Response to Question From a Viewer - Historical Injustice and Current Inequality

Historical Injustice Must Be Proven Like Any Other Crime

This is a short response video to a question that was posed on another brother's blog. The questioner asks... The questioner saw my video and had a question about something, and here's what the question says.

It says, I saw the Adam Robles video, but found it unsatisfactory. For example, I'm puzzled as to why he sees historic injustices such as slavery, Jim Crow, zoning laws, etc. as having no bearing on our duty to address the inequality that has arisen as a result.

A lot of these things don't even go that far back. They happen in the lifetime of our parents and or grandparents. How is not a matter of justice? How is it not a matter of justice to try to attenuate the consequences of past injustice in a justice that tends to dangerously perpetuate itself?

Are we supposed to do nothing? Now, this is an interesting question because I actually don't think that we should do nothing about historic injustice because every crime that happens is technically a historic injustice.

Every crime that we prosecute in a criminal court happened in the past, so it's a historic injustice. So that's not my position that we shouldn't do anything about historic injustices. What my position is, though, is that you have to demonstrate these historic injustices the way you would demonstrate any crime.

So if there were crimes done in slavery by someone who's still alive today, which is not possible, then you would, yeah, I would say that the right thing to do would be to, you know, adjudicate that according to biblical standards of law.

Now, this questioner seems to be talking about the inequalities that have arisen as a result of slavery and Jim Crow and things that were done by, you know, our ancestors or our parents or grandparents or things like that.

And that's a little bit dicier because now we're talking about addressing things that start, inequalities that started because of a real crime, a real sin. Slavery was a crime. You know, these people were kidnapped and brought over.

Kidnapping is a crime punishable by death. And so if we ever found someone that was kidnapping and enslaving a person today, I would say that that should be punished as a crime, in other words. But the problem is that there are some inequalities that have arisen as a result.

So in other words, you know, people that benefited from slavery in hundreds of years ago, their family lines went a certain way and a lot of them, you know, have a lot of working capital now. And then the people that were enslaved, their family lines went a certain way as well.

And a lot of times they aren't in the same economic positions as a result. But the problem is we can't punish the children of people who committed crimes for the crimes of their parents. That's not something that the Bible allows.

Equal Treatment Under the Law Does Not Guarantee Equal Outcomes

And so we shouldn't try to do that. I don't know if that's what this questioner is suggesting. It could be that they're suggesting that we try to reverse the inequalities. And I don't think that we should attempt to do that.

I think we've already sort of done what we can do. In other words, we've made it illegal to have slaves. That's a good thing. We've already done that. We've made it illegal to discriminate. Now, you might consider that a good thing, depending on your political viewpoint.

I actually don't consider that a good thing. I think it should not be a crime to discriminate. I think it's wrong to discriminate. And the churches should handle that within their own bodies. But we've made it illegal as a country.

We've decided that it's illegal to discriminate. So we've actually even gone above and beyond in these areas. And so every person, according to law, needs to be and is treated equally. Now, that doesn't mean that the results will be equal.

So that's not going to eliminate income inequalities in itself. And in fact, I don't think it will in the future either. But eliminating income inequalities is actually not a good goal to have. This questioner goes on.

Gender Pay Differences and Racial Pay Gaps

And this I don't think this is in response to me. This might be in response to something else, because I don't think I mentioned this. But the person says you mentioned patriarchy and gender differences.

Things like the pay gap are much more easily explained by women's fertility and other secondary gender characteristics that tend towards certain types of professions. When speaking of race, these kinds of explanations really fall short unless one is willing to essentialize some type of racial difference, like the racists who say that blacks are inherently violent, et cetera.

Appealing to cultural differences also doesn't get you off the hook because culture doesn't exist in a vacuum and because changing a culture might also be a matter of justice. So here's this person saying, well, yeah, the gender pay differences can be explained by gender differences that, you know, that makes sense.

And that's true that the gender pay gap is largely a myth. And where it's true, there's good reasons why it's there. And she's saying and this person saying, I think it's a woman. I'm not I'm not really sure.

Anyway, that racial differences in racial pay gaps can't really be explained by that. OK, well, that's fine. I'm fine with that. But the question is, how do you explain them? Because you can't just look at the pay gap in between, you know, black families and white families and then assume discrimination or assume racism.

You have to actually prove it. You have to actually demonstrate it. So I'm not saying that you couldn't prove it. I'm just saying I've never seen the evidence just because there's a pay gap doesn't mean that there's necessarily a crime that's been committed or a sin.

You have to demonstrate how these black families are being defrauded, how these how these white families are taking advantage, things like that. You have to actually prove it. You can't just assume it.

That is if you do just assume it, that's a Marxist interpretation of that data. And there is no reason to accept a Marxist interpretation of the data in that in that instance. Anyway, I hope this is helpful.

God bless.