Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s ‘outtess yet in’ Critical Race Theory (CRT) supporter Professor Jarvis Williams has shared how he intentionally chose to pass over white congregants when choosing people to be a part of his small group, instead choosing minorities and ‘multi-ethnic’ persons of color, in order to serve as a ‘model’ for the church.
Williams, one of the professors hooping CRT into the SBC’s flagship university, (see here and here) made the comments during an interview with Verge Networks. The video has been posted below and the salient part starts at the 2:20 mark, but the whole short clips is worth a listen.
First, for his affirmation of white privilege existing, but then for his rejection of ‘colorblindness;’ which in CRT-speak is the definition that someone ‘doesn’t see color’ or ‘is colorblind’ or ‘doesn’t have a racist bone in their body.’ This view is seen as Very Bad because critical race theorists want you to see race and want you to focus on racial differences.
If you treat a black guy the same as you’d treat a white guy, because in your mind their skin has no impact on how they ought to be treated or viewed, (being colorblind) you’re simply ignoring discrimination, lying to yourself, and are inflicting ideological violence on the POC you’re not treating differently. Williams says:
“I recently had this conversation, someone said ‘well what can I do as a white person to help the cause of racial reconciliation?’ To which I responded ‘you want to get rid of the white saviorism mentality and not view yourself as the savior who’s going in to help these poor people, but rather take the posture of the learner.
Put yourself in spaces where there are people from different ethnic groups, but then also learn that person’ narrative. Because quite often I think that one reason why certain people in the majority group reject white privilege or…of affirm that there’s colorblindness, is because their narrative is not the same as the counter-narrative of the marginalized group…
Turning to the small group, Jarvis explains his rationale which sounds perhaps reasonable, until you consider how insidious it actually is.
In my small group, I intentionally chose people who were multi-ethnic to be in my small group to serve as a model for our church what this looks like before we have an officials mall group ministry that the church is behind.
So in my small group you have me, my wife’s Latino. We have a white brother who’s engaged to an Indian sister who are going to be married soon. We have my multi-racial cousin and his black girlfriend, we have a brother from Pakistan in my small group -he’s gonna get married to another Pakistani so he’ll be in the group.
And so it’s majority-minority, and we have at the moment one white person, and the rest of the group is minority, but it’s diverse minority groups, and then we’re going to pick up a couple more white brothers and sisters and so we’re trying to model what this looks like; we’re putting ourselves in spaces with different people and we’re doing life with each other.
In essence, the selection of small group participants by Williams was not based on the spiritual needs of the congregants, or on their growth and maturity, or proximity to the location the group would be gathering at- things which all would actually be relevant and perhaps worthy of consideration.
Rather small groups were chosen based on skin color and ethnicity as the primary, driving factor. Even the white guy seems to have been chosen because he has an Indian fiance. This is not a benevolent, thoughtful plan for how to build a small group, but rather is the laying of a rotting, fetid foundation.
This is shameful to the extreme, but you’d be hard-pressed to find Mohler or any of the SBC elites to say anything about it. After all, it’s already been passed around the yard and is in nearly every cell.
