Dual Perspectives on Critical Race Theory

In July 2024, Timothy Muehlhoff interviewed Ed Uszynski regarding the role perspective-­taking played in understanding the deep differences between Christian groups and their understanding of Critical Race Theory (CRT) as he researched and wrote his book, Untangling Critical Race Theory.¹ This article is an edited transcript of the conversation. To listen to the full conversation, see the Winsome Conviction Podcast archives.² 

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TIMOTHY MUEHLOFF: Since this issue is about the lost skill of perspective-­taking, could you share how it’s come into play in your own life?

ED USZYNSKI: Perspective-­taking was essential during my American culture studies program at Bowling Green University as I worked on my PhD. I was part of a cohort of 13 people that were handpicked and from wildly diverse backgrounds. Given the makeup of the group, it was obvious I was selected as the lone white evangelical heterosexual male. I checked off all the boxes of things that the culture studies discipline tended to stand against, but I appreciated the chair of the program’s genuine desire to collect people with very different perspectives to engage each other over the hot topics happening in American society in the early 2000s.

TM: That kind of diversity of thought could have easily been a nightmare. Was it?

EU: It really wasn’t (at least not for me) but I think that’s because I purposely came to class as an explorer seeking understanding and not as an apologist defending a worldview. That meant instead of getting defensive when I felt like something was said that I didn’t believe was true, I asked the speaker to explain it more. What was the experience they had that was infusing this belief? What mental images or stories fueled their subjective perspective? And honestly, Tim, that served me amazingly well. It wasn’t just this strategy where secretly I’ve already got all the answers, and so I’m just going to do this to kind of placate you or almost patronize you so I can get you to a place where I can fix your thinking. But by employing active listening and investing energy in unpacking others’ stories, I genuinely came to realize I often didn’t have good answers for why I think the way I think, and realized there were many experiences I’d never considered.

TM: Does perspective-­taking bleed into other areas?

EU: Perspective-­taking isn’t just a survival tactic I used in grad school. I’ve learned that perspective-­taking is wise as a husband, as a father, as a friend, and as a minister of the Gospel. It’s an intentional choice to say, “Instead of investing tons of energy in seeking to be understood, I’m going to first invest energy in trying to understand.” I stopped arguing and really tried to understand why people think the way they think, and it’s been super helpful in communicating with people.

TM: What you’ve described is a humble approach to people with diverse and even threatening views. Do you think intellectual humility is a prerequisite for perspective-­taking?

EU: Absolutely. I think it’s almost impossible to truly understand someone else’s perspective if I’m not willing to at least temporarily step away from my own, which means admitting I don’t have a corner on the supreme way to view the world. It even necessitates recognizing that I didn’t just come to my conclusions objectively on my own in some pure kind of way. In other words, I’ve been shaped by certain cultural forces, certain experiences, certain exposures that have led me to the conclusions that I’ve come to. As a Christian, I do believe in objective truth in the sense that God sets the parameters of reality and sets moral markers within those parameters, but from a purely human perspective, my own brokenness leads me to view the idea of “objectivity” much more humbly.

TM: A key part of perspective-­taking is understanding how experiences shape another and to step into those experiences at some level.

EU: These experiences go way down deep in our soul. We don’t even realize that they’re there or consciously consider how they affect the way we see, the way we talk, the way we walk. Then we tend to surround ourselves with others who are just like us! If given the choice, most people spend their time with people who are very similar in the way they were shaped, the way they were formed, the way they think about the world. It’s somewhat ironic that in a time where we’ve actually got access to the possibility of being exposed to an almost infinite number of different realities, we tend to hunker down and stay with those who are most comfortably like us in the most formative years of our life. Then when we’re in our 20s and our 30s, we find and do life with the same type of people and the parameters they set hinder our ability to see outside our circle. Intentional perspective-­taking pulls us out of our own subjective world to try both experiencing and understanding other’s perspectives—especially with those whom we disagree!

TM: That is a good transition to your book on one of the most controversial topics of our time: CRT. Before we dive into how differing groups within the church view this theory, might you give us a short synopsis of it?

EU: [laughter] Sure. But know this is impossibly short and leaves a lot out.

Critical Race Theory in its purest form is a discipline that examines how legal policies, patterns, practices continue to adversely affect African Americans and other non-­dominant culture groups, offering distinctly racial counter-­theories for why inequality persists. It began in the 1970s when a group of legal scholars sought to counter a popular narrative about race that was circulating. The narrative, in essence, was that we had entered a post-­racial age. Thus, race was no longer a meaningful lens through which to analyze problems in society. After all the civil rights bills were passed in the 1960s, everybody wanted to say, “We should be in a better place now. Everything that’s gone on the last couple of centuries is in our past. It’s in the rearview window. Let’s stop blaming racism for social outcomes.” Again, I’m oversimplifying, but it was a strong cultural narrative. Academics, particularly in the legal world, generated theories that refuted this idea of a post-­racial age. They said, “We want to offer a counter-­narrative that takes seriously the role that racial power (both past and present) actually plays in establishing and maintaining inequality.”

TM: How did these scholars start to generate this counter-­narrative?

EU: They gathered at conferences and wrote papers exploring how systems and processes had become so normal that we don’t even think twice about their racial effects. So, while one group of people is saying, we don’t see overt racism anymore, these theoreticians said, racism has gone underground, and we need to look at how it’s embedded in all the different social strata that we have in front of us.³ And they set out to analyze how racial power continues to work and continues to produce inequality and hold sway over people’s minds and imaginations in ways that they just don’t think about. They wouldn’t say it this way, but they were essentially coming up with theories to describe how racial sin continues to manifest itself in post-­civil rights society. So, that started in the 1970s, which was how long ago now? 50 years?

TM: That’s helpful to understand the primary concerns about the originators of CRT.

EU: That leaves a lot out, of course, but I think what I said represents the essence of what the founders of CRT sought to do.

TM: I’d like for you to engage in a perspective-­taking exercise around this topic. Let’s take a concept like systemic racism and give us how different Christian groups might explain it.

EU: First, let’s address two segments of the Christian community I interviewed for my book. One group we’ll broadly label conservatism with a capital C and the other, progressivism with a capital P.

TM: Good. How might each group approach a potentially explosive idea like systemic racism?

EU: I’ll start with the more Conservative view. For this group, there’s nothing even really to talk about. There’s no grand systemic conspiracy to maintain a racial hierarchy or use law to subjugate people. It all comes down to individual choices that either reflect responsible living, or they don’t. That’s not to say that there’s no sin in the structures somewhere that may come out in different ways at different times, even with some racial implication, they’ll grant that, but you can’t talk about there being something systemic where it’s just woven all the way through and it’s always a factor in every situation. That’s just a ridiculous notion. There’s always a multiplicity of reasons why outcomes come out the way they do and to make race the primary or only one is just a non-­starter for me. Frankly, I experienced some version of this Conservative perspective most consistently in my conversations with church people.

TM: Now, give me a capital P perspective.

EU: This group puts more emphasis on systems and structures. There’s always patterns, policies, and procedures that continue to maintain racial division, inequality, and hierarchical advantage. And just think about those three P words: patterns, policies, and procedures. These are factors that have become so normal that you don’t think twice about them, yet they were set in motion oftentimes 50 years ago or longer in some institutions.

For example, when it comes to the way loans are given out, what happens in our schools, what happens in the criminal justice system, the way jobs are given to people, the way people get advanced into leadership or not, these people point to racially infected patterns, policies, and procedures hardwired into social systems that continue to work in the favor of those who are fairer skinned, and work against those who are darker skinned. They take seriously the ongoing consequences and results that spill over from racist historical policies like “redlining” or grandfathered neighborhood restrictions.

They pay attention to people who’ve been affected by not having the same educational quality in neighborhoods ravaged by racial history. People affected in early adulthood by whom they were given access to, start-­up money they were being given access to, whether there was inheritance money that was able to be passed down, oftentimes as a result of political realities in the twentieth century. There’s always a systemic thread that’s racial in nature that if we look hard enough—and sometimes don’t have to look very hard at all—is sitting right there in front of us. Why can’t we talk about it?

TM: Let’s move from concepts to how real people attempt to navigate race and how perspective-­taking might help us to understand their choices. Months after George Floyd was killed, Christian author Max Lucado got on his knees in front of a group of thousands at a multi-­ethnic church in San Antonio and prayed the following. “I am sorry that I have been silent. I am sorry that my head has been buried in the sand. My brothers and sisters are hurting, and I am sorry I made them feel less than. I did not hear. I did not see, I did not understand.”

In your book you draw attention to how this act by a white conservative Christian received wildly different responses. One black pastor said, “Never in my life have I ever seen a white person say to me that ‘I’m sorry.’” However, others responded such as a popular podcaster, [that] Max Lucado bows to the woke mob. Okay, so when we have a situation like that, first, what I love about your book about critical race theory is how you really do perspective-taking with different groups and why CRT evokes such powerful emotions.

What might it look like to take on the perspective of each of these individuals?

EU: There are three different perspectives represented here. And I’ll just say this, I don’t know any of these people. I’ve not talked directly to any of them. I can respond based on what I thought when I first read about this story.

TM: Fair enough. Most times perspective-­taking involves people we’ve never met. Let’s start with Lucado’s apology.

EU: He seems to be genuinely confessing his own experience as a pastor. And I say that because a lot of times these confessions, they can sound like a public relations firm made it and they can just sort of be slapped on, almost like it was something coerced or something that they felt like they had to do because it was trendy. But when I first read this, I got the sense that Max Lucado had a bit of a breakthrough. Now again, think of the setting. He’s at a prayer meeting with a ton of people, black and white.

His apology is on the heels of this very incendiary and horrible death at the hands of police that happened in Minneapolis. Emotions are already high. There’s lots of reflection that’s going on in all directions. And Max Lucado is either doing this for one of two reasons in my opinion. One reason may have been that he was struck by his own lack of concern. I think many of us, maybe most of us can get on that train at any point in time about any number of people when we’re suddenly surrounded with that group of people. If I was suddenly surrounded with Israelis or surrounded with Palestinians and I heard their own stories of what their experience has been in the midst of suffering, it would be very right I think for me to acknowledge I’ve not cared much about their situation.

I think that’s maybe what was happening with Max Lucado.

The other reason he might be doing it is that he recognizes his value as a proxy. And again, I’m not saying that it was disingenuous, but he realizes that he’s representative of white authority in evangelicalism. And in general, the narrative about us—and I’ll say “us” because I’m a part of that segment of evangelicalism—has been negligence. It’s been betrayal, it’s been not stepping up when these moments have happened in society. It’s been very easy for us just to go about our church business, to go about our parachurch work, and not feel anything with our brothers and sisters that have been affected by it, specifically our brothers and sisters of color that have been affected by these racially traumatic moments. So he recognizes the proxy value of him standing in on behalf of a group of people, and at least for this moment, he is confessing a heart that has been cold towards all of it. So that’s one perspective.

TM: Lucado’s apology did not sit well with everyone. Let’s move on to a podcaster who had a very different reaction and felt that Lucado had bowed down to, using his words, “a woke mob.”

EU: There was this feeling then, and I think the feeling is still here now, but it was especially intense five years ago when all this racial unrest was happening that white people are being forced to change. There’s something wrong with me—as a white person—that needs to be fixed. First, I don’t ever like to have to face that, whether it’s true or not. I don’t like that it’s even being suggested. It’s one thing to have people that you trust in your inner circle to confront you about something that needs to be changed. Now, strangers who don’t know me at all are demanding I change. There’s this feeling that there is some type of progressive agenda being not so subtly advanced by politicians, academics, and activists that are trying to force me to become something I don’t want to become. They’re trying to force me to believe things I don’t believe and blaming me for things I haven’t done. So, any hint of a white person who looks or sounds like he or she is being coerced or almost forced under mob pressure to confess, is repulsive to me and I feel like I need to stand against that. I need to shut that down wherever I see it happening, because it affects me. If nothing else, when are they going to come for me and make me bow down in front of the group and offer a forced apology?

To be fair, I don’t know what exactly is going on with this particular podcaster, but it’s my best guess of where he may be coming from.

TM: That brings up a crucial part of perspective-­taking. After I offer my best interpretation of a person’s view or conviction, I engage in what communication scholars call, perception-­checking where I present my interpretation for a person to comment on and even push back.

EU: What an important part of the process. It would be interesting to present my take to both Lucado and this podcaster to get their response. As we discussed earlier, if I choose to stay humble and not assert my view as being absolutely correct, then the conversation can continue in positive ways.

TM: Let’s move on to the black pastor and his reaction.

EU: His reaction to Lucado’s apology is to say, “Never in my life have I seen a white person say to me that, ‘I’m sorry.’” So he’s going even beyond a white Christian or a white pastor. He’s saying he’s never had the experience of a white person humbling themselves, and uttering the words, “I am sorry.” And again, that’s somewhat revealing on its own. We don’t need to try to attach anything else to it. This is a grown man who’s in ministry, who’s a leader in the community, and he’s just sharing his perspective. He’s being transparent. “It moved me to see a white man actually say, ‘I’m sorry.’”

This is where perspective-­taking is so powerful and requires I ask questions. I would love to follow up with him: What have you seen across your life? What has your experience been with white folks in general? Has it been any different for you in the church? I think that one sentence is just so full of deeper conversation: I’ve never in my life had a white person say to me that I’m sorry.

TM: A Stanford communication theorist—Anna Deavere Smith—calls those kinds of statements poetic moments where a person’s pain comes to the surface.

EU: The key for me, regardless of where you come down on CRT or race in general, is what do you do when a poetic moment materializes? Do I immediately push back, or do I say: Tell me more about that?

My guess is that he has seen a lot of defensiveness, that he’s seen a lot of paternalism, that he has seen a lot of white people try to explain away his pain or his experience or his account of George Floyd’s murder or whatever. Perhaps, he’s only interacted with white politicians and other white ministry leaders who felt like they had all the answers and no questions. But, that’s just my guess.

TM: You make an interesting comment in your book about what we don’t need. “Our response to these disagreements can’t be more hysteria. We don’t need more simplistic soundbites.” If that’s what we don’t need, give me your quick take on what do we need in today’s discussion of CRT or issues of race?

EU: We need to ask more questions. We need to stop knee-­jerk reacting to triggering words or phrases like white privilege, systemic racism, or white fragility. It might help to ask ourselves, “What in my own belief system or experience causes that to trigger me so intensely?” Such a self-­reflective move, I think, would be very helpful for all of us to slow down long enough to ask about the source of what’s happening inside me.

TM: After a moment of self-­reflection, what might come next?

EU: After self-­reflection, we then seek to engage the perspective of those who might view words or phrases in a different way. When you hear white privilege, what does that word mean to you? Tell me the story that has brought you to this point. And people always have one. People always have an example. It’s usually going to take us back into their home somewhere, their upbringing, somewhere their extended family has shaped it. But it also might be something that happened just last week. There’s been some very negative things that’s happened which has marked them and set them off in a certain direction for why they think the way they think about this person or this group of people or this idea.

And as I said at the very beginning, I just need to do a better job of seeking understanding. My curiosity or perspective-­taking doesn’t mean then that I can’t ever push into someone’s perspective or raise questions about it or challenge somebody to consider thinking differently. But way before I do that, I need to do the work of asking a lot of questions to understand how they got there.

1. Ed Uszynski, Untangling Critical Race Theory: What Christians Need to Know and Why It Matters (InterVarsity, 2024).
2. Timothy Muehlhoff, host, Winsome Conviction, podcast, episode 128, “Perspective-­Taking with Critical Race Theory,” Biola University, August 4, 2025, https://www.biola​.edu/​blogs/winsome-­conviction/2025/episode-­128​-­perspective-­taking-­with-­critical​-­race-­theory.
3. See Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, eds. Kimberle W. Crenshaw, Neil T. Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (The New Press, 1995); Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, eds. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Temple University Press, 2013); Crossroads, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory, eds. Francisco Valdes, Jerome McCristal Culp, and Angela P. Harris (Temple University Press, 2002).