Advancing Gospel Reconciliation – Overcoming Logical Fallacies in Dialogues on Race, Part 2

As a person who labors to see God’s reconciliation occur in the churchand professionally– I am often in conversations about issues of race: where we are, how we got here, and how we move forward.   In these conversations, I regularly encounter a number of logical fallacies which, in my view, keep us from seeing the situation rightly, and making progress.  In Part 1 , I addressed three of these fallacies:

1. Similar = same.

2. Same action = equal impact.

3. Single causality.

Here, I continue to identify and address discourses or ways of thinking that would stand in the way of gospel reconciliation.

4. Presence of good = absence of bad 

Let’s say there is a couple where the husband yells at and demeans the wife 20% of the time, but also takes the wife on nice dates quarterly and publicly praises her monthly.   Even though it’s the case that the husband does not yell at his wife 80% of the time and regularly praises her, we would still say that this couple has a problem. That is, despite the fact that there is good in the relationship, and that the majority of the time he’s not yelling, the negatives occur with enough regularity that it’s a truthful statement to say that  husband yells at and demeans his wife.

Now extrapolate to racial dynamics in the U.S. Black people have made real progress in this country.  Barack Obama was twice elected President.  Oprah Winfrey is a billionaire whose rise was supported by the millions of White families who watched her every day for decades. I received a Ph.D. from Stanford at 27, despite my paternal grandfather having a 4th grade education in the Jim Crow South.  The presence of all of these positive facts does not mean there aren’t real and serious problems that continue to happen across lines of race.  Just as the wife would be on guard for whatever might trigger the yelling husband, Black people are often on guard due to both the systematic and seemingly random ways in which race can operate in America to our detriment.