ICYMI. World Vision Moderator: White Christians Use Their ‘White Male Gaze’ to Preserve ‘White Primacy’+ View Black Men as ‘Threats’
World Vision has been driving leftwards for a while now. Famously back in 2014, they changed their hiring practices to allow men and women in gay “marriage” to be hired and considered for employment. Then, they quickly reversed course under the pressure and backlash, causing the late heretic Rachel Held Evans to weep in peevishly lament.
In the summer of 2020, in the wake of the death of George Floyd, World Vision announced they would be hosting a free one-year online course titled “May We Be One: Pastors pursuing Racial Justice,” which is designed to educate on social justice and is put on in partnership with “leaders who represent a diverse group of churches and our friendships with experts and some of the pioneers of this work.”
The organization currently has over 115,000 pastors, priests, deacons, and Christian faith leaders trained through the Word Vision program, and they assert that because of their experience in equipping local churches, they believe that they are “positioned to act as a convener and host for this experience.”
Some of their stated goals are to have church leaders “be prepared to lead conversations about racism in America” and to “engage with one another to dismantle racism and change the landscape of the church.” In reality, it was a hotbed of Critical Race Theory and unbiblical syncretism, infecting the organization and resulting in the wokefication of World Vision and a denial of some core tenets of the Christian Faith. These articles expose how CRT and pagan syncretism – the fusion of different systems of religious beliefs with Christianity – has compromised the mission of the famed NGO.
In part II of our series (see the rest here) Dr. Soong-Chan Rah, the Professor of Evangelism at Fuller Theological Seminary and one of the primary moderators for World Vision, explains the CRT concept of “white male gaze” and the ways it is designed to frame black people as a threat, resulting in the propensity of White Christians to “act instinctively to preserve that narrative of white superiority” and “act naturally, instinctively, to preserve…the narrative of white superiority.”
Whose perspective determines the perspective of society? Willie Jennings [of Yale Divinity School] talks about the four quadrants of relationships, a four-part relationship, between the white male, the black male, the white female, and the black female. And that interrelationship between these four oftentimes is determined by the gaze or perspective of the white male.
In other words, how the white male views the others determines how the rest of society views the other. So, for example, when the white male gazes upon the black male, how is that black male perceived? The black male is perceived in such a way that the rest of society views the black male in the same way. So, when the white male sees the black male, that black male is a threat.In fact, if you think about the six o’clock news and what leads every single news report on the six o’clock local news, what is the most scary, threatening person in our society according to the six o’clock news? It is the unidentified black male…
…Now that threat of the black male is translated in a lot of different ways, and one of the ways is translated is the gaze issue again, the perspective, when the black male looks at the white female, that is oftentimes conceived as a very real threat.
Narratives are like a good actor in a good TV show or in a movie. So there are good actors who use something called method acting. In method acting, what they do is they embody the character so deeply that they reflexively and improvisationally, impulsively act out of that character. So, for example, if Robert De Niro is playing a mobster in a movie shoot, and you run into him at a Starbucks, don’t talk to him, because he’s so into that character, he’ll respond to you like he’s an actual mobster.
So that embodied character, getting so deeply into that character that your instinct, your reflex, what you improvise, comes out of that character, that’s what narratives do. And so these narratives have been played out over and over again. The unidentified black male. The superiority of white culture over other culture. The demeaning of other cultures and the elevating of this culture.
When that narrative gets played out over and over again, we end up embedding that character into our imagination, our value system, our worldview, and we act improvisationally, instinctively, reflectively, reflexively, out of that character.
One of the questions we want to grapple with as we go through this material is what are the ways that we act instinctively to preserve that narrative of white superiority, white primacy? What are the ways we act naturally, instinctively, to preserve or act into that narrative of white superiority?”
h/t to @wokepreachertv for the clip and most of the transcript. Everyone should follow him on Twitter, Gab, and YouTube.
About Author
“White male gaze” aka “ability to notice patterns”.
Idiocy on a whole ‘nother level.
I’m gazing at you, Dr. Soong-Chan Rah.
P.S. I am a white male.