Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons.
“My favorite book is the Bible, because it provides the blackprint for man’s salvation.”
The year was either 1989 or 1990, I don’t recall for certain which. After a year away from college, I had returned to the University of Cincinnati (UC) to finish my undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts in the fall of 1989 and would go on to finish the next year.
One day during the school year, my eye happened to catch a display in the lobby of Langsam Library, the university’s main library, with the title “My Favorite Book.” The display was in a glass enclosed case built into the wall. Every quarter – UC was on a quarter system in those days rather than the more common semester system – the display was changed. As it turned out, the “My Favorite Book” display for that quarter was collection of submissions by UC faculty members stating the title of their favorite book and the reason why.
Having a few minutes to spare, I walked over to the display to look it over. Somewhat surprised to see the Bible listed as a favorite, I read the card with the faculty member’s write up, which began with the quote at the top of this page. But it didn’t end there. After so many years, I do not recall the name or position of the faculty member or the exact wording of the rest of his write up on why the Bible was his favorite book. What I do recall, though, was the militant and angry tone he used. There was nothing in his paragraph on the Bible that sounded remotely Christian. Rather, the author ranted on as if he were some left over radical still stuck in the 1960’s. The author, who was apparently black, made it very clear that he did not like white people and used the Bible to justify his position.
Even though I wasn’t a Christian the time, I had grown up in church and knew something about the Bible, enough that I found the author’s use of the Scriptures to promote his clearly hard-core racial agenda deeply disturbing.
At about the same time, there was controversy on the UC campus concerning a few paragraphs in, if I recall correctly, the student handbook. It had been reported that there was language in the new version of the handbook that addressed race issues. The controversy, as I heard it, was over an alleged claim made in the handbook that blacks cannot be racist because they have no power. This claim bothered me as it conflicted with what I had learned growing up. I had always been taught that a “racist” was someone who hated another person based solely on his skin color. Under that definition, anyone, regardless of his background, could be racist. But here was a claim stating that blacks cannot be racist. Somewhat skeptical that any official publication of the University would make such a claim – given how rampant “woke” ideology is on today’s college campuses, I know my skepticism sounds naïve to readers in 2021 – I went and asked for a copy of said offending handbook to see what it said for myself. Sure enough, the report I’d heard was true. It was right there is black and white: blacks cannot be racist, because they have no power.
As had the “My Favorite Book” write up, the language in the handbook disturbed and perplexed me. Not only did the claim fly in the face of everything I had been taught and believed, but it seemed to imply that black people were special class of individuals who were eternally victims incapable of doing wrong, whereas white people, as it were, bore the mark of Cain, eternal victimizers who could do no right.
As I said earlier, at that time I was not a Christian, neither had I ever studied philosophy. Although I was bothered by the assertions I had come across in the two publications, the “My Favorite Book” write up on the Bible and the student handbook, I lacked the needed intellectual tools to analyze and refute them.
Although I didn’t know it at the time and wouldn’t come to realize it until twenty-five years or so later, the radical claims I had stumbled across were part of a new intellectual movement, so new that it had not even received a name until 1989, called Critical Race Theory.
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