America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America

by Jim Wallis

Millions of African people were brought to America in chains, enslaved by a narrative of racial difference that was crafted to justify captivity and domination. Involuntary servitude was banned by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, but nothing was done to confront the ideology of white supremacy. Slavery didn’t end in 1865; it just evolved. Until the 1950s, thousands of black people were routinely lynched in acts of racial terror, often while many in the white community stood by and cheered. Throughout much of the twentieth century, African Americans were marginalized by racial segregation and silenced by humiliating Jim Crow laws that denied basic economic, social, and political rights.

“If white Christians acted more Christian than white, black parents would have less to fear for their children.”

When I came back to my white church with new ideas, new friends, and more questions, the response was painfully clear. An elder in my white church said to me one night, “Son, you’ve got to understand: Christianity has nothing to do with racism; that’s political, and our faith is personal.”

How we treat the poorest and most vulnerable, Jesus instructs us in that Gospel passage, is how we treat him: “Just as you did it to one of the least of these . . . you did it to me” (v. 40). My white church had missed that fundamental gospel message and, in doing so, had missed where to find the Jesus it talked so much about. My church, like so many white churches, talked about Jesus all the time, but its isolated social and racial geography kept it from really knowing him.

God is always personal, but never private. Trying to understand the public meaning of faith has been my vocation ever since. How that personal and public gospel can overcome the remaining agendas of racism in America is the subject of this book.

Believing that black experience is different from white experience is the beginning of changing white attitudes and perspectives. How can we get to real justice if white people don’t hear, understand, and, finally, believe the real-life experience of black people? Families have to listen to other families. If white children were treated in the ways that black children are, it would not be acceptable to white parents; so the mistreatment of black children must also become unacceptable to those of us who are white dads and moms.

If you don’t have any black people or other people of color in your church, it’s time to ask why. Reach out, and ask your pastor to reach out, to black and Latino churches in your community. We must find safe and authentic ways to hear one another’s stories across the racial boundaries that insulate and separate us from others.

White people need to stop talking so much—stop defending the systems that protect and serve us and stop saying, “I’m not a racist.” If white people turn a blind eye to systems that are racially biased, we can’t be absolved from the sin of racism.

Our Christian faith stands fundamentally opposed to racism in all its forms, which contradict the good news of the gospel. The ultimate answer to the question of race is our identity as children of God, which we so easily forget applies to all of us. And the political and economic problems of race are ultimately rooted in a theological problem. The churches have too often “baptized” us into our racial divisions, instead of understanding how our authentic baptism unites us above and beyond our racial identities.

I believe that most police are good cops, but it would take more than a few “bad apples” to produce all the stories that almost every black person in America has about their experience with the police. Those stories are about a system, a culture, old structures and habits, and continuing racial prejudice, and how the universal but complex relationship between poverty and crime is made worse by racism.

Racial profiling is a sin in the eyes of God, as we will later explore theologically. It should also be a crime in the eyes of our society and reflected in the laws we enact to protect one another and our common good.

the heart of the difference is that many white Americans tend to see unfortunate incidents based on individual circumstances, while most black Americans see systems in which their black lives matter less than white lives.

Conservative white Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore said this in the wake of Ferguson: In the public arena, we ought to recognize that it is empirically true that African-American men are more likely, by virtually every measure, to be arrested, sentenced, executed, or murdered than their white peers. We cannot shrug that off with apathy. Working toward justice in this arena will mean consciences that are sensitive to the problem. But how can we get there when white people do not face the same experiences as do black people?34

A government that can choke a man to death on video for selling cigarettes is not a government living up to a biblical definition of justice or any recognizable definition of justice. . . . It’s time for us in Christian churches to not just talk about the gospel but live out the gospel by tearing down these dividing walls not only by learning and listening to one another but also by standing up and speaking out for one another.35

Let me add a personal conclusion to my white brothers and sisters: you can’t continue to say you are not racist when you continue to accept and support systems that are. It’s time for white people to take responsibility for our acceptance of racist systems.

“The United States of America was established as a white society, founded upon the near genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another.”

Second, and perhaps even more unconscious to white people, is the white privilege that has come from our nation’s history. Whether we or our families or our ancestors had anything to do with the racial sins of America’s establishment, all white people have benefited from them. No matter who you are, where you live, how you have acted—and even if you have fought hard against racism—you can never escape white privilege in America if you are white.

So here is the truth: most white people—the vast majority in both the South and the North, including our “founding fathers”—accepted slavery. Most white people, white Christians, and white churches tolerated slavery in North America for 246 years, from 1619 to 1865.4 This historically horrendous evil existed because we tolerated it. That’s why evil always continues to exist: because we tolerate it.

Would we tolerate completely dysfunctional urban schools if they were full of young white children? Would we tolerate racialized policing if it were being done to white children? And would we tolerate deliberate political efforts to diminish the votes of minority communities if it were happening to whites?

Native Americans suffered near extinction as a result of the European “discovery” of their lands. Before European contact in 1492, an estimated 5 million people lived in what is now the continental United States.6 By 1900, 95 percent of the precontact population had been wiped out by European-borne diseases, war, forced relocation, forced labor, dietary changes, and other causes related to European colonialism.7 The Europeans who colonized North America and their descendants also waged cultural genocide against the Native Americans over the next five centuries, attempting to force Native peoples to adopt a “civilized” lifestyle, which included Western Christianity.

We should not tolerate the fact that five hundred years after the arrival of Europeans, the institutions of our society—economic, political, and cultural—continue to disadvantage, marginalize, and trivialize the lives and images of Native people.

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. Costly grace is . . . the call of Jesus Christ at which the disciple leaves his nets and follows him. Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

There is really no such thing as a white race in Europe, which is very much a mixture of cultures and shades of skin colors. But all became white when they arrived in America, taking on not only a new national identity but also a new white cultural identity. Indeed, being “white” meant being part of the “white race,” which in reality was merely a social and political construction, created to supply the ideology and justification for slavery and racial oppression. Because if you were “white” in America, that meant that you were not “black” or “brown” or “yellow.” You were not African, Latino, or Asian. You and all the other European cultures were “white” and therefore different and better than all the people of “color” who would also be found in America.

But given the English (and later American) ideals and rhetoric about human rights, equality, freedom, and democracy, slavery had to be justified by making the slaves less “human.” The ideology of white supremacy, of course, was economically motivated—slavery was enormously profitable—but it had to be philosophically and religiously tied to false ideas of white superiority and black inferiority. To put it most bluntly, racial ideologies had to be created to cover up greed. It was always a myth and an exceptionally cruel and brutal one to deny a group of people their human identity, their worth, their family integrity, and ultimately their standing before God.

By 1877,