it is central to right wing opposition to social justice initiatives of every kind, including anti-DEI initiatives at present.
That sentiment, folks, is simply not at the heart of social justice demands.
But what it tells us, if we decode it, if we say, why, why does it play the role in Stuckey's argument that it does, why does it play the role in right wing discourse that it does, if we decode it, this is what we can see, it speaks to it speaks to the anxiety of conservative white Americans.
It allows them to avoid dealing with the issues that are at play in social us social justice demands.
It puts forward a nonsensical idea with which they can paint their opponents so as to dismiss them as unreasonable or irrational.
You don't have to engage your opponent if you can just label them as having a crazy idea.
And it also illustrates the sociology of conservative Christianity in America.
That is how it works as a social organism, as well as the philosophical and theological anthropology, that is the philosophical and theological understanding of what a human person is that structures conservative Christianity in America.
So I want to spend our last few minutes on this point.
And I know this is a little wonky.
I hope you'll hold with me here.
Because I think it can help us bring this together.
And it's a topic I've discussed before, but it bears repeating.
Conservative Christian social and theological thinking is fundamentally individualistic in nature.
When conservative Christians talk about issues of morality or sin of moral responsibility and so forth, these are all issues that have to do with the conscious intentions of individuals.
Now, Americans are very individualistic in general, but data shows, and people actually study this, that conservative Christians are even more individualistic in their thinking.
And some of this comes from a certain logic of responsibility and guilt implicit in their theology.
So if God condemns sin and punishes people for it, then the punishment of individuals can only be fair or just if it's for sins that they have willingly chosen to commit as individuals.
Now, why does all that matter?
Because it matters because within this framework, there is literally no place for a conception of institutions or structures or systems, or let's call them cultural habits that do not reduce to the individuals or the intention of individuals within them, but which may nevertheless be unjust to perpetuate injustice.
Another way to say this is there can't be anything unjust or quote unquote sinful in a society if it can't be traced back to an individual who is acting and doing something sinful on purpose.
So when theological conservatives talk about racism, this for them, this can only mean a conscious and intentional attitude on the part of an individual.
When Stuckey says we can't know Chauvin's heart, this is what she means.
She's saying, Well, we can't be sure that as he killed another human being, he did so because he consciously in that moment wanted to kill a black person or wanted to kill him because he was black.
That's that's the bar that something has to clear to be racist on this model.
Now, this way of thinking has some intuitive appeal.
I think we all have some sense of like holding people responsible for the individual actions and so forth.
It has some intuitive appeal, but it is very simplistic and it just doesn't work as an account of social reality.
And how do we know this?
We know this because of the Social sciences.
The social sciences have demonstrated this for decades.
What the social sciences essentially show us, and here I lean heavily on like sociology, anthropology, social psychology.
They show us that there are broad social patterns that emerge that cannot be explained on the basis of the individuals within those social entities.
And furthermore, that individualistic model, it ignores the fact that before we ever sort of emerge into society as you know, fully formed individuals, we are socialized through our participation in systems and structures and institutions that pre-exist us and they will continue on long after us.
And this is why we see patterns in which people within particular social groups act in predictable ways.
They experience stable patterns of social effects and so forth, regardless of their individual aims or the individual aims of others in their group.
We see these broad patterns.
And these patterns simply cannot be accounted for on the basis of individual psychology or personal preference or subjectivity or whatever else.
So we see patterns of black Americans being more likely to die in police encounters than white Americans.
We know the black Americans convicted of the same crimes as white Americans are more likely to receive harsher sentences and so forth.
We see these social patterns.
And the inference to the best explanation to use a logic term is that it has to do with race.
And that doesn't mean that every judge or jury who hands down a harsher sentence is full of individuals who consciously do so because they hate black people.
No.
It's that they, as the people they are socialized as, they express cultural behaviors they have been socialized into, that are perpetuated within a particular legal system, that have systemic and predictable negative effects on a particular social group.
These are the patterns we see.
And so when people talk about systemic or structural racism or systemic inequalities or systemic injustice, these are the kind of patterns that they're looking at.
And Stuckey explicitly denies that there is any such thing.
We're gonna look at that in more detail in an upcoming episode.
Okay.
But the findings of social science are inexplicable on any other basis.
Folks, if it all just came down to personal belief and preference, we wouldn't see these predictable social patterns.
There wouldn't be a pattern if we were all the kind of free acting individuals that conservatives like to think that we are.
So, for example, choosing the topic that is relevant to this chapter, if I know about the systemic patterns that exist in relation to white police officers and black men, I don't need to know Chauvin's heart to say that racism is the issue.
And his actions express racism, even if he wasn't consciously acting out of a racist set of beliefs or intuitions in that moment.
What does that mean?
It means that if we want to use the language like that of sin, if that's a theological category we want to use, we have to understand that this cannot simply reduce to individual conscious intention.
And there is no place within the theological worldview of conservative Christians for any such notion.
I have tried to have this conversation with conservative Christians since my days as a conservative Christian pastor.
And it is like talking to a brick wall.
They just cannot and will not recognize this.
So if something can't be explained in terms of individual intention, or if we can't know individual intention, if we can't know someone's heart, if we can't open chauvin up and know his heart and know what he was thinking in that moment as he killed a man, then it can't be an expression of something like racism for those on the right.
And this blindness to issues of structure and system, it's not unique to conservative white Christians, but it is pronounced in that population.
Their theology is a block to perceiving it.
And here's here's another reality, and we're going to get into this more as we move along, okay?
Their social position and interests are served by not seeing it.
Why?
Because these systemic structural issues, they are the basis of privilege, of what we call privilege.
Another concept that people like Stuckey are at great pains to deny even exists.
And that denial is at the heart of her smuggling in the idea that white Americans are somehow being held responsible for the past.
Her misstatement of the social justice hypothesis.
The hypothesis is there are lots of Americans who benefit from those systems, who experience privilege because of the history of those systems.
And therefore need to act.
But she doesn't have a concept of system.
She can't have a concept of privilege.
And so she misconstrues completely what is going on and is a completely self-serving misconstrual on her part.
So we're we're going to look in the next episode.
We're going to look more at this issue.
We're going to pick it up here with this concept of privilege and structure and system and decode how it operates in her chapter.
We're going to do that in the next episode.
For now, I want to kind of sum up where we are here.
Okay.
Number one, Stuckey once again makes moves that are completely typical of the right when it comes to social justice.
She positions white Christian Americans as the real victims of social injustice.
Second, she operates within a worldview that can only misapprehend social reality because it can only think in terms of individuals and their conscious beliefs and actions.
Which means that there is no place in her thinking or experience for an understanding of group dynamics, social systems, institutions, et cetera.
And it is this fundamental misapprehension of social reality that ultimately justifies her dismissal of the social justice movement as such.
She cannot conceive of racism in any meaningful sense, so she cannot see how it operates and structures American society.
But furthermore, and this is the key, she doesn't want to.
Which is why the breaking point for her is exactly where activists start talking about systemic change.
And she herself says that.
If we can blame an individual for a bad thing, fine.
But if you start talking about having to change a system, nope, I'm out, she says.
So as I say, we'll pick these threads up and continue pulling on them in the next episode.
We'll bring more fully into view how people like Stuckey perpetuate the racist systems that they do to maintain their own privileged position within society.
We'll take a look at those things.
For now, we need to wind it down.
Thank you for listening.
It's an intense topic.
It's an intense episode, it's an intense chapter.
I welcome your thoughts.
Daniel Miller Swagge, Daniel Miller, S W A J at Gmail.com.
Welcome your thoughts and input.
You can chime in on the Discord.
If you're a subscriber, if you're not a subscriber, would invite you to do that.
Thank you for listening.
Please keep the ideas coming, whether it's about this or anything else.
And as I always say, please be well until we have a chance to talk again.
