Response to Joel McDurmon: Voddie Baucham’s quote about CRT is not from any school?

 

Author and law student Joel McDurmon has done a series of videos criticizing Voddie Baucham’s book, titled Fault Lines, and the book raises concern with woke ideology infiltrating the church.  Over at Youtube, McDurmon’s first video can be found titled “Review of Voddie Baucham, Fault Lines – Definitions and Meanings – Part One.”  I have written a response to one of McDurmon’s claims here: “Antonio Gramsci is not a Marxist? Response to Joel McDurmon.”  I also see that Kevin Johnson has written a series of posts responding to McDurmon here that is worth looking into and reading. 

Here in this post I want to respond to one of McDurmon’s claims that has not received much attention.  McDurmon claimed Voddie had a quote about Critical Race Theory that is not from any school, not even a high school.

This video clip here is an excerpt from 1 hour 18 minutes 28 seconds to 1 hour 21 minute and 7 seconds:

Here’s the transcript of the video and I highlighted the part in bold that I want to focus on:

And so here’s a quotation he puts up as a definition of what critical race theory is, in their own words. And he says, according to the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. (And let me have it on the screen version here). Quote:

CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American Society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy. Which perpetuates the marginalization of the people of color. CRT also rejects the traditions of liberalism and meritocracy. Legal discourse says that the law is neutral, color blind. However, CRT challenges this legal quote truth, by examining liberalism and meritocracy as a vehicle for self-interest, power, and privilege. He goes on, Voddie adds, many discussions of CRT have referenced this definition and with good reason.

And he goes on to give his reasons, for that which are not necessarily substantial to the point). According to the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, this is the definition of CRT. And many people have used this definition. The problem with this is that this claim is not from the UCLA Luskin School of Affairs. It’s not from UCLA. It’s not from any school of Public Affairs. It’s not from any university school, period. It’s not even from any official school, high school, period. It’s not from any school! This quotation came from a side website, created by a group of students in one part of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. It’s not sanctioned by the school. It’s not sanctioned by any professor. It is not put forth as a definition of CRT. Now, stop at that point right there.  

Here is my take:

 

• I checked Voddie’s book and I agree with Joel that the quote Voddie had given was from a student-run site and not the actual UCLA school site.  You can check out the archived link here that Voddie referenced.  One can see the heading on that site said “UCLA School of Public Affairs | Critical Race Theory” and no doubt that probably led people to think it’s the official school page.  Two things though gave it away to me that this is not an official UCLA site: First off the domain name includes “wordpress.com” which shows this is a blog.  Second I’m a UCLA alumni and when I looked up the link I didn’t see the typical light blue, blue and yellow color of the school as you see on UCLA website.  Plus it didn’t have the “.ucla.edu” in the domain name.  I think Voddie should have gotten a quote that wasn’t from students to describe Critical Race Theory.  I attribute this to Voddie making a mistake and don’t think this is foul play on Voddie’s part.
• Joel McDurmon said what Voddie quoted is not a definition of CRT.  Here would have been a good opportunity for McDurmon to give a definition of CRT.  But McDurmon doesn’t give a definition of CRT here.   
• While McDurmon said Voddie’s quote wasn’t a definition later in the video in 1:27:26-1:27:36 of the first video McDurmon did say the webpage that Voddie quoted from did give tenets of Critical Race Theory and that “tenets are definitional, but they are not definitions.”  I don’t want to debate what is “definitional” and “definition” but I do think Voddie’s quote does provide a DESCRIPTION of Critical Race Theory.
• The crux of the matter is if the description Voddie quoted is something others who are Critical Race Theorists and those favorable/adjacent of Critical Race Theory would see and use these descriptions for Critical Race Theory.  Joel McDurmon said that this quote is nothing more than students opinions.  And his argument for that is that no schools whatsoever have used these descriptions.  Remember what Joel said “It’s not from any university school, period. It’s not even from any official school, high school, period. It’s not from any school!”   But this is not true.  Brandman University has a college course titled “Let’s Talk About Race” (Course ID: #563) and one should look at their class’ syllabus here (just in case, I archived the page here too).  In my screenshot below I highlighted the section that is exactly word for word with what Voddie quoted from the student’s webpage and we see how those words are a part of a school’s syllabus:

This is word for word with what Voddie quoted: “CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American Society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy.”  That’s 59 words that’s exactly the same in the exact same order as that of the webpage that Voddie quoted.  So McDurmon is clearly wrong.  McDurmon is wrong to say “It’s not from any university school, period. It’s not even from any official school, high school, period. It’s not from any school!” 

• For greater context Brandman University is an accredited university and their “Let’s Talk about Race” course is esteemed enough that Epoch Education gave a link to Brandman University’s course on their website; check it out here.  Epoch Education has even partnered with Brandman University in helping the University’s graduate courses on the subject of racism, race and race relations; see here.  What is Epoch Education?  They are an organization who provides educational consultants and courses to promote diversity, equity and inclusion as mentioned in their “About Us” page.  Epoch Education themselves have an educational series on what is Critical Race Theory; see here, here and here.  Their founder, Nancy Dome according to her Linked-In profile, has a masters and doctorate in the field of education.  I know McDurmon talked about Critical Race Theory as a legal discipline, but Critical Race Theory has spread into other areas and discipline, such as education; consider for example the book Handbook of Critical Race Theory in Education authored by Marvin Lynn and Adrienne D. Dixson.  I’m bringing this up to make the point that there is an accredited university that uses the quote that Joel McDurmon said is not found in any school, and that university works with an organization that sees Critical Race Theory in a positive light and teaches it.
• It is hard to know for sure the relationship of Brandman University’s course (and its instructor), the student website that has the quote (and who wrote the quote on that site) and UCLA (specifically the School of Public Affairs).  I don’t know if both the student site and Brandman Univerity is actually quoting from some source we don’t see that is authentically from UCLA, or if one of the students from that website played any role in writing the syllabus for Brandman University’s course.  I personally don’t want to go down the road that the syllabus for Brandman University’s course was plagiarized from that student’s website.  Regardless of what the relationship is, it’s clear that the description Voddie quoted is somehow seen as a true enough description that it is found in a university website; one that works with an organization that claims to know Critical Race Theory enough to make videos on it and maybe even teaching it in their curriculum and courses.  Even the extreme possibility I mentioned that Brandman University somehow took those 59 words directly from the student’s webpage, it must have been seen as a good description for someone writing a syllabus for a college course to use them for a class syllabus word for word.  So Voddie’s use of the quote as a description of Critical Race Theory isn’t as far out there as McDurmon might make his listeners think; though of course Voddie should have quoted from a better source than a student website.  But don’t miss the main point that McDurmon is wrong to say this quote is never used at all by any school.
• One last note.  Joel McDurmon in the first video said in the time stamp 1:28:38-1:28:57 that he (McDurmon) is good with google and he couldn’t find the quotation Voddie has anywhere online except for two places and one of them is a Facebook post with “almost zero interactions.”  I went and did a search myself on Facebook and found McDurmon making another inaccurate claim.  I found the same 59 words quote describing what is Critical Race Theory that we saw in the student’s webpage and Brandman University’s syllabus on more than two Facebook posts prior to 2020.  Here is one of them and it clearly is one that has a lot of interactions (at the moment I wrote this it has 60 likes, 4 comments, 29 shares on a Facebook Page called “Daily Black History Facts” that has 83,009 people liked the page and 87,716 people follow the page. 

The post was written on October 5th 2014 and it says the same thing Voddie said: “According to the UCLA School of Public Affairs: “CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.””  Note that I’m not citing the Facebook post to say this quote is authentically from UCLA since this facebook page might have used the same student website; but we see that yet again McDurmon is mistaken to say that the alleged quote from UCLA school of Public Affairs is only quoted only by a Facebook page that has zero interactions as a way to further make Voddie look ridiculous.  If the Facebook post I cited used an unknown official UCLA source then this shows why this quote was attributed to UCLA school of Public Affairs; but if the Facebook post I cited was using the same student website as a source, then we see Voddie is not the only one who made the same mistake; and this is coming from a Facebook page that isn’t against CRT but instead is sympathetic to Derrick Bell, an important founding figure of Critical Race Theory.  So its not as ridiculous as McDurmon makes Voddie out to be. 

In summary while Voddie could have used a better source to give us a quote describing Critical Race Theory still the content of the quote itself is found word for word in an actual university syllabus, contradicting McDurmon’s claim that this isn’t found or used by any school.    There will be of course Critical Race Theorists who disagree with some of the wordings of the quote and that’s to be expected from a movement that claims to be not monolithic.  This post is not about that disagreement.  Rather there are those who are sympathetic to Critical Race Theory and even teach Critical Race Theory who found the words Voddie quoted to be accurate enough of a description of Critical Race Theory to utilize it.