What's the Problem with Secular Anti-Racism?
Jamaal Williams describes how God's Word has provided the church with a pathway to multiethnic community that's far better than anything the world has to offer
What is “antiracism”? By this, we don’t mean simply being against racism; everyone should be against racism, and there are some approaches classified under “antiracism” that are generally headed in the right direction.
However, “antiracism” has increasingly come to describe a particular approach to fighting against racism that reduces the complex origins and causes of inequities to prejudices shaped by racist policies and biases. This oversimplification can be glimpsed in Ibram X. Kendi’s description of an antiracist life in How to Be an Antiracist: “One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist.” This oversimplified perspective ignores the vast range of possibilities that stands between racism that attributes problems to racial groups and antiracism that sees every problem as a direct result of racist policies. Perhaps worse, it creates a false dichotomy that attributes racial prejudice to anyone who does not pursue one particular approach to eradicating racism. In the process, secular antiracism makes ethnicity and race central in a way that Scripture never does.
So why is it that this approach does far more harm than good in the church? And what alternatives can the church offer?
That’s one of many topics that Jamaal Williams and I address in the book In Church as It Is in Heaven—but, if you want a quick guide to this issue, you can find it in this video clip from Jamaal Williams: “In Church as It Is in Heaven: Session One: Call to Worship.”