It's in the Code ep 162: “Social Justice Is Justice, Pt. 2”
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In this episode, Dan considers his look at why Allie Beth Stuckey rejects calls for social justice. He shows how she denies the existence of systemic racism and of racial privilege, and the ways in which she ignores the multiple dimensions of social justice to invalidate the experience of racism by millions of Americans. He also argues that people like Stuckey carefully cultivate their ignorance of the dynamics of race and privilege in America to protect and preserve their own social privilege. Check out this week’s episode to hear more!
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Thank you.
Hello and welcome as always to It's in the Code, a series that's part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Pleased to be with you.
As always, thank you for listening.
And as always, this is a series that is driven by you.
I welcome your thoughts, insights, questions, clarifications, ideas for upcoming episodes and series.
Daniel Miller Swagge, Daniel Miller, SWAJ at gmail.com.
You can reach me there.
You can reach me on the Discord server.
Love to hear from you.
Coming up on the end of looking at Alibeth Stuckey's book Toxic Empathy, have a few other things planned out.
But I'm always open for new ideas.
So please keep the ideas coming.
Let me know what you think.
Let me know what I need to be looking at.
Look forward to hearing from you.
Want to dive in, uh, because again, it's a lot to say this week.
As I mentioned a minute ago, we're continuing our ongoing discussion of Ali Beth Stuckey's book Toxic Empathy and considering what she calls the lies that we believe if we fall prey to the temptation of excessive empathy, of toxic empathy.
And really, we're looking at her book as a part of the broader conservative Christian critique of empathy as a sin to be avoided.
So as a reminder, if maybe you've missed a couple episodes or maybe you're you're jumping into this for the first time.
Her book is structured around five of the central lies of toxic empathy.
All lies that I consider truths, and we are looking at the last of these, her chapter, social justice is justice.
She considers that a lie.
So in this chapter, she gives us her take on social justice and particularly racial justice.
We're going to get to that caveat today, or that focus.
And she outlines her argument for why Christians and conservatives should reject and resist the calls for social justice leveled by organizations and movements like like Black Lives Matter, for example.
To take a prominent example of the right, arguably the paradigmatic example.
And last episode took a look at a lot of the orienting features of her treatment.
I'm finding with this chapter, this is what we really have to do.
Like getting down in the weeds and looking at arguments about numbers and data is largely irrelevant on this topic.
If we don't get straight, the kind of way that it's being approached, the way that that data is being framed and so forth.
And so we were doing that a little bit last time.
We got down in the weeds a little bit.
Looking at the way that conservative Christians understand the nature of the human person and sin and responsibility and so forth to look at why they can only stand racism in terms of individual personally held attitudes.
That's the kind of takeaway.
And we notivated, excuse me, we noted that that inability is carefully cultivated as well.
And so, sort of as lurking in the background there's really a lot of stuff that could be captured under the idea of privilege.
And I promise that we would take a look at that in this this episode, and that's what we're gonna do.
And I realize this is a familiar concept for a lot of this, and in some ways it isn't difficult to understand.
But Stucky can't Acknowledge that it exists.
And her unwillingness to acknowledge it is what allows her to smuggle in the ideas that she does about the demands of social justice.
And while I think the idea is not overly complex, I also know that it can be difficult to explain, especially if you have people in your world who are acting in good faith and they really just don't honestly understand it, and you want to try to explain it to them, that can be difficult to do.
But certainly for those who want to gaslight us into thinking it's not real, it's important to understand like what are we talking about?
So in this episode, that's the theme that I really want to pick up.
And we're gonna we're gonna look at that, we're gonna look how it traces into some other things.
So I want to start by revisiting Stuckey's articulation of what she called the social justice hypothesis.
Okay.
And this is what she said.
I discussed this last episode, but this is really the core of her understanding.
Page 131 in her book, 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.
Okay.
And to reiterate my point from the previous episode, I said that's not a bad statement of the hypothesis, but I would modify it.
I would say, if I were playing on her definition, this is what I would say.
I would say our inherently oppressive systems cost the lives of innocent people at the hands of those who benefit from those systems.
And there are a couple points here in modifying her statement of this hypothesis.
Okay.
The first thing is we're talking about a wide range of interlocking systems that structure American social life.
It's not one monolithic system.
And that's important, and we're going to see why in a few minutes.
Okay.
But second, and this this is a really big point, the claim of social justice advocates is actually broader than someone like Stuckey realizes.
It is not simply the idea that, quote unquote, those in power operate inherently oppressive systems that cost people's lives.
It is that, okay.
And it is not the claim that all white people have power and intentionally oppress others.
That is how the thesis or the position of social justice is consistently presented by those who oppose it.
Alibeth Stuckey is explicit in her treatment of this.
And that's the idea that she smuggles into her discussion when she says that what the social justice claims are is that white people today bear collective guilt and responsibility for the racial injustices of the past.
That's what she says it is.
White people are in power and they are responsible for the racial injustices of the past, and that's just unfair and so forth.
She's off and running.
That is not the claim.
On the contrary, the idea underlying demands for social justice that she's close to, but also a million miles away from, is the idea that there are many people at present, including the majority of white people who benefit from oppressive or exclusionary systems.
They benefit from them.
They are not, quote unquote, in power.
They're not the big power players.
They're not the ones in charge.
They're not elected officials, they're not big tech CEOs, they're just regular people.
They don't control those systems.
They did not institute those systems.
They are often completely unaware of how their lives and the lives of those around them are shaped by those systems.
They typically have no conscious intention of oppressing or marginalizing others by using or participating in these systems, but they nevertheless benefit from them, whether they are aware of them or not, and regardless of whether this is a conscious intention on their part.
And that experience of benefits that we may not choose or even be aware of that exist, that is what we mean by the term privilege.
And this is an absolutely crucial point we have to understand about privilege.
Privilege is conferred upon an individual or group.
It is not simply claimed by them.
What does that mean?
That means that it operates independently of individual intention or desire.
I know lots of people who know and recognize that they are quote unquote privileged in various ways.
And it's not about them.
They can't step out of that.
Somebody who experiences white privilege, guess what?
You're white, and you live in a Society that for a long time has privileged whiteness.
That's not your fault.
It's not something you chose.
It's not something you intended.
It can be even something that you oppose and don't like and want to combat.
And nonetheless, it affects you because it is something that is conferred upon you by others.
Privilege is not necessarily an attitude someone holds.
People can know about privilege.
They can lean into it, but it's not that inherently.
And because it relates to other people, as I say, it's not something we can simply set aside.
So for example, no matter what I do or believe, if I'm pulled over in a traffic stop, cops will respond to me as if I was a white guy.
They're always going to respond to me that way.
That's how I read socially.
I read as a white guy, and that's how they're going to respond to me.
And that's true of most white people, which is why most white parents don't have to give their kids, especially young men, the same kind of strict instructions and warnings about what to do in case they're pulled over.
The black parents routinely give to their children.
And there are lots of things written and discussed about this from within the African American community in particular about training young men what they can and can't do if they want to survive a traffic stop.
I never had to get that talk from my parents because I'm a white guy, and I was just never going to have police respond to me in that way.
Privilege is about how people in society respond to you in positive ways because of your perceived identity.
And again, it often operates unconsciously the part of those who are responding to somebody with privilege.
It's obviously not, it's often not intentional or conscious.
If you want illustration of this, there have been studies, for example, that sent resumes for job interviews.
They would send the identical resume and they would simply change the name, and they would take a name that sounded quote unquote white, John Smith, Sarah Wilson, maybe, I don't know.
And they would send literally the same resume with a name that sounded not white.
Maybe it sounded like a more African American name, stereotypically, or a Middle Eastern name or something like this.
And what they found is that those people with the names that were not perceived to be white were less likely to get job interviews.
And oftentimes the people reading those resumes, that's not conscious on their part or intentional.
But it happens.
Women being paid less than men is another one.
There have been studies that showed, you know, that they would look at at companies and do the, you know, crunch the data and so forth and find these disparities in pay.
And CEOs and COOs and others were shocked by this.
They did not know that that was happening in their company.
It was not intentional.
What they've demonstrated, what studies like that demonstrate is that these things are often not conscious animus or hatred towards some population or another, but it's the privileging of others.
is privileging of men, for example, over women, or privileging of people who are perceived to be white over people who are perceived not to be.
That's how privilege operates, and it doesn't have to be conscious or intentional.
Now, of course, if you're saying, well, there's a flip side to this, Dan, you're exactly right.
The opposite of privilege is implied in all of this.
And we can choose to call that any number of names, but for now, I just want to call it like disadvantage.
Some people experience privilege, some people are disadvantaged because of their identity.
It's just the inverse of privilege.
It is people who are denied advantages because of their identity in a way that sort of mirrors the way that some people are sort of essentially rewarded for their identity.
And again, it is often not conscious or intentional on the part of those who respond to them in this way.
And in the same way that somebody can't simply set aside privilege, somebody can't simply like choose to not be disadvantaged by who they are.
They can't simply claim advantage or privilege.
Okay.
So these two ideas, privilege and let's call it disadvantage, they accrue because the identity somebody is perceived to have.
It is not necessarily about conscious intention on the part of those who are extending privilege or disadvantaging others.
And the last point I really want to make about this is that Privilege, or its inverse, is historically and socially and system and systemically constructed.
Again, it's not consciously chosen by the people who experience it.
And those who treat us with privilege or disadvantage are often not doing so intentionally or as a result of consciously held attitudes.
This is what makes privilege different from prejudice.
And people ask this all the time.
What's the difference between privilege and prejudice are views that I hold about others?
They may be conscious or unconscious, but I hold them.
They can be brought into view and they can be brought into view.
They can be changed.
I can change how I perceive others.
Privilege doesn't work that way.
Disadvantage doesn't work that way.
So if it doesn't come from conscious intention, where does it come from?
It comes from institutions and structures and practices and social attitudes that develop over time.
Okay.
Now, if you study the history of these, to be really clear, many of them do have origins in explicit racial animus and explicit privilege or excuse me, and prejudice, explicit prejudice.
They are intentionally designed or instituted or originate in a desire to marginalize or to harm others.
But over time, they sort of harden.
It's like a layer of sedimentation that forms.
And those systems or practices or social habits, they perpetuate the different effects of privilege and disadvantage, even if the attitudes of those participating within them change over time.
So when people talk about something like systemic racism, that's the idea they have in mind.
Racist effects, effects that differentially affect people based on their race that come from these systems or institutions or cultural patterns that don't reduce to individual intention.
That's what they mean.
And if somebody says, well, give me an example of that.
That's really abstract.
What's an example?
Here's an example.
It's the practice of so-called redlining.
This was the practice of denying things like mortgage loans or home insurance or things like that to individuals from particular neighborhoods or to people or particular backgrounds moving into particular neighborhoods.
It was aimed primarily at African American Americans to prevent them from moving into white majority suburban areas.
Okay.
And it obviously began as an intentional discriminatory practice to make sure that white majority neighborhoods, neighborhoods that had formed by the so-called white flight of wealthier whites from urban areas, it was a way to make to ensure that those white majority neighborhoods remained white majority by discouraging particularly individual, particular individuals rather from moving into them.
So over time, even if the intentions of people like mortgage brokers and loan agents change, even if a loan agent isn't sitting there thinking, this is a black applicant, I need to make sure that they don't get this.
The practices and policies in place continue to privilege some homeowners and home buyers and to disadvantage others.
And there's a whole literature on this on this specific topic.
And I invite you to go take a listen, uh take a listen to it, and people talk about it, or to go read it.
Invite you to look at that.
Okay.
And you get additional factors.
When I talk about cultural habits or cultural patterns, this is what I mean.
Once the ethnic makeup of a neighborhood or a subdivision becomes highly homogeneous, in other words, it's it's majority white or black or overwhelmingly white or black or overwhelmingly part of one ethnicity or another, this creates a kind of added cultural disincentive to diversify.
Lots of people, for obvious reasons, they don't want to be the only person of their background in a given neighborhood.
And so there's this kind of pressure that just develops for a neighborhood to remain ethnically homogeneous.
So in this way, okay, and lots of others, the system for buying and selling homes comes to have effects that systematically privilege some people by disadvantaging others.
If you're a person from a particular ethnic background, you are more likely to get the loan that will allow you to move into the more the more affluent neighborhood to have the nicer house, which then gives you a greater home, obviously a greater home value, more equity and so forth.
It increases your wealth.
It opens up other possibilities and on and on and on.
There we go.
And we still see the lingering effects of this kind of practice.
There was a, I think a series of lawsuits from recent cases, I'm thinking in Baltimore, where it turned out that homes that were owned by people of color in diverse neighborhoods were consistently undervalued when they did valuations of those homes.
There were actually lawsuits filed about this, that they were systematically undervalued, that race was playing a role here that I don't think was intentional on the part of people doing it, but it does reflect the history of these practices and the way that people socialized into these practices perpetuate them.
Okay.
So what emerge are patterns that can't be reduced to just the individuals involved.
They can't be explained in terms of individual attitudes or beliefs or what have you, in the way that somebody like Stuckey thinks.
So what's the point of this?
Okay.
And I realize this is kind of wonky for some, maybe overly familiar for others.
What's the point?
Here it is.
Stuckey denies that any of this is real.
Everything I've just said, she says is not something that happens.
The individualistic understanding of morality and sin and the nature of the human person, all the stuff we talked about in the last episode, it makes racism of this kind invisible, literally unthinkable.
It cannot be conceived.
It is unintelligible to somebody who approaches their understanding of the world and the people in it the way that Stuckey does.
So Stucky argues that we can't know Derek Chauvin's heart, for example, while she completely ignores decades of data that demonstrate clear patterns of differential treatment by white police, depending on the ethnicity of the offender.
And this emphasis of hers, the way that she approaches this, that is why, despite overwhelming evidence, people like her can still insist that racism is rare in America and that in the isolated instances where it does occur, it's it's an issue of the proverbial few bad apples.
It's a few bad racist individuals, but it is extremely rare.
It's almost never something that occurs.
A viewpoint that, you know, is contrasts sharply with the perspective of different communities of color who live this every day.
And once again, this is a strategic unknowing on her part.
When I say that she can't conceive it or understand it, please don't think I'm letting her or anybody else on the right off the hook.
I'm not.
It is a strategic unknowing.
They choose not to know this.
It is a carefully cultivated ignorance.
And if you've tried talking about this with people, you know what I mean.
You know how they react to keep themselves from having to face these realities.
By denying the reality of systems and structures that exceed the individual, by denying that privilege and systemic disadvantage exist, Stuckey and others like her, others who experience privilege on the basis of existing systems, they can continue to do just that.
They can continue to experience that privilege by denying its existence.
So the social justice hypothesis, as Stuckey calls it, it is not that present-day white people are responsible for the wrongs of the past.
That's a silly idea, and nobody that I know who's serious in any way has ever advanced it.
It is the claim that they collectively continue to reap the benefits of that past, experiencing privilege at the cost of disadvantaging others.
That is the claim.
And we see all of this at play in Stuckey's work when she claims what her non-negotiable line in the sand is.
And again, I talked about this last episode, but this is really carrying the idea forward.
She said, as a reminder, that the calls for social justice, they lost her when they started calling for change to the system.
Folks, it is an article of faith within conservative Christian circles that quote unquote, the system cannot be corrupt, that the U.S. cannot be a nation founded on racism, racist principles, that the U.S. cannot be a nation in which racism is endemic.
That is an article of faith.
It is not a fact to be demonstrated.
There is No evidence for it.
It is an article of faith.
And I will tell you, it is as central within the operation of conservative American Christianity and Christian nationalism as any claim to the Bible or beliefs in Jesus or anything else.
It is that central.
It is that deeply ingrained.
And she says as much in the book when she says what lost her were those claims.
Full stop.
You start criticizing America.
You start suggesting that white Americans, among others, experience privilege because of some social systems in this country.
Nope, we're done.
We're done.
You have violated an article of faith.
That's what it is.
So that's the first piece.
The blindness, the carefully cultivated blindness and unwillingness to recognize privilege and systems and so forth.
That is what structures Stuckey's rejection of any claims for social justice.
Okay.
But there's another dimension to this that I think we need to touch on.
And I've referenced this, I referenced it last episode.
We're going to reference it.
I referenced it again earlier here, and now we sort of circle back around to it.
She limits her discussion of social justice to the narrow issue of race.
Okay.
But we know that privilege and disadvantage affect multiple interlocking social domains.
This is why I say systems in the plural.
Economics and gender, for example, sort of stack with race to multiply the effects.
And I use this as a video game term.
When you have certain advantages in a game, like I don't know, if you wear certain armor, you have certain powers or whatever, you get like these benefits.
And sometimes those benefits stack.
So if you have two or three things that give benefits, you get to stack the bonuses from those.
That's essentially how privilege works.
You get to stack privilege from different domains.
It's also how disadvantage works.
The negative impacts of disadvantage also accrue from multiple interlocking systems.
So for example, white men experience a greater measure of privilege than white women.
White women have often the privilege of whiteness, but also the disadvantages that come with being a woman and not a man and so forth.
Okay.
Stucky overlooks studiously, carefully, intentionally overlooks interconnections like this to deny the significance of privilege or race when she does attempt to respond to the empirical evidence.
This is my way as I have as I often say, this is how she's not acting in good faith.
She intentionally overlooks dimensions of social life to try to basically exonerate people from experiencing privilege and to render race a moot point.
And I am not making this up to illustrate this.
I want to look in her section.
She has a section in her chapter called The Myth of Systemic Racism.
Okay.
And in this this section, she takes on some of the data.
And I want to look at how she does this to see how she tries to evade the significance of that data by only focusing on race and ignoring other dimensions of systemic injustice and privilege.
So here's the data.
This is from her book.
She says, Let's look at some facts.
It's true that black people are disproportionately represented in the justice system.
Though they comprise about 14.4% of the general population, they made up nearly 40% of the prison population and about 26% of all arrests in 2019.
In other words, they are disproportionately arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned.
They are more likely than any other ethnicity to be involved in traffic stops and to be accused of reckless driving.
They are also said to be more likely to be killed by the police than their white counterparts.
End the quote there.
Okay.
So how does she respond to this?
Somebody says, Well, I mean, you accuse her of ignoring the data, Dan, but she's looking at the data.
Okay, let's see what she does with this.
Here's what she says.
Here's how she's going to dismiss this.
Here's how she's going to say, you know, that looks like it might be about race, but it's really not.
Here's what she goes on to say.
She says it's important to note that densely populated black communities are typically high in crime.
And black men, while making up only five to six percent of the population, account for 40% of police Officer killings.
She goes on to say, a few lines down, any disparity in killings, that is killing of black men by white police officers, is likely due to the fact the black Americans are more likely to have interaction with the police due to living in high crime areas.
Okay.
That's her response.
Her response is essentially this.
She says, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
More black people in prison, more black people in traffic stops.
But it's it's just because you know what?
They live in areas of higher crime, so they encounter police more.
What do you what do you expect?
The real cause isn't race, it's crime.
Okay.
Now, here's my question for her.
I say, okay, Allie.
Okay.
But why?
You're ignoring the huge, obvious question of why are quote unquote densely populated black communities, end quote.
Why are those communities high in crime?
Why are there densely populated black communities to begin with?
What conditions make it so that black Americans are more likely to have interactions with the police?
The answer is like, okay, so like, yeah, the areas are higher crime, but what does that mean?
Why?
Why are they higher crime?
And the answers are complex, but the interlocking nature of privilege and disadvantage explain it.
Densely populated black communities, as she calls them, are also likely to be poorer.
They are likely to have lower property values, they are likely to have populations who are less educated, and so forth.
And that, all of that reflects long histories of not only racial discrimination and disadvantage, but economic injustice and educational injustice.
And we talked about that with the example of redlining.
One of the reasons why you had quote unquote densely populated black areas is because they were prohibited prohibited and banned in various ways, sometimes legal, sometimes extra legal, from moving to other areas and so forth.
They couldn't build the kind of generational wealth that white families have often been building for decades.
And you get this endemic cycle of poverty and crime and everything else in these communities.
Crime accompanies poverty and it accompanies lower education.
So in creating a dynamic in which people of color are more likely to be poorer and more likely to be less educated, it is virtually assured that neighborhoods of these populations will also have higher crime.
The answer is not social justice isn't a real thing because there's higher crime.
The answer is social justice, quote unquote, also is not just about race.
It is about education.
It is about economics.
It is about so many other things that interlock and come together.
So far from proving that somehow or another, this makes it not about race.
It shows the depth of the racial problem and the way that race and systems of racial injustice are coordinated and connected to other interlocking systems of injustice.
She hasn't shown us that this isn't really about race.
I mean, that's what she's claiming.
She's she's actually showing us that social justice involves more than just race.
And it serves her interest then to not mention any of that, to not ask any of those questions that logically follow from what she's saying of like, why is there higher crime?
Why are there concentrations of these populations?
Where there are, why are these demographic factors there?
She ignores all of that.
Stucky ignores those other social dimensions as a strategy to try to make race disappear as an explanation for things such as the killing of George Floyd.
And this is why I say when we're having this kind of discussion, we have to understand these kind of big, overarching like meta issues.
Because if you just dive into the data, the data presents itself very, very differently, depending on on your perspective and your orientation, if you recognize these social dynamics or not.
So let's take a minute here and like sort of tie these together.
I realize these episodes have been, you know, like I say, we get down in the weeds and we get into some pretty wonky academic stuff.
So let's talk about where this has taken us.
Okay.
So here are some key points.
Stucky basically rejects the social justice thesis on the grounds that it says white people are responsible For the racial injustices of the past.
It doesn't say that.
She denies that there is any such thing as systemic racism or that racism is an endemic problem in the U.S. She says that most accusations of racism are off base because we simply can't know the hearts of the people involved.
And she rejects any notion, following from all of this, that systemic change is needed in the U.S. to achieve social justice.
She dismisses that as a radical claim.
And the reason that's significant is every point there is completely typical of the broader discourses of the right.
Everything she says is straight out of the typical right wing playbook.
It's exactly what your parents are hearing from their pastor.
Or it's exactly what Uncle Ron will tell you.
Or it is exactly what we hear routinely from GOP politicians.
It's the logic that says, hey, you know, more black people are in prison or encounter police because there's more black crime.
It's not hard to understand.
But if we dive into the discourse as I'm trying to do here, if we decode it, if we pick it apart to see how it works, we find where it goes wrong.
It's based on a simplistic understanding of human psychology and social dynamics.
It ignores processes of historical development and socialization.
It isolates and ignores related interlocking social dynamics and processes.
And most importantly, it represents a carefully cultivated ignorance that serves the interests of those who benefit from existing processes of social injustice.
And folks, straight white conservative Christians like Stucky are at the top of that list of people who benefit.
I've said this before on the show.
I say it when I teach, we often hear well-intentioned people say, "Well, you know what?
If we live in a just society, everybody wins." Everybody benefits from a just a more just and equitable society.
You know what?
Not everybody wins in a more just and equitable society.
The people who currently benefit from an unjust and inequitable society lose some of that.
They lose some of their privilege if we have a more equitable and just society.
So there is a huge incentive on the part of people like Ali Beth Stuckey to make sure that they remain ignorant on these dynamics and to make sure that others do as well.
And that is what we see in this chapter.
So that's the role that privilege plays and its inverse of disadvantage.
And the way that you can have racist structures and processes and histories and cultural habits that are not reducible to the conscious intentions of those who participate in them.
And when people talking about social justice talk about the, you know, the responsibility or something of white Americans, what they're saying is those who do experience privilege who are privileged on the basis of those systems and structures have a responsibility to change and address those systems and structures.
They're not saying that we are guilty of slavery in the 18th century or 19th centuries.
Nobody's saying that.
They are saying millions of white Americans, to give just one example, do in fact experience privilege on the basis of the legacies of those practices.
And that has to be something that's wrapped into a model of racial injustice, economic justice, that's wrapped into a model what it means to bear quote unquote responsibility for justice.
I hope all that makes sense.
That's a lot.
That's heavy and it's hard.
Please let me know.
Daniel Miller Swagge, Daniel Miller, S W A J. Love your insights and comments and feedback on this and other topics, as most of you probably know if you're a subscriber.
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Let me know.
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We've got some new things coming up soon.
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Thank you for helping us to do all the things that we do.
I say it often and I mean it.
If you're listening to me right now, you could be doing something else.
