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Critical Race Theory, which has recently been banned ineffectively by the Australian Senate from the National Curriculum, has everything going for it as a lightning rod. It has an acronym (CRT), opacity and an air of self-importance. It is also associated with a controversial social movement: Black Lives Matter. The theory does not need to be understood before generating heat.
Underlying both CRT and the controversy, however, is a deeper question about the relationship between social structures and personal responsibility. This relationship may be illuminated by an earlier Catholic controversy about social sin.
Critical Race Theory itself developed out of a wider discussion among lawyers about the importance of the social context in the interpretation and administration of law. It asked whether legislation was influenced by such factors as the race, wealth, social standing, gender and religion of the legislators, and whether the administration of the law by lawyers, judges and police was influenced by similar factors.
These questions led them further to ask whether such biases prevented those involved and society at large from seeing the prejudice and partiality of their decisions and actions. In other words, whether the system was rigged, and its kings unclothed. And if so, what was the proper response.
This brief overview suggests that critical race theory is a field of study based in social psychology which has to do with the effects of social relationships on personal attitudes and beliefs, and so on institutions. It is not a set of conclusions but an enquiry in which radical and less radical views on all sides can be stated and questioned. Its focus on race reflects the attention given to racial discrimination in the United States.
The controversy about Critical Race Theory is really about the roots and dynamic of racial discrimination and its influence over the ways in which racial minorities are treated. This is a fraught question.
If you accept that the framing of laws and their administration by police and courts are coloured by discriminatory views, and that these laws and institutional practices in turn both license and conceal discriminatory attitudes and behaviour, the implication is that the gains and privileges enjoyed by the majority as a result of this discrimination are ill gotten. Justice might then demand a reordering of society in which previous winners would be losers.
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'The emphasis on social structures and on a conflictual approach to social reform led Catholics naturally to expand their understanding of sin to account for the destructive, unconscious attitudes of groups enshrined and perpetuated institutionally in economic, legal and policing systems.'Â Â
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Given the high stakes, if you were in the majority group you might resist the imputation of discriminatory behaviour. You would see the violence and discrimination against people of minority races as the crimes of individual ‘bad eggs’ or as the fault of the victim. You would attack allegations of a systematic culture of racism as fomenting division. You would call for a reconciliation defined as the acceptance by the aggrieved minority of the status quo. And you would deflect the public debate away from action to shape a more just society, and focus it on to barracking for or against slogans and blaming the guilty. And generally, given the imbalance of power and influence, you would be successful.
The debate about social sin in the Catholic Church was similar to that surrounding Critical Race Theory. But it was situated in a context of faith that focused on the personal — on the inalienable dignity of each person, their interdependence and call to solidarity, on their failure to live by that calling through greed or hunger for power, on conversion and on reconciliation. Church tradition spoke in terms of persons and their relationships with God and other human beings.
The Second Vatican Council committed Catholics to associate concretely with movement for justice and change in the world. In so doing, they found themselves in the company of people who had a similar thirst for justice but located the obstacle to change not in personal sin but on social structures that perpetuated injustice.Â
The emphasis on social structures and on a conflictual approach to social reform led Catholics naturally to expand their understanding of sin to account for the destructive, unconscious attitudes of groups enshrined and perpetuated institutionally in economic, legal and policing systems. They spoke of social sin and of sinful structures and emphasised reform through political action. They then faced the challenge to show how this was compatible with the Christian emphasis on personal sin, conversion and reconciliation.
As has been the argument about race this conversation was heated. It was centred in Latin America, a predominantly Catholic continent. To talk of sinful structures there touched landownership, work practices, government corruption, brutal policing and military action, and church acquiescence. These formed a social network in which the wealth of the very wealthy was sustained by exploitation of the majority poor. The exploration of social sin threatened to uncover and provoke resistance to privileges hitherto taken for granted.
The lightning rod for the debate was what was loosely called liberation theology — diverse strands of thinking about Christian faith whose starting point was the concrete lives of poor and oppressed local communities. The debates were conducted initially in Latin America in Conferences of the Latin American Bishops, and later between the Vatican under Pope John Paul II and the Local Bishops Conferences. The Vatican feared that the theoretical and pastoral directions of the movement threatened the politicisation of the church with consequent divisiveness and the reduction of faith to social ideology.
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'The lightning rod for the debate was what was loosely called liberation theology — diverse strands of thinking about Christian faith whose starting point was the concrete lives of poor and oppressed local communities.'
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The Vatican influenced this debate through the appointment of Bishops, the influence exercised over local Bishops’ conferences and through documents on liberation. In the course of the debate, Rome in turn was led to ponder how to incorporate social analysis into the Catholic tradition. This can be seen in its approach to social sin.
At first the response was defensive, dismissing its opponents’ appeal to it as denying or minimising the importance of the morality of individual sins. This was the burden of a polemical Instruction issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
A little later, the Papal Encyclical on penance and reconciliation offered a more nuanced account which offered four possible usages of social sin ranging from acknowledgment that all sins affect society in unseen ways; that many sins directly affect society, including the readiness to do whatever it takes to secure wealth or power;Â that the sins of individuals can deform social institutions and so encourage unjust actions; and that individual responsibility is of little importance compared to social structures. The Pope saw only the last of these understandings as incompatible with faith.
In a subsequent Encyclical on Catholic Social Teaching, issued around the time of a much more positive document from the Congregation for the Defence of the Faith, Pope John Paul II wrote in a more relaxed way of structural sin. He continued to insist on the importance of individual sin, conversion and reconciliation, but acknowledged the way in which discriminatory and violent behaviour so shapes society that it is impossible to trace the web of individual sins.
This story of Catholic conflict about social sin and of its resolution might illuminate the secular controversies over Critical Race Theory. In the Catholic tradition the person, their human dignity and their inner life and values are central in any reflection on their relationships to one another, to institutions and to the world. In all situations human beings are agents and their decisions to act or not to act are of central importance, whether they perpetrate discrimination or suffer from it. Lasting improvement comes only when there is personal conversion, repentance and reconciliation.
This is a laborious process. It accepts the need to change the social structures of law, policing and economic relations that embody discrimination. But it also asks whether such change will be effective or lasting without a change of heart and a meeting of minds, of a respect that goes deeper than condemning our friends’ enemies, supporting a movement, and using right words.
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'We need to do more than treat either the perpetrators or the victims of discrimination as representatives of a class. We must also enter their lives and their experience in order to understand them.'
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It suggests that we need to do more than treat either the perpetrators or the victims of discrimination as representatives of a class. We must also enter their lives and their experience in order to understand them. We need to avoid, too, reducing the responsibility of those of us who look on from outside to denouncing those who discriminate and cheering their victims.
Underlying critical race theory and Catholic reflection on social sin is the conviction that we are all complicit in shaping our world and its structures. To reform them commits us to the long process of change of heart, self-reflection, engagement with those from whom we differ, and solidarity. These are building blocks that shape a just society.
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Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: Cropped studio shot of two women joining their hands against a gray background (Laylabird/Getty images)