The Woke Ideology of Jemar Tisby and Phil Vischer

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July 22, 2021

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00:00: A 2020 survey from the National Association of Scholars found that for every dollar college professors donated to a
00:06: Republican cause, they donated $21 to a Democrat cause. Other studies confirm that traditional media and social media employees also give over 90 % of their political donations to Democrat causes, as opposed to Republican ones.
00:21: This means that a great portion of the most influential people in the country are politically motivated in one direction.
00:30: Because of the reputation their institutions have for high standards, they are able to effectively spread their ideological assumptions as if they were simply the products of neutral reason.
00:40: Yet, simultaneously, they deny religion and tradition the status by relegating them to the realm of personal experience and uncertainty.
00:49: This is how centers of information revolutionized society, though still loyal to the Christian order, that included a clear moral and social hierarchy, the existence of good and evil, and the principle of sacrifice are attacked and demonized as abusive, bigoted, and ignorant.
01:05: This is why, despite the pervasiveness of social justice, some impoverished and marginalized groups do not qualify for political defense or social assistance.
01:14: Consider, for example, a large demographic in the United States, made up of 25 million people who experience great disparities when compared to the general population.
01:26: They have higher poverty rates, lower household incomes, and less access to health care. This likely contributes to their higher percentage of obesity, smoking, and physical inactivity cases.
01:37: They also lead the country in infant mortalities, as well as seven of the top ten causes of death, including drug overdoses.
01:45: During the last three decades, politicians persuaded many of them that building state and federal prisons would help answer their economic woes, only to find instead they contributed to them by increasing poverty.
01:58: It would be easy to trace a line of abuse toward them going back hundreds of years. The Union Army made total war against many of their ancestors.
02:08: The government displaced more than 500 of their families to form Shenandoah National Park.
02:15: More recently, outsourcing and coal mining regulations contributed to massive job displacement, and stigma surrounding some of their identifying characteristics, such as their appearance and accent, create opportunities for prejudice and discrimination.
02:32: It would come as no surprise if, when you first heard the description I gave describing these Appalachian mountain dwellers, you concluded they represented a racial or religious minority.
02:42: However, they are actually primarily Christian and of Scotch -Irish stock.
02:48: Though they would be prime candidates for social justice -style reparations, affirmative action, their own history month, and many other compensatory campaigns highlighting their mistreatment and poverty, it fails to serve the cause of the current social justice movement's negative posture towards Western Christianity and white privilege.
03:07: In other words, the inhabitants of Appalachia vote conservative, and they are still loyal to the old order.
03:14: Which is the very thing academics and journalists think holds back society's progression towards greater equality.
03:20: Focusing on their affliction would also weaken narratives such as systemic racism, which are necessary in order to justify deconstructing and fundamentally reshaping society.
03:31: In essence, the only acceptable victim narratives are those that can be used to further the current revolution.
03:37: The recent focus on racial equity has been especially successful in this regard.
03:44: Communists believed for a long time they could use racial disparities in the United States to further their own goals.
03:51: In 1921, the Workers' Party of America voiced their intention to help the black people in their fight for economic, political, and social equality, and bind them into a solid union of revolutionary forces for the overthrow of our common enemy.
04:07: In 1958, Manning Johnson, a former leader of the National Committee of the Communist Party, described how
04:14: Moscow targeted many black people, including pastors, to promote their agenda. They stirred up conflict and convinced many to blame white people in general and capitalism in particular for the injustices they experienced.
04:29: As a result, Johnson wrote, they effectively wiped out the racial progress based upon understanding, goodwill, friendship, and mutual cooperation, built up painfully over the years.
04:43: A similar narrative, though even less justified, is prevailing today on a much larger scale. Historian Jamar Tisby's central thesis from his 2019 bestseller
04:52: The Color of Compromise is illustrative of the way ideology distorts reality by oversimplifying it.
04:59: Tisby states, history demonstrates that racism never goes away, it just adapts. But is this conclusion really demonstrated by history, or is it rather a philosophical presupposition about the nature of reality itself?
05:12: Because racially motivated legal barriers and overt hatred against black people has significantly diminished in the
05:17: United States since the Civil Rights era, it would be reasonable to assume that extremely positive changes have taken place.
05:25: However, if this were true, it would threaten one of the social justice movement's major reasons for existence.
05:31: The only way for the movement to continue marching towards racial equity is to pinpoint or produce evidence of inequity.
05:38: Thus Tisby points to things like law and order politics, the wealth gap between black and white citizens, the existence of confederate monuments,
05:47: Christian schools with racially insensitive policies, and the devaluing of black theology to prove that racism against black people has adapted in a new era.
05:59: People who support states' rights, or speak out against welfare, or say all lives matter, or support President Trump, or disagree with the assessments and solutions of activists for racial equity are somehow complicit in this racism.
06:13: Tisby admits that since the 1970s, Christian complicity in racism has become more difficult to discern, but that is only because it is hidden, taking on settler forms.
06:24: For Tisby, racism is a system of oppression that does not need the malicious words and actions of individuals to exist.
06:31: Rather, it is prejudice plus power, and includes the imposition of bigoted ideas.
06:38: Philosopher Donald Livingston describes ideologues like Tisby as people who become obsessed with one ill in society and use that as the key to defining the whole.
06:48: For critical race theorists, it is white supremacy. Because racism is inescapable in this framework, one must craft their entire life around identifying and eradicating it.
06:59: Some of the more silly examples include identifying things like sheet music, beards, and farmers markets as examples of white supremacy.
07:08: Jamar Tisby believes the purpose of studying history itself is to change the present, through exposing, explaining, and repairing injustice.
07:17: Consequently, he encourages young historians to use their craft to assist the ongoing struggle for liberation from economic, gender, racial, or other forms of oppression.
07:28: This kind of metaphysical tunnel vision distorts both the nature and purpose of historical investigation.
07:35: Not only is the scope of research narrowed to focus on one element, such as a particular variety of oppression, but the goal is no longer to understand the past on its own terms.
07:47: As the great Christian historian Sir Herbert Butterfield stated, The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history.
07:59: Though he can never entirely abstract himself from his own age, a historian endeavors to understand the past for the sake of the past and not for the sake of the present.
08:10: Tisby and many other activist historians have fallen into the trap of presentism whereby they interpret history according to modern priorities, fashions, and values.
08:20: In this scheme, historical narratives start to resemble simplistic and fanciful cartoons with kernels of truth but lacking depth.
08:28: Phil Vischer, the creator of the animated children's show VeggieTales, exhibited this popular flattened reading of history in his
08:36: Race in America video, which received more than 1 .5 million views on YouTube alone. Most of his information came from Michelle Alexander's revisionist work
08:47: The New Jim Crow, which even drew directly from critical race theorists like Derrick Bell and Marie Matsuda.
08:54: Vischer starts in the present by identifying the problem he believes history can explain. Black households have only one -tenth the wealth of white households.
09:02: There exists haves and have -nots along racial lines. What follows is 16 minutes of historical illustrations intended to persuade viewers to conclude systemic racism is to blame for the current disparity.
09:14: Of course, if white racism were the sole cause for this inequality, it would be reasonable to assume that other racial minorities who also experience discrimination would possess less household income than whites.
09:26: However, this is not the case. On average, Americans of Asian descent make more money, have a faster growing median income, and possess more wealth than Americans of European descent.
09:39: Religious American Jews, who are no stranger to historical persecution, possess approximately four and a half times the household net worth of the average
09:48: American. In addition, black immigrants have a significantly higher income and net worth than black people born in the
09:56: United States. To conclude, that racism alone caused the wealth gap between white and black people is, at best, a substantial oversimplification that ignores the full picture.
10:08: Factors such as religion, education, geography, and other cultural considerations may contribute.
10:14: Unlike Butterfield, who saw history as a dialectic of different clashing or intersecting wills and circumstances,
10:21: Vischer, like most social justice advocates, only finds one line worth tracing. Vischer claims white people engineered the wealth gap by creating vacancy laws,
10:32: Jim Crow legislation, the Southern Manifesto, segregation, academies, law and order rhetoric, the
10:39: Federal Housing Administration, the GI Bill, suburbanization, drug criminalization, discriminatory policing, and education barriers.
10:51: Yet inaccuracies, exaggerations, limited analysis, and dubious correlations plague his narrative.
10:56: For example, Vischer incorrectly states that vacancy laws were only applied to black men and ignores the desperate economic circumstances in which they arose.
11:06: He neglects to discuss the ways in which some white people promoted integration gradually and the constitutional concerns associated with forced integration.
11:16: When it comes to disparities in home ownership, Vischer overlooks the historical correlation between income, education, and home ownership.
11:25: He also fails to mention how the FHA underwriting manual's guidelines and racial restrictive covenants apply to more than just black people.
11:34: In addition, Vischer completely ignores laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race in lending as well as studies within the last 30 years that show racial discrimination does not prevent minorities from obtaining loans.
11:47: Vischer's oversimplification causes him to make greater errors in evaluating the criminal justice system.
11:54: He insinuates that white people's fear of black people created disparities in policing and cites a poll known to be compromised which falsely alleges that the majority of Americans blamed black people for crime in 1968.
12:08: However, he overlooks the fact that many urban black people requested additional law enforcement themselves.
12:14: Vischer also points to higher incarceration rates as evidence that harsher penalties for drug -related crimes, especially for crack cocaine violations, singled out black people.
12:24: Yet again, he fails to mention that most of the Congressional Black Caucus supported these harsher measures.
12:29: Penalties for possessing crystal meth, which is associated with white people, were the same as penalties for possessing crack cocaine until 2010, at which point they became even more severe.
12:42: Vischer insists that there is no visible connection between higher incarceration rates and higher violent crime rates.
12:49: Yet, only about 17 percent of black people in prison are there on drug charges. Violent crime is currently the most proportionally significant category in which more black people are incarcerated than white people.
13:01: The FBI reports that black people account for over 37 percent of violent crime arrests, even though they make up a little over 13 percent of the population, according to the
13:10: Census Bureau. The Department of Justice found that over 70 percent of violent crimes against black people are committed by other black people.
13:17: Black criminals also commit violent crime against white victims nine times as often as white criminals do against black victims.
13:25: It is likely that this data could make more sense of the current 33 percent incarceration rate.
13:31: Vischer also alleges that a study of drivers in New Jersey showed discrimination on the part of the police, since black drivers were stopped 42 percent of the time, though they composed only 15 percent of drivers.
13:42: However, the study he references claims that only 32 .7 percent and 22 .1 percent of stops at different points on the
13:48: New Jersey Turnpike were of black people. Vischer also fails to mention another study on the
13:54: New Jersey Turnpike that found 2 .7 percent of black drivers were speeders compared with 1 .4
14:00: percent of white drivers. Among drivers going faster than 90 miles per hour, the disparity was even greater.
14:07: Such carelessness in relaying and interpreting data seemed to be a common occurrence both for Vischer and social justice advocates arguing for the current existence of systemic racism.
14:17: At one point, Vischer falsely attributes the findings in a survey specifically focused on economic conditions experienced by black people who lived in urban areas to black people in general.
14:28: At another point, Vischer cites a study that suggests white teachers are half as likely to recommend a black student for a gifted track.
14:36: Yet the very study he mentions admits its own limitations in not considering a school's gifted referral and evaluation process.
14:45: It also found that Asian students were overrepresented in gifted programs and points to a need for additional research to understand the disparity for black students.
14:55: Interestingly, in arguing his case, Vischer also leaves out details one assumes a
15:01: Christian would include. For instance, he mentions nothing about scientific racism, including eugenics and Planned Parenthood.
15:09: In 2018 alone, 117 ,626 black babies died as the result of abortion procedures.
15:18: Vischer also skips over the potential harmful effects of socialist leaning movements and policies.
15:23: He fails to mention the racism of the early labor union movement and does not consider the possible negative impact minimum wage has had on black youth unemployment.
15:34: He ignores President Lyndon Baines Johnson's War on Crime and Great Society, instead focusing his criticism on Richard Nixon's War on Drugs.
15:43: Some conservative economists argue that cultural factors and the negative impact poverty alleviation policies have on cultural factors contribute to the wealth gap far more than racism.
15:55: For almost the first hundred years since the end of slavery, black people advanced themselves economically despite barriers, including racial ones.
16:03: Between emancipation and the turn of the century, it is estimated that black people increased their income by over 240 percent, and their rate of increase was higher than the general population.
16:13: By 1900, black families owned or partially owned 25 percent of the farms they worked. Black -owned businesses doubled from 20 ,000 to 40 ,000 from 1900 to 1914.
16:25: Before 1960, black people started over 100 institutions of higher learning for themselves.
16:31: According to economist Walter Williams, in every census from 1890 to 1954, blacks were either just as active or more so than whites in the labor market.
16:41: Some former slaves, such as Alonzo Herndon, Joseph Haygood Blodgett, and Robert Reed Church, even became millionaires.
16:50: While ideologues like Vischer prefer to explain the complexities of history by presupposing oppression as the root cause, it is very likely a more significant element is at work.
17:01: A moral breakdown and abandonment of the family unit seemed to be a major contributor to the current situation.
17:08: In 1960, not even 8 percent of marriages ended in divorce, and 67 percent of children were born to a married couple.
17:15: Though black incarceration rates rose over the course of the 20th century, they did not hit over 30 percent until 1942.
17:22: Today, over 77 percent of black children are born to unmarried mothers. One study indicated that black men were more likely to consume pornography than all other race and gender combinations.
17:33: Black women, on average, also have the highest abortion rate of any other demographic.
17:39: If being raised in a married family reduces a child's probability of living in poverty by around 80 percent, it follows that policies that weaken the family by encouraging out -of -wedlock births and rewarding unemployment are probably not helping.
17:51: In fact, though Canada does not have the same history of prejudice against black people as the United States, black people still experience similar disparities in economics, education, incarceration, and family breakdown.
18:04: At the end of his presentation, Vischer announces, I'm not here to tell you what the right solutions are because I don't know.
18:12: Yet the information he chose to distort, focus on, and leave out guides viewers to conclude that racism is responsible for the wealth gap and white people are to blame.
18:23: Not only does this analysis naturally lead to social justice solutions, but when faced with the issue of fatherless homes,
18:31: Vischer stated it was an issue he could do very little about. Instead, he chose to focus on issues he could affect, such as early childhood education and housing access.
18:42: This is how an egalitarian ideological metaphysic or understanding of reality drives a social justice ethic.
18:49: Family -driven, free market, or law enforcement remedies are no longer considered because the assumption behind what causes the gap is simply racism.
18:59: Social justice advocates generally do not pursue measures to impede family breakdown by perhaps making abortion illegal, re -implementing anti - pornography measures, and gradually ending the welfare state.
19:12: Neither do they lobby to enact proposals that afford black teenagers more opportunities by ending minimum wage laws, promoting charter schools, and producing virtuous art.
19:23: They do not pursue policies that could deter criminal behavior through things like restitution -based punishments or the death penalty.
19:31: Generally, they argue the opposite side on these issues. This bias against conservative solutions is rooted in an alternative conception of reality itself.
19:42: Today, political conservatives take for granted a liberal bias existing in the news, entertainment, and academic industries.
19:51: Many talk show hosts spend a great deal of time and energy exposing the media's lies and double standards.
19:58: Yet such complaints are only relevant to those who value truth. Christians, of all people, should believe truth matters.
20:06: After all, the Bible teaches that both bearing false witness and using differing weights and differing measures are sinful in the eyes of God.
20:15: Unfortunately, even self -proclaimed Christians often adopt false beliefs due to pragmatic concerns or ideological pre -commitments.