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

by Jim Wallis

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.

The Confederate flag had been raised above the South Carolina statehouse in 1962—in direct defiance of racial integration and the civil rights movement3—and has been used as an emblem of white hate and violence against black people ever since. It is therefore an anti-Christian flag that helped inspire the murder of black Christians on June 17, 2015.

But no matter where you go as a white person in American society, no matter where you live, no matter who your friends and allies are, and no matter what you do to help overcome racism, you can never escape white privilege in America if you are white.

As I have talked with black friends about this book, especially with black parents, the line that has elicited the most response is this one: “If white Christians acted more Christian than white, black parents would have less to fear for their children.”

The story about race that was embedded into America at the founding of our nation was a lie; it is time to change that story and discover a new one.

I have always learned the most about the world by going to places I was never supposed to be and being with people I was never supposed to meet.

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.

As Nicholas Kristof wrote, “The greatest problem is not with flat-out white racists, but rather with the far larger number of Americans who believe intellectually in racial equality but are quietly oblivious to injustice around them. Too many whites unquestioningly accept a system that disproportionately punishes blacks. . . . We are not racists, but we accept a system that acts in racist ways.”

The most controversial sentence I ever wrote was not about abortion, gay marriage, the wars in Vietnam or Iraq, elections, or anything to do with national or church politics. It was a statement about the founding of the United States. Here’s the sentence: “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.”

Racism is rooted in sin—or evil, as nonreligious people might prefer—which goes deeper than politics, pointing fingers, partisan maneuvers, blaming, or name calling. We can get to a better place only if we go to that morally deeper place. There will be no superficial or merely political overcoming of our racial sins—that will take a spiritual and moral transformation as well. Sin must be named, exposed, and understood before it can be repented of.

Prejudice may indeed be a universal human sin that all races can exhibit, but racism is more than an inevitable consequence of human nature or social accident. Rather, racism is a system of oppression for social and economic purposes. As many analysts have suggested, racism is prejudice plus power.

The heart of racism was and is economic, though its roots and results are also deeply cultural, psychological, sexual, religious, and, of course, political. Due to 246 years of brutal slavery and an additional 100 years of legal segregation and discrimination, no area of the relationship between black and white people in the United States is free from the legacy of racism.

Whiteness is not just an ideology; it is also an idol. For people of faith, this is not just a political issue but a religious one as well. Idols separate us from God, and the idolatry of “whiteness” has separated white people from God. It gives us an identity that is false, one filled with wrongful pride, one that perpetuates both injustice and oppression. Whiteness is an idol of lies, arrogance, and violence. This idol blinds us to our true identity as the children of God, because, of course, God’s children are of every color that God has made them to be. To believe otherwise is to separate ourselves from God and the majority of God’s children on this planet who are people of color.

For people of faith and conscience, these issues about implicit racial bias and the realities of white privilege in our society are not just political matters; they are moral and religious questions.

White privilege is a sin of which we must repent, and the best way to show that is by changing practices and policies—and by helping to create new communities that provide for another way.

In one of his most famous quotations, King sadly said, “I am [ashamed] and appalled that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in Christian America.”

The sociology of many white communities shapes the theology of their churches, making them “conformed to the world” and disobedient to the gospel.

The white pastors who opposed the civil rights movement, and even those who ignored it, were indeed disobeying Paul’s theological proclamation that, in Christ, there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female; but all are one in Christ Jesus.

America’s successful future depends upon honest cultural exchanges between different racial communities. We need focused, honest, serious, and disciplined conversations on race between white people and people of color. And people on all sides need to find the freedom and safe space to share their very different experiences, to voice both their fears and their hopes.

The young man on the panel of urban kids asked for the right thing: “Just do what you do best, and throw that in here!” Just offer what you have. And that is the right question to ask in every neighborhood with the problems we have examined in this book. What do you have to offer and how can you offer it? That is an “altar call” for all of us.