David French’s recent essay “Structural Racism Isn’t Wokeness, It’s Reality” has met with less serious critical comment than I would have expected. Perhaps it’s just that I don’t get out enough around the Internet. I’ve heard that Mr. French has been denounced vigorously on Twitter – no doubt with the thoughtfulness and precision that invariably distinguish that medium – but I’ve run across no opposing essays except one by Michael Anton that seems to me unlikely to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with him. Therefore, I’m going to engage in my own feeble critique.
Mr. French takes as his starting point a dispute between a Protestant megachurch’s pastors and some of their congregation. The latter have brought a lawsuit alleging that the church has denied them “their rights to cast a free and fair vote, to have those votes lawfully counted, and to enjoy their right to a secret ballot”. According to Mr. French – and I have no reason to disbelieve him – the plaintiffs’ real grievance is that, in their view, the pastors have added critical race theory to the Gospel.
Mr. French doesn’t argue that the complaints against the pastors are false. Instead, he disputes what he takes to be the dissidents’ central premise, that “the concept of ‘equality under the law’ – as mandated by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act – is both necessary and largely sufficient to address the causes and consequences of centuries of slavery followed by generations of Jim Crow” (emphasis in original). That position, he argues, is “biblically and historically wrong”.
His argument divided into three parts: an exegesis of a Biblical pericope, an historical analysis purporting to show that past racism is responsible for the present problems of black Americans, and a discussion of remedies. The first may not interest many readers; I won’t be offended if they skip ahead.
The Biblical Argument
Mr. French draws the Biblical portion of his argument primarily from 2 Samuel 21:1-14. Even if you possess the Scripture knowledge of Bertie Wooster, you may not recall it. In brief, at some point after David’s overthrow of King Saul and accession to the throne of Israel, a famine strikes the land. David consults God and learns that “Saul and his family have incurred blood guilt, by putting the Gibeonites to death” (trans. New Jerusalem Bible).
The Gibeonites were a gentile enclave within Israel, allowed to remain in return for labor services as “hewers of wood and drawers of water for the congregation, and for the altar of the Lord” (Joshua 9:27, trans. KJV). Saul’s violation of the treaty, which the Israelites had confirmed with oaths in the name of God, was, one infers, the cause of the famine.
David asks the Gibeonites how Israel can make amends. They reply, “Our quarrel with Saul and his family cannot be settled for silver or gold.” Instead, “we want seven of his descendants handed over to us, and we shall dismember them” (trans. NJB). David consents. The seven are torn to pieces. Their bodies would have been devoured by birds and wild beasts, had not one of Saul’s concubines protected them.
In this grim anecdote, Mr. French discerns an “underlying conception of justice”, that “Israel remained responsible for its former leader’s sins, and they were required to make amends.” Let’s follow that thought for a moment.
The Gibeonite demand wasn’t for anything so paltry as reparations (“silver or gold”). They would be appeased only by torture and death. This is as if Black Lives Matter demanded that the descendants of Theodore Bilbo be lynched. Israel didn’t, in fact, “make amends” at all. No Gibeonite was a whit better off after the Saulides’ execution, unless one thinks that men’s lot is improved by the psychic satisfaction of revenge.
One should always try to learn from Scripture, although the historical narratives of the Old Testament are tricky to unravel. Without pretending to great exegetical skills, let me note the two most striking features of this incident. One is the Gibeonites’ eagerness to inflict suffering, even though it does them no good and, for that matter, doesn’t harm their persecutor, who was killed years ago. Another is King David’s passivity in the face of an unreasonable demand. Some commentators have cynically opined that he didn’t at all mind ridding himself of potential rivals. If he had stood firm against torture and murder, and insisted that the Gibeonites accept monetary compensation or some other non-homicidal satisfaction, both his honor and the offended people’s lives would have been better served.
Mr. French has, intentionally or not, taken on the role of defense counsel for the Gibeonites. He doesn’t convince this juror.
The Historical Argument
Turning from Scripture to American history, Mr. French argues that “the effects of slavery and Jim Crow. . . . are so embedded in our system that powerful people often perpetuate those structures even when they lack any racist intent at all”. He invokes as evidence the lingering effects of racial segregation in housing. Discrimination “resulted in the creation of large communities of dramatically disadvantaged Americans”, who, even after the demise of Jim Crow, “often lacked the resources to purchase homes or rent apartments in wealthier neighborhoods with better schools”.
The implicit premise is that the economic condition of one’s ancestors is the primary determinant of one’s own condition. Applied to individuals, we all know of so many exceptions that it’s impossible to see the rule. Applied to racial and ethnic groups, the purported rule is obviously false. The Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese and Japanese who immigrated to America weren’t the upper crust of their societies; they were mostly destitute, suffered from severe discrimination and certainly didn’t find homes in “wealthier neighborhoods with better schools”.
That point is almost routinely raised in answer to CRT-like narratives. The answer is just as routine: Those other groups had the benefit of “white privilege”. Only blacks have continued to suffer discrimination to the present day. Mr. French doesn’t put that argument forward. He doesn’t claim that the church members with whom he disagrees are racists. Rather, he declares that their lack of racism doesn’t matter. Hence, his argument reduces to ancestral economic determinism, a position that stopped being plausible in the English-speaking world sometime in the Sixteenth Century.
Without the prop of ancestral economic determinism, past racism lost its impact when present-day racism dwindled to a prejudice shared by a small, powerless minority. It is something to regret, not repent. As C. S. Lewis writes in his well known “Essay on National Repentance”, repenting sins that are not our own encourages “us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing – but, first, of denouncing – the conduct of others.”
Remedies
Contrary to what Michael Anton seems to think, Mr. French doesn’t advocate anything approaching reparations. On the other hand, his discussion of what to do isn’t very enlightening. The concrete issue that he addresses is housing segregation. His not unreasonable assumption is that racism played a large role in creating current housing patterns, yet he concedes that there are legitimate, non-racist objections to the one solution that he mentions, namely, “permitting more multi-family housing in wealthier communities”.
Even if every member of a local zoning and planning commission isn’t racist, there are multiple non-racist reasons for them to resist greater population density. There’s traffic congestion. There’s school overcrowding. There’s the potential consequence to property values. There are environmental objections. There are a host of related infrastructure concerns.
These non-racist reasons to block multi-family development are a reason why even the most deep-blue, race-conscious progressive neighborhoods so often bitterly resist new development, school zoning changes, and other concrete reforms that would grant individuals in historically segregated neighborhoods greater access to the educational and economic opportunities of historically white communities.
Time and again, there are non-racist reasons for wanting to maintain the structures racists created.
It isn’t clear to me whether Mr. French believes that arguments, however valid and convincing, should be automatically disregarded if deployed in support of arrangements whose origins can be traced to racism. The argumentum ad originem has become very common lately. We are told, for instance, that police departments, the Second Amendment and the Senate filibuster all should be abolished because (supposedly) they were instituted a couple of centuries ago from racist motives. (Oddly, no progressive raises that objection against minimum wage laws, whose earliest advocates trumpeted how they would protect white men’s jobs from competitors of other races.)
The upshot of judging present day policies by the motives of men long dead is that we quibble endlessly about matters that have nothing to do with the actual merits of those policies. Suppose that it were true that contemporary police departments can be traced back to slave patrols a couple of centuries ago. There are today “non-racist reasons” for police, as even some super-progressive big city mayors are starting to notice. (And here is something chilling to read if you doubt it.) Can those reasons be considered? If they can, why can’t a suburb’s racially neutral objections to having its population drastically changed by an influx of new residents?
As G. K. Chesterton observed, before one removes a fence, one ought to find out why it’s there. But he didn’t go on to say that we should ignore all changes of circumstance since it was constructed or the possibility that it might serve a different purpose today from the one that its builder intended. Much less did he suggest that we had a duty to tear down a good and useful fence if its reasons for construction did not meet our present standards. I am not certain that Mr. French would agree with that.