I’ve heard this kind of argument being made in conservative Christian circles for years, particularly among Six Day Creationists, of which I am one. I used to hold this view.
I don’t any longer. Others here, particularly John M, have offered more helpful comments than I would have been able to write. I will add some more.
Race can be used in a broad or narrow sense. It can mean the whole human race. It can also mean people of a particular nation or ethnicity. In his book on the history of the English speaking peoples, Winston Churchill refers to the “British race” or the “Saxon race.” That usage is fairly common in older authors. Race can also mean something in between those two categories, as a family of similar nations living close to one another geographically, and therefore sharing certain climatic adaptations like skin color or eye shape. In America, we took in immigration from mostly Western European countries during our formative years. When people talk about the “white race” in an American context, they mean the people from Western Europe who settled the country originally: Germans, English, Scots, Irish, Scandanavian, Dutch, etc.
Even among whites, as Paul Ojanen has noted, certain ethnic differences remain and endure. Dutch differ from Germans differ from English differ from Scot and on and on. Those ethnic differences endure in our churches. If you are not Dutch, it’s going to be awkward, to a certain extent, to be part of a Dutch Reformed church. If you are not Anglo, or not even a native English speaker, being part of a Presbyterian church and loving the language of the Westminster Standards is going to be harder for you than for someone fro whom it feels more familiar. It’s just the way it is.
The recognition of these differences does not imply that we embrace Darwinism, nor that we embrace discrimination or hatred of the Other. For integrity’s sake, however, and for clarity’s sake, I think conservatives would benefit from dropping appeals to racial blindness. One of the reasons the Woke crowd has made the inroads it has is that most people feel instinctively that race is real and that it matters to their identity. They feel this because it is true. They listen to the Woke because they sense that the Woke are attempting to deal with race honestly because they are the only ones with a platform frankly speaking about race. That’s a real shame, because the Woke crowd is spreading a lot of falsehood and evil.
At the end of his podcast on BLM and police shootings, Alex Costa made a comment about loving being black, and how he does not want to be white. He wants to be black. That kind of frank honesty is what we need more of. We don’t need for white people to puff out their chests and do a Sieg Heil or something stupid like that, but we need for people of all races to be able to say, “I like being my race. I don’t want to be another race. I’m not insecure about who I am.”
If more of us, but especially conservative whites, could say such things about ourselves, so much in our racial conversations would improve. Nonwhites would sense that whites were finally being honest. Their respect for whites would increase. The open recognition and celebration of differences would, paradoxically, lead to more harmony rather than discord between different races.
Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, whites in America have felt very uneasy about white identity. By and large, they’ve run away from it, thinking that owning their identity, being OK with being white, will somehow lead to them becoming a Klan member. They’ve also felt this overpowering guilt about being white, and this urge to “do something” to improve the lot of nonwhites. Alex Costa dealt with this in the podcast. The efforts of self-important whites to “help” the nonwhite have mostly backfired. White self loathing does not lead to black success.
If the only way you think about your race is that you despise your own race, or you think that you must endlessly apologize for your racial group or your ancestors, you have a very unhealthy self-image that is, paradoxically, not self-giving but rather narcissistic and self-serving. The pathology of whites in America is very screwed up. It can be cured through honesty.
I’ll end by saying, “It’s OK to be white.” Being white is not the most important thing about me, but is a true thing about me. I see no need to run away from it.