During the 20th century, sin pretty much disappeared from the lexicon of progressive Christianity. Original sin was largely replaced by the notion of original goodness. But a host of other evils were discovered along the way, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., and these were grouped together under the general banner of intolerance. At the same time opposing terms such as "inclusiveness" and "diversity" emerged as the "good" which counteracts these evils .
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| Shelby Steele |
Recently Shelby Steele wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal called "Why the Left Can't Let Go of Racism." Steele is a black conservative who is in many respects the mirror image of Barack Obama. Steele, now in his 70s, had a father who was a black truck driver and mother who was a white social worker. Steele is widely known for his career at Stanford University and his journalistic work for the Wall Street Journal. Following here are excerpts from the above-mentioned piece which appeared in August 2017.
It used to be that racism meant the actual enforcement of bigotry--the routine implementation of racial inequality everywhere in public and private life ... It was a social malignancy, yet it carried the authority of natural law, as if God himself had dispassionately ordained it.
Today Americans know that active racism is no longer the greatest barrier to black and minority advancement. But ... talk of "structural" and "systemic" racism conditions people to think of it as inexorable, predestined. So even if bigotry and discrimination have lost much of their menace, Americans neverthelss yearn to know whether or not we are a racist people.
A staple on cable news these days is the "racial incident," which stands as a referendum on this question. Today there is Charlottesville. Yesterday there were the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others. Don't they represent an irrepressible racism in American life? At the news conferences surrounding these events there are always [those] ready to spin the tale of black tragedy and white bigotry.
Such people--and the American left generally-- have a hunger for racism that is almost craven. The writer Walker Percy once wrote of the "sweetness at the horrid core of bad news." It's hard to witness the media's oddly exhilirated reaction to, say, the death of Trayvon Martin without applying Percy's insight. A black boy is dead. But not all is lost. It looks like racism.
What makes racism so sweet? Today it empowers. Racism was once just racism, a terrible bigotry ... But the civil rights movement ... changed that. The 1960s recast racism in the national consiciousness as an incontrovertible sin, the very worst of all social evils.
Suddenly America was in moral trouble. The open acknowledgment of the nation's racist past had destroyed its moral authority ... Only a strict moral accounting could restore legitimacy.
Thus redemption--paying off the nation's sins--became the moral imperative of a new political and cultural liberalism ...
This liberalism always projects moral idealisms (integration, social justice, diversity, inclusion, etc.) that have the ring of redemption. What is political correctness, if not essentially redemptive speech? Soon liberalism had become a cultural identity that offered Americans a way to think of themselves as decent people. To be liberal was to be good.
Here we see redemptive liberalism's great ingenuity: It seized proprietorship over innocence itself. It took on the power to grant or deny moral legitimacy across society. Liberals were free of the past while conservatives longed to resurrect it, bigotry and all ...
So today there is sweetness at the news of racism because it sets off the hunt for innocence and power. Racism and bigotry generally are the great driving engines of modern American liberalism. Even a remote hint of racism can trigger a kind of moral entrepreneurism.
The "safe spaces" for minority students on university campuses are actually redemptive spaces for white students and administrators looking for innocence and empowerment. As minorities in these spaces languish in precious self-absorption, their white classmates, high on the idea of their own wonderful "tolerance," whistle past the very segregated areas they are barred from.
America's moral fall in the '60s made innocence of the past an obsession. Thus liberalism invited people to internalize innocence, to become synonymous with it--even to fight for it as they would for an ideology. But to be innocent there must be an evil from which to be free. The liberal identity must have racism, lest it lose innocence and the power it conveys.
