I feel no shame in admitting that, before today, I’d never heard of Davidson College in North Carolina. It’s a private liberal arts college, and if you’ve ever driven through the Southeast, you know that the region is dotted with these 19th-century institutions, all of which imagined raising up a generation of Americans imbued with the great ideas. Davidson’s latest great idea is to teach White churches how to be less racist.
Campus Reform reports that the college got a $1-million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to embark on this great project. Here’s how Davidson itself describes its plan:
White Christians are having a moment as America again reckons with racial injustice, facing questions of how their faith should be lived and coming to terms with how Christianity itself has been intertwined with racist systems. But a newly funded project titled “Churches That THRIVE for Racial Justice” will seek to address these issues.
Thanks to a $1 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to Davidson College, the five-year project will work to shed light on the challenges of racism among white dominant congregations in North America and help churches, like Myers Park Baptist, to build on their commitment to racial equity and expand their capacity for confronting racial justice.
Funding for the project comes from Lilly Endowment’s national Thriving Congregations Initiative, which aims to strengthen Christian congregations so they can help people deepen their relationships with God, build strong relationships with each other, and contribute to the flourishing of local communities and the world.
Gerardo Martí, L. Richardson King Professor of Sociology at Davidson College, will lead the project in partnership with Paula Clayton Dempsey, director of partnership relations for the Alliance of Baptists (a denominational partner of Myers Park Baptist). The project’s core team also includes sociologists Mark Mulder, of Calvin University and Kevin Dougherty, of Baylor University, who’ve spent their careers examining racial and ethnic dynamics in American churches.
Here’s a little information about all the people involved on the ground:
Meanwhile, here are the lead people at Lilly Endowment Inc. The Board of Directors consists of:
- N. Clay Robbins, chairman, president & chief executive officer – White
- Daniel P. Carmichael – White
- Clarence Crain – Black
- Craig Dykstra – White
- William G. Enright – White
- Charles E. Golden – Probably White
- Jennett M. Hill – Probably Black
- John C. Lechleiter – White
- Eli Lilly II – White
- Mary K. Lisher – Unknown
- David N. Shane – White
The Officers are:
- N. Clay Robbins, chairman, president & chief executive officer – White
- Robert L. Smith, senior vice president for collaborative strategies – White
- Ben W. Blanton, vice president, secretary & general counsel – White
- Peter A. Buck, vice president for investments – White
- Christopher L. Coble, vice president for religion – White
- Jaclyn P. Dowd, vice president for evaluation & special initiatives – Unknown
- Ronni N. Kloth, vice president for community development – Black
- Ted Maple, vice president for education – White
- Julie A. Siegler, vice president for administration – White
- Diane M. Stenson, vice president & treasurer – Unknown
So, of 24 people in leadership positions involved in this project, 15 are definitely White, and another three are probably White. They are all extremely well paid. According to ProPublica’s non-profit explorer, back in 2018, Lilly’s key employees were paid between $375,000 and $870,000 annually. That’s the kind of money that, for an organization situated in Indianapolis, can place you in a very nice home, in a crime-free neighborhood.
Salaries at Davidson aren’t quite so generous, but it appears that the average salary is upwards of $100,700. Calvin University faculty members seem to draw between $55,000 and $79,000. And Baylor professors bring in something in the realm of $120,000 or more. The people working on the Davidson project aren’t as wealthy as Lilly’s people, but they’re all doing all right.
Here’s my point with this obsessive focus on race and salaries: the Davidson project is intended to remedy “racial injustice” and is part of a “strategic moment in the history of the Alliance [of Baptists].” In 2018, the Alliance stated, “Systemic racism has been a part of the history of the United States of America and continues to exist. We, the Alliance Board of Directors and Staff, recognize that our organization was born out of white privilege and white supremacy.”
As an aside, the Alliance of Baptists, although it has a Black president on its Board of Directors, also seems pretty darn White. Likewise, Davidson College, although it has some Black faculty members, also seems remarkably White. In June 2020, though, it gave the rote academic statement about its deep hatred for systemic racism.
In other words, every White person involved in this project claims to believe in the precepts of Critical Race Theory — namely, that all White people are racists who have gained an unfair advantage to the detriment of Blacks because systemic racism gave them toxic White privilege. Again, if the 20 or so White people involved in this million-dollar project believed what they’re saying, they would have quit their high-status, remunerative jobs and ensured that those jobs went to Black people or other minorities injured by White systemic racism.
The fact that all these people clearly revel in their jobs and have no intention of abandoning them is proof positive that they are bloviating hypocrites who don’t believe a word of the anti-White and anti-Black racial garbage they’re spouting. (In case you’re wondering, it’s also anti-Black because it demeans Blacks and other minorities by painting them as helpless victims of demonic Whites and posits that their salvation can come only from Whites.)
Some might say they don’t have the courage of their convictions. Given that not a single person has acted on his, her, or its stated beliefs, I don’t think these are convictions at all. They’re just posturing — although at great cost to America and the ideas that bind us together as a nation. As such, these people should be named, shamed, and canceled — which I hope this post has done.
