Last Updated Nov 20th, 2019 at 3:57 pm

It simply must be exhausting – waking up every day under the burden of grievance, bound by some self-inflicted expectation to find something, anything, to be offended by, victimized by, wronged by; willfully attaching to yourself the manmade shackles of seeing every person, every situation, every encounter you have through the prism of skin color.

This obstinate, almost perverse obsession with race has predictably resulted in the counterproductive effect of undermining the grim nature of real racism. How serious can sober minds be expected to take accusations of racism when they are subjected to the relentless attribution of racist motives every time they turn around?

And when it comes to this “boy who cried racism” epidemic, it’s often woke theologians like Twitter instigator Kyle James Howard are sadly among the most notorious. It was Howard who once criticized southern seminaries for “othering” people like himself by allowing the proliferation of “confederate style beards.” He later deleted that comment not because he was sorry for making up something needlessly divisive, but because his thoughts were “too complex” for the rest of us to understand.

We’ve all gotten used to the “I’m sorry you were offended” non-apology these days, but here Howard introduces one even better: the “I’m sorry you were too dumb to understand what I meant” non-apology. Figuring out a way to actually insult someone while apologizing to them is the mark of true genius.

And no doubt his flare for the complex and my inability to understand it is likely the source of my problem with Kyle’s most recent grievance-mongering tweet – this one focused on the homeschooling movement in America:

My wife and I do not homeschool, so this accusation doesn’t grate on me personally. It annoys me as a student and teacher of history, however, because it’s just so preposterously false.

To be fair to Howard, it’s important to note that he isn’t saying that homeschooling itself is inherently racist. Nor is he arguing that homeschool families are racists (Kyle says he and his wife homeschool their children). No, this is Howard advancing the narrative that the rise of homeschooling – its origin – is rooted in racism.

Except, it’s not.

Writing on the history of the homeschool movement, Autumn Burke wrote a well-documented piece recently where she explained,

Homeschooling dates back to the 1960’s with a counter-culture movement that soon fizzled out. The movement was rekindled in the 1970’s after the Supreme Court upheld the decision that removing school prayer was not unconstitutional. This decision sparked the Christian movement to homeschool although, at the time, it was illegal in 45 states.

The homeschool movement was always about resistance to a cultural and religious indoctrination taking place in the governments school system. If you want to know why homeschooling is so big, look no further than the “our genitals actually don’t determine our gender, some people born with vulvas can be boys,” nonsense that defines its curriculum. So what is Howard doing here?

What bothers me about this kind of thing is that the claim is so demonstrably wrong and so easily disproven that I struggle to assign any motive to Howard beyond a naked effort to stoke division. Even still, I’m left asking, “Why?”

Why would someone, in the name of fighting racism, actually perpetuate it by loudly and repeatedly claiming that plainly inoffensive things are racist, thereby inoculating everyone within earshot against real racism?

Why would a professed preacher of the Gospel of Christ, entrusted with what Scripture calls the “ministry of reconciliation”, intentionally seek to invent an issue that provokes and engenders frustration, angst, and discord among his fellow citizens?

Oddly enough, perhaps Howard himself answered that question in a separate tweet recently:

Yes, they will. And Kyle Howard does a lot of lashing. So do many of these woke-scolds. From condemning facial hair to decrying teaching your kids to add in the privacy of your own home, their conduct should serve as a stark reminder that perhaps one of the most prevalent idols among us is race.

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