I think it should be clear why I claimed, in the first part, that it will be a long time, if ever, before Blacks cease to see themselves as oppressed. Should a black man ever cease to see himself as oppressed, he will have apostatized from the faith, leaving the Church of Oppression, outside of which there is no hope of salvation. Worse, if he should deny the reality of systemic oppression, he will have denied the very existence of God.  (One easily sees how Blacks like Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, Thomas Sowell, Michael Steele, Walter E. Williams, and Shelby Steele, having identified with their “oppressors,” have lost their status as Blacks; they are no longer among the oppressed. To be truly black in Black Liberation Theology is to be oppressed.)

This is why it does not matter that there is no forced segregation in schools, or Jim Crow laws, and so on. Theology, being about those things in the category of the ultimate, is about those things which do not change. God does not change; the status (oppression) of those with whom He exists and identifies Himself, cannot change. And so the response of Black Theology, with the help of her handmaiden, Critical Race Theory, to the claim that Blacks are no longer oppressed is that what has changed is merely the form of the oppression, not the fact of it, the appearance, not the reality.

Jeremiah Wright at least tacitly suggested this in a speech he delivered to the NAACP, many years ago, possibly during Barack Obama’s first campaign. Wright was talking about education and said that black learning styles are not white, or western, learning styles:

Dr. [Janice] Hale showed us that in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks…. Dr. Hale’s research led her to stop comparing African-American children with European-American children and she started comparing the pedagogical methodologies of African-American children to African children and European-American children to European children. And…she discovered that the two different worlds have two different ways of learning. European and European-American children have a left-brained cognitive object-oriented learning style and the entire educational learning system in the United States of America, back in the early ’70s, when Dr. Hale did her research, was based on left-brained cognitive object-oriented learning style…. African and African-American children have different ways of learning. They are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style. Right brain–that means creative and intuitive. Subject-oriented means they learn from a subject, not an object. They learn from a person…They have a different way of learning.

Ignoring appearances, we must observe the reality of oppression in the insistence by left-brained Whites that right-brained Blacks learn in accordance with left-brained Whites’ learning styles. It is oppressive to insist that Blacks adapt their learning styles to the white mind. The appearance of equality by the integration of schools after Brown, is merely that – appearance. The reality is that desegregated schools are as oppressive as segregated schools, just in a different way. They are oppressive because although they may not be segregated, they are not (using Wright’s terminology) integrated. Yes, Blacks and Whites go to the same schools, but if right-brained (i.e., black) kids are made to learn as if they are left-brained (i.e., white) kids, then that is just as oppressive as leaving them in segregated schools. True integration would mean leaving Whites to their left-brained learning style and Blacks to their right-brained learning style.

Go to Part Three >>