PERSPECTIVE FROM THE 19^TH HOLE:  This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all of my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

I am little hesitant to write again about “critical race theory” because I am not sure I have much new to offer to the swirling debate.  I guess I could add that ignorance doesn’t usually stop me.

But, an essay in the Wall Street Journal this morning prompted me to think again about the subject.  It appeared under this interesting headline – “The Hedgehogs of Critical Race Theory” — and this first paragraph:

“The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin turned an obscure fragment by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus (‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’) into an intellectual’s cocktail-party game.  In a famous essay, published as a book in 1953, Berlin suggested that the world is divided between hedgehogs and foxes—between those who believe in One Big Thing (one all-sufficient super-explanation), and those who are content with a more modest, irrational and even incoherent idea of history’s unfolding. Karl Marx was a supreme hedgehog: Everything, for him, was about the conflict of economic classes.  Franklin D. Roosevelt was a restlessly improvising fox. “

The essayist, Lance Morrow, used the above to contend that many people today start with important truths – slavery was wicked, for example – “and then get carried away into monomania.”

Here are two paragraphs that summarize Morrow’s contention:

“The hedgehog’s trajectory may begin on the side of undeniable and important truth—for example, the truth that slavery was a great wickedness in America (as it was elsewhere in the world), and that race prejudice has been a chronic American dilemma and a moral blight that has damaged and scarred the lives of millions of black American citizens over generations.

“All true—a truth to be acknowledged and addressed. But hedgehogs, who deal in absolutes, are liable to get carried away. Their truth changes shape as it coalesces into a political movement and gets a taste of power and begins to impose itself programmatically. Its ambitions swell, it grows messianic, it embraces civic idiocies (defund the police!) and beholds the astounding impunity with which it may run amok in the streets and burn police cars and shopping malls, as it did last summer, and the ease with which it may take over city councils and mayors’ offices and turn so many of the country’s normal arrangements upside down.”

I agree with Morrow’s basic notions, though, for me, I summarize my views a bit differently as follows:

1. It makes all the sense in the world for all of us to become more aware of racism, both in society and in our ourselves.  The latter often can be subtle, but still important.  Knowing more and learning more about racism and ourselves are solid goals.
2. Things go too far when “critical race theory” becomes a political catch-all phrase that forms a prism through which every other issue is judged.  Concern about racism becomes political, not personal.  And, political overkill makes it almost impossible to recognize progress we have made as a nation against imbedded racism.  The fact is that recognition of progress – as well as how far we have to go — can create incentives for more progress.
3. As a Christian, I also recognize what God says about race in the Bible.  HE says we should not be a respecter of persons and that everyone – regardless of race, skin color, geography or history – can be a CHILD OF GOD.  Good for us to remember that God calls us to respect and love all others just as he does.

My wife, to her credit, takes action to illustrate her love for other, especially refugees.  They arrive in the Salem nearly every week and often are helped by a program run through our church, Salem Alliance.

My wife’s role has been to provide clothes, food and furniture to these refugees as they arrive here trying to build a new home for themselves.  So, concern for immigrants is not something that just happens at our southern border.  It is right here where we live.