Roasting the Social Justice Inquisitors at the #MLK50 Conference ERLC (Part 4)

Affirmative Action as Partiality and Hiring Practices

All right, let's return to this very important panel discussion from the ERLC Gospel Coalition MLK50 Conference.

Let's jump right in. And Dr. Echavarria, several times you mentioned hiring a different administrator, but faculty.

Right, just so you remember, he's talking about how difficult it is for Hispanics, not Latinos, but just Hispanics, how difficult it is for them to get jobs and promotions and positions of power in our institutions.

The director of a university or, I'm sorry, a seminary, the director of a seminary, is talking about how it's very difficult for guys like him to get positions of power.

Faculty or staff positions. This is actually a very sticky issue when we start talking about it because of some of the tensions in our country when it comes to affirmative action.

I think oftentimes when to think about. Yeah, so let's just make sure we frame this correctly. Affirmative action is the practice of partiality, which is a sin in the Bible. So what affirmative action does is it either sets up, you know, quotas, we need to hire a certain amount of Latinos or blacks or whatever, or it sets up, you know, just kind of an ambiguous thing.

Well, we need to take, you know, skin color and race into consideration. Very often what happens is you lower the requirements for the job. So if you need an eight to do this job, you need a skill set of an eight.

What they'll say as well. But if you have the right skin color, if you're black or brown, then you can be a seven or six and that's fine too. That's what affirmative action is. It's partiality based on ethnicity or skin color.

By hiring, we sort of bristle back and assume that, okay, if we do this, we're participating in this affirmative action, which has kind of been made a boogeyman.

And so, but it is a boogeyman because it is a sin. It's not us making it a boogeyman. Partiality is a sin in the Bible. And that's what affirmative action is.

At Southeastern, what we try to do is that because those who are in the position to hire folks are in certain social circles and the tendency is to look to those who are closest to you to make hires from, what we try to do is to try to intentionally draw people in to the hiring pool who are from different backgrounds.

So that's not affirmative action. It's bringing people to the table, inviting them to the place where they can be considered amongst other athletes.

Good on you. If that's really how you guys do it, that's actually really good because that's not affirmative action. That's not actually. And ethnicity or race could have nothing to do with that. If you want to expand your candidate pool, you'll probably find a better candidate than if you just go to your own personal network.

You should include your personal network for sure, but also get people from the external world as well. That's a great hiring practice. I would recommend that to anybody. And I have nothing, I don't care about the racial dynamic of that or the diversity dynamic of that.

To me, that's just a good business practice. Good on you, Southeastern.

Defining Racism and the Limits of Privilege

So that's just another sort of peeling back the veil and staring into our institution, especially as it goes on that issue. And so just thinking about just race and racism in general, it's sort of this thing that gets so difficult to get our hands around.

We don't know what we're talking about. And so Dr. Mullins, can you tell us about the.

Who doesn't know what race and racism is? He says, we don't know what we're talking about. That's I think most of us do.

Complexity of race or racism and then give us a some tangible ways to work through this all in like 30 seconds, please. Thanks for that really simple question.

So first of all, he's acting like this is not a simple question. It actually is a very simple question. Racism is defined in the Bible. It's the sin of partiality based on skin color. And the concept of race.

So if you're partial to or against someone of a certain ethnicity, then you are a racist. That's a very easy definition. So I don't know why he's acting like it's so complicated. I'm sure he's going to you're probably going to see a definition of racism, the likes of which you've never heard of before, the likes of which you will never find in a dictionary.

He's going to overcomplicate it in such a way that makes as many people as possible racist and it won't be a biblical definition. It'll just be a made up definition that tries to get a lot of people to believe that they are racist, even if they're not.

But second of all, why are you asking this white guy? Why does he even have a platform in this? We should just move on to the next person. How does the white guy know what racism is?

It's a very difficult thing to describe, especially if you're.

It isn't. I can do it in one sentence. Racism is the showing of partiality based on ethnicity.

Coming from like a privileged background, because the revelation of one's privilege is usually a slow rolling revelation. And it's difficult to recognize things as problems when they're not a problem for you.

Confederate Monuments, Dr. King, and Social Justice Definitions

Right. And but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're not problems. So when I'm thinking about an example or trying to describe the pervasiveness of racism, I think about even this conference and how many people, even with our own convention, are hostile to celebrating the legacy of Dr. King for objections that they raise regarding his life or his theological perspective.

And yet many of these would be the same exact people who would go to the mat and argue to the death for retaining the Confederate monuments in their towns and cities. All of a sudden, life choices and perspectives don't seem to matter so much.

You know, when when a bunch of Christians are paying for a group and that group decides to put on a conference where they're honoring and venerating and putting up on this pedestal, a man who was not a Christian, who was actually a heretic, a formal heretic, who who did not believe that Jesus Christ was God in flesh, who did not believe in substitutionary atonement, who did not believe that he was Christ was even deity.

This is this is this is what Christianity is. If you do not believe that Christ was God or is God rather, I should say, then you are not a Christian under any biblical definition, under any orthodox statement of faith definition.

You are not a Christian. So, yeah, people push back when you have a huge conference and you spend all this money to honor and venerate and discuss and exegete and dissect a man who is a heretic, a formal heretic.

No matter how many good things you think he did, he was a heretic. He was an enemy of the faith. OK, now. The monuments, I don't know which monuments he's talking about, but I'm sure he's talking about Robert E. Lee and some of these other guys.

And, you know, I don't care about monuments. I think statues are weird anyway. But if you do care about monuments, you know, yeah, he was maybe he was a bad dude. Maybe he had, you know, slaves. I don't know.

Made some bad choices, but he wasn't a heretic. You know, no one's having a Robert E. Lee conference where, you know, they're spending millions of dollars and he's actually a heretic. But yeah, you know, that's racism.

Notice, I mean, he's going to continue talking. So maybe he's going to define racism in a minute. But notice none of this has anything to do with the definition of racism. Actually, none of it even has to do with racism as far as I can tell.

In those circumstances, and I think that's just maybe a bit of an anecdotal example of just how pervasive racism is.

But you were asked to define racism and you're telling me it's pervasive, but you haven't even defined it. What are you talking about? The fact that people don't like the fact that Christians are putting on a conference about a non-Christian.

That's racism because we don't understand oftentimes the subtleties and the differences between that kind of individual and more systemic racism. So, man, maybe another practical way to think about this is in the realm of politics.

Right. Because then once we start talking about politics, then all bets are off.

Politics, Voting, and Systemic Racism

Who's going to bet that this has nothing to do with racism, either? It's probably going to mention Trump, too.

But you might have a candidate, OK, who that person might harbor no malice in his or her heart for people of other racial backgrounds. They might feel no personal prejudice whatsoever. And yet perhaps their policies, their political philosophy, their view of the world may do a lot to perpetuate the kind of disparities and the kind of wealth and education and so on.

He's talking about Democrats here. This is interesting because. This is exactly how I would describe Democrats. They don't have any bad feelings in their heart necessarily towards blacks, but all of their policies may put blacks in way worse of situations, put Latinos and Hispanics in way worse of situations.

And we can actually demonstrate that with proof. We have the facts. We have the facts. We have the technology to look into this and say, why are blacks in the position that they're in now when when civil rights were passed 50 or 40 years ago, whatever, we can look at this.

And it's and it's because of these liberal social policies. How much you want to bet he's not talking about Democrats?

That keeps the divide, socioeconomic divides between black and white and brown people in play all the time. And so even though that person might harbor no personal malice towards others based on race, their policies do.

And when you vote for that person, you're complicit. No, you're complicit in the perpetuation. Dude, that's racist. This has nothing to do with racism, by the way, of those policies that are creating the very kind of racial divisions that you seem to be avoiding or eschewing or even healing by kind of addressing your own personal resentments.

So I wonder if you would apply that to every person who voted for a Democrat who's pro-choice or pro-baby killing. You know, I wonder if you would say that all of those black folks that voted in the special election with Doug Jones and Roy Moore, we're all they're now they're all complicit in all of the baby murders that are happening there.

The abortions, are they all complicit? Is that what you're trying to say? I mean, you want to have them repent of their sin of murder, all of these black people who did that. I don't know if that's really the road you want to walk down, especially at this MLK conference.

It's another word. It's not enough, right. To only address your personal or other people's, your friends, the personal problems based on race, because that's not all racism is. It plays into how you vote.

It plays into the way that you talk to people. Yes, but it plays into these more where you send your kids to school, what you think about education and all of those kinds of things. And so I think this is where things oftentimes break down with talking past each other is that.

Social Justice Language and the Failure to Define Racism

Well, I think where, where things are broken down in, and this is where typically breaks down with social justice warriors, and I am comfortable calling this man, a social justice warrior. When you're asked a very specific question, even when it's not really a challenging question, like, Hey, can you define a race and racism?

And then you don't do it. And you just talk about all this other emotional stuff. Um, that's usually where it breaks down. And, and I gotta be honest with you. You, you say, well, the race is racism. This is very difficult.

No, it's not. It's not race and racism is very easy to define. It's the sin of partiality applied to skin color or ethnicity.

Especially people in the majority white folks in the United States feel like, well, I'm harboring no malice in my heart. So I don't understand, you know, why all this political animus and why all of this conflict and tension over this issue of race.

And, and people who are being actively disenfranchised, uh, by those same people's votes, look at.

I would love to see some evidence of that. I would love to see as evidence that it's very clear. He's talking about Trump and Republicans. And, and it's funny because the way he described that is actually way more applicable to Democrats than it is to Republicans.

Now I'm not a Republican or a Democrat and I don't vote. So, um, I guess I'm not complicit. That's good. Hey, that's one reason not to vote you. This guy won't think you're complicit in all of the sins that your candidate does.

Hit that and say, can you not see right? The tension and it's difficult to see the tension if it doesn't affect you. Um, so it's a big roiling mess and the only.

Closing Critique of the Panel's Approach to Race

Yeah. Kind of like how it's difficult not to see the tension when it doesn't affect you. You're not the babies that are being killed. Yeah. So, I mean, who cares? Right. Who cares vote for Hillary? You know, this is funny because this, this, this, this, this con this panel is called how not to talk about race.

I, that's an ironic title because yeah, this is definitely not how you talk about.

Race way to begin to address it is to start to, to challenge your own presuppositions and to put yourself in position to have experiences with and share your life with people with radically different experiences.

And so now I was wrong. This is, this is the first time I've made a prediction and I've been wrong because I said that you would get a weird definition of racism that would try to make as many people as possible racist.

And you, it would be a definition you've never heard before that you could find in no dictionary. And what we got was no definition. He just started talking about whatever it is he wanted to talk about.

Maybe we should deplatform this guy.