There is a reason San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid suffered no significant damage in the 7.1-magnitude 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in Central California. Its pyramid shape and “earthquake-friendly” foundation make it about as quake-resistant a high-rise building as you’ll find.1
Not all earthquake damage is created equal. Some buildings are better suited to withstand the trauma. One of the deadliest disasters in recent history was the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti in 2010, taking hundreds of thousands of lives as it toppled more than 100,000 structures. Similar magnitude, but totally different outcome than Loma Prieta. Why? “At the time, Haiti had no quake-resistant building codes or in-depth understanding of its vulnerability,”2 the Miami-Herald tells us. In other words, paying more attention to infrastructure and preparation would have spared many lives.
For those whose worldview considers power, oppression, and hegemony to be the basis for all human relationships, my story is only important if it affirms said oppression. For them, what I am sharing is a textbook (literally) example of internalized oppression. I am not exaggerating. The following list of examples of internalized oppression is from Özlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo’s book Is Everyone Really Equal?, one of the most influential college textbooks currently being used to train future educators:
One of the greatest tragedies of the Critical Social Justice movement is how it promotes devastation by encouraging people and communities of color to avoid “adopting the dominant culture” by eschewing real data. As Thomas Sowell points out in Discrimination and Disparities, the CSJ crowd “proclaim that statistical disparities show biased treatment—and that this conclusion must be believed without visible corroborating evidence… unless sheer insistent repetition is regarded as evidence.”4
This kind of thinking and argumentation lies at the very heart of Critical Race Theory and the Critical Social Justice movement. According to CRT:
Racial inequality emerges from the social, economic, and legal differences that white people create between “races” to maintain elite white interests in labour markets and politics, giving rise to poverty and criminality in many minority communities.5
Let’s examine this claim line by line. First, the subject is “racial inequality.” What does that mean? Whatever it is, it “emerges from the social, economic, and legal differences that white people create between races.” And these differences are created for a sinister purpose: “to maintain elite white interests in markets and politics.” Now we get to the definition of racial inequality. It is what this evil white creation gives rise to: “poverty and criminality in minority communities.”
When you combine this concept with the idea that attributing inequality to anything other than racism is—well, racist—you are left with no alternative than to “do the work of antiracism.”
There are four glaring problems with this scenario. First, this idea is an example of circular, question-begging logic at its worst. Second, accepting this argument requires repudiating entire swaths of research on alternate causes of racial inequalities. Third, it leads to the condemnation of biblical truth and a well-established preaching tradition—a black preaching tradition. And fourth, it feeds into a victimology mindset that teaches disadvantaged people that their only hope is the benevolence, good will, and eventual revolutionary political action of well-meaning white saviors. For the rest of the chapter, I will address each one of these points
so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Ephesians 4:14–16)
According to research by the Cato Institute, 62 percent of Americans say the political climate these days prevents them from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive. And this is not limited to one side of the political spectrum. “Majorities of Democrats (52 percent), independents (59 percent) and Republicans (77 percent),” according to the report, “all agree they have political opinions they are afraid to share.”6
One is that systemic/structural racism is not the only, or even the primary, explanation for inequities. If you have engaged in such conversations lately, you have learned there is no such thing as brotherly disagreement on this issue. On these matters, there is right and there is wrong. More accurately, there is the CRT view on the one hand, and some version of white fragility, “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback,”7 or some other modern CSJ disorder on the other. This is where the circular reasoning comes in.
The argument goes something like this: Systemic racism is the cause of disparities. If you doubt that, it is because you are a racist who wants to protect your power and keep those disparities in place. This has to be true because, if you were not racist, you would know that the cause of disparities is… racism. The news is replete with examples of people who have lost their jobs over this madness.
Kurt Beathard was the offensive coordinator for the Illinois State University football team. That is, until he found a BLM flyer on his office door and replaced it with a flyer of his own stating, “All Lives Matter to Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Beathard was fired within weeks.8 Professor Stephen Hsu was forced to resign from his position as vice president of research and innovation at Michigan State University over alleged “scientific racism.” His actual crime? Interviewing an expert on police shootings who debunked the CRT myths surrounding them. (Apparently, merely associating with someone who questions the narrative is tantamount to “scientific racism.”)9 Portland State University professor Bruce Gilley was subjected to international scrutiny and scorn after starting a “Critiques of BLM” reading group. And the list goes on!
The CSJ view is considered both unfalsifiable and unassailable. Facing off with a true believer is a reminder that “a brother offended is more unyielding than a strong city, and quarreling is like the bars of a castle” (Proverbs 18:19). If you do find someone willing to engage on the topic, you will eventually get to the question-begging spiral. I have had many of these conversations, and they all lead in the same direction: at the heart of every malady is an historic wrong.
Take an imaginary discussion about a young man in trouble with the law who was eventually expelled from school:
Could his history of drug use be a contributing factor?
Not his fault… Racist policies flooded the inner city with drugs.
How about his record of poor academic performance and absence from school?
Inequities created inferior schools that minorities are unmotivated to attend.
Could the lack of a father in his home have anything to do with it?
That is a byproduct of slavery and an excuse used to blame the victim.
In the end, the answer to everything is racism. Not only is this kind of reasoning logically flawed, but it also flies in the face of a substantial body of sociological research and the historic preaching and understanding of the black church.
In his book Human Diversity, Charles Murray sheds light on the orthodoxy in social science. “The core doctrine of the orthodoxy in the social sciences is a particular understanding of human equality,” he notes. “I don’t mean equality in the sense of America’s traditional ideal—all are equal in the eyes of God, have equal inherent dignity, and should be treated equally under the law—but equality in the sense of sameness.”10 Murray calls this “the sameness premise.” The premise holds that in “a properly run society, people of all human groupings will have similar life outcomes.”11 While this premise sounds good, Murray demonstrates convincingly, using copious data, that it is false. “The political expression of the orthodoxy,” he adds, “had its origins in the mid-1960s with the legal triumphs of the civil rights movement and the rise of feminism.”12 Nor is this coincidental.
“The crucial question,” writes Thomas Sowell, “is not whether evils exist but whether the evils of the past or present are automatically the cause of major economic, educational and other social disparities today.” In Sowell’s view, the fundamental problem is the assumption that “disparities are automatically somebody’s fault, so that our choices are either to blame society or to ‘blame the victim.’… Yet,” he asks, “whose fault are demographic differences, geographic differences, birth order differences or cultural differences that evolved over the centuries before any of us were born?”13 Nor is Sowell alone in his perspective.
“Many vocal advocates for racial equality have been loath to consider the possibility that problematic patterns of behavior could be an important factor contributing to our persisting disadvantaged status,” writes Brown University economics professor Glenn Loury in a Manhattan Institute essay called “Culture, Causation, and Responsibility.” “Some observers on the right of American politics… take the position that discrimination against blacks is no longer an important determinant of unequal social outcomes. I have long tried to chart a middle course—acknowledging antiblack biases that should be remedied while insisting on addressing and reversing the patterns of behavior that impede black people from seizing newly opened opportunities to prosper.”14
Both Loury and Sowell chart a course that is not only sensible, but is also aligned with the historic view of the black church in America. Neither argue that America is free of racism, but both argue that there are other issues that must be addressed regardless of racism.
There are certainly black churches that are rife with Marxist liberation theology, CRT, Intersectionality, and the social gospel. With all the churches that exist in a country the size of the United States, this should come as no surprise. However, if you assume that this means the pulpits in black churches don’t address personal responsibility, you are wrong. White liberals like Robin DiAngelo, Jim Wallis, and Daniel Hill may chafe at the idea of black responsibility, but black pastors do not. The internet is filled with clips of black pastors getting standing ovations as they passionately admonish their young members to “pull up your pants, get an education, stop dropping babies all over the place, learn to speak proper English, get all that gold out of your mouth.…” They and their members know that, regardless of what is going on outside the black community, culture matters. The black family matters. Education matters. Decisions and choices matter. And above all, God’s Word matters.
I am not suggesting that evangelical proponents of CSJ do not know this—at least not the ones on the conservative end of the spectrum. My point here is that the fault line is shifting. There is a growing shift toward extremes. Today, any preacher who intends to make a statement to a black audience or about the black community from a biblical text that addresses personal responsibility will have to spend the lion’s share of his message doing so much apologizing and explaining that the force of his admonitions will die the death of a thousand qualifications. Gone are the days when a preacher can assume his audience will give him the benefit of the doubt.
I have come to the conclusion that such qualifications do more harm than good. Preachers who spend more time trying to be helpful than they do trying to be truthful are doing a disservice to those to whom they preach. There is a place for nuance, but the clear admonitions of Scripture are not it.
Thomas Sowell is one of the most significant intellectuals of our day. His words are useful here:
Disagreements about social issues in general seem to be not only inevitable but even beneficial, when opposing sides are forced to confront contrary arguments that might not have been considered before, and examine empirical evidence not confronted before. Neither side may have taken all the factors into consideration, but having to cope with each other’s different views may bring out considerations that neither side gave much thought to at the outset.15
With this in mind, I want to address four areas where this is particularly true: fatherlessness, education, crime, and abortion.
In a speech delivered at the Morehouse Conference on African American Fathers two decades ago, William Raspberry said,
Are black fathers necessary? You know, I’m old and I’m tired, and there are some things that I just don’t want to debate anymore. One of them is whether African American children need fathers. Another is whether marriage matters. Does marriage matter? You bet it does. Are black fathers necessary? Damn straight we are.
Morehouse College is one of the historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) that falls to the far left on both the political and theological spectrum. I have a dear friend who went to seminary at Morehouse back in the 1990s who summed it up well when he said, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, “I think maybe one of my professors was actually a Christian.” I say this only to highlight the significance of the aforementioned statement and the conference where it was made. This was not a white supremacist speaking at some kind of alt-right rally. This was a black man speaking at Morehouse!
Morehouse administrators later wrote that they “believe that among the most urgent problems facing the African American community, and the entire nation, is the reality that 70 percent of African American children are born to unmarried mothers, and that at least 80 percent of all African American children can now expect to spend at least a significant part of their childhood years living apart from their fathers.”16 This has long been a concern among black religious, political, and community leaders and continues to be so to this day. However, the rise of CSJ and CRT has led to a sea change. Today it is neither popular, nor in many cases acceptable, to address the need for moral change in the black community.
In June 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama gave a Father’s Day message at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago that today would be considered classic verbal violence on most university campuses.
“[I]f we are honest with ourselves,” he said, “we’ll admit that way too many fathers also are… missing from too many lives and too many homes.” He went on to say that fathers “have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”17 Then, in a moment Obama probably wishes he could erase, he took off his CRT hat and made a statement that would definitely require a trigger warning:
We know the statistics—that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.18
This speech was given from the pulpit of a black church, and there was not a hint of surprise, controversy, unease, or disagreement. Why? Because this has been common fare since time immemorial! This is “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:13).
Nor is this just a black thing. “The science tells us that the number one predictor of economic mobility for poor kids in America is the share of two-parent families in their neighborhood,”19 wrote University of Virginia sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox, a leading researcher on the importance and impact of marriage and family. That well-known fact is why Obama told his Father’s Day audience that two-parent families are “what keeps [children’s] foundation strong. It’s what keeps the foundation of our country strong.”20 And the future president didn’t stop there. He went on to address another issue that is often deemed verboten by the antiracist crowd: the need for high standards and a commitment to education in the black community.
In typical Obama-speaking-at-a-black-church fashion, the then-senator took aim at the all-too-prevalent culture of underachievement. You know, the rampant truancy, failure to do homework, and the general indifference to learning, all in the name of the poisonous notion that pursuing academic excellence is a manifestation of “acting white.” It’s one of those things black people are only allowed to talk about when white people are not listening. Evidently, Obama forgot he was being recorded, because he encouraged fathers to set “an example of excellence for our children,” noting that, “if we want to set high expectations for them, we’ve got to set high expectations for ourselves.” He went even further, stating, “It’s great if you have a job; it’s even better if you have a college degree.”21 Is he wrong? Was the church wrong for applauding? Are myriad black pastors around the country wrong for saying the exact same thing Sunday after Sunday? Of course not!
This is part of the legacy of Black America. We are a proud people who have always seen the need to strive for education. Noted historian Robert Higgs, commenting on the astonishing feat of achieving black literacy in post-slavery black America, noted, “For a large population to transform itself from virtually unlettered to more than half literate in 50 years ranks as an accomplishment seldom witnessed in human history.”22 This led to levels of economic advancement that were also unprecedented.
It is unfortunate that this part of black history is often glossed over due to its inconsistency with the current victimology narrative. However, the facts are undeniable. “The conventional attitudes of blacks toward marriage, parenting, school, and work a century ago,” writes Jason Riley in False Black Power?, “aided and abetted [an] unprecedented black economic advancement and complicate liberal claims that black antisocial behavior in the twenty-first century is a ‘legacy’ of slavery and Jim Crow.”23
It is important not to miss Riley’s point. Those attempting to blame fatherlessness, crime, and a lack of black achievement today on the legacy of slavery must account for the fact that one hundred years after slavery ended, blacks, according to many measures, were actually doing better than they have in the sixty years since the Civil Rights Act. Sowell notes, “As of 1960, two-thirds of all black American children were living with both parents. That declined over the years, until only one-third were living with both parents in 1995.” This was more pronounced among families in poverty, where “85 percent of the children had no father present.”24 How then, given the fact that the trajectory worsened after 1960, can slavery and Jim Crow be the cause?
Obama’s Father’s Day speech struck a similar tone in that he located the problem and the solution not outside the black family, but inside. “They see when you are inconsiderate at home; or when you are distant; or when you are thinking only of yourself,” he warned. Then, in a move that would make DiAngelo and Kendi cringe, he connected behavior in the black family to pathologies in the black community, noting, “It’s no surprise when we see that behavior in our schools or on our streets.”25 No surprise? Why? Because it is what systemic racism has produced? No—because the way we live in our families matters! Again, according to the gurus of antiracism, this is not to be done. This is what Robin DiAngelo calls “aversive racism.”
But Obama wasn’t done. Next he turned his attention to another taboo issue in the current CSJ debate: crime. And when he did, he once again echoed the sentiments and findings of others who have studied the matter, including the Morehouse Conference.
[C]ontrolling for race, neighborhood characteristics, and mother’s education and cognitive ability, boys raised in single parent homes are twice as likely to commit a crime leading to incarceration. A child growing up without both parents also faces a greater risk that he or she will be a victim of a crime, especially child abuse.26
This statement from the Morehouse Conference is consistent with Wilcox’s more recent research which found that “the rule of law is strongest in communities where stable married families dominate the local landscape.”27 This connection between stable families and the rule of law is something most of us know intuitively. It doesn’t mean that we have a simplistic understanding of racism or deny it exists. It just means that we understand the importance of the family as it relates to the community at large.
Again, from Obama’s Father’s Day speech:
Yes, we need more cops on the street. Yes, we need fewer guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. Yes, we need more money for our schools, and more outstanding teachers in the classroom, and more afterschool programs for our children. Yes, we need more jobs and more job training and more opportunity in our communities. But we also need families to raise our children. We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child—it’s the courage to raise one.
And just when it seemed he couldn’t get more politically incorrect, Obama took a bite of another forbidden fruit and said, “It’s up to us to tell our sons those songs on the radio may glorify violence, but in my house we give glory to achievement, self-respect, and hard work.”28 Then he moved on to the sine qua non of racial politics: homicide rates.
I started this book addressing the deaths of black men because it is the touchstone of the current debate. At the end of the day, it is not income inequality, incarceration, or education that causes the greatest stir; it is those deaths. Whenever we hear people talking about “the discussion about race,” or “issues of racial justice,” it usually comes on the heels of a high-profile police killings like Michael Brown, Philando Castile, or George Floyd. But when Obama stated that “homicide is a leading cause of death for black Americans of all ages,”29 he wasn’t using hyperbole. Nor was he alluding to the killing of “unarmed black men” by police. He was referring to black-on-black murder.
According to the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, “[I]n 2000, for people aged 10–34 years, homicide rates were more than 11 times higher for blacks than the rate for whites.” And that number has not improved. “In 2015, homicide rate for blacks aged 10–34 years was 13 times the rate for whites.”30 And almost all of those murders happen not at the hands of the police or white people, but other blacks—usually young black men. This is why sermons in black churches have frequently and forcefully addressed violence. Nor has the church been alone in its concern. “Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks,” writes James Forman in Locking Up Our Own, “African American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.”31
If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us. (1 John 1:8–10)
If the first false claim is “Police are hunting and killing unarmed black men,” the second is that “white people are hunting and killing unarmed black men.” The Black Lives Matter movement gained traction and prominence after the Michael Brown case, but it traces its origins back to the killing of Trayvon Martin. These two cases are often conflated not only by BLM, but by evangelical SJWs as well.
“So when I watch a video like George Floyd’s,” wrote Christian pastor and rapper Shai Linne, “it represents for me the fresh reopening of a deep wound and the reliving of layers of trauma that get exponentially compounded each time a well-meaning white friend says, ‘All lives matter.’ ”32 For Linne, this is about “the systemic factors that contributed to the George Floyd situation,”33 which is why he contends that though all lives matter, “in this country, black lives have been treated like they don’t matter for centuries and present inequities in criminal justice, income, housing, health care, education, etc. show that all lives don’t actually matter like they should.”34 So for him and others in the evangelical CSJ movement, it is impossible to separate these cases.
I disagree. Not only should we separate these issues, but if we are intent on addressing the underlying questions, we must separate them.
The Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery cases were not so-called “state-sanctioned killings.” I reject that categorization altogether in the post–Civil Rights era. It damages our understanding of history to lump modern police killings with cases like that of Medgar Evers and Emmett Till. There was a time of state-sanctioned killings of blacks. Thank God we do not live in that time now! We live in a time when such cases would be unthinkable, and anyone who argues otherwise is hard pressed to prove that their assertion is anything more than hyperbole.
The Martin and Arbery cases involved civilians, and thus belong to a discussion about the broader issue of intraracial violence. This is a discussion the CSJ movement does not want to have since the facts not only disprove their narrative, but obliterate it. According to federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, in interracial violence involving blacks and whites, white perpetrators account for 15 percent of the cases while black perpetrators account for 85 percent.35 In other words, far from there being an epidemic of whites “hunting down innocent, unarmed black men,” when it comes to interracial violence, black people are overwhelmingly more likely to victimize white people than the other way around.
This is also true when it comes to crimes against the police, as mentioned earlier. A police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black assailant than an unarmed black man is to be killed by a cop.36 And before you accuse me of “victim blaming” or “promoting negative stereotypes about black criminality,” remember, my point in raising these statistics is to expose and warn against the flippant use of univariate analysis in order to “prove” racism. I no more accept the notion that these stats prove something endemic to black people than I accept the notion that disparities in police killings prove racial injustice in policing. Both stats require more honest, robust analysis and a rejection of CRT/I presuppositions.
Current cries about “over-policing” of black communities and the need to “defund the police” are inconsistent with the facts on the ground. According to recent Gallup polls, most black Americans (81 percent) want police to spend the same amount of or more time in their area as before protests broke out in 2020.37 This resonates with my own experience growing up in a high-crime area. I remember days when I had to walk through territory that was unfamiliar or unwelcoming. I always had my head on a swivel, looking for gangbangers who might want to jam me up. Like all young black men in my neighborhood, I had nightmares about being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and being asked, “What set you claimin’?” However, on one occasion I had no fear of this, and that was when there was a heavy police presence. Ironically, though I feared the police, I still had a sense that when 5-0 was roaming the hood, I was safe.
This complicated relationship with the police is something worth exploring. “I have tried to recover a portion of African American social, political, and intellectual history,” writes James Forman, “a story that gets ignored or elided when we fail to appreciate the role that blacks have played in shaping criminal justice policy over the past forty years.”38 In his book Locking Up Our Own, Forman weaves a narrative supported by historical and data analyses and demonstrates the little-known or -appreciated fact that blacks have not only viewed crime as a major issue, but have also played a significant role in shaping the modern legal response to that problem.
African Americans performed this role as citizens, voters, mayors, legislators, prosecutors, police officers, police chiefs, corrections officials, and community activists. Their influence grew as a result of attaining political power, especially after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And to a significant extent, the new black leaders and their constituents supported tough-on-crime measures.39
Forman’s work helps dispel one of the most persistent myths of our day concerning crime and punishment: the idea that disparate penalties for crack and powder cocaine represent de facto evidence of racism in the criminal justice system. In fact, “the racial-conspiracy hypothesis,” writes Barry Latzer, “has never been established in historical scholarship and remains the redoubt of a few ideologues.”40 Latzer’s work takes dead aim at the claims of Michelle Alexander, whose popular book The New Jim Crow is a favorite on antiracist reading lists in spite of its several glaring problems, some of which Forman raises.41
Forman’s work, as well as my personal experience growing up in South Central Los Angles, show that, “in the years preceding and during our punishment binge, black communities were devastated by historically unprecedented levels of crime and violence.” This increase was largely driven by the fact that during the heroin epidemic, “homicides doubled and tripled in D.C. and many other American cities throughout the 1960s,” which is important to keep in mind when considering the crack versus powder cocaine disparity. The crack epidemic came two decades after the heroin epidemic and dwarfed it in terms of impact. Crack was “a terrifying drug whose addictive qualities and violent marketplace caused some contemporaries to label it ‘the worst thing to hit us since slavery.’ ”42 This is why Latzer challenges Alexander’s assessment of the problem:
The notion that the buildup of the criminal-justice system, which began in the 1970s but gained steam over the next three decades, was part of a plot to undo the civil-rights movement rather than a response to the massive crime and drug wave that afflicted this country not only is dubious revisionist history, but it overlooks the strong support of black leadership for an expansion of the criminal-justice system.43
Any analysis of the difference in penalties must take these facts into consideration. The historical context simply does not lend itself to the kind of simplistic analyses and assertions of the CSJ crowd. In a March 2019 op-ed published in National Review, Alexander acknowledged the fact that violent crime “accounts… for 54 percent of [black inmates] in prison.” Latzer celebrates the fact that Alexander “now concedes that mass incarceration cannot be addressed without doing something about violent crime,” which he argues (and I agree) “is a big improvement over her New Jim Crow claim that drug prosecutions were the heart of the problem.44 Forman’s analysis of the issue is both nuanced and sobering. Again, from Locking Up Our Own:
As they confronted this devastating crime wave, black officials exhibited a complicated and sometimes overlapping mix of impulses. Some displayed tremendous hostility toward perpetrators of crime, describing them as a “cancer” that had to be cut away from the rest of the black community. Others pushed for harsher penalties but acknowledged that these measures would not solve the crisis at hand. Some even expressed sympathy for the plight of criminal defendants, who they knew were disproportionately black. But that sympathy was rarely sufficient to overcome the claims of black crime victims, who often argued that a punitive approach was necessary to protect the African American community—including many of its most impoverished members—from the ravages of crime.45
As someone who survived this historic moment, I can attest to the fact that the situation on the ground was harrowing. There were days when I feared the police, but I feared the drug dealers more. I knew there was racism. I also knew that the crack epidemic was devastating. I knew it turned people into zombies who would sell their bodies, or the bodies of their children, for a rock. I knew that a “crackhead” would kill you if he thought he could find money in your pockets with which to get high. And I knew the drug behind this rampant addiction was the catalyst for the regular barrage of drive-by shootings that caused my streets to run red with blood.
My cousin Jarmal was not killed by the police; he was shot by another drug dealer while selling crack. I learned what freebasing cocaine was by walking in on my father while he was doing it.46 I also stood over my father’s hospital bed after he had taken five bullets in a crack-related incident, then preached at his funeral several years later, after his prolonged crack use had so compromised his heart that it simply failed him. Yes, crack was a monster… a demon. It squandered fortunes, demolished families, shipwrecked some lives, and ended others. In the end, the response was not perfect, but it was understandable.
But crack is not the only demon plaguing black America. Nor is it the worst. There is another that takes and destroys even more lives.
“The question of ‘life’ is the question of the twentieth century,” said Jesse Jackson in a 1978 speech that is uncharacteristic of his later stance. “Race and poverty are dimensions of the life question, but discussions about abortion have brought the issue into focus in a much sharper way.” He concluded with a point that he has belied by his actions, but which nonetheless remains true: “How we will respect and understand the nature of life itself is the overriding moral issue, not of the black race, but of the human race.”47 I could not agree more! That is why I believe the abortion question belongs at the center of any discussion about race and justice.
Kermit Gosnell is one of America’s most prolific and least-known serial killers. That is because his crimes took place at the intersection of a series of political realities that rendered them inconvenient for those who would normally make much of a man whose victims numbered in the thousands.
First, Gosnell was an abortionist in impoverished West Philadelphia. This meant those in the media, who are overwhelmingly pro-abortion, were reluctant to call his crimes “murder.” Second, Gosnell’s victims were predominantly black. This was inconvenient because, to the CSJ movement, the primary social justice issue is not the taking of human life through abortion, but abortion’s availability to women. Third, Gosnell is black. Therefore, the pro-abortion lobby viewed him as a saint providing a vital service for a systemically and intersectionally oppressed, underrepresented minority. Never mind the fact that his facility was a vile maze of unsanitary equipment, bags and jars of discarded fetal body parts, cat feces, and rat droppings that went uninspected for decades at a time. The Philadelphia community he preyed upon didn’t make a peep until federal agents raided his clinic in February 2010 looking for prescription drugs he was allegedly selling in the neighborhood—not investigating the death of an immigrant woman who died under his care or any of the many obvious health code violations agents discovered. (Nor did those things seem to concern his legal team; when they were mentioned at his 2013 trial, his attorney sniffed, “If you want Mayo Clinic standards, then you go to the Mayo Clinic.… It fits their needs, this racist, elitist prosecution, to make this a homicide.”)48
Until then, the small band of pro-life protestors who preached and prayed outside the clinic were viewed as the problem—not Gosnell.
Make no mistake about it: Kermit Gosnell was a murderer. He regularly performed abortions long after the legal limit of twenty-four weeks and killed babies who were born alive in his clinic by snipping their spinal cords with scissors. He was eventually tried and “convicted of murdering three babies born alive, and found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the overdose death of an adult patient”49 who was given too much anesthesia. And if you haven’t heard about his case, it may be because the media refused to even cover his trial until their absence in the courtroom was made known.
But why? There are protests and riots in the streets, prominent pastors take to Twitter demanding outrage, and Big Eva publishes Liturgies of Lament and public lamentation services (led by ministers who in most cases have never led a liturgical service of any kind) over cases that often turn out to be justified police homicides. However, most do not know Gosnell’s name. Nor is his an isolated case.
Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger started what became known as the Negro Project in order to reduce the black population through birth control.50 Sanger was a Malthusian eugenicist who believed black and brown people were inherently inferior. Her first achievement among the black community came in 1923 when she opened a clinic in Harlem, where she “hired African American doctors, nurses, and an all-black advisory council to help her clients feel more at ease—and more inclined to listen to her birth control propaganda.”51 She also relied on black clergy to advance her message.52 Today that message is the accepted norm among a vast majority of the black population.
Fifteen and a half million black babies have been aborted since 1973. That means abortion is not only the leading cause of death among black Americans, but it has taken more black lives than heart disease, cancer, accidents, violent crime, and AIDS combined.53 Though black women make up less than 13 percent of the population, they account for 35 percent of all abortions. In major cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, more black babies are aborted than born.54 The fact that nearly 80 percent of Planned Parenthood’s abortion clinics are in minority neighborhoods often raises a “chicken or the egg” debate as to whether Sanger’s eugenics dream or black people’s penchant for self-destruction is to blame. In either case, the fact remains that black women are killing their unborn children at alarming rates. This is an issue of paramount concern, or at least it should be.
Much of the discussion about abortion in the black community tends to ignore one simple fact:
According to a recent Gallup poll, from 2001 to 2007, 31 percent of black Americans thought abortion was morally acceptable. From 2017 to 2020, that number rose to 46 percent. Over that same time period, non-black voters’ approval of it went up from 41 percent to 43 percent. There was also an eight-point jump in the number of blacks who believe abortion should be legal under any circumstance (from 24 percent to 32 percent). By comparison, non-black Americans only saw a two-point change (up from 25 percent to 27 percent).
What jumped out at me when I saw these statistics was not only the dramatic change, but the fact that in both instances, blacks went from having the most conservative views on the issue to having the most liberal. In other words, from 2001 to 2007, blacks were less inclined to support abortion than the average American (by ten points!). What changed?
It is impossible to say for sure. However, I would venture to say that the election of the most pro-abortion president in the history of the United States in 2008 and 2012 had something to do with it.
Barack Obama garnered 95 percent of the black vote in 2008 and 93 percent in 2012. I wrote articles beginning in 2007 excoriating him for his tragic record on abortion. As a state senator, Obama openly and vigorously opposed the Illinois Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, which would require medical personnel to save the lives of babies born alive during abortions as opposed to leaving them to die, which was the normal practice at the time. He was the only Illinois state senator to actually speak in opposition to the bill when it was debated in 2002.55 (A federal version of the bill passed both houses of Congress without a single dissenting vote, which is practically unheard of—making his opposition to it even more glaring.)
The only thing I found more disturbing than this was the reaction I got when raising the issue with black Christians, many of whom are either flat-out pro-choice or only reluctantly pro-life. Either the Gallup poll which found a 46-percent approval rate for abortion among blacks is a gross underestimation, or I have been engaging in conversations with the wrong black people.
Racism is real, and it is alive and well in America. I have said as much from many pulpits on many occasions. Remember, my target here is the notion that “inequity must equal injustice.” It is this notion that undermines efforts to bring law and the Gospel to bear in the lives of those categorized as oppressed, as well as those categorized as oppressors. I can and do look injustice in the eye and call it what it is. It is my duty as a herald of God’s Word. In this case, however, the injustice I see is the false witness-bearing, Marxist ideology-promoting, Gospel-perverting ideology of Critical Race Theory and its offshoots.
In the next chapter, we will explore some of the ways those offshoots have begun to manifest themselves.
1. Jeff White, “Five Reasons Buildings Fail in an Earthquake—and How to Avoid Them,” Healthcare Design, https://studylib.net/doc/18074210/five-reasons-buildings-fail-in-an-earthquake.
2. Jacqueline Charles, “Haiti’s 2010 Earthquake Killed Hundreds of Thousands. The Next One Could Be Worse,” Miami Herald, January 12, 2020, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/haiti/article237830414.html#storylink=cpy.
3. Robin DiAngelo and Özlem Sensoy, Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education (Multicultural Education Series) (New York, New York: Teachers College Press, Kindle Edition, 2011), 49–50.
4. Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities (New York, New York: Basic Books, Kindle Edition, 2018), 163.
5. Tommy Curry, “Critical Race Theory,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/critical-race-theory.
6. Emily Ekins, “New Poll: 62% Say the Political Climate Prevents Them from Sharing Political Views,” Cato Institute, July 22, 2020, https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-62-americans-say-they-have-political-views-theyre-afraid-share.
7. Alison Bailey, “Tracking Privilege: Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes,” Hypatia 32, no. 4 (September 2017): 876–92.
8. Jason King, “The Kurt Beathard Story Exemplifies BLM’s Successful Attack on Christianity and Football,” Outkick, https://www.outkick.com/the-kurt-beathard-story-exemplifies-blms-successful-attack-on-christianity-and-football.
9. Brittany Slaughter, “Scholar Forced to Resign Over Study That Found Police Shootings Not Biased against Blacks,” College Fix, June 30, 2020, https://www.thecollegefix.com/scholar-forced-to-resign-over-study-that-found-police-shootings-not-biased-against-blacks.
10. Charles Murray, Human Diversity (New York, New York: Grand Central Publishing, Kindle Edition, 2020), 2.
11. Ibid.
12. Murray, Human Diversity, 2.
13. Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities, 117.
14. Glenn Loury, “Why Does Racial Inequality Persist? Culture, Causation, and Responsibility,” Manhattan Institute, May 7, 2019, https://www.manhattan-institute.org/racial-inequality-in-america-post-jim-crow-segregation.
15. Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities, vii.
16. “Turning the Corner on Father Absence in Black America: A Statement from the Morehouse Conference on African American Fathers,” Morehouse College, fall 1998.
17. “Obama’s Father’s Day Remarks,” New York Times, June 15, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/us/politics/15text-obama.html.
18. “Obama’s Father’s Day Remarks.”
19. W. Bradford Wilcox, “First Family, Then Freedom: Replying to Thomas D. Klingenstein, ‘Preserving the American Way of Life,’ ” American Mind, June 11, 2020, https://americanmind.org/features/preserving-the-american-way-of-life/first-family-then-freedom/.
20. “Obama’s Father’s Day Remarks.”
21. “Obama’s Father’s Day Remarks.”
22. Jason L. Riley, False Black Power? (New Threats to Freedom Series) (West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania: Templeton Press, Kindle Edition, 2017), 48.
23. Ibid., 53–54.
24. Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities, 180.
25. “Obama’s Father’s Day Remarks.”
26. “Turning the Corner on Father Absence in Black America.”
27. Wilcox, “First Family, Then Freedom.”
28. “Obama’s Father’s Day Remarks.”
29. Kameron J. Sheats et al., “Violence-Related Disparities Experienced by Black Youth and Young Adults: Opportunities for Prevention,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine 55, no. 4 (October 2018): 462–69, doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2018.05.017.
30. Ibid.
31. James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own (New York, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Kindle Edition, 2017), 11.
32. Shai Linne, “George Floyd and Me,” Gospel Coalition, June 8, 2020, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/george-floyd-and-me.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. “Race/Ethnicity,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=922.
36. Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops (New York, New York: Encounter Books, Kindle Edition, 2016), 79.
37. “Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence,” Gallup, August 5, 2020, https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-retain-local-presence.aspx.
38. Forman, Locking Up Our Own, 10.
39. Ibid.
40. Barry Latzer, “Michelle Alexander Is Wrong about Mass Incarceration,” National Review, April 4, 2019, https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/04/22/michelle-alexander-is-wrong-about-mass-incarceration.
41. See Michael VanderHeijden, “Faculty Publications: Critique of the New Jim Crow,” Lillian Goldman Law Library blog, April 17, 2012. VanderHeijden shares an example of a common critique of Alexander’s work. He writes, “Prof. Forman questions the usefulness of the analogy which, he argues, leads to a distorted view of mass incarceration by: failing to consider black attitudes toward crime and punishment; focusing on the War on Drugs and neglecting violent crime; and drawing attention away from the harms that mass incarceration has on the most disadvantaged groups. He also warns that in seeking to find parallels between the Old Jim Crow and mass incarceration, scholars risk overlooking other terrible aspects of the Old Jim Crow.” See also Mac Donald, The War on Cops, 212. Mac Donald writes, quoting President Obama, “The ‘real reason our prison population is so high’ is that we have ‘locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before.’ ” This assertion, which drew applause from the audience, is the most ubiquitous fallacy of the deincarceration movement. It gained widespread currency in 2010 with Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow. See also R.L. Stephens II, “Mass Incarceration Is Not the New Jim Crow,” at http://www.orchestratedpulse.com/2015/04/mass-incarceration-not-new-jim-crow/. For a review from the left, see also “The New Jim Crow Discredited, Advocates Demand Revision,” libcom.org, February 3, 2013, https://libcom.org/news/new-jim-crow-discredited-advocates-demand-revision-03022013.
42. Forman, Locking Up Our Own, 10.
43. Barry Latzer, “Michelle Alexander Is Wrong about Mass Incarceration,” National Review, April 4, 2019, https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/04/22/michelle-alexander-is-wrong-about-mass-incarceration/.
44. Ibid.
45. Forman, Locking Up Our Own, 10–11.
46. Freebasing, according to addictiongroup.org, is a method in which the user puts the base form of the drug in a glass pipe and heats it until it boils. Then he or she inhales the vapors for a faster, more intense high. See https://www.addictiongroup.org/drugs/illegal/freebasing.
47. Jesse Jackson, “How We Respect Life Is the Overriding Moral Issue,” Right to Life News, January 1977, http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/nvp/consistent/jackson.html.
48. Joseph A. Slobodzian, “FBI Agent Recounts Raid on Gosnell Abortion Clinic,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 19, 2013, https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=922.
49. “Doctor Kermit Gosnell Found Guilty of Murdering Infants in Late-Term Abortions,” Fox News, May 13, 2013, https://www.foxnews.com/us/doctor-kermit-gosnell-found-guilty-of-murdering-infants-in-late-term-abortions.
50. “Margaret Sanger Started What She Called ‘the Negro Project’ to Reduce the African American Population by Pushing Birth Control,” Culture of Life Studies Program, http://www.sangervideo.com/negroproject.html.
51. Ibid.
52. Tanya L. Green, “The Negro Project: Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Plan for Black America,” BlackGenocide.org, http://www.blackgenocide.org/negro.html.
53. Ibid.
54. Carole Novielli, “Tragic Report: More Black Babies Are Aborted in New York City Than Are Born,” NRL News, February 16, 2020, https://www.nationalrighttolifenews.org/2020/02/tragic-report-more-black-babies-are-aborted-in-new-york-city-than-are-born.
55. Robert P. George, “Obama and Infanticide,” Public Discourse, October 16, 2008, https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2008/10/282.