How will history come to understand 2020? How will it ultimately interpret this movement called, "Black Lives Matter? Is this movement a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement of the early and middle 1960s, or is its true foundation the student protests that happened later in that decade? Moreover, what is its relationship, if any, to the "Occupy Wall Street" movement?
In looking at these questions, I am not concerned primarily with what people think they are doing when participating in Black Lives Matter protests, nor with what they are intending when looting, rioting, or committing acts of violence. Most of the people actually engaged in Black Lives Matter protests seemingly believe that systemic racism pervades many large urban police departments, even if 20-30% of these police forces are themselves black. Some in Black Lives Matter have experienced actions that can easily be interpreted as racist, and these experiences then have surely formed the subsequent hermeneutical lens by which entire communities interpret subsequent police activity.
When this happens, statistics about the actual number of unarmed people shot by police matter very little. The narrative has been birthed and the power of the narrative to explain and predict subsequent events is clearly manifest. But does the belief that racism exists and a distaste for such racism really explain why people are out in the streets in protest all over the world?
I don't think so. I am old enough to remember the Civil Rights marches on television, and I am old enough to recall that there were actually people in the sixties who were intellectually against the Civil Rights movement. A fortiori, one needed to march in those days in order to raise the awareness of others. Some people believed, after all, that only white people should enjoy the privileges that society could offer.
The strange thing about the protests today is that virtually nobody is now consciously a racist who believes that people of color are somehow inferior and should not enjoy all of the benefits of our society and culture. In other words, if the marches are actually about basic equality between the races and the notion that police departments should not murder black people -- or people of any color -- then there really is nobody to have to convince by marching. So what is the point? What are we supposed to learn from those marching and demonstrating?
Clearly, since we are not needing to learn how not to be explicitly or consciously racist, then the marches really are teaching us something else: how not to be unconsciously or nonintentionally racist. People march so people around the world can reflect upon how it is that there are groups of people, sometimes races, who do, in fact, exploit other people systematically and perhaps nonintentionally. They do not exploit by being individual agents that have particular beliefs and desires that explain their behavior. Instead they exploit by being part of an entire social order that eventuates in the exclusion and marginalization of people other than those in power.
If this is true, then white privilege is really nothing one can confess, nor is it something from which one can repent. It is itself an entire structure of aims, behaviors and interpretations. One is tempted perhaps to say that is is a form of life, an overarching matrix of meanings and actions. It is, in fact, a world that one occupies and upon which one projects one's own possibilities of being. Such a world of meaning and action is not something that can be easily adjusted. When a controlling understanding of race relationships is deeply ingrained in our culture and traditions, one cannot simply excise this understanding while leaving in place the world from which the understanding emerged and upon which their concomitant actions and meanings make sense.
All this is to say that if we are to understand what is happening in our world today, we need to know something of the theoretical grounding that supports movements like Black Lives Matter. An honest examination of this grounding removes us from the drama on the streets and deposits us in seats in the German academic lecture hall. In order to understand what is going on today, we must learn something about critical theory as it developed within, and subsequently morphed outside the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany.
In subsequent posts I will examine some of the crucial insights of the Frankfurt School and also "third generation" critical theory with an eye towards how its basic presuppositions and assumptions inform our contemporary situation with regard to the worldwide protests. I will try not to distort the views of these thinkers through simplification and generalization.
Continental thought in the last 100 years is extremely complicated. We cannot simply call everything "postmodern," and say that "postmodernity teaches X." Some continental thinkers in recent decades are postmodern, it is true. But individual thinkers disagree with one another on all types of issues. What is important is that we achieve clarity, that we are sober in our judgments and that we don't try to find the bogeyman under every tree. Clearly, in examining facets of continental thinking over the past eight or nine decades, the devil is in the details.
Critical theory challenges the assumption of modern democratic capitalistic societies that people are in general happy or fulfilled in their lives. It unmasks the myriad sufferings of humanity and offers a general remedy for such sufferings. Critical theorists in general believe that Marxist theory, if properly adjusted and purged of its original materialistic determinism, can provide a superior alternative to capitalism if one is properly to advance human flourishing. Such theory aims at transformation, an overturning of the old order of things in order to attenuate social marginalization and exclusion.
Critical theory may have profound theological implications. After all, how is sin possible on the assumptions of critical theory? In what does salvation consist? What does 'justification' mean? Will contemporary interpreters of critical theory find room for any theology at all?
In subsequent posts, I shall try to introduce the basics of critical theory fairly, connecting it to our current situation. I shall attempt to be fair, knowing that many would claim that my own background, education and experience would make my fairness in regard to it very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Since I am a theologian, I will be making theological comments along the way as well. This may be even more offensive to some readers.
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