Response to opinion piece

Ethan Hansen’s opinion piece, “What is Critical Race Theory?” badly misinterprets Critical Race Theory and intersectionality. In reality, these are just tools to help us understand how racism works. The idea of “intersectionality” is that nobody has just one identity, and we can be disadvantaged or oppressed more or less because of that. If you have several identities (race, class, disability, national origin, gender, etc.) that each leads to your being discriminated against, the effects can pile up. That’s not a political statement, just a way to look at how things work. As for Critical Race Theory, it is a stretch to associate it with Marxism at all. It’s a theory meant to examine how racism can operate at a structural level. It assumes that racism is sometimes built into social or legal systems (it is not just individuals’ feelings). Example: “redlining,” a set of official and unofficial policies that prevented Black people from living outside of Black neighborhoods, even when huge numbers of them were migrating from the South (leading to overcrowded ghettos and lowered property values.) It’s beyond me how these ideas are a threat to the country, or a threat to Christianity.

Phil Somervell,

Palmer