By Casey Chalk

Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the influential "16 19 Project," once claimed that "the white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world." Naturally, she also dismisses criticisms of her work as motivated by racism. Bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi has similarly labeled his interlocutors bigots, and in 2020 implied that then-Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett's adoption of two black children was a kind of white colonization. Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrice Cullors - who used BLM funds to bankroll her extravagant lifestyle - has accused her critics not only of being racist but also seeking to assassinate her.

These are some of the most prominent voices of America's anti-racist movement, and the above examples are representative of how anti-racist leaders often respond to even measured criticism of their ideas: unsubstantiated, with vicious ad hominem. Which, as one might expect, complicates efforts to productively debate the veracity or utility of the anti-racism project.

As Kendi himself asserts in his book How to Be an Antiracist: "One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist.'" Read: if you don't submissively accept what Anti-racism Inc. is selling (which is not cheap!), then you are a racist and bigot, or an enabler of racists and bigots.

Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers, author of Building a Civilization of Love: A Catholic Response to Racism, is aware of this problem: "Ever since the Black Lives Matter movement gained prominence, I have been an outspoken critic of what they stand for, to the point of not seeing any purpose of engaging in dialogue with them." And yet, Burke-Sivers continues, "I now believe that Catholics should be open to establishing a dialogue with BLM, as difficult as those conversations may be. . . .There is no harm in having open and honest dialogue with those we disagree with." Can one have open and honest dialogue with those whose default response is to attack or misrepresent criticism as stemming from bad faith?

It's a curious position for Deacon Burke-Sivers to hold, given how well he understands anti-racism. His chapter on critical race theory, for example, carefully charts the Marxist origins of that intellectual movement, and then explains how CRT is incompatible with Catholicism, and more broadly, Biblical teaching. He notes that CRT holds that racism is an inherent, preternatural quality of the human condition that is impossible to eliminate, rather than a result of original sin.

This puts CRT at odds both with historic, orthodox Christianity, but also natural law and its understanding of vice and virtue. Moreover, in its emphasis on addressing systems and power structures to the exclusion of individuals and their choices, CRT elides the reality of personal culpability, whether it be on the part of victimizer whites or victimized "persons of color."

His treatment of BLM - a child of both Marxism and CRT - is equally strong. Citing its own website, Burke-Sivers argues "BLM is using prejudice and racial injustice as a Trojan horse to advance their true agenda: the promotion and normalization of alternative lifestyle choices as well as the destruction of the nuclear family." He rightly notes the hypocrisy of BLM's dogmatically pro-choice politics, which result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of black lyeves in the womb every year. He critiques BLM's aversion to what it called "the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement," a foolhardy misjudgment of what ails black America, given that about seventy percent of black children in America are born to unmarried mothers.

The chapter on liberation theology (and, more immediately relevant to the book, black liberation theology), is a bit less coherent. After rightly censuring liberation theology for its Marxist roots (and premises) and its tendenc...