Roasting the Social Justice Inquisitors at the #MLK50 Conference ERLC

The Conference Panel and the Setup for the Clip

Hello, today we have a new thing to listen to and respond to from the GIF that keeps on giving, that is the MLK50 ERLC Gospel Coalition Conference About Racism. This is actually a panel discussion about how not to talk about race, which I thought could be very spicy.

Somebody sent this to me on YouTube, and I'm very grateful for them because this is a super interesting topic. Anyway, so let's just jump right in. I'm going to start it, and then we're going to jump ahead a little bit to get to the spicy stuff.

And we will have a good time.

Thank you for joining us at this panel sponsored by Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and the college at Southeastern, called How Not to Talk About Race, and talking with each other and not pass each other on complex issues.

So I'm glad to have you guys here. Glad to be joined with some good friends of mine from our institution. To my right is Dr. Miguel Echeverria. He is the director of Hispanic leadership development.

Can you imagine if a college had a director of white leadership? Can you imagine if there's a position? All right, hey, what's your job at the school? Oh, well, I'm the director of white development and leadership.

People would freak out if they had that. But what a lot of people from this perspective would say is that everyone is the director of white leadership or is involved with white people, except the people that specifically aren't.

I think that's pretty dumb, but hey, not my school.

So assistant professor of New Testament and Greek at the school. To his right, we have Dean Missy Branch. She is the assistant dean of students for women. So we're glad to have her.

What about the assistant dean of students for men?

Yes, she has some people out there. And then to her right, we have Dr. Matthew Mullins. He's assistant dean for advising and also assistant professor of English in the college at Southeastern.

He doesn't get a fancy title. He's just a white guy. Oh, man. Well, I don't even know why he has a platform here. I mean, he shouldn't even really be in this discussion, I don't think. You got to de-platform all the white males.

And then we have Mr. Cortland Perkins, who is a student at Southeastern, and he also works on our Kingdom Diversity Initiative. And my name is Walter Strickland. I serve as associate vice president for diversity and also assistant professor of theology.

All right, we're going to jump ahead to this, but I just thought that that panel introduction was pretty funny. All right, let's jump to minute eight, because this is where it gets spicy. We've got the Hispanic, which I believe the proper term is Latino now.

So I don't know how, why these guys are so behind the times. But this is the leadership and development director for Hispanic students. He's going to talk about some problems that he sees and how we talk about race.

Microaggressions and the Charge of Offense

Seen or heard. Here's an example. Let's say you see a pastor or a fellow faculty member talking to someone and they just so happen to be Hispanic or be Asian. And they speak with really good English. And what they think is a compliment, for example, Juan, your English is really good.

All right. That's actually not a compliment. All right. Because what do you assume? It actually is a compliment.

This is this. You know what? Let's just listen to a second example and then we'll talk about both of them, because this is pretty silly.

You're assuming that Juan's English, because he's Hispanic, is not supposed to be good. So what I typically do is I happen to find myself walking around their offices later on and we just happen to enter into a conversation.

And what I might say is when you were speaking to Juan, you said his English is really good. It's like when I hear that, what I hear is you assume that a Hispanic person's English is not supposed to be good.

All right. And typically there's kind of a light bulb.

Actually, let's just finish there. So so this is this is this is the the microaggression. Right. That's that's what he's describing. He hasn't used the term microaggressions yet. But that's what he's described.

This is a microaggression. So if you don't know what a microaggression is, it's something like that where you you see Juan and you say to Juan as a compliment, you're not intending to insult him. Hey, Juan, your English is really good.

And Juan decides to take that as an insult or or this professor does decide decides to take it as an insult. And and here's the reality of this whole situation. Right. You an insult cannot be given. It can only be taken.

Right. And so so he's already admitting that this person is not intending to insult this person. And what what what? You know, it could be we don't know anything about this example. So it could be that Juan has a very thick accent, but he has really good grammar.

And so maybe maybe what this person meant was, wow, I've never heard someone with such a thick accent has such good grammar. Or it could be that maybe this person has never met very many Hispanics before or Latinos again.

I want to use the right term here because I don't want to get accused of racism. But but, you know, maybe this this this this person on campus has has met maybe like 20, you know, Hispanics in his entire life and none of them have had very good English.

And then he meets one that has near perfect English. And so he's like, wow, you have great English. Now, now the this this professor is saying, well, that means that you expect Latinos not to have good English.

Well, maybe that's true, because maybe his experience or this person's experience is that every Latino he has does not have very good English. And so it is actually a compliment. It's not an insult. Or maybe it has nothing to do with that.

Maybe it has to do with the the thickness of his accent and things like that. And again, it's not saying he's not saying anything about Latinos in general. He's just saying, in my experience, out of all the Latinos that I know, you have the best English.

That's actually literally a compliment unless you want to force it to be an insult. And so my advice, if you see somebody microaggressing a Juan out there and saying, wow, you have good English and you consider that a microaggression.

My advice is. Deal with it, right? You don't have to you don't have to take offense at everything. This is this is just ridiculous, like like let's not encourage people to take offense at things that are are not intended to be offensive.

If somebody told me that I had good English, the furthest thing from my mind would be, wow, he must think all Latinos are idiots.

Goes on and it's like, oh, I see now what you're talking about.

He's talking about making students feel guilty. That's that's. He's saying, oh, the light bulb went off and now I now I need to feel so guilty.

OK, that's perhaps a racially biased thought that I have in my mind about the way Hispanics are supposed to speak. It's or another one is, let's say you have you have a black student on campus or in your church and someone comes up to them and says, wow, you are the most educated Hispanic or black person I have ever met.

Again, I find that person later on and say by your question, what you're saying is you're assuming that most Hispanics and blacks are not educated again.

No, no, no, he's not. No, that person is not. Not necessarily when it's not a question. First of all, he said you are the most educated Latino or Hispanic or black person that I've ever met. That is not saying that Latinos and blacks are uneducated.

No, no, no, no, no. You added all of that. You added that assumption. What it is saying is that this person is the most out of all the ones that I've met, the most intelligent person that I've met. Now, this is this is super weird.

I've never heard anything like this before, but I'm assuming that it happens because I don't think this this brother would make that up. But man, what if it's true? What if it's the most educated black person this person's ever met in his life?

And he just decided to say it now. Maybe that's uncouth. Maybe that's a weird thing to say. Maybe you wouldn't say it, but it's not a sin. Let's not pretend that it is. You can't go from. Hey, you're the most educated person of this ethnicity that I've ever met and say, well, that means that all the other people of that ethnicity are not educated.

No, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. That you added all that stuff. You made the offense. You're deciding that you want to take offense to something and that was not intended in an offensive way. And so you're adding all of this extra stuff that the person didn't say.

Now, if the person, the white person came up to this person said, wow, you know, all those Negroes out there, they're really dumb, but you're really smart. Yeah. If they said that, then obviously that is an insult.

Obviously, that is a sinful attitude in their minds. But that's not what happened in this example. Microaggressions are stupid. They are very stupid. And this is this is an example of why they're stupid.

This is why they shouldn't be in worship songs. We shouldn't have worship songs that mention microaggressions, because you know what love does? Love assumes the best about the people. Love believes all things.

It doesn't decide to take offense at every little thing that that that you could potentially take offense to. I mean, if someone was doing this in a marriage, a good counselor would be like, yeah, what's wrong with you?

Why are you doing this? Anyway, we will continue that later.