今日黑料
On today鈥檚 episode, we鈥檙e practicing perspective-taking on the topic of Critical Race Theory, and we鈥檙e getting some help from today鈥檚 guest Dr. Ed Uszynski (Ph.D.). Ed鈥檚 book, Untangling Critical Race Theory: What Christians Need To Know And Why It Matters, is an excellent resource on this subject, and it helps the church to frame conversations on race relations and critical race theory. Tim and Ed discuss key terms that are often misunderstood: critical theory, critical race theory and white privilege, and they look at these from the perspectives of conservatives and progressives to help foster cultural engagement and healthy disagreements.
Transcript
Tim Muehlhoff: Welcome to the Winsome Conviction Podcast. My name is Tim Muehlhoff. I'm a professor of communication at 今日黑料 in La Mirada, California, and I'm the co-director of the Winsome Conviction Project that seeks to open lines of communication rather than close them. One of the things I absolutely love about this program is not only do we have access to top scholars, but we also have access to friends who happen to be scholars. And today I want to introduce a friend. We have been friends for, my gosh, at least, at least 37, 38 years. We'll explore that when he officially comes on. But Dr. Ed Uszynski, got his PhD from Bowling Green University in American Culture Studies. He was on staff with CRU for 33 years. Him and his wife Amy, have been speaking at family-like marriage conferences for a long time, as well as giving direction to that ministry.
To be honest, Ed's not only a friend, he's one of the sharpest thinkers. Honestly, when it comes to issues and particularly issues of race. Whenever I want to check my thinking, I always give Ed a phone call to just bounce my ideas. I can't think of a better, more insightful person when it comes to the tensions of race that I can think of now, listeners that I have said before. I think the issue of race is one of the most complex, divisive issues that our country faces, even above, I would say politics, the race discussion is one that we need to have. So it is with great pleasure that I bring on Dr. Ed. Uszynski.
Ed, welcome.
Ed Uszynski: Good to be here, Tim. Thank you for that introduction. I'll be replaying that for myself through the months and years to come.
Tim Muehlhoff: So do you think it's 30? Because you've known us for sure, as long as Noreen and I've been married, that's 35. And did we know each other at least five years before I got married?
Ed Uszynski: I think we met in the late '80s.
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh my word.
Ed Uszynski: I became a Christ follower in 1988 and we were at retreats together probably in '89, '90, right around there is when we met.
Tim Muehlhoff: Okay. So real quick, you only get to do one PhD in your life. I mean, that's pretty much it. Why American Culture Studies?
Ed Uszynski: Well, what's funny, no one's asked me that in a long time, and I don't even know if you fully remember this, maybe you do and that's the setup for it. But you and I were at a common event back in the early 2000s, and you had been prodding me to continue finishing my education just because of the nature of the conversations that we had had for years. And as you asked me what it was that I was reading lately, and as I answered that, you said, you're a culture studies theorist, you should look into culture studies as a PhD. And I'd never really heard of that discipline at that point. And literally that day I started to explore the whole world of culture studies and American culture studies to be specific and found out that Bowling Green State University had one of the better programs in the country, it was just a couple hours up the road from me. And so I applied there and I've been so glad that I did.
It really reshaped or just kind of helped take me into a new world of understanding, which is really why I wanted to pursue a PhD as much as anything. I didn't anticipate that I was going to sign up for a life of academic scholarship. I've been in vocational ministry since 1992 and I really wanted to continue in that path. But I wanted to do a secular PhD or a PhD at a secular school, a non-Christian school. And I really wanted to understand why people think the way they do about life in America. And so this American Culture Studies program was just ideal for that.
I was part of a cohort of 12 or 13 people that were handpicked and just from wildly diverse backgrounds and very intentionally I was the lone white, evangelical, heterosexual, I mean, I checked off all the boxes of things that this program tended to stand against. But I appreciate Don McQuarie, who was the chair of the program who very purposely brought in people with very different perspectives for the purpose of engaging one another around the hot topics happening in American society. So it was super helpful to me.
Tim Muehlhoff: Okay. One thing, we're going to have you back without a doubt because I want to explore how you made the cohort work. Being the outsider, being the most conservative person in the room, I felt like that was me at UNC Chapel Hill. I was always the most conservative, socially, politically, religiously. So will you come back and let's just talk about the interpersonal workings of how... That group could have been a nightmare.
Ed Uszynski: For sure.
Tim Muehlhoff: And I would love to hear the inner workings, the challenges, because you're probably describing a lot of scenarios that people find themselves in a neighborhood, in a work situation, or even in a church that is divided over a specific social or political issue. So listen, I am not saying this because we've been friends apparently forever. I had totally forgotten that conversation about cultural studies way back in the day. But you have written one of the best books that I've read in the last easily 25 years, and I'm bold enough to say maybe the best book on race and critical race theory I've ever read. It's called Untangling Critical Race Theory: What Christians Need to Know and Why It Matters by InterVarsity Press. That's why we want to have you on this segment is I want to break down this book and talk about perspective taking as it related to your writing this book. Okay. Ready to go?
Ed Uszynski: Ready. Thank you.
Tim Muehlhoff: All right, here's first question... And I mean that Ed, you know that I absolutely mean that.
Ed Uszynski: You've been very generous with your affirmation and praise and I appreciate it.
Tim Muehlhoff: Okay, so in your introduction, you start with the David French quote, who's actually been on this podcast, this is what he says, "In my entire adult life, I don't think America's dialogue about race has been as toxic as it is today." First, do you agree with that? And if you do, what has fueled the toxicity that French is observing?
Ed Uszynski: I do agree with it, that's why I started the book with the quote, because when I read that, I just inside myself thought I feel the exact same way and really for two reasons. And first, I'd say my first reason is because race is a political topic. And in the 57 years that I've been alive, I was born in 1968, I don't think America's political climate has ever been as toxic as it is today. And so in the public square, it's just more difficult than ever to have civil discourse around any topics, let alone contentious ones. Even in the church, I don't know that we fare much better. I think we've gotten progressively worse at being able to do this within church circles where we're just mirroring what's going on in the larger culture. And so I've been saying for years, and I'm not alone in saying this, that today we are probably shaped far more by our partisan politics than our biblical prophets. And that's always going to be a problem for civility. So that's the biggest reason why I think that's true.
And then second, the current racial climate is really a problem of progress versus retrenchment. What I mean by that is when you study through the race lens, when you study society through the race lens across centuries, you'll see that anytime that there's any kind of racial progress and healing that's taking place, anytime there's genuine moves towards inclusivity and imago Dei equality, there's always going to be counter moves to not only resist the progress, but to try to send it backwards. That's just always been true, and I think in our lifetime, David French's lifetime, Tim, yours and my lifetime, there's been lots of racial progress. There's been lots of moves forward when it comes to equality, and so it totally makes sense that there would be equal and sometimes surpassing efforts to resist that and send it backwards.
So those are my two big reasons why. At the very bottom of all of it, Tim, race has always been a demonic stronghold. Throughout history it's always been a demonic stronghold. And so I think it's all relative as to how bad it gets at different times across somebody's life, but it shouldn't surprise us that it's always going to be a place where there's great spiritual warfare that's taking place. So I'll just stop there with that.
Tim Muehlhoff: But let's pick up on that real quick because there's a bunch of issues that we wrestle with as a church, a community, as a nation. But what leads you to that observation very quickly that in your estimation race, that a demonic stronghold has always accompanied this as we wrestle with it in the United States?
Ed Uszynski: Well, it has been an easy way for the enemy of God, Satan, I don't know if we can talk in this language on this podcast. I assume that we can.
Tim Muehlhoff: Of course. Absolutely.
Ed Uszynski: There's a spiritual reality which you've written about now that I think about it, there's a spiritual reality that attacks the good things that God has created. So it makes sense that we'd find lots of demonic activity in marriage, especially Christian marriages that are trying to put on display the unity of God and the love of God. You would expect to find demonic activity there as you've written about, you would expect to find demonic activity in those places where people are trying to be unified, where very different kinds of people are celebrating their differences. And again, I'll say this in the name of God because I'll just keep this even in the church where people are actually trying to come together and be unified. As Jesus prayed in John Chapter 17 that that would be part of the Holy Spirit's job in the world was to help people get beyond their differences and be unified with one another.
Satan is going to do everything he can to maximize our differences. That's a simplistic way of saying it, but he does. I don't know exactly how that works or what it always looks like. It just makes sense that throughout human history you would find people destroying one another on the basis of their differences. Even as we sit here today, Tim, and there's bombs being dropped in different parts of the world and missiles being fired, it's on the basis of people's different viewpoints and different ways of being in the world, and it's a playground for Satan. So I don't think that's an overstatement or being overly dramatic to say that race has always been a locus, a site where Satan has really taken great ground in his war with God. Again, whatever that means at this point in history. I'm not surprised to see that that's always going to be a contentious sight.
Tim Muehlhoff: Wow. Well said. Okay, so if this was just a book about race, I think it probably would raise some eyebrows that a white male educated PhD is jumping into the race conversation, but you went into critical race theory, which is the rhetorical third rail of today's modern discourse that took a lot of rock courage. So before you define what it is very quickly, why go this route? Why not just a general book on race?
Ed Uszynski: Well, that was the hot topic of the last decade. I mean, it was showing up in our ministry circles, certainly in my crew circles, it was showing up, but it was obviously part of the national discussion. And I just thought there was a lot of confusion about it. And it just so happened that my PhD program, we did some deep dives. It was very founded in critical theory in general, my PhD readings were, and there was a subset where we spent quite a bit of time in critical race theory reading.
So that was in 2008, 2009, 2010, a decade or so before critical race theory started showing up on Fox News and started showing up in political headlines. But I had done more of a deep dive into critical race theory than any of my peers had in ministry. And honestly, I thought it was just maybe a waste, that it was never going to show up actually in any kind of meaningful way. And then all of a sudden people started arguing about critical race theory in public. And I just thought maybe I could bring some clarity to what was really going on and to try to bring understanding. That's just the word I kept coming back to is I wanted to bring understanding, at least from my peers in ministry to slow down long enough to really understand what was behind these theories. What are they actually saying? What are they actually requesting that we talk about and think about in the church? Which is really where I was primarily concerned.
Tim Muehlhoff: And the book does a great job, Ed, of doing that. You really do a nice deep dive, but accessible. So let's violate every principle of academia. Would you, for the sake of our listeners, very quickly, first tell us what critical theory is and then what is critical race theory?
Ed Uszynski: I can't tell you how much I dread getting asked this question, even though I've answered it a bunch of times and why, you just kind of referenced it, [inaudible 00:15:13] summarize walls of argumentation and nuance and efforts to try to get to the bottom of what really is a pretty significant body of work.
What is critical theory? Critical theory was an extension of Marxist thought. I'll just say this, I wasn't really expecting you to take me all the way back there, and I haven't answered this in a little while. All of the people that were aligning with Marx in the early 1900s looked around and saw that conditions were ripe for the revolution that he had predicted to take place. And when it didn't take place, theoreticians started to ask, why is that? Why is it that when capitalism should be imploding on itself right now instead we find that there are dictators that are rising up and there are forms of fascism that are overtaking the world when we should be having revolution that's setting people free, there's actually a greater form of oppression that's happening?
And so these theoreticians in the early 1900s started to ask, why is that? What is it about the way culture has organized itself around capitalism to protect it? What is it around the way culture has organized itself around conservatism that will maintain the status quo indefinitely. Unless there's just some massive intervention that takes place, people are going to go right along with their own forms of oppression under the umbrella of capitalism and conservatism. And again, there's so much that I know that I'm putting on the table with that.
But then critical race theory came along in the 1970s, and there were Black and other just non-white theoreticians and people in the academic world who recognized that there was a particular narrative about race that was circulating. And really what they wanted to do was confront that narrative and what it was was simply that we were post-racial. That race was really no longer a meaningful lens through which to analyze society. This is back in the '70s. So after all the civil rights stuff got passed in the '60s, everybody, including lots of non-white people too, just kind of wanted to clean their hands of it and say, we should be in a better place now. Everything that's gone on for the last couple of centuries is in our past, it's in the rear view window. We passed civil rights laws. We're post-racial, let's stop talking about it basically. And again, I'm oversimplifying, but that was the vibe.
And so they offered these academics that got together in the legal world, so that's really where it started. They said, we want to offer this set of ideas that are going to offer a counter narrative for the role that we think race actually plays in establishing and maintaining inequality. And they started to get together around conferences and started to write papers, and they realized that usually what they were talking about is how systems and processes had just become so normal that we don't even think twice about their racial effect.
So while one group of people is saying, we don't see overt racism anymore, in fact, at least not the way we used to, and we've actually made it illegal in this country to operate that way. These theoreticians said, well, no, now it's just gone underground and we need to look at how it's embedded and all the different social strata that we have in front of us. And they set out to start picking it apart and analyzing how racial power actually continues to work and continues to produce inequality and continues to hold sway over people's minds and imaginations in ways that they just don't think about. So that started in the 1970s, which was how long ago now? 50 years ago now.
Tim Muehlhoff: No, Ed, I think that's incredibly useful. I mean, these words get thrown around today all the time, mostly CRT, but then if somebody even says critical theory. The rank and file are not aware of the depth, nuance of these concepts. We're a big fan here, Winsome Conviction, perspective taking, which is can I step out of my perspective long enough to step into another person's perspective? I don't leave behind my convictions, my beliefs, but I set them aside enough that I can step into your world at least to see the world through your perspective. So we're huge fans of this. What I love about your book is this really was played out as you were jumping between two different groups and how they viewed CRT. So could you, broadly speaking, what are the two major ways to view CRT and then what most defines these groups?
Ed Uszynski: Yeah, Tim and I was thinking about what labels do we want to put on these two groups. And I think the most convenient way for me to think about it, and this has maintained itself through the years, is that one side comes from a more, capital C, conservative position, and the other side comes from a more progressive, capital P, position. Again, just when we think in terms of political positions. You said, I kept going back and forth and let me put some more flesh on that.
So at the time that I was doing my PhD, and again, this was from 2008 to 2013, I was spending, well, my main job was to work as a campus minister with athletes and CRU like you talked about, but I also had this side gig going where I was a teaching elder at a very conservative Baptist church that was local to the community here. So that's where I spent my days and my vocational hours.
Then I was driving up to Bowling Green, whereas we already established, I was literally the only person, I wasn't the only person that came from a more conservative leaning background, I was certainly the only person that came from a theologically conservative background. There were two or three other people that would've considered themselves politically conservative in the way that they responded to things. But the majority of the class and certainly almost the entirety of our readings were very progressive in their perspective, were grounded in Marxist thoughts and critical theorizing thoughts. I don't know that we ever came outside of that. And again, there were all kinds of disagreements even that took place within those worlds, but we were always on the progressive side of things when we read.
So I was quite literally driving back and forth between these two worlds and had to keep flipping. And this is what I was actually thinking about earlier, that I had to decide what my role was going to be in these different spaces. And I don't mind debate with people. I don't even mind getting close to argumentation, although as I've gotten older I find that that just never ends up resolving itself very well. And so rather than trying to fix people or fight with people in these different worlds, I just put a different set of lenses on where I was genuinely going to try to understand how they came to the place, where they believe, what they believe.
And that just brought about, instead of making statements, I was asking a lot more questions. Instead of getting defensive when I felt like something was said that I didn't believe was true, I asked them to explain it more or give me an example or tell me what the pictures were in their minds that caused them, what was the story that they had that was infusing this belief? And honestly, Tim, that served me amazingly well because I didn't understand. It wasn't just this strategy where I've already got all the answers, and so I'm just going to do this to kind of placate you or almost patronize you so I can get you to a place where I can fix your thinking. I learned. I realized I didn't always have really good answers for why I think the way I think, or they exposed through their own journeys and their own narrative stories that I had not imagined that I had never thought of it from this perspective. And it was actually really super helpful to me.
As a survival tactic, but then I realized, no, this actually would be really wise as a minister, it would be really wise as a husband, as a father, as a friend, to live more in this space where I'm going to equip myself to actually, instead of trying to be understood, I'm going to actually try to understand, that's certainly not original to me, and pour more energy into that.
And so that just really helped, Tim. Again, that was a lot of words to get to that place.
Tim Muehlhoff: No, it's so good.
Ed Uszynski: I shut my mouth, I stopped arguing and really tried to understand why people think the way they think, and it was super helpful.
Tim Muehlhoff: So exact same thing with me, ED, at UNC Chapel Hill with feminist theory. If you would've said to me heading in, what do you know about feminist theory? I would've said, well, I know it's wrong because my pastor said that repeatedly from the pulpit. But I don't know anything. I honestly don't know anything. And our good friend Tim Downs that we both really respect, he did a great thing in my masters. He said, "I absolve you from converting the entire department in one semester. Go be a student."
Ed Uszynski: Good.
Tim Muehlhoff: And I thought that was really wise to be there to seek to understand. So would you say a prerequisite of perspective taking is a certain amount of intellectual humility?
Ed Uszynski: Absolutely. I think it's almost impossible to truly understand someone else's perspective if I'm not willing to step away from my own, which necessitates humility. It even necessitates realizing that I didn't just come to my conclusions objectively on my own in some pure kind of way. But I've been shaped by certain forces, certain experiences, certain exposures that have led me to some of the conclusions that I've come to.
Tim Muehlhoff: You actually write a whole chapter on that. Chapter seven, you ask a great question why CRT means different things to different people, and your answer to that is the groups that we belong to. So very quickly, how do groups shape and give us a certain disposition that might be really harmful to intellectual humility?
Ed Uszynski: This disappointed me that I did this really a whole other chapter, Tim, where I talked about the work of Pierre Bourdieu, a French theoretician who talked about a person's habitus, their habitus, and their habitus is all of the inputs, most of which have been forgotten, that cause you to see the world the way you see it. So it's things that you heard when you were little. It's things that you saw. It's your first encounters with a person who is different from you, for example. It's showing up in elementary school, I hadn't thought about this in years, and reciting every day the Pledge of Allegiance and singing My Country, 'Tis of Thee, which is what I did throughout elementary school to start my day. That was adding layers to how I thought about justice, how I thought about other people, what I assumed was true in the world.
And when you really stopped to think about it... well, we have a mutual friend, Tim, James White, who talks about the subterranean cultural prejudices that get formed inside of us, which is like, that's like Bourdieu's habitus. These things that get way down deep in our soul. We don't even realize that they're there. We don't realize that they affect the way we see, the way we talk, the way we walk, and we tend to gravitate towards others who are seeing, talking and walking the same way. We tend to hang out with people who are very, very similar in the way they were shaped, the way they were formed, the way they think about the world.
And again, it's so ironic that in a time where you've actually got access to the possibility of being exposed to an almost infinite number of different realities, we tend to hunker down and stay with those who are most like us in the most formative years of our life. And when we're in our 20s and our 30s, we gravitate towards those people and they wind up setting the parameters of our ability to see outside. They end up setting the boundaries for who we're going to consider other and who the they are, who are outside of these lines that have been manufactured by our people.
And it just really gets in the way, it becomes a hindrance. Unless we become very consciously aware of how we got to this place, we're probably not going to give much effort at all to trying to understand how the others got to their place. And especially in this political climate, Tim, and again, I'm going to keep going with this. I mean, we've been handed really for at least the last decade, this intense binary, it's either this or that. You're on this side or that side, always. There's two options. There's no middle. There's no nuance. You're either over here with us and we're right or you're out there with all the other thems and they're wrong. And that doesn't work very well for bringing about civil discourse, does it?
Tim Muehlhoff: Well, that's so good, Ed.
Ed Uszynski: It just doesn't.
Tim Muehlhoff: To me, this is the value of critical theory. Critical theory is trying to get at that subterranean foundation that has been handed to me and normalized.
Ed Uszynski: Yes.
Tim Muehlhoff: And so to throw out a big word for a podcast would be hegemony. So the way I learned it is hegemony, that's the stuff you don't reflect on, it just is the way it is.
Ed Uszynski: Good.
Tim Muehlhoff: I don't even think to think about it, you eat dessert last, I would never even think of a different way. A green is go. Red is stop.
Ed Uszynski: Yes.
Tim Muehlhoff: That's just the world I've been handed. The minute I start to question, because one time Noreen went away, Ed, left me alone for three days with the three Muehlhoff boys. Now she made meals. So we were about to have the first meal on a Friday, and I had an epiphany, a life-changing epiphany. One of my kids said to me, dad, why can't we eat the brownies first? And I had this liberating moment, Ed, we can. We can eat the brownie first.
Ed Uszynski: We can. Yes.
Tim Muehlhoff: So that became ideology, which can be resisted. I don't even think to resist hegemony, but once hegemony becomes ideology then I realized, boy, the world has been constructed in a certain kind of way now I can resist what Stuart Hall calls the theater of oppression, I can now step in and now challenge these kinds of things. So to me, a critical theory is a benefit to know the cards that I have been given, which ones am I going to keep and which ones need to be challenged. That's why to me, critical theory is such an important tool in anybody's toolbox.
Ed Uszynski: So good, Tim, and I appreciate that. But there are always consequences though to realizing that you can eat dessert first. There were consequences when Noreen got home, I'm sure if she found out about that. There would be consequences-
Tim Muehlhoff: She didn't. I'm literally outing myself in this podcast. Go ahead.
Ed Uszynski: You hid that from her-
Tim Muehlhoff: For years. Yes, years.
Ed Uszynski: You'll need some form of marital counseling once she finds out, because people don't do well with somebody that starts to suggest you can do this really differently. And again, that's kind of the nature of conservatism is that we're going to pull back, and I mean that positively, we want to pull back to what's become normal for us and what stasis looks like. And as long as that's working for us, why would we mess with it? One, of course, it's always the people for whom it's not working for who are usually the ones that become what we end up labeling them as radicals, activists, the people that are trying to push back to say, this is something we manufactured, we made this rule up that you've got to eat dessert last, and it's not working for us. Can we change this? I mean, that's the nature of almost everything that's going on in politics today.
Tim Muehlhoff: What makes critical race theory so difficult... And again, I've said this before, dealing with issues of race, when the Winsome Conviction Project, when we're brought into a church, a Christian organization, is these concepts get brought up these words and they immediately scatter everybody. It's like you're taking a rhetorical match and you're throwing it on gasoline.
So I want you to quickly comment on two different concepts that we have found are the most divisive, but I want you to give us both perspectives, the capital C conservative perspective of how they would interpret that word, and then give us the capital P progressive, how they would interpret the words. Ready?
Ed Uszynski: Okay, I'll try. Yep.
Tim Muehlhoff: Okay. Here we go. White privilege. Give me the C version, capital C, capital P, version of that term white privilege.
Ed Uszynski: The capital C conservative view of that would be assuming that there are unearned benefits that are being given to certain people just on the basis of the color of their skin, which is ridiculous because there's never been a point in time where people have had more choice, more freedom to make choices, more freedom to take responsibility for their own lives, and so to suggest that one group is being advantaged over another group, not only victimizes and enables a group to get away with blaming other people for their disadvantage, but it mocks those of us who are making good choices, who are going the extra mile in the classroom, who are doing what we need to do to get ahead. And so it's just a ridiculous notion to suggest that one group of people is being favored over another group systematically or that there's some grand conspiracy happening. How is that?
Tim Muehlhoff: Perfect. Capital [inaudible 00:35:28] to capital P-
Ed Uszynski: Are all our conservative listeners...
Tim Muehlhoff: Oh, go ahead. Go ahead.
Ed Uszynski: Well, I don't know if that'll satisfy all the conservative listeners, but it's some version of that that I've listened to and experienced and at times felt inside myself across decades, if I can be honest. I know that feeling. I know that way of thinking about the world.
Now you said capital P, or let's go on the other side?
Tim Muehlhoff: Yeah. Yeah.
Ed Uszynski: Well, the world has always been broken up by haves and have nots, and one of the strategies of the haves is always to gas or make it seem like the have nots are crazy for pushing back on the fact that they don't have. So let's just establish that right out of the gate. That's been especially true when it comes to race in a culture whose history was grounded and founded in racism and very did purposely say that white is good and Black is bad, and in fact did that across centuries. It's absolutely ridiculous to think that there's not an ongoing residual effect, where, as a white person I don't have to get up and think about race at all. And if I'm a non-white person, it's constantly somewhere on my grid that I'm aware of the fact that I'm not white even in a time that's as progressive as this one has become, I'm always aware that I'm not white, and I need to be careful for what that means in different situations with different groups of people.
It's like one podcast that was listening to with a lawyer in Cleveland who had been serving in Cleveland City city hall for decades, and he said, it never hurts to be white in a courtroom and it never helps to be Black. And that's just a great way to capture the idea of white privilege from a progressive angle.
Tim Muehlhoff: Here's what I love about what you just did, and then we're going to move on to the second concept. You didn't just give us content, you gave us emotion. What a great reminder that perspective taking is not just this cognitive function that I can create this bullet list of what you believe and it accurately represents what you believe, I'm not minimizing that that's really important. But you gave us emotion attached to it. I think that's such a great reminder with perspective.
Ed Uszynski: Well, and there's always stories, Tim. There's always stories behind it. We've got pictures in our minds. We've got experiences that back up why we feel what we feel. And in the social sciences, and I know we need to keep going, but you can always find examples of whatever it is that you're looking for, and I don't say that in a cynical way. We can always find people who have allowed themselves to be enabled by the idea of certain people have privileges and certain others don't, who really can use that as an excuse to become lazy or to just always blame other people. I know people like that, not about race, but there are people that are wired just to always look for a way to make it always be at somebody else's fault. I can find examples of that.
But I can also find examples of people who have story after story of how the fact of the color of their skin, the accidental, though God ordained, fact of the color of their skin brought meaning into a situation that helped affect the outcome or at least influence the outcome and they had to be aware of that. Got all kinds of stories of that.
Tim Muehlhoff: Well, that's great. Okay, second one, second one, systemic racism.
Ed Uszynski: Well, and these are so similar [inaudible 00:39:18]-
Tim Muehlhoff: Ed, my experience, if white privilege doesn't do it, then systemic racism is what people just shake their head and say, okay, that is just blatantly ridiculous. Systemic racism.
Ed Uszynski: Yeah. I'll be conservative. There's nothing even really to talk about. There's no grand systemic conspiracy, at least not one that I've been told about. It all comes down to individual choices that either reflect responsible living or they don't. It's not to say that there's not sin in the structures somewhere that may come out in different ways at different times, even with some racial implication, I'll grant that, but you can't talk about there being something systemic where it's just woven all the way through and it's always a factor in every situation. That's just a ridiculous notion. There's always a multiplicity of reasons why outcomes come out the way they do. And to make race the primary or only one is just a non starter for me.
Tim Muehlhoff: Okay, give me a capital P.
Ed Uszynski: There's always patterns, policies and procedures that continue to maintain racial division inequality and advantage. And just think about those three P words, patterns, policies, procedures, things that have become normal that you don't think twice about, that were set in motion oftentimes 50 years ago or longer in some of these institutions. When it comes to the way the banking industry works, the way loans are given out, what happens in our schools, what happens in the criminal justice system, the way jobs are given to people, the way hiring happens, the way people get advanced into leadership or not.
There's patterns, policies and procedures that are hardwired into the system that have a racial edge to them that continue to work in the favor of those who are fairer skinned and work against those who are darker skinned or come from backgrounds where they have been affected by the fact of redlining. They've been affected by the fact of not having the same educational access. They've been affected in early adulthood by who they were given access to, money they were being given access to, whether there was inheritance money that was able to be passed down as a result of things that happened back in the 1950s that were set in motion.
Then there's always a systemic thread that's racial in nature that if we look hard enough and sometimes don't have to look very hard at all, it's sitting right there in front of us. Why can't we talk about it?
Tim Muehlhoff: Hey, let's wrap it up this way, Ed, you make a really interesting comment in your book about what we don't need. Let me quote from your book, "Our response to these disagreements can't be more hysteria. We don't need more simplistic soundbites." I think you just did a great job of not giving a soundbite answer to white privilege or a systemic racism. So if that's what we don't need, give me your quick take on what do we need in today's discussion of CRT or issues of race?
Ed Uszynski: Well, I've already said it, Tim. I think we need to ask more questions. We need to stop knee-jerk reacting to triggering words, triggering phrases. Actually, it might help to ask ourselves, why is that triggering me? Really, the self-reflective move I think would be very mature and helpful for all of us to slow down long enough to ask why what's happening inside of me is happening.
But then two, it just never will get old to not assume that when somebody starts to talk in a certain way or starts to use certain language that I necessarily mean the same thing, or I know what they mean by their uses of the terms or the ideas. And so I always want to ask, tell me more about that. What do you think that those words mean? Or give me an example that's going through your mind. That's been so useful to me, Tim, through the years, especially with people that I don't agree with. Tell me the story that has brought you to this point, and people always have one. People always have an example. They usually have, and I shouldn't say they always do, some people really don't realize at all how they got to this point. But most of the time when I'm having conversations with people, they can give me an example that causes them to think the way that they do. And it's just helpful because then we can talk about that example or we can talk about what their feelings were, why it was that it caused them to feel a certain way.
It's usually going to take us back into their home somewhere, their upbringing, somewhere their extended family has shaped it. There's been some very negative thing that's happened that's marked them and set them off in a certain direction for why they think the way they think about this person or this group of people or this idea. As I said at the very beginning, I just need to do a better job of understanding. That that doesn't mean then that I can't ever push into it or raise questions about it or challenge somebody to consider thinking differently, but way before I do that, I need to do the work of asking a lot of questions to understand how they got there.
Tim Muehlhoff: Perfect.
Ed Uszynski: It always works.
Tim Muehlhoff: No, Ed, thank you so much for taking time to wade into this difficult and complex issue that really does have different perspectives and evokes different emotions. Let me just recommend the book again. It's called Untangling Critical Race Theory: What Christians Need to Know and Why It Matters, InterVarsity Press. Please take a look at it. It is both academic, by that I mean it goes deep. But Ed's a gifted writer. I'm sure even just listening to him now on this podcast, you pick up that he's really putting this into language and situations that we can really relate to. So I hardly recommend that you check out the book.
I also recommend that you check out our website, WinsomeConviction.com You can go there, you can listen to past episodes. Ed is not a new guest, he's been on our podcast before. You can also sign up for our quarterly newsletter. A lot of things are happening with the Winsome Condition Project. Listen, we do not take you for granted. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk soon.
