Tag Archives: American South

An African American Theologian Addresses Racism in Christianity

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I’ve often cited Fr. Richard Rohr in my blogging.  He has been an important figure in my spiritual life for over ten years; and, having moved to New Mexico five years ago I have even had the honor of meeting him at his headquarters in Albuquerque.  In his daily posts that I receive via email, he has introduced me this week to an African American theologian that I had not heard of before, Howard Thurman. Thurman lived through the horrendous racial turmoil of the 20th century in my country, passing away in 1981.

In the excerpts Rohr has shared this week, I have become painfully aware of just how racism has haunted my life and how it has predicated my life in a very subtle fashion.  Racism shaped my emotional/spiritual life when I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s in the American South.  It cemented into my heart and soul an “us-them” paradigm that I will never totally escape…though “awareness” is helping me mitigate its abysmal ugliness. The Thurman excerpt today helped me to see so clearly how racism was egregiously present in the spiritual tradition that I was born into, a spiritual tradition which nevertheless even today provides an Anchor in my life as I venture into the phase of life so beautifully captured by W. B. Yeats, “An aged man is a paltry thing.  A tattered coat upon a stick.”  (Though there is no “cane” in my life yet, and my coat is not “tattered”, I am living in the frailty of aging that Yeats had in mind.)

This vulnerability is priceless.  It helps me to learn from the daily emails…and the books…of Fr. Rohr and to appreciate the wisdom of “unknown” figures like Thurman. This Thurman wisdom offered today speaks volumes about my Christian tradition, pointing out the sinister manner in which innocent-minded and very good people can use the teachings of Jesus to bring a distorted version of Christianity into the world.  And, of course, when one is so ensconced in a distorted view of any dimension of life, there is a deep-seated aversion for considering that “distortion” might be present.  The ego wants it that way.

Here is Thurman’s wisdom from today’s Rohr email:

The burden of being black and the burden of being white is so heavy that it is rare in our society to experience oneself as a human being. It may be, I do not know, that to experience oneself as a human being is one with experiencing one’s fellows as human beings. Precisely what does it mean to experience oneself as a human being? In the first place, it means that the individual must have a sense of kinship to life that transcends and goes beyond the immediate kinship of family or the organic kinship that binds him ethnically or “racially” or nationally. He has to feel that he belongs to his total environment. He has a sense of being an essential part of the structural relationship that exists between him and all other men, and between him, all other men, and the total external environment. As a human being, then, he belongs to life and the whole kingdom of life that includes all that lives and perhaps, also, all that has ever lived. In other words, he sees himself as a part of a continuing, breathing, living existence. To be a human being, then, is to be essentially alive in a living world. . . .

If being Christian does not demand that all Christians love each other and thereby become deeply engaged in experiencing themselves as human beings, it would seem futile to expect that Christians as Christians would be concerned about the secular community in its gross practices of prejudice and discrimination. If a black Christian and white Christian, in encounter, cannot reach out to each other in mutual realization because of that which they are experiencing in common, then there should be no surprise that the Christian institution has been powerless in the presence of the color bar in society. Rather it has reflected the presence of the color bar within its own institutional life.

On the other hand, if Christians practice brotherhood among Christians, this would be one limited step in the direction of a new order among men. Think of what this would mean. Wherever one Christian met or dealt with another Christian, there would be a socially redemptive encounter. They would be like the Gulf Stream or the Japanese Current tempering and softening the climate in all directions. Indeed the Christian would be a leaven at all levels of the community and in public and private living. Of course, such a situation may lend itself to all kinds of exploitation and betrayals—but the Christian would be one of the bulwarks of integrity in human relations in an immoral society.

 

 

Ta-Nehesi Coates: “Thinking They are White”

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Ta-nehesi Coates’s book on racism was one of the most provocative books I read last year. Mr. Coates grew up an impoverished black child in Baltimore, Maryland, managed to escape with an education, and wrote this very revealing book about what it is like to grow up under the tyranny of racism in ’70’s and 80’s America.  One line that really grabbed me a class of people who learned to “think they are white” and the power that comes with that understanding.  For, being white in America did carry, and still does to a large degree, implicit assumptions of power, i.e. prerogative.  Growing up a poor white boy in Arkansas I clearly remember discovering early the “black-white” distinction in my culture, the blacks being known, of course, as “N…….s” and viewed with great scorn and contempt.  Looking back I now recall distinctly how important this was as a poor white, having a class of people who were lower on the totem pole than we were though we were very low socio-economically.  Learning to “think I was white” was one of the most important early discoveries of my life, very much a formative part of my identity the early stages of which involves drawing distinctions between self and others, including between my group and other groups.

But Mr. Coates’ observation, “thinking they are white” really cut to the quick with me, conveying to me what he had seen about the smug observations we make early in our childhood which become solid bedrock in our cognitive grasp of the world.  And with my grasp of my “whiteness” I knew that though I lacked many things, no one could take away from me my “whiteness” and with that status came the power of eating on the right side of the diner, using the nicer bathrooms, drinking at the white water fountains, and going to the better white schools.  It was nothing I thought about…consciously.  It was a given, a basic assumption, an implicit part of the template through which I viewed the world.  I had a power that many others did not have, regardless of how powerlessness I might feel otherwise in my life.

Though I have long since gone beyond this racist view of the world, I know the template is still there in the depths of my heart thought quite faint.  In the past decade as I’ve aged I have recognized faint racist imagery and thoughts creep into my consciousness, an experience which has not alarmed me because I see them for what they are.  The earliest imprints from our culture, even those “burned in” on our pre-conscious soul, never leave us.   People may vehemently deny being racist but very often their behavior and passing thoughts betray them.  For example, note the Republican Party which is quick to deny racism but has systematically and persistently sought to deny blacks the right to vote in recent years.

Racism is only the surface of a deeper problem, an intrinsic dimension of identity formulation already alluded to.  For an identity to begin to organize and to escape the matrix in which it first existed, that “blooming, buzzing, confusing world of sense experience” spoken of by William James…it must draw distinctions between it and the “other”.  Blacks in my early life, and in most of my generation, was one of the earliest “others” that we found and when we “othered” them it was done with great emotional intensity.

So racism is merely an essential part of American identity and all cultures and tribes have some similar process at the bedrock of their collective psyche.  But I’ve discoursed here only as an introduction to my next blog post, the Christian faith utilized as a contrivance for identity formulation and, devoid of maturation, serving only to “other” masses of people.