Brandon Paradise on "How Critical Race Theory Marginalizes the African American Christian Tradition"

Brandon Paradise (Rutgers Law) has a valuable new article on "How Critical Race Theory Marginalizes the African American Christian Tradition." It's a lengthy piece that documents how critical race theory's methodology has been overwhelmingly deconstructionist and secular, ignoring the central role of Christianity in the lives of most African Americans and in the civil rights movement.

As I read him, Professor Paradise thinks has had several troubling consequences (even though he understands how realities like white Christian support for slavery and quietism within the black church have helped spurred it). First, it has cut off critical race theory from a central aspect of the lives of a large percentage of African Americans--an ironic result given the critical-theory premise that “'the actual experience, history, culture, and intellectual tradition of people of color in America' should serve as the epistemological source for critical scholars." (Quoting Mari Matsuda.)

Second, it significantly eliminated from critical race theory the call for individual spiritual transformation that was an important part (although of course, Prof. Paradise recognizes, not the only part) of the message of M.L. King and other civil rights leaders. Third, and related, Paradise notes how the deconstructionist orientation limits the ability of the theory to appeal to universal principles of human dignity, human nature, and morality in the way that the Christianity-grounded civil rights movement did. Including that old concept of natural law, which just happens to be central to the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." About the letter, Paradise writes:

[F]ar from offering an indeterminacy critique—the thrust of which illustrates that first principles cannot compel a specific vision of community—King resolutely argues that first principals of natural law compel him to reject a segregated vision of community in favor of a desegregated one.

Prof. Paradise then offers some sober hope about the possibilities for developing an African-American Christian approach to law:

Because of the possibility that developing an approach to law that reflects the African American Christian tradition will receive little support in the legal academy, scholars engaged in the project will have to be pioneering, prophetic voices who are willing to cut against the grain of the secular left as well as the predominantly colorblind, religious right. However, not all is grim. While the project may suffer marginalization within the halls of the legal academy, the Black community’s substantial identification with Christianity means that the effort to develop an African American
Christian approach to law has a natural and substantial constituency outside of the ivory tower.

Lengthy, but as Larry Solum would say, "highly recommended." In this more pluralistic age, civil-rights theory and practice surely can't be grounded solely in the Christianity that inspired the movement of the 1960s: I think Prof. Paradise would recognize that. But he makes a good case that Christianity has been far more marginal among the theorists than it ought to be.