I wrote here recently about the mixed-up morality of “privilege” activism so prominent on college campuses today. It’s the wrong way out of America’s race problem — which is tragic, considering it’s the best answer our country’s brightest intellectuals have been able to come up with.

There’s a reason they haven’t done better. They’re looking in the wrong place.

Working All Sides of the Problem

At least they’re working on the problem. Credit them for that. They’re addressing both of its most crucial dimensions, too. The race problem is a moral problem, meaning that it has to do with the way we treat other people; and as a moral problem it has both a past and future component. The past component is guilt: How do we deal with the feeling and the reality of having done harm? The future component is the obvious matter of how we can begin doing better from this point forward.

Proponents of on-campus “privilege” activism do try to tackle both of these components. In their view, white guilt is addressed through expressing public shame. Future race-related behavior is corrected by whites renouncing all forms of cultural appropriation, casting aside Europe’s cultural heritage, checking their privilege, and sitting appalled in astonishment at all they’ve done wrong. All of these answers are being pursued heavily on campus.

And much as I disagree with “privilege” activism, much as I consider it part of a whole package of misdirected answers, still I respect the educators for trying. They’re trying as hard as they can.

In All the Wrong Ways

Of course their efforts are doomed to fail. They’re going about it in all the wrong ways.

No generation of white college students could possibly bear the guilt of all the generations before them. It’s too huge, too heavy, and it’s only theirs by proxy. They didn’t transport, purchase, “own” (how I hate that language, but it’s what they called it) or abuse the slaves. They’re generations removed from all that. Today’s typical college student isn’t the leader or even rude classmate who makes life easier for whites than non-whites today; they’re unwilling beneficiaries of that particular privilege at best.

Students just can’t carry the guilt that needs carrying. Not even the sum of all whites alive today could carry it — even if all were willing, which is certainly never going to happen. Also not going to happen: reaching enough people on campus to solve all the country’s ongoing and future behavior problems with respect to race.

Time To Quit Pushing and Look for Another Angle

When trying harder fails, sometimes it’s wise to back up and look at a problem from another angle.

So the best answer from our brightest minds is doomed from the start. It isn’t for lack of trying. Read the reports from campus and you can feel how desperately educators want to keep trying new things, keep trying harder, keep pushing at the race problem until we can finally solve it.

But when trying harder fails, sometimes it’s wise to back up and look at a problem from another angle.

Generally speaking there are four ways to handle a problem: solve it yourself, suffer through it without a solution, hope for fate to take care of it, or let someone solve it who knows how. The four can be combined in various ways, but between them they cover the territory.

Lesson Learned: We Can’t Do It Ourselves

Pride and personal responsibility lead us to want to solve things for ourselves, but only as far as we’re able. For a crumbling home foundation we go to a contractor. For cancer we go to a specialist.

Educational leaders have been acting as if race is the sort of problem we should try to solve for ourselves. By now, however, it should be clear enough that it’s beyond us, like a crumbling foundation. It was worth trying, but it needs to be left behind as a lesson that we can’t do it ourselves.

Leaving it to fate is no option; things would fall apart. Do we just suffer through it, then? To some extent, unfortunately, we must; we have no choice. There is no instant answer that will end the problem for all people for all time.

Is There Anyone Out There Who Could Help Us?

What about the fourth possibility, though? Can we turn over at least some of the problem to someone who knows how to solve it? How great it would be if we could! But it seems completely impossible. Who on earth could we turn to?

Such a person would have to be a wiser moral theorist than all our educators and counselors, all our poets and authors. He (for the one I have in mind is indeed a he) would have to be a far more effective leader than all our professors and politicians. He would have to be more than human, yet intimately involved with human life, familiar with all its pains and challenges.

This person would have to be able to show us an answer to guilt and a way forward into love — including love for people and groups that have been hostile towards one another. He would have to have a way to reach down far enough inside the human heart to change it from the inside out.

The One Who Can

Jesus isn’t so popular on campus these days. He should be.

There is One who fits that description: Jesus Christ.

Jesus isn’t so popular on campus these days. He should be. He is the one person who has what it takes to solve the one greatest problem our universities are trying to tackle.

Part of his unpopularity among academics comes from false reports about the Christian faith: that it’s anti-scientific, foolish, proven false or otherwise beneath intellectual respectability. None of that is true, if only they knew it.

Part of it comes from Christians’ bad reputation, some of which is deserved, but nowhere near all of it. It’s all too common among academics to focus on Christianity’s weaknesses while either ignorantly or even willfully forgetting how Jesus Himself turned the world’s heart toward the oppressed, and His followers have demonstrated His compassion over and over and over again in myriad ways down through history.

And I’m quite sure part of Jesus’ unpopularity comes down to the pride that keeps us from turning our problems over to someone else to solve for us, thinking we can solve them ourselves.

Our Only Hope

We can’t. It should be obvious by now. You’d think by now the most educated people in the land would have learned that this one is beyond us all. We need to let go of our false hopes, and turn to God for His help, through prayer and through concerted study of the true and historic ways of Christ and His people: where they’ve failed, of course and  also where, yes, in very significant ways they really have succeeded.

We need to turn to Christ and His ways. Otherwise we really are without a way out of this mess.