Calls for racial justice arising for and out of the Black community have always been labeled Marxism and Socialism. North Carolina Rep. Abraham Venable in July 1848, during a debate over the Wilmot Proviso, linked abolitionism to socialism. MLK, Jr. was called a Communist. https://twitter.com/thabitianyabwil/status/1349398342401454086

2/ The political philosophy rooted in the Agrarian US South had a habit of calling anything related to abolitionism and freedom for Blacks as socialism/Marxism, which was a European political system. They could only see calls for justice that forced them to change as Marxist.

3/ But, instead of seeing freedom as an expanding concept that benefitted all, they actually saw it themselves through a Marxist construct of labor/capital, land ownership, and Master/Slave. If those they oppressed gained freedom, then they would lose power. It was zero sum.

4/ “there’s a good case to be made that the great right-wing American tradition of denouncing all opposition as “socialist” had its origins among slaveholding elites.” https://earlyamericanists.com/2014/05/13/slavery-abolition-and-socialism-in-the-u-s-congress/

5/ But, as @ThabitiAnyabwil and @JawnO have said, Black, and especially Black Christian, calls for justice, peace, freedom, reconciliation arise from a different intellectual and theological stream than the European critique against capitalism and the ruling class. But since...

6/ ...White Evangelicals shaped in the Southern Agrarian political reaction to any threat to their hegemony as deriving from Socialist/Marxist sources are only able to frame things that way, they miss the Biblical call for justice and reconciliation from fellow Christians.

7/ This has been going on for around 180 years, by the way. As the Civil War was recast through Lost Cause ideology as a fight to protect individual Liberty, personal property, and Southern White supremacy, threats to those endeavors could be assessed as socialism and godless.

8/ But, how does one honestly assess Black calls for racial justice and freedom as Marxist-Socialist when the Black church clearly roots it in the Biblical narrative and Hebrew prophets? How can White leaders consistently label this plea as godless/Marxist even when biblical?

9/ We shouldn’t ignore historic reality that most calls for justice/freedom for Blacks have been met with cries of socialism/Marxism b/c or a prevailing fear that the current social order must be dismantled and property/power confiscated and redistributed to meet the demand.

10/ But, Black Church is largely working from a different base, from a call for justice and repentance that flows from Cross of Christ that deals with suffering, sin, injustice, and provides hope and reconciliation as Jesus tears down dividing walls. It is decidedly Christian.

11/ To say that calls for racial justice/reconciliation stem from an infusion of godless ideology in Marxism and that CRT is Marxism, per se, without properly defining terms and recognizing the Black church’s justice tradition is to effectively declare the Black Church godless.

12/ But if we do that when the Black Church makes a biblical critique of injustice/oppression as they call for past/current sins to be addressed, then we must ask what god we actually serve? A history of labeling Black cries for justice as socialist should at least give us pause.