Month: March 2019

Addendum: I Believe Systemic Racism Exists Because of Biblical Anthropology, Hamartiology, and Soteriology

Brad Mason5 Comments

biblical anthropology

[T]here is nothing wrong with Black people as a group, or with any other racial group. That is what it truly means to think as an antiracist: to think there is nothing wrong with Black people, to think that racial groups are equal. There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of African ancestry. There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of African ancestry. But no racial group has ever had a monopoly on any type of human trait or gene—not now, not ever. Under our different-looking hair and skin, doctors cannot tell the difference between our bodies, our brains, or the blood that runs in our veins. […] Black Americans’ history of oppression has made Black opportunities—not Black people—inferior. (Stamped From the Beginning, p. 11)

Introduction

As I’ve stated before, the existence of SYSTEMIC OR INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM, i.e., “polices, practices, and procedures of institutions that have a disproportionately negative effect on racial minorities’ access to and quality of goods, services, and opportunities” (Vernellia R. Randal), is a simple deduction from three premises:

  1. Well documented and vast social and economic disparities between black and white Americans, including de facto neighborhood, school, and church segregation.
  2. All racial groups are equal; in Ibram X Kendi’s words, “no racial group has ever had a monopoly on any type of human trait or gene—not now, not ever.”
  3. The majority of Americans are not overt racists, members of a neo-Nazi party, or intentionally discriminating against black Americans due to conscious prejudice and hatred.

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Anthony Bradley & “Cosmic Redemption” : Herman Bavinck & Imago Dei

Brad Mason2 Comments

Cosmic Redemption

Reading Dr. Anthony Bradley’s recent article, “The Great Commission Christianity Keeps Blacks Away From Evangelicalism,” I was reminded of the section of Herman Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics entitled, “The Whole Person as the Image of God.” Bavinck is careful throughout to capture all that it means to be created in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26-28), in order to properly know who man is, what redemption must include to fully restore him, and to rightly know the “Last Adam,” our Lord Jesus Christ, who is to accomplish this redemption.

In this post, however, I hope to narrowly focus on the correlation between redemption and the image of God in man, as I think this aspect of Bavinck’s study nicely reinforces Dr. Bradley’s emphasis on “Cosmic Redemption.”

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Segregationists, Assimilationists, and Antiracists

Brad Mason4 Comments

Stamped 2

I was asked recently by a friend if it was correct to say that every American—whether white, Latinx, black, etc.—is a participant in systemic racism, and therefore racist. Given that social structures and institutions have been historically formed in America to benefit white people at the expense of others, then isn’t everyone who participates in such systems also participating in white supremacy? I think this is a very important question. As the wider culture finds itself engaged in deciding who is racist, who isn’t, and why I am not and you are, the binary assumed, viz., “racist” or “not racist,” not only de-emphasizes the distinction between racism as individual and systemic, but also bifurcates what is obviously a much more complicated spectrum. It is easy to say that a Neo-Nazi is a racist, but what about an African American who ascribes the vast current social and economic disparities to black laziness or immorality? Or ascribes segregated churches to blacks’ disinterest in sound theology? And what about white and black Americans who simply give little thought to the disparity or segregation at all, but continue to travel the same worn paths?

Here is where Ibram X. Kendi’s categories “segregationist,” “assimilationist,” and “antiracist” can be so helpful.

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