What do you think of when you hear these words?

If you have a strong reaction to these terms/concepts you are not alone. Many conservative Evangelical Christians struggle with topics like this.

Personally, until I took a course at Trinity Western University called “Culturally Responsive Communication” I was unfamiliar with the meaning of many of these terms. As someone who has grown up in rural Saskatchewan in a very homogenous area, and who reads a lot of books about culture, I reacted very negatively to many of the terms and ideas presented in this course. 

To be honest, most of the books I read and the voices I listen to online are very conservative and strongly opposed to ideas like “white privilege.” For example, I am a (nuanced) fan of Jordan Peterson, and I find people like Ben Shapiro interesting to listen to. These are thinkers who dismiss concepts like “white privilege” as Cultural Marxism. Additionally, since the racial protests and the Black Lives Matter movement took up much of the media’s attention in the summer of 2020, I was motivated to research Critical Race Theory. My early research came from voices I already agreed with–mostly Christians who dismissed it as postmodern identity politics. For these reasons and more, when I took the course at Trinity Western University, I had a really hard time engaging the content with an open-mind.

For our case study on critical thinking, I want to use some of the material from this course to model good critical thinking. After all, critical thinking is most valuable when we encounter ideas that we might may not agree with naturally.