It’s easy being idealistic when you don’t have to live with your ideals, when you can just outsource “your” sacrifice to the less powerful. There was, for example, the well-heeled Brooklyn parent who, reacting to an integration plan targeting his kids’ school, said in 2015, “It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children.” It’s also, apparently, more complicated when it’s about your own privilege.
This is the conclusion one writer drew when assessing Davidson College in North Carolina, a liberal arts institution that has a new mission: teaching white churches to be “less racist.” Here’s how Davidson describes its scheme, which is funded by a big-business-born foundation:
White Christians are having a moment as America again reckons with racial injustice, facing questions of how their faith should be lived and coming to terms with how Christianity itself has been intertwined with racist systems. But a newly funded project titled “Churches That THRIVE for Racial Justice” will seek to address these issues.
Thanks to a $1 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to Davidson College, the five-year project will work to shed light on the challenges of racism among white dominant congregations in North America and help churches, like Myers Park Baptist, to build on their commitment to racial equity and expand their capacity for confronting racial justice.
Funding for the project comes from Lilly Endowment’s national Thriving Congregations Initiative, which aims to strengthen Christian congregations so they can help people deepen their relationships with God, build strong relationships with each other, and contribute to the flourishing of local communities and the world.
Gerardo Martí, L. Richardson King Professor of Sociology at Davidson College, will lead the project in partnership with Paula Clayton Dempsey, director of partnership relations for the Alliance of Baptists (a denominational partner of Myers Park Baptist). The project’s core team also includes sociologists Mark Mulder, of Calvin University and Kevin Dougherty, of Baylor University, who’ve spent their careers examining racial and ethnic dynamics in American churches.
Now, commentator Andrea Widburg reports on this story and points out that the Alliance of Baptists stated in 2018, “Systemic racism has been a part of the history of the United States of America and continues to exist. We, the Alliance Board of Directors and Staff, recognize that our organization was born out of white privilege and white supremacy.” In June, Davidson also made the obligatory statement about “systemic racism.” My, what principle!
But then there’s this: Providing pictures and names, which you can see and read in her article, Widburg further points out that the people involved in this little race endeavor are generally quite white — and very, very privileged. She writes that
of 24 people in leadership positions involved in this project, 15 are definitely White, and another three are probably White. They are all extremely well paid. According to ProPublica’s non-profit explorer, back in 2018, Lilly’s key employees were paid between $375,000 and $870,000 annually. That’s the kind of money that, for an organization situated in Indianapolis, can place you in a very nice home, in a crime-free neighborhood.
Salaries at Davidson aren’t quite so generous, but it appears that the average salary is upwards of $100,700. Calvin University faculty members seem to draw between $55,000 and $79,000. And Baylor professors bring in something in the realm of $120,000 or more. The people working on the Davidson project aren’t as wealthy as Lilly’s people, but they’re all doing all right.
… As an aside, the Alliance of Baptists, although it has a Black president on its Board of Directors, also seems pretty darn White. Likewise, Davidson College, although it has some Black faculty members, also seems remarkably White.
Widburg calls these people hypocrites. After all, if they really believe they (as do all whites, the theory holds) benefit from illicit privilege, there’s nothing stopping them from resigning their lucrative positions and insisting they be replaced with non-white individuals while also transferring at least some of their considerable wealth to those individuals. But this means going beyond value-signaling and actually making sacrifices.
This, of course, applies to all of Critical Race Theory-obsessed academia, whose professoriate is 84 percent white in a nation now only 60 percent non-Hispanic white; upper-echelon corporate America and the establishment in general also reflect these demographics.
At a college appearance, commentator Dinesh D’Souza addressed this kind of hypocrisy quite captivatingly (and aggressively. Video below) with a reparations-supporting student.
Making this more unseemly still is that these pseudo-elites outsource what should be their sacrifice via discrimination programs, euphemistically called “affirmative action,” which make success more elusive for powerless blue-collar whites. (Coming to mind is the earlier 2000s case of the 18 Connecticut firefighters denied promotions.)
The kicker: Liberals such as Senator Elizabeth “1/1,024th” Warren (D-Mass.) will advocate discrimination program-sacrifice for the powerless while actually benefiting from it themselves by masquerading as minorities.
Even more damnably in the Davidson case, however, is that the school was established by Presbyterians, most involved in the race project claim to be Christian, and it’s apparently being billed as a Christian endeavor. Yet as pointed out last month, Critical Race Theory is actually a heresy.
In fact, the Davidson project serves to (further) distance churches from actual Christianity and, ultimately, to help replace the faith with the leftism du jour.
Finally, though, Christians are called to sacrifice themselves, not others. If the Davidson crew really believes their racial “principles” are Christian imperatives, they’re obligated to set the example of how they’re lived, to practice what they preach.
This was once understood. When it was discovered in 1988 that televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was preaching purity but practicing prurience — consorting with a prostitute — a tearful apology (video below), sincere or not, was expected.
If Swaggart had enjoyed the cultural status of the Davidson crew, his actions would just have been considered business as usual. Now that’s what you call privilege.
