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June 26 - June 30, 2020
As individualistic Westerners, many of us haven’t considered how our attitudes and behaviors are significantly shaped by our social environment.
Blackness is a visible marker that justifies suspicion, brutality, and confinement by white society.
The majority of white people believe that racism is a national problem rather than a problem in their own communities.
Colorblind ideology is the twenty-first-century continuation of white Christian silence to racism.
Racism isn’t first and foremost about a horizontal divide; it is a vertically structured hierarchy.
Very frequently, racial exchange solely happens under the terms and conditions of white people, which in itself is already an act of reaffirming the racialized hierarchy.
Relational, social, and geographic proximity across the racial divide does not necessarily result in the new humanity to which we are called in Christ.
most Christians tend to operate out of a naive and thin understanding of racism, which doesn’t factor in the depth and width of our racialized and hierarchical society.
When we know a little more about racism’s impact on society, we can not only bridge the divide of racial segregation but actually begin dismantling racial hierarchy.
Many refuse to think about the larger racialized patterns of society that shape individuals’ ideologies and habits.
My point is that the church’s understanding of racism is frequently too thin, narrow, and deficient for it to be antiracist in its witness. Our very instincts about what racism is tend to be unhelpful.
Certainly the tracking systems and the residential patterns alone suggest that blackness meant something in Norristown, but I rarely sensed my presence being perceived as an overt threat.
was just beginning to learn how complex racism was, and that it could be manifested very differently in various communities and regions.
People on campus who had not yet gotten to know me personally responded to me very differently from those with whom I had developed a relationship.
Black women on campus were more likely to get treated as though they were invisible, in contrast to the hypervisibility that many black males experienced.
Some of these white friends of mine would pull out the old “you are different from them” rhetoric. It was as if our friendship had no bearing on breaking their stereotypes of other black students at all.
am positioned to see how my black body was always navigating a racialized society and being interpreted by white onlookers, but in very different ways.
Reverse racism is the term developed by white dominant culture to suggest that the real problem of racism today is that white people experience prejudice and discrimination by people of color.
There is a long history, going all the way back to slavery, of white Americans not trusting black perspectives as truthful. Therefore white verification is required to confirm every black thought and testimony, because on their own they hold no weight in court or public opinion. White perception is assumed to be more accurate and objective than black perception.
Instead, it is only after looking at the reoccurring patterns, studying the whole pack, and then gathering the entire deck and putting it back in order that we claim to make sense of any individual card.
We aren’t playing the race card; we are analyzing the racialized deck.
Typically, dominant society has been consumed by a single card while most people in the African American community have been working with the entire racialized deck. And what we have always known is that the deck is stacked against us.
Although race is a lie white people invented that divides humanity into categories used to oppress nonwhite people, the concept has created tangible people groups. These groups have felt, and continue to feel, how very real all of this has become. Race is a social construct that not only shapes how we perceive particular people groups but also justifies oppressive hierarchy and European domination over nonwhite people.
We should never separate race from its ideological and political work.
So although race may indeed be socially constructed, that does not mean that racism is imaginary.
At the heart of it, racism, from this dominant cultural vantage point, is defined as “personal prejudice or hatred of someone of a different race.”
We must rid ourselves of this definition because it leaves us with nothing but subjective assessments of individual moments, in which people or incidents are rarely assumed to be racist.
racism is “a racialized systemic and structural system that organizes our society.”
Racism structures society in such a way that the white dominant group systemically advantages and overvalues its own group members while oppressing and exploiting other people.
This perspective on racism requires that people in the dominant culture have deep and wide conversations with the black community.
When we can be honest about how our entire society is deeply racialized, we will be ready to move forward.
Racial moments are the norm rather than the exception.
the scapegoating of Paula Deen is the sophisticated cultural reflex of a highly racialized society that doesn’t want to own up to how racism works systemically.
Consider this: the greatest threat to black life is not Paula Deen calling someone “nigger.” Rather, it is the white supremacy embedded into systems within our country, advantaging some people at the direct expense of others.
If you want to hold Deen accountable, then let us also hold the entire racialized system accountable for its calculated violence against black, Native, and brown life.
Our finite assumptions about God are mere projections of our own wanting.
Thurman reminded his readers that Jesus was Jewish rather than a white man, poor rather than some wealthy elite, and part of an oppressed minority living under occupation rather than one domineering over others in the sociopolitical realm.
Jesus’ entire way of life reveals him consistently clashing with the status quo establishment in such a provocative way that various powerful and well-connected people were always wanting to kill him.
What is clear from these few examples is that the life of Jesus was so subversive and radical that he repeatedly undermined and clashed with the status quo establishment.
Jesus did not affirm the existing social order.
They could not recognize that it was God manifested in Jesus. They attended synagogue and observed the torah their whole lives. Yet when God took on human flesh, somehow Jesus looked nothing like many people’s projections of the divine one.
That Christian piety and oppression could so easily coexist should be horrifying.
Unfortunately, dominant cultural reflections on God rarely adhere with the revelation of Jesus as specifically attested to in Scripture.
Jesus can help us transform how we understand and resist racism in our society.
To make any progress in understanding each other across racial lines, we in the church must begin to talk about our own socialization, which we have received from various communities.
We need to wrestle with where our opinions have been shaped.
Many dominant-culture Christians never even imagine that they might need to interrogate their own intuitive responses to racism.
dominant-group socialization is normally not as obvious.
Rather than thinking of their own lives as being shaped by a peculiar context or culture, people who constitute the majority of a society are often unconscious of these realities.
And therein lies the problem. White intuition, perception, assumptions, and experience—limited by homogeneous networks and socialized in dominant society—claim one thing, while black experience claims an alternative and diverging reality.
