The immoral assault on color-blindness

[This is a write-up in defence of my claim that this article is essentially racist.]

What is color-blindness? Well, what does it mean to say that justice is blind? It means that all men should be treated equally before the law, regardless of status, wealth, race, religion or any other factor. Color-blindness therefore is the theory that one should treat everyone equally regardless of the amount of melanin in their skin. As a theory that rejects racial segregation and racial discrimination, color-blindness is a theory about fairness. It is a theory about equal treatment, but it is not a theory about rendering everyone equal. Treating everyone equally has to do with fairness, while expecting everyone to be equal is Marxist. The former has to do with actions, the latter being. Under Marxism, any inequality of result of any kind is considered inequality and injustice. Thus, racial Marxism is the idea that all races or ethnicities must be equal, and that any inequality, even if there is no inequality of treatment, IS "injustice."

Racial Marxism is solidly entrenched in today's "social sciences," in the form of Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theorists decry inequality among the races, which is not necessarily a bad thing. However, part of Critical Race Theory is their insistence on "systemic racism," and the "proof" for "systemic racism" is found in inequality among the races. Note here however the Marxist slant, whereby any form of inequality is necessarily evil. But is there proof of actual acts of racism, i.e. the older (and truer) ideas of what constituted racism? Well, in America, besides pointing to the pathetically small minority of true white supremacists, and pouncing on the (truly deplorable) racist rhetoric found among the Alt-right and current president Donald Trump, which is a lot of bark but no bite, what proof do they have for actual racism (the real racism, not the Marxist redefinition of the term)?

Color-blindness is a theory of non-discrimination. It focuses on the ACT of treating people fairly, without having double standards towards others of other races. Color-blindness is NOT an exhaustive theory of how one should interact with anyone. The very idea that color-blindness MUST mean that one interacts with a person as a "generic human" is a caricature that no one who embraces color-blindness holds to. In fact, this caricature betrays a Marxist mindset, because in Marxism, the individual is reduced to the collective, and thus all theories must be reduced to speaking about people in collective terms.

It is at this point that we will see what is wrong with Edmonson's article. We note immediately the caricaturing and misrepresentation of Color-blindness, which should alert us to a possible SJW viewpoint. The Marxist slant is cemented when we start to read this sentence:

Race, class, and gender are the fault lines of sinful disparity and division that pass from the world right into the church.

The focus of the article then deals a lot with classes of people in the form of distinctions. But, as I have pointed out in another post, we deal with people as individuals, not races. We are not our race, but ethnicity constitute a part (not the whole) of us. The association of personal distinctions with sociological categories like race points us to a collective view of humanity and racial groups. After all, the only reason why race must be mentioned as "distinction" is because race is definitional of all persons of that ethnicity, or at least it should be, and this distinction trumps all distinctions within people of the same ethnicity (assuming of course the same gender and same social class, because... intersectionality!). You are, in essence, your race, AND gender, AND class. Any talk of distinction is focused only on your race, gender, and class. And since there is, in the contemporary social sciences, as many genders as one can conceive of, the art of perceiving distinctions has just gotten much much harder, but I digress.

If Edmonson were just to mention distinctions of race, gender and class, and the need for us to acknowledge them, then we can say that there is a strong Marxist slant but still since these distinctions are indeed present in people, we cannot say with certainty that it is necessarily Marxist. But Edmonson is unambiguously clear in his racial Marxism when he attacks Color-blindness. In his attack on color-blindness, he repeats the misrepresentation pushed by the Critical Race Theorists. Through the attack on Color-blindness, he makes his racial tribalistic view of society very clear. To the extent that his article promotes a Critical Race Theorist viewpoint on dealing with distinctions, to that extent it is racist, because Critical Race Theory is a racist theory.

How should we deal with distinctions? How do you deal with differences you have with your biological brother or sister? Or, how would you deal with differences you have with your friend of the same ethnicity? Likewise, so you ought to deal with distinctions with others, in getting to know them personally, and not as a racial entity. Ethnicity is just one of many things that constitute an individual. When one plays identity politics and tribalism, beware lest you get burned. For if you promote better treatment for your "race" on the basis of Marxist inequality, you stir up tribalism from other groups as well. The stage is then set for balkanization and ethnic strife, even possible total warfare of entire ethnicities against each other. So this error is not merely a theoretical one, but it has ghastly practical consequences, as we have seen in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. But even if we couldn't care less about society, is it biblical to treat people differently according to their ethnic group, since we need to "preserve" distinctions? Or rather, should we treat people according to who they are individually, of which their ethnicity is merely one facet of their persons? I would suggest that the Christian way is to NOT treat people differently just because they are of different ethnic group. And just for the record, racism in action IS treating people differently because of their ethnic distinction. The only difference it seems between Edmonson's view of distinction and a traditional racist's view of distinction is that Edmonson affirms distinctions (positive discrimination) while a traditional racist denigrates distinctions (negative discrimination). The problem however with this is that if someone is positively discriminated for, then the rest who are not of that tribe is by definition discriminated against.

Color-blindness IS the Christian ideal, for we are to treat everyone equally as human beings NOT as tribal groups. The assault on color-blindness by Edmonson is therefore unbiblical, and socially immoral, given what we know of how such theories when put into practice results in the sundering of societies at best, and genocide at worst. While this is most certainly not what Edmonson wants, or what he explicitly teaches, yet his article is dangerous precisely because the Critical Race Theory hidden in it could cause major damage to the practice of the faith, and to the social fabric of entire societies and countries. As such, while I do not believe Edmonson is a racist, his article is racist, in essence.