Of Ryan Foley, Christian Post reporter | Tuesday, August 10, 2021Protesters take part in the Get Your Knee Off Our Necks Commitment March in Washington DC on August 28, 2020. | The Christian Post
A longtime African-American Neighborhood Policy Strengthener criticized critical racial theory during a webinar at an evangelical seminar over the weekend, arguing that the United States had a “mercy problem” rather than a “race problem”.
Bob Woodson, director of the Woodson Center and founder of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, attended the Southern Evangelical Seminary’s online event “Awaken: Thinking Well About Wokism, Social Justice, & Racial Reconciliation” on Saturday.
The civil rights veteran, who once worked on community development programs for local and national organizations, including the NAACP, was asked, “Is America Systemically Racist?”
Woodson shared his belief that Critical Race Theory, a theoretical framework on systemic racism in America promoted by some in academia and the political left, “should be replaced by Critical Grace Theory.”
“America doesn’t have a racing problem, but it has a mercy problem,” said Woodson.
Woodson attributed the problems African Americans suffer in American society today to the expansion of the social safety net rather than systemic racism.
Woodson stated, “When whites were worst, blacks were best.” He spoke about the role of the black church in improving the lives of African American people in the century after the abolition of slavery.
When he found that the black community had an illiteracy rate of 75%, Woodson said that many black churches were opening Sabbath schools.
“In 40 years, illiteracy went from 75% to 30%,” he recalls.
Robert Woodson talks about racing in America during a video for Hillsdale College October 2020. | YouTube / Hillsdale College
Woodson explained how “Christian values” and “Christian principles” enabled the African American community to experience relative peace and prosperity despite the adversity they faced due to the Great Depression and racism.
“We had the highest marriage rate of any other group in society during [the] Depression because of our beliefs and because of … our self-determined attitudes, “he explained.” Older people could feel safe in these communities without fear of being attacked by their grandchildren. “
“Eighty-five percent of all black households had a husband and wife raising children,” he added, noting that “church attendance was the absolute highest” in the African American community.
He complained that “culture changed in 1965” when “leftist sociologists” at Columbia University School of Social Work began “promoting socialism” and using “blacks’ plight” to accomplish this goal.
Woodson said these sociologists were trying to “separate work from income,” making fathers “redundant” and “increasing drug addiction and” [the] School dropout rate. “
They aimed to “get as many people as possible into the welfare system,” he said, which would “force America to change and start redistributing income”.
At this time in American history, government poverty programs were beginning “opening offices and recruiting people into the welfare system,” he continued.
“Over the course of three to four years, millions of blacks flocked to the welfare system in the 1970s when the unemployment rate for black men in New York was 4%,” he said. “And as a consequence, we saw that the illegitimate birth rate began to rise. There was this massive decline. When the government stepped in and took the place of the family … we saw the decline … that we are experiencing today. “
Woodson was born in 1937 and worked for organizations such as the National Urban League in New York City in the early 1970s. He then worked as a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and also directed the Neighborhood Revitalization Project in Washington, DC
Woodson’s organization, the Woodson Center, seeks to “bring credit and funding to strengthen the efforts of indigenous neighborhood leaders and organizations that are effective in addressing critical issues in their communities through innovative initiatives.”
Woodson said the organization applies “the principles of our market economy” to the social economy. Specifically, he made it clear that “only 3% of the people in our market economy are entrepreneurs, but they create 70% of all jobs”. He stressed that “to say that 70% of black families today are raising children who drop out of school, in prison or on drugs, that means 30% don’t.”
“What the Woodson Center has done over … 40 years is we have gone into those 30% of … households and found the Christian virtues alive and well,” he said.
In these households “people are successfully raising children in the face of these challenges”. The Woodson Center has researched these households’ “successful efforts” and worked to promote them to the African American community as a whole.
He presented “strong examples of people who succeed against all odds” and true stories of the effects of the black church and Christianity that reversed the fate of the black community in some parts of the country.
In one example he mentioned, gangsters “took over” a public housing estate in Washington, DC.
“You drove out the drug dealers. And they began … to serve these children, to take care of them. And over the course of 10 years, 600 of those kids from this desolate, criminal, and drug-infested neighborhood came … to be restored and they went to college, ”he recalls.
Woodson praised the efforts of a man named Leon Watkins, who lived in south-central Los Angeles, where the Eastside Crips “terrorized the community.” According to Woodson, “Watkins had wanted posters everywhere” and “met with these gang members in person.”
Watkins met with the gang leader and spoke to him for three hours.
“The next day he had him for a Bible study. And in a week he had the whole gang of 26 studying the Bible, ”he continued.
“This gang went from terrorizing this community to protecting this community,” said Woodson. He cited the above examples as part of a curriculum that defies critical racial theory by taking “lessons from the past” and sharing stories about “the presence of grace in action”.
Woodson urged people to join the advice of late civil rights activist Dr. Following Martin Luther King, who believed that “we should not enter into this bitter conflict to humiliate or destroy our enemy. But we should do this with God’s love and grace, and we should do this with the aim of transforming the oppressor. “
“King believed that the goal was not to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to humanize him or her in order to sow the seeds of friendship or eventual alliances,” claimed Woodson. “Dr. King called it spiritual aggression. “
Woodson presented critical racial theory as the antithesis of this way of thinking.
Critical race theory is defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica as an intellectual movement and loosely organized framework of legal analysis that argues that race is a socially constructed category used “for the oppression and exploitation” of people of color.
The reference source reports that “Critical racial theorists believe that the law and legal institutions in the United States are inherently racist in that they serve to create social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and non-whites, particularly African-Americans.” and maintain ”.
“It’s really stereotypical that we shouldn’t be defined by God’s judgment of us or God’s grace, but as a group … as a category,” argued Woodson.
Woodson described the idea as “ridiculous” and “really harmful” and stressed that “we fought against it”. After quoting from King’s famous appeal, “according to the content of your character and not the color of your …”
While most of his speech focused on the challenges facing the African American community, Woodson argued that the US as a whole is “in a moral and spiritual freefall” that is “consuming people of all classes and backgrounds.”
Woodson pointed to “a moral and spiritual void in the lives of our young people” who “wander through life with no content or purpose in their lives”. “You will not hesitate to choose someone else’s or your own.”
“We have to address this crisis facing our young people today, but we cannot do that while we are racially divided in this nation,” concluded Woodson. “I think this current racial crisis is a fabricated crisis by elements of the radical left who really want to … America’s birth defect of slavery … and use Jim Crow as a club against the country to undermine that nation’s virtues and principles. “
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: [email protected]
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