White Fragility with Chris Hohnholz

Andrew Rappaport's Rapp Report

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.edu slash visit. Okay, folks, I'm just going to start off by telling you anything.

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And I mean, anything can happen today on this podcast. Just saying.

00:25

Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

00:33

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

00:43

OK, Bud, what in the world were we thinking? I was just following your lead, sir.

00:49

I just I don't know now for any of the Patreons, they're going to they're going to want to to make sure that they watched the pre -show just a little bit of the clip of before we started recording for the

01:03

Patreons. You'll get to see our guest conducting music.

01:09

We'll just we'll say that we'll say that I can't say how what the attire was.

01:16

I will say there was a superhero conducting music. I'll at least say that much. But apart from that, and I will admit it was very entertaining,

01:26

I should have stayed the record button much earlier, correct, Bud? Yes, yes. But we are we're going to be blessed today to talk about a horrible topic.

01:37

That's really sounded weird. No, we're blessed by our guest, not so much by the topic.

01:43

But we've we've announced this for two weeks now. We have an award winning podcaster with us today.

01:50

He is half of the Voice of Reason radio, and it is none other than Chris Honholz.

01:57

So, Chris, welcome to The Rap Report. Thank you, brother. I appreciate you being on. And just to make it clear,

02:04

I'm the lesser half because Rich is really much the better half of the show. Just saying. Well, that might be.

02:10

But, you know, it is something that the chemistry you guys have on that show just works very well.

02:18

It is kind of fun where it's like the first five minutes is some banter. And then it's it's always the fun experiment to see,

02:25

OK, how is Rich going to transition from the banter to the subject? You know, so it's always it's always fun to see how that's going to happen.

02:33

But he does a good job. He does. So but you recently wrote a book review and folks have all the links in the show notes.

02:43

But this is a book review that you had done on a book. You were you were so excited to read.

02:48

Is that correct? About as excited as cutting my eyeballs open with rusty with rusty razor blades.

02:56

Yes. That's about how excited I was to read it. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why we're saying we're really glad that you're here. But the subject itself, maybe not so much.

03:03

But it's necessary. It's necessary. So you're you know, before we get into the book review, which is going to be at Slave to the

03:14

King dot com. This is I'm trying to think how best to word the book.

03:23

I mean, I think the subtitle is going to really tell you enough. But white fragility is the subtitle is why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism.

03:35

Is it you know, I almost feel like the response to that is because black people do it all the time.

03:41

Is that is that what we're supposed to understand? I mean, but let us first start because I don't

03:48

I'd be shocked if people in my audience don't know who you are and don't listen to Voice of Reason radio.

03:55

But just in case, introduce yourself, let folks know a little bit about yourself and you know what you what you do, you know, your podcast, what you guys do, you know, what you do for fun and activities outside of, you know, your day job, you know,

04:11

I don't know anything you want. Oh, OK. As Andrew said, my name is

04:16

Chris Honholtz. I am one half of the host team of Voice of Reason radio, which is a podcast that myself and Richard Story have been putting on for about a little over four and a half years now.

04:29

And it is a extension of our site Slave to the King dot com, which kind of started as just a personal blog quite a while ago.

04:40

And we've been doing that for about four and a half years. The whole point of Voice and Reason radio is that there is only one true voice of reason, and that's the word of God.

04:48

Anything outside of that is us trying to bring the world's ideas in rather than looking through the word of God at the world and then trying to understand how we should then live.

05:00

So we have to filter everything through the word of God. It is simply a podcast with two individuals,

05:06

Rich and myself, who live literally two time zones away from each other. I'm on the West Coast and near Reno, Nevada.

05:12

Rich is in Mississippi. And you made mention of the fact we have this great banter and great chemistry.

05:17

The thing that I think always cracks people up is they don't realize Rich and I have never met face to face. And we've known each other for nearly seven years.

05:26

We've been doing this for four and a half years. It's basically a program of two Christians who just love the

05:32

Lord, love his word, and try to talk about a variety of topics together and kind of like just a conversation between brethren.

05:40

And you get to be part of that. And so that's what we've done. And that's what we try to do with it. We have two stated goals.

05:46

Number one is to glorify God. And number two is to edify the saints. That's what we hope to accomplish each and every show.

05:52

And God has been gracious to us that we have a small audience that's been faithful and shares the program.

05:57

And we're now part of Christian podcast community as of earlier this year. And we're grateful to be a part of that and be part of a network of podcasts that are trying to simply glorify

06:07

God with the platform available. Myself, I'm a husband of 19 years, just as of the 27th.

06:15

So just under a week ago, we have my wife. Christine is just a wonderful treasure who has constantly been there for me through thick and thin.

06:23

We have two teenage boys that we homeschool. And I'm looking forward, very forward to retirement for my current current employment and hopefully one day to continue to do this type of stuff long term as something that if God so wills,

06:39

I'll be able to do that. And it's just I'm a member of Community Bible Church of Reno, Nevada.

06:46

I have three wonderful pastors who faithfully shepherd over us each and every week, who pour their heart into understanding the word and proclaiming it and building up the saints and equipping them.

06:58

And they've just been a blessing. And they they know about what I do and they're supportive of it. And it's a blessing to to be in that kind of environment.

07:06

So that's kind of me in a in a real tight nutshell. And, you know, before you joined with Christian podcast community, you were awarded with the best episode of the year last year on the one you did on help on help pastors.

07:21

I'm drowning that, you know, that was a major honor. Thank you.

07:27

Yeah. And it was deserved. And I mean, I've I've said this before. And for folks who don't listen to Voice of Reason Radio, I put this up as one of the top podcasts that are out there.

07:38

And it's it's it really is amazing. The amount of content and detail that you guys get into and discuss is especially when, you know, neither of you are in ministry full time.

07:52

You know, it's just it's just really neat to see a lot of good content there.

07:59

So I do want to encourage you guys to to do that. You know, can I can

08:04

I really get away without playing at least a clip of your co -host? Let's see. I have I have so many here.

08:10

But Rich, this is not my fault. I mean, this is probably my favorite clip from and you know, see, because you guys don't edit.

08:18

I could tell because you have this sometimes said to that, although I haven't been frequently for a little bit again.

08:28

See, so this is this is we're not trained professionals.

08:36

I tell people, don't try this at home. Yes, we do. Hey, but sometimes you get you get this.

08:42

And this this is a gem from your co -host. Well, I've said this before and I still stick to it now over the last 10 years off and on.

08:51

When it comes to ministry versus boxing, boxing is far less violent. And he is right.

08:58

And I think that really plays into a lot of how, you know, when you started your podcast, you had you and Rich had been podcasting actually for a while longer than Voice of Reason, but you got out of it for a while.

09:10

And what was interesting, you guys had gotten back in in the early episodes, what what ended up happening was you you guys were starting out saying, look, we wanted to have a voice of reason being

09:23

God's word, you were kind of fed up with nonsense. You saw on social media of Christians and the poor behavior of Christians.

09:33

And I think that that was really what started, I think, your your podcast early on.

09:40

And now it's just kept growing and continuing and the blog site as well.

09:46

So we appreciate your work. Oh, and I appreciate that. You're right. Our hope was that we we never wanted to be.

09:55

And it was kind of funny because I actually got somebody called me a discernment podcaster this week. I go figure. Yeah, that was that was a fun comment.

10:04

But that was one of the things we wanted to avoid is there's a lot we can discuss as Christians and we're going to have different perspectives.

10:14

None of us have this wrap so tight that we've got every single detail dialed in. So every every time we speak, there's a chance we're going to say or do something wrong.

10:24

We may hold a position that's wrong. We may hold a position that isn't biblical, but we can. Interact and discuss these issues without beating the living snot out of each other, which oftentimes is what happens on social media and a lot of social media platforms such as podcasts and blogs and other forms often become exactly that.

10:44

And so we've always hoped to be able to model that you can do this kind of platform.

10:50

You can do a podcast and you can do blogging. You can stand firm. You can be passionate, but you can still try to strive to understand that there are others who hold a position that you don't that you're going to have to learn is that even if they disagree with you, that may not make them the enemy that may not make them a false teacher.

11:10

And they may be somebody who's simply wrong or maybe you're wrong and you don't see it. And so we have to learn to to work together in that regard.

11:18

So even when we're talking about contradictory theological issues, we've always tried.

11:24

I'm not saying we've ever done it perfectly, but we've always tried to at least be fair in how we represented somebody else.

11:31

And so that's what we hope that our program does, is that it encourages other Christians.

11:37

When you talk about these issues, number one, you go to the word of God. That is your lens. That is your filter.

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You don't have opportunities, anything else. That's what you go to. And then you do so that even if it's to be firm and to be passionate, you're still doing that with love in your eyes and care in your heart for someone else who is a brother in Christ.

11:58

So let's let's get into a topic for tonight. This book review you had done. It is, as anyone who's listened to your podcast knows, you've been talking about this for a while.

12:10

You've been working through it very slowly, not because you read slowly, but more because you were trying to maybe reserve what little hair you had left.

12:21

I'm not sure. But I mean, I'm I'm just saying as a listener to the podcast, I've heard you go through in this.

12:28

So why did you choose this book to discuss, to do a review on?

12:35

So first, why this book before we get into the content of it? Well, it was one of several books that I wanted to look at.

12:43

And the simple fact is I had people ask me, why? Why on earth are you reading these books?

12:49

And I'll simply put it this way. One of my one of the people that I look very respectfully toward is

12:56

Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. And one of the things he does whenever he's dealing with any topic is he will let the other side speak for themselves.

13:06

He will address what the person has said in context. And I believe that's a valuable tool because it helps us not build straw man arguments that we can easily misrepresent, even if we're trying to be faithful to the word of God.

13:22

So as this topic of critical race theory, intersectionality, systemic racism continues to build and continues to become more and more the norm in our in our country.

13:34

It's one of those conversations that Rich and I have needed to discuss on the show. So finally, after listening to people like Daryl Harrison and Virgil Walkover just thinking and reading, watching the

13:48

Synodoc by what standard that founders put together and reading the book that went with it, I began to realize it would be necessary for myself to do just like what

13:57

Dr. White says. You go to the sources, you go to the original sources. And so White Fragility was one of those books that it is.

14:04

It's not an unknown book. You're going you walk into any particular store that has books, whether it's a

14:11

Wal -Mart, a Target, a Barnes and Noble, who goes to bookstores anymore, but anywhere you go, you're going to find this book.

14:19

And it's even being used, I believe it was in. Please don't please don't hate me if I get the city wrong.

14:24

But I think it was Seattle, Washington, that had a diversity training course. This was their go to training manual.

14:32

And it was like, OK, this is an important book. And the funny thing about it is you read the subtitle, why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism.

14:41

Here's the thing. Robin DiAngelo, the author, is a white woman. So this is a white woman telling us as white, you know, white readers.

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And that's who it's geared for. We don't know how to talk about racism. So I knew

14:55

I was going to have to read this. And like you said, it was it was slow. It was hard to read.

15:01

I think it was Samuel Say who first reviewed it out of the people that we know. And he talked about wanting to have surgery without anesthetic to ever have to rather than ever have to read this book again.

15:12

And so I knew it was going to be painful. So I grabbed my pen. I sat down. And with every page that went by,

15:19

I couldn't go more than two, maybe three paragraphs without writing notes, highlighting, underlining whatever.

15:27

And that's why it took so very long, because if you can read this book in a very it's about one hundred and fifty pages, you could read it in a couple of days if you wanted to.

15:37

But if you're reading it with any sort of critical thinking, you're going to have to slow down because there's a lot there and a lot of assumption, a lot of presuppositions, a lot of bias built into it.

15:49

And there is no critical thinking allowed. So if you don't do that, if you don't take that time, you're going to it's like getting beaten over the head with a baseball bat over and over, you're finally just going to capitulate.

16:01

And that's what this book does. And I was I knew I was going to have to do that if I wanted to be able to articulate what critical race theory talks about, why the idea of systemic racism is anti -biblical, why as Christians we need to understand these things because they're using definitions that we don't use.

16:20

And if you don't go to their books and their resources, you're going to run the risk of creating straw men and wrongly handling the material.

16:29

Well, let's get into this the book itself, because this is

16:34

I mean, you laid out the case of why this book becomes important. We know this is an issue that is affecting the church.

16:43

You've dealt with this on Voice of Reason radio. We've dealt with it here on The Wrap Report. We've dealt with it on Apologetics Live.

16:51

So the issue is is something that is not going to go away, especially now that we have, unfortunately, well -known

16:59

Christian pastors who are now, I don't know, giving up the

17:06

Bible for the sake of a platform. I just don't get it. But they're they're deciding they're going to go woke and they're going to start teaching that, you know, that America is systemically racist, which if it really is, then there really is no choice.

17:27

I mean, if America really is systemically racist, then you can't change it. So there's no need for a book like this.

17:33

Right. The only thing we should do is basically pay all those that are black to move back to Africa and say, we're sorry we brought you here.

17:42

Right. Because they say that we're the cause, even though we didn't own slaves.

17:47

Right. So and forgetting the fact that it was, you know, Africans that kidnapped

17:53

Africans and sold them as slaves before the, you know, whites were doing it. So, you know, it's just it's all this stuff.

18:02

When they say it's systemic, that it can't change. Then you really there what's the purpose of going on with this?

18:10

Because there is no there's no solution to it. Let me give you a James Cone quote.

18:16

You see, you read this. I've I ended up reading black theology, black power from James Cone, who's really the father of black liberation theology, but he goes he says, black hatred is the black man.

18:28

Strong, strong aversion to white society. No, no black man living in white

18:33

America can escape it. Well, right. I mean, my thinking is if there's no way to escape it, then there's no solution to it.

18:42

So why write the book? I mean, this is the critical thinking you were referring to, right? Well, and the sad part about it is the purpose of writing those books isn't really to address, hey, there's racism and we need to actual figure out what's going on and why, et cetera.

19:02

It's actually about destroying power structures. That's what the whole books are about. You know, and D 'Angelo makes this case in her book.

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And I know others do as well, that because the system is, you know, the nation is systemically racist, the only way you can resolve that is by destroying the existing power structures and changing them.

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And then if you do that, then you can change the who's in power, who's oppressing, who's not oppressed, and therefore then you bring about this utopian equality.

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So the purpose of writing these books isn't about critical thinking. It's not about, OK, how do we actually address the sin of racism, which there are there is racism.

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That's that anybody who says that if you deny systemic racism, you're denying racism is is is playing word games.

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And so as a Christian, we recognize that the Bible says to have untrusted hatred of anyone is sinful.

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And if you have unjust hatred of someone on the basis of their ethnicity, we know what that is. That's in secular terminology, that's racism.

20:06

So we acknowledge that racism exists. What we dispute is the definitions that the critical race theorist brings to the to the table.

20:14

The critical race theorist isn't going to allow you to to challenge those definitions. And that's what this book is about.

20:21

It's about preventing you from actually challenging critical race theory as a whole.

20:26

And it's going to paint you into a corner to where you only have one option and that's challenging the existing power structures.

20:32

And so clearly, and there's no way to get around this, we're going to be talking about Marxism, you know, socialism.

20:44

So has that's really the underlying thing here. Has has this this idea of breaking down social structures?

20:50

You think this has ever happened before or been used as an argument in history? Maybe. Yeah.

20:57

Karl Marx. Oh, yeah. So, I mean, when I see the a book like this and I see the review you had, the question

21:06

I always ask with this stuff is what's the end game? Right. Yeah.

21:11

The end game is very clear. The end game is that it is the toppling of Western culture.

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It is the it is the establishment of a new power structure that the ruling elite will then they'll discard everything else.

21:29

And it's what socialism and communism has always done. You'll you will establish a ruling elite. You put the haves and have nots at odds with one another.

21:37

You create a conflict. You create a revolution. The ruling elites come in. They take control and then we're all equally poor.

21:46

Yeah, and that's the thing that is amazed I'm always amazed with is that people think that somehow human beings, given lots of control and power over their human beings, it's going to create a utopia.

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And yet every time it's been tried, the people who are fighting today for this justice that they say that, you know, to overcome the oppression they feel in a few years when they get their way, they're going to be on the streets, you know, begging for food.

22:17

This is the consistent pattern. I mean, Venezuela didn't take very long to go from being a top producing country to having restrictions on their use of electricity and begging for food in the streets, killing one another in the streets now for bread.

22:33

It doesn't take long. And when you look at this, you have to go, well, what is the end goal of this?

22:43

The end goal for many, unfortunately, I think, is a black supremacy. And that really doesn't solve the problem, it actually continues it.

22:52

I mean, I've said this many times. The only way to end racism is by ending all racism.

22:59

You can't end it by saying, well, we're going to make up for one injustice with another injustice.

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All that creates is more hatred. You know, and the problem with it is the definition of injustice changes.

23:14

So you and I would recognize that anybody who looks at another person with a certain skin color and says,

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I hate you for your skin color and I'm going to oppress you. And I'm going to make sure you can't get by your own merit to move forward and to and to be successful.

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We would recognize that is unjust, that is unbiblical, that is a sin. However, as D 'Angelo points out in this book, that can only be one sided.

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There's only one way that anybody that that kind of oppression exists. And that is because this system was built by white racist slave owners.

23:55

So only they hold that power. And so anybody fighting back against them, it's essentially they're a freedom fighter, essentially.

24:02

You're you're rebelling against and fighting back against the oppression. So therefore your reaction is justified.

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That's why when you hear of the riots in the streets and there are evangelical leaders who go, OK, the riots are bad, but we need to understand why that's the language of critical race theory.

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That is saying there is a justification that we can dismiss sinful behavior by saying years of oppression, you know, racism is systemic, all of that, and therefore it's justifiable.

24:33

So that's the problem. It's the definitions are not biblical. The definitions are worldly and sociological and Marxist in nature.

24:41

So you cannot actually, you know, get around it if you if you don't recognize what it is you're dealing with, which is a changing of the words.

24:51

Yeah, it's a classic postmodern technique. I mean, this is what you see across academia.

24:58

You see it culturally. You see it socially where we are using familiar phrases, familiar words, but we're putting new meaning to it.

25:06

And just I read this book as well, Chris. And one of the things she tacitly says, quote, people of color may also hold prejudices and discriminate against white people, but they lack the social and institutional power that transforms their prejudice and discrimination into racism.

25:27

The impact of their prejudice on whites is temporary and contextual. When I say that only whites can be racist,

25:33

I mean that in the United States only whites have the collective social and institutional power and privilege over people of color.

25:40

People of color do not have this power and privilege over white people. It's exactly what you're saying.

25:46

It is with regards to the system. And they're not looking for equity of opportunity.

25:52

They are looking for an inversion of authority and oppression and and control.

26:01

You know, absolutely. And I recall that passage. And the interesting thing about that passage is understand when we used to define racism as, as she puts it, like an intentional directed act at someone on the basis of their race.

26:17

Right. That's how we always understood it. Issues of bias and discrimination were kind of your broad topic.

26:24

That's how we if discrimination is basically saying, you know, I choose one thing over another.

26:29

It's like I'm choosing Taco Bell over McDonald's. I discriminated against McDonald's. There's good ways and bad ways we discriminate.

26:36

So in a negative way of discriminating, if I say that, you know, Bud has this this hat that I think is ugly and terrible and I'm going to mistreat him on the basis of that hat,

26:48

I've chosen to treat someone who's in the image and creating the image and likeness of God in a poor manner. I've made that choice on the basis of something ridiculous, just on the basis of the hat that he's wearing.

27:00

So that that's a negative form of discrimination. And that was the broad way we would try to understand discrimination and then we would make it more refined.

27:08

And we would say, look, if I mistreat someone on the basis of their sex, I was sexist if I mistreat someone on the basis of their ethnicity.

27:14

I was I was racist if I do it on religion. It was it was a form of discrimination that was religious based.

27:22

So she takes that term racism and plucks it out from being a refined understanding of of a particular form of discrimination and she puts it above and she says, now it's something different.

27:36

It's a system. And she repeatedly states throughout the course of the book, racism is a system, not an act.

27:42

So this is it's not and they take it. They've taken that out. They've given it its own meaning and they've put it up above everything else.

27:51

And now racism is what drives everything. And discrimination is an underlying component of systemic racism.

27:58

And and this is where in our culture we're starting to see a change where they're having a different term.

28:04

So you have racism and fighting racism. And it's interesting because they recognize people are recognizing what racism historically has always been, as as you just explained.

28:17

Right. You treat someone based on the color of their skin or something like that. And the idea of racism isn't enough now.

28:26

It's now you have to be actively fighting against something that they also say you can't control.

28:34

You you can't do anything to stop it, which it's like it's to someone that uses critical thinking, it's like your mind blows up, right?

28:43

Because how how you're telling us we have to change and at the same time telling us there's nothing we could do to change.

28:52

Well, that's that's probably, I think, one of the more insidious parts of this book is that you are put instantly on a treadmill that you can never get off of.

29:00

Yeah, the thing with the problem with the the racism versus anti -racism is that there is no neutral position allowed.

29:09

If you are someone who is white and you're born into American culture, you are de facto racist because you are participating in a system that has elevated you and benefited you.

29:21

Now, you may not you may look at your life and go, I don't think I've had a very great life. But by the very fact that you are white, you are not dealing with the oppression that a black person deals with.

29:31

So therefore, you have a benefit. You have a privilege that has somehow, even in a small way, you've benefited from.

29:39

So the second you say, no, I haven't. You are exhibiting, as she terms it, white fragility.

29:46

You are. And one of the things one of the more annoying points of the book was when she and you have to forgive me,

29:57

I forget who the person she quotes, but she basically cites an example where an individual says to say that you didn't know you were racist and that you were part of a white privilege system.

30:07

It's kind of like walking down the street and people are stuffing money into your pocket that you never asked for, never wanted, but it's being received by you and you're benefiting from.

30:17

So the the insinuation, well, I won't even say insinuation. The direct correlation is, you know, as a white person, you know, you've benefited from your position in society.

30:26

And so the only position you can take that's not racist is to be anti -racist.

30:32

You have to work against and you have to give up your place of privilege. You have to elevate those who are persons of color, who are black or indigenous.

30:42

You have to elevate them and you have to work to tear down the system that has benefited you. Otherwise, even just saying,

30:49

I'm not going to partake of this. I'm not going to act in this way. I'm not going to speak in this way. I'm not going to affirm these things.

30:56

That is insufficient because you are still existing in the system that benefits you.

31:03

So that's the problem with how this, how racism versus anti -racism is posited.

31:10

It is it is you are immediately thrown into an oppressor class and you were not allowed out of it.

31:16

And you may you'll never really be allowed to be out of it. D 'Angelo repeatedly states throughout her book, she'll never not be racist.

31:23

She's a white woman teaching white people how to fight against racism. She says it was her for herself because she's a white woman.

31:29

She'll never not be racist. So you're stuck in that oppressor class. You can never get out of it.

31:34

But you have to dismantle the existing system for any hope for even the slightest amount of atonement. You know what

31:40

I find interesting with the whole thinking here and what you're just because Bud read the book, you read the book,

31:46

I read your book review. but the thing that amazes me is when you take a step back and you read books like this, you know,

31:59

I've read a bunch of James Cone and you read this and you go, wow, you know, if I was black,

32:05

I'd be insulted by what these people are saying, because they're not only saying that they've that blacks in America have been oppressed, but they can't get out of the oppression without the permission of white people, right?

32:21

Absolutely. And I mean, right there, you look at this and say, well, they're they're still having a view of blacks that are that's the meaning to sit there and say, well, you can't do this on your own.

32:35

We white people have to give up our white privilege for you to be able to get ahead because you can't do it without us.

32:41

So you're still that's still even in their arguments that they're racist.

32:47

In fact, I'm going to agree with her that she is racist because that's what she sees.

32:52

She sees people by color and that's racism. She treats people different based on color of skin when it's just the different amount of melanin.

33:03

We're all we're all colored. OK, so the reality, though, is she is grouping people in by what she just determines is a race.

33:14

And based on that, she's she's basically saying that certain people can't get ahead unless she convinces all of us white people to to basically give up our privilege so that blacks can get ahead because they can't do it on their own.

33:29

I strongly disagree with that. And this is where you end up seeing the breakdown, because what you end up seeing is there are plenty of blacks who get ahead.

33:40

There's other reasons they're being oppressed. And it doesn't have to do with the whiteness that they think it is, which, by the way, the way they define whiteness is kind of interesting as well.

33:51

You know, if you actually have a mother and a father, that's whiteness. But then Black Lives Matter wants to destroy the whole mother father thing because they don't want a nuclear family.

34:00

So it's like so, you know, these groups want to like continue the very thing that's hurting their community.

34:10

And yet they want to blame it on whiteness and then say that we somehow are going to are in the control and the power to get them to be out of an oppressed state.

34:21

You know, instead of looking at all the other factors that go into it, because there's plenty of blacks that do much better than plenty of whites.

34:27

There's plenty of blacks who are smarter than plenty of whites. It has nothing to do with them being an oppression issue.

34:34

Does have to do with, you know, just the way that God's created us. It does have to do with the fact of our environment.

34:44

I mean, very simple. You have someone who has mother, father, they're able to sit home and study.

34:52

And that education is really important. And parents encourage doing homework and studying versus someone who is in a single mother home.

35:05

The mother is working two, maybe three jobs to try and make ends meet. She's not home for the kids.

35:11

There's no one else at home for the kids. The kid has to take care of himself, fend for himself. There's no encouragement to do his homework.

35:19

There's no one watching him. You look at those two scenarios and both those scenarios notice nothing about color.

35:27

Maybe the first scenario is a black family and the other one's a white family. But the reality is, is that child that that is in that second scenario is not going to have the same advantages when they get older as the as the one in the first family has nothing to do with color.

35:46

Right. So there's a lot of other factors people don't look into. And yet, you know what

35:51

I'm guessing from her book and what I've read from others like James Cone, they put it as if it's still like blacks just can't do this without white help, which

36:01

I think is very belittling. And the bigger issue I see as a Christian is and you've already hit on this,

36:07

Chris, it gets away from the reality that we are created in the image of God.

36:13

And it's those attributes that we are that God has given to us that make us a human that we all share.

36:21

And this is what gives us the ability to overcome things. The reality is every time

36:28

I'm sure, Chris, you've had adversity growing up, bud, as well. What did that do?

36:33

That does one of two things. Typically, it either makes you stronger or makes you weaker.

36:40

It's all how do you deal with adversity? If you start playing the victim, you're going to be weaker.

36:46

If you're going to look at that and say, I'm going to, you know, I just listened to a podcast about Sidney Poitier, how he was, you know, he was here.

36:55

It's kind of neat. I didn't know as much. He basically was growing up in a family. He was,

37:00

I think, the first black actor to to get an Emmy. And so or whatever the awards is that they give themselves.

37:11

And so the you know, he ended up coming to this country because he had a big family.

37:17

He was the he happened to be born in America, made him an American citizen. So the parents had to get rid of someone.

37:24

He was the he could get to America. So they shipped him off. But he was told he couldn't he wasn't he couldn't be a good actor.

37:34

He wouldn't be a good actor. Go be a dishwasher. And he turned and says, no, he literally grabbed the guy and said, no,

37:41

I am going to work harder than everyone else. I want you. I'll do whatever it takes. And the guy said, fine, you know, we're going to keep you in the school.

37:48

And he became, you know, an award winning actor. Right. Because what did he do when he faced adversity?

37:55

He didn't just go, oh, what was me? It's the society. He said, no, I'm going to work to conquer that.

38:03

He said, you know, because he ended up saying he wasn't just going to be a good actor, he was going to be better than any white actor.

38:11

He was going to be the best. And that was his goal. So I think that's the thing that I see, as you know, when

38:19

I was reading through your review of the book, which I encourage people to go and read because I, you know,

38:27

I have it linked in the show notes. You made some comments about this book and how you know, what is the purpose or the the presumption she makes?

38:40

You end up talking about, you know, your first point that you kind of make is that there's a biased presupposition that she has.

38:48

Could you go into a little bit of detail on that? Yeah. First and foremost, when she's writing the book in the introduction,

38:57

Robin D 'Angelo makes it clear she is she is not going to argue whether or not systemic racism exists.

39:04

She implicitly explicitly states, excuse me, explicitly states, she starts with the assumption systemic racism exists.

39:13

That now I've said this in the in the radio and I'm going to say here, I understand why if you're writing a book that says,

39:21

I believe in systemic racism and I believe that white people are are reacting wrongly to it.

39:27

You're not going to spend a ton of time trying to explain and convince people you're going to address the problem.

39:33

So I understand why you would start with that. But it also colors everything she says.

39:39

There is zero interaction with opposing perspectives. She's not she's not going to allow for an opposing perspective.

39:48

Every single instance in which an opposing perspective is brought up is termed white fragility.

39:54

So she controls that narrative from page one. She is not going to give ground in any way, shape or form.

40:02

So that's that is a presupposition that is entirely biased in favor of critical race theory, of systemic racism.

40:11

You know, you you are not allowed to bring anything into this. You are there to be told you to sit there, be quiet and be told what you are.

40:20

And so that's a huge problem, because if you're going to you know, if you are trying to convince people that they're acting in a way that is inconsistent and wrongly treats others, you have to convince them that the behavior is wrong.

40:38

When we talk from a gospel perspective about our need for Jesus Christ, what do we what should we be doing?

40:44

Not every Christian does this, but what should we be doing? We go to the law of God. We talk about to lie is a violation of God's word.

40:52

To worship a false god is a violation of his commandments. To hate others and unjustly is a sin.

40:58

We take people and show them in his word where God has said you can't do this.

41:04

And when you do, you are rebelling against him. And then we take them to Christ. And when we talk about the fact that Christ received the penalty you you deserve and through his propitiatory death and resurrection, you can be redeemed.

41:17

We build that case if we are rightly explaining the gospel to people. But when if you were to come to someone and beat them about the head and neck and say, repent, repent, repent, repent, and never show them what it is they're supposed to repent of, they may capitulate out of fear and they may make a profession.

41:38

But did they actually come to understand the gospel? Did they rightly make a profession of faith or are they simply stopping or just simply saying it to get you to stop from beating them?

41:50

And that's what she's doing. She brings in a verbal bludgeoning from page one.

41:56

You are a racist. You will always be a racist. There is no there is no other way to view yourself and anything you do to defend yourself is proof of your racism.

42:07

So that's the problem is that she I understand why you want to start with the presupposition. We all start with presuppositions.

42:14

We started this show with a presupposition. We we believe her book is wrong, but we're trying to interact with what she says and why we believe it's wrong so we can compare it against scripture and say, this is how we should deal with it.

42:26

We want if you're going to make the case of something, you have to rightly interact with the opposing viewpoint.

42:33

And there's just none of that allowed in this book. It's absolutely this is what you are. And you're going to it's a steady drumbeat every single page.

42:42

Yeah. And, you know, the thing that I see with this is if I was to turn to her and say, well,

42:52

I know that you are a racist and I'm not. And you're really just putting this book out for the sake of Marxism.

43:01

She would deny it. But yet that's exactly what she's doing to us. I've never owned a slave.

43:07

No one in my family has owned slaves. We are we come from Russia and Romania. They didn't have the slave, the

43:13

African slave trade there. How am I responsible and why? Why is it because of the color of my skin?

43:19

I'm responsible for slavery. And yet all the blacks who kidnap blacks and sold them as slaves in the

43:27

African slave trade, they're not responsible. And how are you going to figure out which which ones they are now?

43:33

You know, so it just becomes this big mess. And excuse me.

43:39

You know, so I want to get into some of the the basically the rewriting of history, stuff like that, that you brought out in the book.

43:46

Let's let's do that right after this commercial. My name is Andy Olson and I want to tell you about Echo Zoi Radio.

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45:16

today. You want to get this before it's too late. It's a short little book written by Josiah Nichols, helping folks to understand how to interpret the

45:28

Bible. Chris, you kind of like that. So you smile with the Sinnos, huh? You have Rhinos or Republicans in name only.

45:34

And, you know, it could be Chino, right? With a C sound, but C can also have an S sound. And it sounds better as Sinno, because they're

45:42

Christian in name only. It's they prefer their sin over Christ. So I think you're fit.

45:50

Got to get a good chuckle from you. So let's let's talk about this book and their, you know, basically rewriting of history.

45:58

Why does that end up having to play into this whole critical race theory that they have? Well, you have to understand that from the critical race theory perspective, the system that we exist in is de facto systemic racism.

46:16

And there has to be a reason that it is. So you have to, OK, how did we get from there to here?

46:23

You know, that's that's that's a good question to ask. How did America get from where it once was to it is now?

46:29

History teaches us that that's what history is for, to help us learn where we've come from and learn where we're going.

46:35

So that's great. Let's let's examine that. The problem is, is that history is not clean.

46:41

We can't you know, we all grew up looking at history books and we looked at timelines, 1776, the

46:48

Declaration of Independence, you know, and we look at the dates of the, you know, the you know, the

46:53

Revolutionary War. And we look at the dates of the Civil War and we look at the dates of when the civil rights era happened.

47:00

And we have these clean, nice little lines that we can point out and say that's when these things occurred. But history, if you're really understanding history, is not clean.

47:09

There are multiple streams of influence that cause things to happen. Martin Luther King, Jr.

47:16

certainly was one of the seminal figures of the civil rights era. But he wasn't the only person.

47:22

So we think of the civil rights or we think of Martin Luther King, Jr. And we should. The man did a lot of great work. But that doesn't mean he was the only influence.

47:31

There were many people who agreed with his message, people in the government who didn't, you know, never met him, never talked to him, but already believed what he believed.

47:41

And some of them, surprisingly, were white. So here's the thing. History has multiple streams of influence.

47:49

It never has real clean start and stop dates. And there's all kinds of, you know, factors to be involved as to why things happened the way they did.

48:00

The problem with the history presented in DeAngelo's book is it is reduced down to one stream.

48:08

Slavery, you know, slavery was here in America. Slavery was a a bedrock principle in the colonies.

48:20

The, you know, the southern colonies and others would not give up slaves even if they wanted to join together.

48:25

So therefore, slavery is the bedrock foundation of our

48:31

Western culture in America. And that because of that, that is what influenced everything forward.

48:40

And so that it is completely reductionistic. It is bringing it down to a single stream, a single reason as to why things are the way they are.

48:50

And so you were talking about earlier about how the slave trade happened. You know, Daryl Harrison has talked about this on Just Thinking, talking about how his own ancestors in Africa who were black, who were tribesmen, who kidnapped other tribes members and sold them into slavery.

49:06

That issue is a part of the issue of slavery. It is one of the influence of slavery.

49:13

If you didn't have people in Africa kidnapping other people and selling them, you couldn't have had slaves that came here.

49:19

So that is a stream of which influenced slavery. In America, you had people, for example, like John Adams, one of our founding fathers, who abhorred slavery, as did his wife.

49:30

And when they're fighting for freedom in America, wrote of the fact that they had problems with the idea of here we are trying to fight for our freedoms, yet we will not give up, give freedom to the people that we enslave.

49:42

That's part of our influence of our history. John Adams was one of the major influencers of what eventually became our

49:49

Constitution. He, you know, he had a lot of impact on the growth of our nation and the birth of it.

49:55

So when you take all those factors out and you simply reduce it down to slavery existed, white people owned slaves.

50:04

We, you know, Christians should have known it was wrong. People should have known it was wrong and they didn't get rid of it.

50:11

Therefore, that they wanted black people to be lower tier and the whites to be supreme.

50:18

When you make that your basis for history, you are absolutely disregarding anything that is that has any other possible influence.

50:30

It's not to say that if slavery didn't have an impact on the birth of our nation, it did.

50:35

You know, that had not the founding fathers been willing to compromise on the issue, we wouldn't even had colonies joining together because there were

50:44

Southern colonies that refused if they if they were forced to give up slavery. So it had an impact.

50:50

It's just not the only impact. It certainly influenced the South for generations. That's why the

50:55

Civil War eventually was fought. So, yes, we acknowledge that it exists. We acknowledge it's part of history, but it is not the sole component of history.

51:05

And why is it that that is the is that all of white culture is painted by that.

51:12

When you had whites who were fighting and abolitionists who were part of the getting slaves out of the

51:19

South, up to the North, you had a lot of people who were involved in that. How is it their influence is not part of what has developed as white culture because it can't be allowed.

51:29

It has to be extricated out and we have to have it down to this one narrow stream.

51:34

And what that does is that's the obvious stream. That's the one everybody can look at and go, oh, bad. And so that must have had a huge influence.

51:41

So therefore, yeah, I guess they're right. This, you know, it would it took a civil war to get emancipation.

51:47

But even that wasn't enough. They were treated as second class and it took the civil rights era. But even then it wasn't enough.

51:53

And then we had white supremacy groups like the KKK and neo -Nazis. It's the easiest thing to point to, but it's not the only thing you get to point to and but yet D 'Angelo and she cites only pre -CRT, pre -critical race theory sources, by the way, that's how she gets this history.

52:13

She only points to that and she will not allow for anything else. And if you bring anything else into the mix, again, you're asserting your white fragility, you're trying to assert white solidarity and white dominance in the conversation.

52:25

Well, the point that you made earlier with regards to she opens the book up with a patent presupposition.

52:32

So we already know where she's at. And when you've done that, you sort of have tipped your your worldview.

52:39

So as you go back and look at history, you have to be revisionist in it. You have to read it through that lens.

52:47

And that's what she's done. And one of the quotes I was looking at here says the U .S. economy was based, the

52:53

U .S. economy was based on the abduction and enslavement of African people, the displacement and genocide of indigenous people and the annexation of Mexican lands, and that's this huge generalization, but it's also largely revisionistic.

53:10

Did some of those things happen? Absolutely. But this is not the corpus of all of American history.

53:17

So I think your observation of the presupposition that she establishes from the get go, that does

53:23

I mean, it's just like every page you read through this. It's just how do you how do you not think this way, given where your worldview is coming from?

53:34

yeah, and that's exactly sorry, sorry, Andrew. No, go ahead. That's exactly the thing.

53:40

The issue about the entire economy was based on was the entire economy based on it. No, you look when we go read

53:48

David McCullough's book on John Adams, brought him up a little bit ago. John Adams, what was he doing in France and in Europe during during the war?

53:56

Securing loans. Why? Because we had we had no money. How did we get this economy?

54:03

We were in debt when the nation was born. It took getting our freedom and then being able to produce and export and begin to pay back those loans and gain money from other nations before we began to actually develop an economy.

54:22

So that's ignored. All the whole basis was slavery part of that. Yes. Was that a despicable part of it?

54:28

Yes. Should we say that that was the only basis for it? Absolutely not.

54:33

Because America was a producing nation and eventually paid back those loans. And to be able to say that that's the only basis for our economy, as you say, completely reductionistic and in is laser focused worldview of systemic racism, you have to if you are going to argue that the system is racist, you can't allow for any other influence.

54:58

There can only be one influence. That's how you establish the system is wrong, is is racism. Yeah. And I was going to bring that point up and also the fact that this really anyone who's read the book 1984,

55:13

I remember reading that book in high school going, there is no way this could ever happen. The idea of being able to just change terminology, just change words.

55:22

And everyone's going to go back and rewrite all the history to match the words. It was like, this is so ridiculous.

55:28

But that is what we're seeing right now. That's exactly what we're seeing in our culture. You know, this is an interesting thing that that I had seen from James Cone, because this is where I think the disconnect is, is, quote, is from him from the book

55:43

Black Theology and Black Power from James Cone, quote, it is interesting that most people do understand why

55:50

Jews can hate Germans. Why can they not understand why black people who have been deliberately and systematically dehumanized or murdered by the structure of this society hate white people, unquote.

56:03

Now, here's the thing I find with this. You don't find that the Jewish people hate the Germans anymore.

56:10

That generation that did it. There was a hatred for them, the ones that actually did this to to the people.

56:17

You don't have it today. Why? Because that didn't continue. Right. This is the problem.

56:24

Are blacks being dehumanized? No, not the way they were with slavery.

56:30

This is a redefinition of the term to say, oh, see, it's still going on. But this is not the only people being dehumanized really today.

56:39

There's two groups of people being dehumanized today at mass numbers. Children in the womb and people involved in human trafficking, you know, the victims in human trafficking.

56:51

Those are the two groups. And I don't hear any of these people trying to defend either of those two groups who are actually legitimately being dehumanized.

57:02

And and this is the the issue that I end up seeing. Now, you made a point and I know we're

57:09

I don't want to go too long on this, but I knew we'd go a little bit long.

57:14

We didn't we didn't even get you know, we this has been a serious for anyone who knows you and I, especially online.

57:21

We've had very few joking around. And I actually wasn't sure where this was going to go if we'd be completely serious, which

57:27

I hoped. But I mean, because I was going to say you did make one comment about preferences, you know, and just like, you know,

57:36

I think we could all agree that no sane person would enjoy eating at Olive Garden. I mean, that's something we could say.

57:44

Just OK. Well, then again, now we'd have to question whether you're sane. See, but isn't this this is exactly how the argument would work, right?

57:52

I can I can I can solve that problem. I'm not. Right. But you see, this is with you.

57:58

That establishes that. Yeah. Well, but this is how these these arguments go. I make an argument that within the argument, if you disagree with me, it proves that I'm right.

58:09

Exactly. And that's their argument. And that, I think, is why we end up seeing, as you pointed out in your review, that this is a lot of a focus on emotional manipulation.

58:21

So the last two things I'd want to talk about, if we can, is the emotional manipulation.

58:27

And then this whole thing that you refer to as ethnic Gnosticism.

58:34

The the emotional manipulation is done through really having any lack of context.

58:41

You know, and I know that if somebody comes up to you and says, Jimmy told me I was a terrible person and he hates me.

58:48

And the first thing that's going to do is tug on your heartstrings and feel bad for this person that Jimmy said is a terrible person because, you know, this person until you get to Jimmy and then

58:58

Jimmy says, well, yeah. See, what happened was she went up and she smacked somebody across the back of the head, stole their purse, dumped her soda on him and ran off and laughing.

59:08

And so I pulled her aside and I said, what you did was terrible. That is not right. You need to go back and apologize.

59:14

You need to make that right. That is a terrible act. And I and I rebuke them for that. And then you go, oh, sorry,

59:23

Jimmy, I had some bad thoughts about you. I really should have gotten some more information. And that's what happens without throughout the course of D 'Angelo's book.

59:31

She she likes to cite studies. She likes to cite anecdotes. She likes to go to like legal cases.

59:36

She uses a lot of these anecdotal type of types of evidence and says this is proof of systemic racism.

59:47

And so she'll cite things like the statistics of who holds position of wealth or power.

59:53

And overwhelmingly, the statistics will say there's X number of white people in these positions.

59:59

And without discussing about how that happened, why that happened, she immediately makes it clear the implication is because all these people are white, that's proof of racism.

01:00:10

There's no context given to those numbers. She'll cite legal discussions.

01:00:17

You talked about, OK, you're Jewish. You've got your your ethnic background has this connection to historically to Nazi Germany and your ancestors had a connection to that.

01:00:32

And. According to her thinking, you should you should hate them for that.

01:00:38

So if you were to say, look, because as someone who's a Jew, I understand what that oppression looks like because my family was impacted by that.

01:00:46

The immediate response that she brings up is, well, what you have to understand, Andrew, is at some point Jews became seen as white.

01:00:53

And you don't have to it's not the issue that you have Jewish background that you would understand oppression. You've you've become white.

01:01:00

And so what she does is she'll take a historical legal cases that talk about how

01:01:07

Supreme Court's justice is determined. What what groups were what what ethnicities?

01:01:13

And she goes, well, and you have white men deciding who's white. There was a massive amount of context lacking,

01:01:21

I mean, huge legal arguments to get to that point. All gone, not even discussed, not even hinted at.

01:01:27

Just said, here's white men deciding who's white. That that is a massive pull.

01:01:33

That is the Jimmy hates me and says I'm a bad person. Heart tug. And then every anecdote that she loves to use from her diversity training classes is almost exclusively without context.

01:01:47

She'll talk about how she's talking about to these people about, you know, you're you know, this is racism, this is this, this is that.

01:01:54

And the discussion will break out in a group exercise or something. And it's almost always some poor gal.

01:02:00

I don't know what it is about white women she has a problem with, but it's always some poor gal that breaks down and is upset because she's been you know, she's she's everybody's attacking me and I'm not this.

01:02:11

And that person leaves. And now well, now the whole focus is on this white woman and we've lost everything, except that there's no discussion of what the conversation was that got her there.

01:02:22

Nobody says she doesn't say what anybody says of her. She doesn't say what anybody what the conversation was.

01:02:27

And then she uses another one I thought was just insidious. That same scenario, here's a white woman who's in a meeting and she gets upset because she feels like nobody's listening to her, everybody's attacking her and she rushes out.

01:02:39

And then and everybody feels bad and apologizes to her. And then in another scenario, a black woman is sitting in a meeting, listening to her peers and ask for court clarifying questions.

01:02:50

And later she's pulled aside by her supervisor and said people felt like you were attacking them. That is a heart tugger, that is a grabber, that is to make you feel bad.

01:02:58

Why? Because the white woman was clearly irrational and the black woman was clearly calm and didn't have any reason. Yet again, no discussion about what was actually said.

01:03:08

Andrew, if I came to you and I calmly asked you, have you stopped beating your wife yet?

01:03:14

I'm just asking for clarification, I'm not sure if I understand. Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Andrew, you would naturally get upset and you would actually later tell me, why are you making such insinuations of me?

01:03:27

There's a context that would make it understandable. We don't know what the question is. Maybe maybe these scenarios were irrational versus rational.

01:03:36

But we don't know because D 'Angelo doesn't tell you. So it is a massive manipulation of your emotions because you are always left without the details that make it specific enough for you to understand why things happened.

01:03:49

Maybe she's right. Maybe those scenarios were examples of racism. Maybe they were irrational reactions.

01:03:55

Maybe it was white men deciding, hey, we're going to be conspiratorial and say, we know it's white, but there's nothing discussed about the details.

01:04:03

So how do you determine it? She's manipulating the reader into a predetermined outcome. So that is what

01:04:09

I mean by the the lack of context and the emotional manipulation. If you don't provide the details, somebody can't draw a proper conclusion.

01:04:17

And that's how you drag somebody to your predetermined location. It is massively manipulative.

01:04:23

Well, then let's talk about this. The last point in the time that we have left the ethnic

01:04:30

Gnosticism. First, for folks who may not know, define what Gnosticism is and then how you use it in this case.

01:04:37

Essentially, the Gnostics were heretics that the early church had to contend with. And often what they would say is we have a special knowledge.

01:04:46

We know certain things. For example, Gnostics would claim that one particular teaching was

01:04:51

Jesus was purely spirit and he only appeared to be flesh. So, you know, because they had a belief that flesh was inherently sinful, sinful and spirit was not.

01:05:00

So you had to adhere to the Gnostics teaching to gain this knowledge. You could never attain it by yourself.

01:05:06

You couldn't just go to the word of God. You couldn't listen to the apostles teaching. You had to go to the Gnostics. They have a special knowledge.

01:05:13

And I want to say it was Votie Balcom that came up with the term ethnic Gnosticism. What ethnic

01:05:18

Gnosticism essentially teaches is there are groups of people by their ethnicity that have special knowledge.

01:05:26

Sometimes people and this can be either for ethnicism or it can be for gender.

01:05:32

But sometimes you hear it referred to as standpoint epistemology, that you have a special knowledge because you as a particular group of people have gone through oppression.

01:05:41

And because of that, you actually have more and greater knowledge than the oppressor, because the oppressor doesn't know what it means to be oppressed, the oppressor doesn't know what it means to have your life experiences rejected or doesn't know what it means to have to have lived under that.

01:05:56

So you have a broader knowledge. And so, again, I think it was Votie that came up with the term ethnic Gnosticism that essentially says and she teaches this in her book.

01:06:05

So I'm not mischaracterizing this, that the black indigenous people of color have a special knowledge of racism because of hundreds of years of oppression.

01:06:19

And that that and again, I am not misquoting her. I'm not misrepresenting her. If you doubt this, go read the book.

01:06:26

I know some people are going to say, oh, no, you're not understanding. Yes, I do understand. I read this. I have a headache from it. Yes, I read this book.

01:06:32

She is saying by default, if you are a black person, for example, you know what racism is because it's built into essentially your

01:06:42

DNA, your family, your ancestors, your your community for generations have been oppressed, have been enslaved, have been kept down.

01:06:53

And so therefore, you know what something is. And when you feel something is racist, if you're a black person, you know it's racist.

01:06:59

There is no way to argue around this. And she makes that explicitly clear.

01:07:05

It is she says this multiple times. It is not the intent of what you said or did. It is the impact that is important.

01:07:12

And if a black person, a person of color, indigenous, whatever, if they feel that you were being offensive, you were being oppressive, if you said or did something that was hurtful in their eyes, there is no questioning of this.

01:07:27

They know what it is. They have that special knowledge. You don't have it. You're a white person. You are a beneficiary of white privilege.

01:07:35

You have you lack this knowledge. And so you can never be able to say my intent was because it doesn't matter.

01:07:44

The person receiving it, the person of color says that was racist. And you have to accept it. You cannot deny it.

01:07:51

You cannot explain it away. You cannot bring context into it because then you are reasserting your white fragility and your white dominance.

01:07:58

And by the way, for clarification, she does not define white fragility as some sort of weakness.

01:08:04

It is actually, as she puts it, kind of an insidious conspiratorial effort to reassert white dominance.

01:08:10

Yeah. So when you react negatively to being called a racist, you're not being weak or scared.

01:08:16

That's not what she means by fragile. She means you are reacting in a conspiratorial effort to reassert white solidarity.

01:08:23

Please understand that. So when she says any person that tries to explain or bring context to what was said or why it was said, it doesn't matter.

01:08:34

You've just reasserted your white dominance. That person has special knowledge. That person cannot be wrong. You are always in the wrong.

01:08:41

So what if I said this? Let me just say this real quick. What would she do? I wonder if I said

01:08:47

I have special knowledge, my special knowledge says you're wrong and it comes from a source that not only cannot lie, but knows everything that there is to be known.

01:08:57

She'd reject you and she'd say you were being fragile. Exactly. Right. I mean, but isn't that the problem?

01:09:03

We actually can say she's wrong, not because we think she's wrong, but because the God of the universe that created everything says she's wrong.

01:09:12

Exactly. But what were you going to say? No, I was just going to say that, you know, she's got this presuppositional template that is born out of pure economic

01:09:23

Marxism now applied broadly across this particular hot topic issue.

01:09:30

But one of the things when I got done reading this, I'm thinking, you know what, she could take that template and write a book called

01:09:36

Male Fragility or Cisgender Fragility or I mean, you can take this thing and apply it to any one of these intersections.

01:09:44

Don't give her ideas, bud. No, but I'm telling you, so this is how broad this thing is.

01:09:51

And the one other thing I wanted to question, Chris, to get your quick comment on was to indicate how broad this is, how pervasive this systemic racism that she's touting.

01:10:04

She wrote this, the romanticized traditional family values of the past are also racially problematic.

01:10:13

I mean, this is an attack on the family, much less we know it's an attack on the gospel. But this is a very fundamental building block of society, and it's a racist entity.

01:10:24

Well, it has to be because the white, the white norm is if that's what they want to call it, is the nuclear family.

01:10:34

When we look at Andrew mentioned this earlier, the disparity between a family where the parents are there, they're involved in the education, they're providing meals, they're providing comfort and correction.

01:10:49

That is traditionally seen when we're talking about it from a racial lens as kind of like the white norm.

01:10:56

It's the 1950s Ozzie and Harriet, leave it to beaver picture. And when we when we point to the fact that studies show that actually creates a a basis for successful lives for the children, and then we point to the fact that absence of family, parents working multiple jobs, fathers not being there, children raising themselves and how that's negative.

01:11:24

What do we typically see that as? We see that in the slums.

01:11:30

We see that in the inner city. We see and who occupies those places?

01:11:36

Yeah, black, indigenous, people of color. So, you know, in order to, in my opinion, in order to justify why the white supremacist system is the bad system and the person of color system is is the superior one really is what it's saying.

01:11:56

You have to attack that foundation. You have to go after the family because the understanding of how a children's grow and develop healthy, emotional connections and strong families and are set up for success.

01:12:13

You have to tear that down because that is a white supremacist system. And you have to elevate the idea that you don't need that family background.

01:12:23

You don't need that family dynamic because you could be successful without it. And so that's why she's calling it a racist system, because it is seen as it is seen as the norm in the white culture.

01:12:35

It is not seen as the norm and say the inner city culture. And so when I hear her say that, that's what I'm picturing her attacking.

01:12:41

It takes a village. Exactly. You can't have you can't stand independently.

01:12:48

You can't be. And that's one of the biggest problems with this book, by the way. She always attaches you to a group.

01:12:55

You do not get to she eschews the idea of independence. She eschews the idea of meritocracy.

01:13:02

You are not an individual. You are part of your group and you bring your group with you.

01:13:07

You bring your group's history with you. And so she absolutely has to tear that down, because if if there's any card left standing in her house of cards that could potentially go after what she says, she's got to knock it down.

01:13:23

And so the idea of the the family unit, which is a biblical concept, she's got to tear that down.

01:13:28

Yeah. And not only does she get to put you into that category, she gets to define the category as well.

01:13:36

Yes. So it makes it convenient. I mean, realistically, folks, we've just touched the surface of this.

01:13:42

Oh, my goodness. There's so much more that could be said. I know, Chris, you've gotten tired of talking about it on your show.

01:13:51

I think our listeners got tired of hearing it. Yeah. You know, it is something we have to deal with.

01:13:57

I mean, it's it's not going to go away. You know, and that's that's absolutely true.

01:14:03

And just for one thing that I've been trying to kind of hammer out when I talk about this with some people, a lot of folks say, well, you know, like after the election, this won't be a big deal or eventually or eventually this thing's going to collapse in on itself.

01:14:16

And I agree it will. Here's the thing. Everybody remember the emergent church? The emergent church brought oh, we're just asking questions and utterly destroyed the idea that you could believe the

01:14:28

Bible, that it was sufficient, that it was an errant utterly attempted to destroy that. Now it collapsed in on itself.

01:14:35

But what did it do? It spread the seeds of doubt of the word of God. And look what we're dealing with today. We've got people saying you have to bring critical race theory in because the

01:14:42

Bible isn't sufficient. If we think that this isn't going to have a lasting impact for generations, we're fooling ourselves.

01:14:49

Yes, I believe this thing will eventually collapse in on itself, but I believe it will do a great amount of damage to the to people.

01:14:56

I believe it will do damage to Western culture. And I believe the church will be greatly impacted. And we know that because look what happened with the

01:15:03

SBC and Resolution nine, nine, they did not know what it was. They, as Tom Buck and Tom Askell said, they trusted the committee because they didn't know what it was.

01:15:14

Now we're starting to see the picture, but the damage is being done. So it's important that we discuss it and understand it.

01:15:20

I don't believe every one of us have to gouge our eyes out with rusty nails and read this nonsense to do it.

01:15:26

But no, but that's why we have you see. Thank you. I appreciate that. Don't mind being thrown to the wolves.

01:15:34

But it's good to spend some time at least finding people who do know what it is and be willing to interact with it as it what it actually is, not because we make a really bad mistake,

01:15:47

Andrew. And I wish we would get this, understand this. We assert only our definition and we apply it to theirs and we get beat up and we can't figure out why.

01:15:58

And it's because we're not we're not playing. We're not reading the rule book. And if we don't at least understand and operating knowledge, we're going to get beat up every time we get into this conversation.

01:16:07

Yeah, because they're constantly they're constantly changing the definitions. It's a moving goalpost.

01:16:13

So you're dealing with many of the Christians are trying to argue. This is trying to argue a definition of racism that's 30, 40 years old.

01:16:21

Exactly. And that's not the definition. That's why they can't be racist, because it has nothing to do with color of skin anymore, has to do with economic class of a whole group of people, not you as an individual, but the whole group.

01:16:36

And so I think that this is something we could we could keep going for hours on.

01:16:44

Not that you guys that are listening want to hear this for hours, because I think you're probably already wanting to pull your eyeballs out.

01:16:51

But, you know, the Chris, we appreciate you coming on, folks. If you have if you don't listen to Voice of Reason radio, want to encourage you to go do that, go subscribe to that.

01:17:01

Listen to the back episodes where Chris goes into details on these sort of things. This is the sort of content you're going to get on Voice of Reason radio.

01:17:10

So you realize now that some good, high quality content. Go check them out. Chris, we appreciate you coming on.

01:17:17

Anything you want to plug, anything you want to say before you leave. Maybe you got a new book coming out.

01:17:23

I don't know. We'll start a rumor. No, no, no, no books. I would have to be a lot more dedicated and disciplined with my time.

01:17:32

I just want to thank you, number one, for having having me on. I greatly appreciate it, Andrew. I'm going to embarrass you.

01:17:39

I appreciate you. All that you've done for myself and Rich, for making people aware of the show and for bringing my wife and I out to the

01:17:47

Cruciform Conference, that was a blessing. Folks, that that was his doing. I got to finally meet your wife.

01:17:53

Come on. She's she's definitely the better half. She's absolutely the better half. But I want to say to everybody who does listen and does interact with what

01:18:04

Rich and I do, you guys are precious to us. OK, we're not we're not the biggest program out there. And I don't think that's God's design for us.

01:18:10

We're talking to a certain number of people. Praise God for that. The fact that people listen, we are so grateful for.

01:18:17

We don't have a program if people don't listen. We'd be just talking to ourselves, which we could probably do and have a lot of fun, but you guys make it enjoyable for us to do that.

01:18:25

And so thank you. And Andrew making it, allowing us to be part of Christian podcast community, that's a blessing.

01:18:32

I just want to think I ask people to consider checking out Slave to the King dot com. I'm trying to be more proactive about putting written content up on there.

01:18:42

Rich and I over the last year and a half have really tried to be consistent about putting content up there every week as far as the podcast goes.

01:18:51

You can always find every show we put up there. Occasionally we've been doing this for four and a half years. And some of you still go, you can have a podcast.

01:18:59

But we've got enough content now that if we can't make something and please understand, Rich is he's he's disabled, he's wheelchair bound.

01:19:08

So there are times when we're not able to because of his health reasons, work related issues or family issues sometimes take me away.

01:19:15

So or, you know, went to Chris from conference and, you know, didn't have all my recording equipment.

01:19:20

So or the fact that neither of you could figure out technology sometimes. Hey, I don't know what happened with you, but you blame

01:19:30

Skype gremlins and all kinds of things. Well, there's then there's you with your infiltration of my house by your own admission.

01:19:38

OK, we're going to have to find out which episode that was. But now that you bring that up, you got to tell the story of that one, because that was a hilarious episode and I didn't know what

01:19:48

I was getting myself into completely clueless until I heard the podcast. Yeah, it was absolutely hysterical.

01:19:55

It's one of those moments where I think it just shows that God has a sense of humor and God is completely. So there's no coincidences.

01:20:02

But Rich and I are recording a show and we're doing our typical harassment of Andrew. And I forget what it was that we were talking about.

01:20:10

But we were posting something online as we're dealing with issues that we're having the Internet connection issues or something, and I'm saying, well, it's and we're recording this.

01:20:20

And I'm saying, well, it's probably Andrew's fault. He's probably done something to my computer. He's probably sitting at home right now doing this as we're recording and saying this,

01:20:28

Andrew, there's something else that you had said in that first one. Also, you said he probably has a camera and he was watching us.

01:20:36

That's right. Probably has a camera watching us, knowing this. And he's probably doing this as we're saying this.

01:20:43

And he's Andrew at the same moment is looking at my stuff online from Twitter and is responding with the comment, well, that's because I have a camera in your house and a microphone and I'm watching what you're doing at the moment.

01:20:56

And we said and Rich and I lost it. We just went completely nuts. We're dying laughing. I'm reading this on the air.

01:21:02

Andrew has no clue, no clue what's going on. And the reason the reason

01:21:07

I have no clue is it's being recorded. You guys don't do it live. It's recorded and plays later.

01:21:12

So I don't know till like a couple of days later that my typing in this in was you already made a comment about it on the show.

01:21:21

It was the timing could not. I'm telling you, we did not plan this. Andrew had no clue.

01:21:27

It literally was. I think that's just one of those moments. God says, I'm going to let somebody have a little bit of fun with this because that nothing is coincidental.

01:21:34

So, yeah, it was so we like to blame Andrew. But, yes, we have we look, we are we are the bargain basement podcast.

01:21:43

OK, everything I have is because other people were gracious to send stuff to us. The most expensive thing

01:21:49

I have is my MacBook. I don't work a job that creates lots of revenue for me.

01:21:55

OK, so everything I have was donated and I got it dialed in and I don't mess with it because I'm afraid

01:22:02

I'm going to break something. I have a limited understanding of technology. I have enough to get by and not blow up the computer.

01:22:10

And that's it. I wish I could get my family to understand I'm not I .T. Please don't call me when I work and ask me to fix your phone.

01:22:16

I don't know how to do that. But but so we we are grateful because people still tune in.

01:22:23

We're grateful because they listen. And if you're if you think that you would like to have a podcast to listen to where it's just Christians talking together and working through issues together, that's what

01:22:36

Rich and I try to do. We really just try to make this a conversation. There are some really seriously smart brethren out there.

01:22:44

Rich and I are not those, but we are the average lay

01:22:49

Christian and we're trying, like the rest of you, to work through some of these issues and we hope that our conversation gives people.

01:22:58

An impetus to go to the word of God, because we always tell people, don't trust us because we said it, in fact, don't trust me because I wrote a review on this book just because I have you know,

01:23:12

I've done this. You still need to do some work for yourself. Don't take it as gospel because Chris said it.

01:23:19

Please don't do that. But go to the word of God. That's what we want people to do. We try to encourage people to do that.

01:23:26

And so if you think that that's a podcast that you could benefit from, we'd ask you to tune in and listen to it.

01:23:32

And whatever you do, though, never let any of these podcasts, Andrew's mine or anybody else's

01:23:38

Christian podcast ever supplement your participation in a local church. You got to be part of a local church.

01:23:43

You got to have elders who are feeding and praying over you and working hard. So that that is your primary source of instruction.

01:23:50

We just hope at best to be a tertiary component where you're you're just learning something or thinking about something that you're going, oh, yeah, that.

01:23:58

OK, yeah, I see where they're going with that. Or I'm not sure I agree, but let me look into that. That's what we're hoping we can do with this podcast.

01:24:05

So we're so grateful for. And Andrew, we really appreciate all that you do to make this podcast be known and get that information out there.

01:24:14

Well, thanks. And so, Bud, you have anything else you want to add before we close up? Chris, thank you very much.

01:24:19

Enjoyed this. Hope we can do it again. You know, absolutely. I'm thrilled to come on and have these kind of discussions.

01:24:26

Anytime, anytime you guys want to do this, just give me a holler. Well, we appreciate it, Chris. We appreciate all the work you do in the podcast.

01:24:33

And you know what, Bud? Yes. What? That's a wrap. Hey, what happened to the.

01:24:43

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01:26:03

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