The antiracist movement has many of the hallmarks of a [Christian] cult, including staying close enough to the Bible to avoid immediate detection and hiding the fact that is has a new theology and a new glossary of terms that diverge ever-so-slightly from Christian orthodoxy. At least at first. In classic cult fashion, they borrow from the familiar and accepted, then infuse it with new meaning. This allows the cult to appeal to the faithful within the dominant, orthodox religions from which is draws its converts. (Voddie Baucham, fault lines, page 67)
We will discuss in more details the impacts of the Critical Tyrannies' hijacking of language in a later post. It took me a while to understand how subtle and effective their appropriation of language is. Definitions become fluid. The same word can have extremely divergent definitions in close proximity, too. This is on purpose.
In this post, I want to show how effective this is with a few terms commonly used by the Critical Race Theorists--the wokesters: racism/racist and white supremacy/supremacist. With both these terms, the true meanings have softened considerably compared to the classical definitions and common, uninitiated understanding of the words.
In Wokelish, racism generally refers to the disparate outcomes between races in arenas like income, life expectation, representation among management or executives, net worth, grade distribution, medical outcomes, etc, etc, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
White supremacy is the term used to describe the fact that whites are the typically the winners in the disparate outcomes noted above.
Not so bad, and it does represent reality...apparently.
This is where it gets tautological, you see. If you don't know what a tautology is, let me enlighten you:
A statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form.
"A tree is tall or it is not tall" would be a tautology. It can't be falsified. If the tree is short, it's a true statement. If the tree is tall...you get the drift.
The tautology of systemic racism relies on the uninitiated hearer not understanding what the wokester is really saying. Your typical Joe Shmoe or Jane Doe hears "systemic racism" and thinks "the people in power over the institution [church, school, justice system, etc.] think people of color (POC) are inferior." This sounds really, really bad--but today it also sounds preposterous. Who really thinks that these days?
So, you might ask the wokester, "How do you know this institution is racist?" The wokester reply will be: "Well, you see, POCs [have low representation in management, more people convicted of crimes, make less money, die at a higher rates of COVID, etc.]. So the evidence presented to prove racism is the disparate outcome. However, in wokester language, inequity of outcome is also the definition of racist or racism. The evidence is the definition. Hence, it can't be falsified.
But they don't tell you the word games they play. Instead, they let the emotional thrust of the classical meaning prick your heart and inflame your emotions, but then play slight of hand with the definitions. It's clever.
However, if you deny that the institution is racist in the woke meaning, the word quickly reverts back to the classical meaning (relating to the belief in the superiority or inferiority of a race or races) and is then applied to you as an individual. And then the efforts of cancelling begin.
Here's the good news. When you hit a tautology espoused by a religion or worldview, you've likely found a presupposition/fundamental assumption of the worldview. In other words, you've hit something that is accepted without question--something they take on faith. For wokesters, a key presupposition is this: disparate outcomes spring only from systemic racism. Robin DeAngelo admits this by saying: "The question is not if racism is at play, but how is it at play?"
This cannot be falsified. It can't be tested. It's truly tautological. But wokeism is also intensely postmodern, so who cares about falsifiability? Power defines truth. Power is synonymous with truth.
In contrast, Christianity has a fundamental assumption is that the Bible is God's revelation to mankind. However, the Bible also claims to be just that: God's very words. It's my assumption, and I take that on faith. It seems tautological, but it's not. It could be falsified, but in my view, it hasn't. It makes truth claims that could be disproven, and says that God does not lie. That would falsify it.
However, despite that, one still must accept the truthfulness of the claim on faith. It could be shown false, but never absolutely true by evidentiary means.
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