Sure, I could have included more positive evaluations of some of his claims. I think it’s good that he’s concerned about whether people who care about social justice can remain faithful Christians—I gesture in that direction at the end, but it seems I ought to have said it more strongly. It’s also true that there is room for critique of all kinds of secular ideologies as Christians. I don’t have a problem with criticizing CRT. My doctoral advisor works primarily with critical race theory, and she’s great, but we have theoretical disagreements. I think those two are the major things I find to be good in Shenvi’s writing.
The people I am thinking of who wish to justify oppression are whole communities of people who I’ve encountered in my own Christian circles who talk about how the confederacy should have won and Robert E. Lee was such a great man and then turn around and post Neil Shenvi articles. Any possible suffering endured by people of color—their being incarcerated and subsequently denied things like the right to vote, ability to be employed, or eligibility for all sorts of benefits—is ultimately the fault of the people suffering. The overwhelming poverty in the US (especially compared to nations with similar GDP) is blamed on personal choices, not on a system that gives you lots of chances if you’re well off and essentially none when you’re not. I don’t think you have to espouse CRT to think that racial and economic oppression exist in alarming degrees—that’s largely an empirical question. I think hard-line denial of oppression’s existence (again, in the bog-standard dictionary definition, not any specialized definitions) in the face of substantial empirical evidence coupled with an insistence that cultural inferiority is the causal factor for that suffering amounts to a justification for that oppression. Few people are going to say, “Yes, this is oppression, but it’s good.” They’ll say, “Yes, this might look like oppression, but it’s actually do to with cultural inferiority.” That’s what I more specifically had in mind. If you want a set of recommendations for empirical studies about this stuff I’m more than happy to provide references.
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree as to whether these organizations and ideologies justify oppression. Certainly bad things happen in their name. I think “cancel culture” gestures to a set of different and sometimes only tangentially related phenomena, some of which I think are bad and some of which I think are harmless.
