Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

by Drew G. I. Hart

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.

Whether white, black, Native American, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, or Asian, we all get caught up in the currents of our white-dominated society and internalize its messages. Each of us must turn to the good news for a more hope-filled present and future. Given the racial history of the church in America, which has unfortunately often been at the center of the problem, few have considered the subversive life of Jesus as the way out of our racialized and hierarchical society.

Churches have often been the least helpful place to discuss racism and our white-dominated society.

Churches operating out of dominant cultural intuitions, perceptions, assumptions, and experiences define the problem one way, while most black people and other oppressed groups bear witness to an alternative and diverging reality. This epistemological divide concerning racism—that is, the different ways of knowing and understanding life—is an even greater gap within the church than it is among the rest of society.

White Christians, especially, seem incapable of recognizing the contradictions of their utopian language and their distinctly and deeply racialized lifestyles and daily choices. Colorblind rhetoric prevents people from evaluating the majority of their social relationships, the places they feel they either belong or do not belong, and the kinds of cultural, intellectual, and artistic influences that are worthy of engagement. With such contradictions, I can only assume that it is not color that they are not seeing; rather, it is racism that is being missed.

Colorblind ideology is the twenty-first-century continuation of white Christian silence to racism.

The church urgently needs to understand the realities of racism better than it has previously. Christians must do a better job of thinking, analyzing, discussing, and ultimately transforming our racialized lives into antiracist and antihierarchical ways of life that conform to the way of Jesus. We must learn to see and understand the racism all around us so that we can faithfully resist being complicit in its patterns. Once we are able to see it, we must engage in initiatives of deep metanoia, or repentance—initiatives that change us from racialized accommodation to resistance.

Immersion in and understanding of the black community have never been routinely expected or necessary for employees, politicians, scholars, doctors, teachers, or pastors. This is even more so the case for most white Christian communities, which willfully ignore the diverse gifts of the black church tradition. Black faith and tradition are rarely looked to as worthy sources for learning about how to practice spiritual disciplines, embody daily discipleship, and share in Christian community.

Racism isn’t first and foremost about a horizontal divide; it is a vertically structured hierarchy.

Loving black people has never been normative in America.

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.

Hopefully, through a renewed commitment to following Jesus and by pulling back the curtain on racial power dynamics in society, we can transform not only what we know about racism but also how to resist it every day. 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.

The church must confront its popular definition of racism, which has historically never implicated the white majority by its framing of the problem. Many think that racism is only about KKK-like behavior, or about doing or saying things that were common for white people in the mid-twentieth century.

Many white people assume racism is only about individual racial prejudice and hatred, and therefore they are always on the lookout for the “bad racists” to scapegoat. Many refuse to think about the larger racialized patterns of society that shape individuals’ ideologies and habits. Others assume racism today is just the residue left over from slavery; in their minds, when the older generations die off, we will naturally transition into a post-racial society. These same people have rarely considered the ways that young white people in the twenty-first century continue to make daily choices that advantage them, structurally and systematically, over people who are not white.

Through struggling to make sense of my body’s constant reinterpretation by a white gaze, I learned that race always means something in our society.

The accusation that I am playing the race card rarely comes from people who have patiently dialogued with me. Rather, it comes from people who, right from the beginning of the conversation, dismiss my perspective rather than considering whether my views might help them enhance their own.

Merely speaking about a particular incident and mentioning racism often results in the accusation of playing this mythical card. This criticism—that one is “playing the race card”—is impulsively used over and over to stigmatize those who disagree with the myth that America is now a colorblind, post-racial nation. This is a script that even white Christians seem to have learned and rehearsed.

White and black Christians seem to find racism at very different moments and believe it to flow in very different directions.

America to talk extensively about reverse racism. 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. According to this framing, white men have it the hardest right now in our society. Despite the fact that white men are overrepresented and predominant in the state, economic, religious, political, and media sectors, within the reverse racism framework, they are the true victims in the American story.

African Americans, having experienced hundreds of years of racialized oppression as a community, often look at particular incidents in particular ways. Through the lens of their experiences, they recognize the continuity of systemic oppression, which has merely mutated shape and form, and along the way their analysis often becomes rather sophisticated and structural in nature. In this way, they say that a particular situation is racist and needs to be addressed.

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.

The white dominant standard of racial discernment rarely finds white racism, while simultaneously deciding that the specific card played was falsely made into a “race card.”An individual moment, event, or action is judged by looking for KKK rhetoric, or maybe the N-word, or some cross burning in the yard. If such overt hate crimes prominent in the early and mid-twentieth century are not currently present or visible, then the racial component of the complaint is quickly dismissed.

Our definition of racism is not based on a definition that dominant society both has created and continues to wield to deny any wrongdoing. No, we refuse to “play their game,” even if we work with their cards. 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.

Race and racism are commonly misunderstood terms. Despite its common usage, race is not a natural biological category for human beings, though physical features certainly create boundaries of difference. The language of race obscures rather than clarifies human similarity and difference. It is smoke and mirrors. Instead of being a biological fact, race is a social construct. Racial categories are not inevitable; they were created—and not very long ago, given the length of human history. And while human prejudice between competing people groups is ancient in practice, race and racism are not.

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. The global practices of European domination, colonization, and conquest in the Americas and Africa in the sixteenth century required ideological justification. Otherwise, such brutal and inhumane practices against indigenous communities would undermine Anglo-Saxon Protestants’ image of themselves as an innocent Christian nation. Drawing from an older, preexisting myth of Anglo-Saxon superiority, white supremacy and racism constructed a white-dominated understanding of the world rooted in racial hierarchy.

how it has structured society and human relations. The dictionary definition of racism is usually insufficient. It is the common, taken-for-granted, dominant cultural definition. It is solely based on how the white majority and dominant culture define and discuss race and racism. Some fail to realize that the dictionary operates like a mirror, merely reflecting how we already commonly use language. The dictionary’s definition of a particular term does not mean it is the most insightful use of a term; it is just a commonly understood way of using it.

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.” Of course, such an intention-based definition is extremely hard to prove. How can you prove what someone believes deep down, on the individual level?

There is another definition of racism, however, and it comes from the sociology department rather than English dictionaries. Specifically, in a field of study called critical race theory, racism is explored and analyzed as a social phenomenon. Critical race theory asks a particular set of questions: What is the meaning of race in a society? How is society organized by race? What are the origins of racism, and how does it operate in and affect our daily lives?

In this view, 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. All of this seems justified because of the dehumanizing categories and ideologies designed to make an “other” out of nonwhite people and because of the “legitimate” and “official” channels through which policy is enforced.

With a sociological framework, we can begin to see that the average white person lives a highly racialized life, though he or she is often unaware of it. Patterns of self-segregation become clear. One lives mostly among those of the same race. The same thing goes for one’s church, intimate relational networks, phone contacts, and guests at the dinner table. You can even see the racial distinctiveness of most people’s bookshelves, social media contacts, and music. Through these social patterns, sociologists are able to reveal high levels of self-segregation among white Americans (more so, on average, than among black Americans).

This perspective on racism requires that people in the dominant culture have deep and wide conversations with the black community. Typically, many white people search for the one black person who holds the same positions and perspectives as they do, and then prop that person up as verification of their own beliefs. Taking a riskier and more teachable posture—allowing an entire community to speak into their lives—would ultimately result in changing their operating definitions. White people must learn to define individual incidents in light of the larger pattern of society.

To resist naming our racialized society is to create an unfair game in which players, according to these rules, must never try to connect the dots between widespread patterns and individual events. Of course, in the community of truth and grace, we resist any denial of historical and contemporary systemic oppressions in society. We take the time to understand the experiences of communities living on the underside of our society.

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. It is the racialized and inequitable public school systems, the war on young black people (known as the “war on drugs”), the mass incarceration of people of color, and the lack of adequate housing and access to living-wage jobs. It is the systematic practice of white preference in social networking and the preferential treatment of white people for employment regardless of qualifications.

The magic of it all is that racial oppression in the twenty-first century has become so sophisticated and subtle, in contrast to the overt racism in the mid-twentieth century, that no one even realizes that they are complicit in the system or that their own hands are dirty. One out of three African American males will go through the judicial system at some point in their lives because they have been categorized as a danger and a problem by the white dominant group. Young black women and men cannot drive their cars or walk on the streets of their own neighborhoods without being disproportionately more at risk of dying at the hands of police.

When mainstream America makes an example of Paula Deen, it both turns her into a scapegoat and also creatively claims its own innocence, because it limits the definition of racism to individual acts. In doing so, the dominant culture washes its hands of all the racial ideology that it permits, the racialized injustice it ignores, and the racialized patterns of life in which it participates. 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.

In 1967, Vincent Harding articulated the effect of a white American Christ on not only white churches but black churches as well: From the outset, almost everywhere we blacks have met him in this land, this Christ was painted white and pink, blond and blue-eyed—and not only in white churches but in black churches as well. Millions of black children had the picture of this pseudo-Nazarene burned into their memory. The books, the windows, and paintings, the filmstrips all affirmed the same message—a message of shame. This Christ shamed us by his pigmentation, so obviously not our own. He condemned us for our blackness, for our flat noses, for our kinky hair, for our power, our strange power of expressing emotion in singing and shouting and dancing. He was sedate, so genteel, so white. And as soon as we were able, many of us tried to be like him.

As Christians, we have developed all kinds of fancy theological tricks and justifications that allow us to circumvent Jesus as recorded in Scripture. We don’t think it’s necessary to immerse ourselves in the gospel narratives so long as we call on Jesus’ name. We are not concerned that the Jesus we follow sometimes bears more similarity and likeness to Uncle Sam or ourselves, in thought and reasoning, than to the crucified Messiah in Christian Scripture.

When considering the racial problems in the United States, we must begin taking the New Testament Jesus more seriously, in all of his subversive and troubling implications for our social order.

After we discard the white, elite, Western Jesus, a human construct used for sociopolitical domination, we open ourselves up to the divine revelation of the poor, oppressed, Jewish, and ultimately crucified Messiah. And in a life of discipleship, we will find the way that can dismantle and dis-align the racial hierarchy and order upon which our lives are built.

Unlike the stereotype of Pharisees as hypocrites, which commonly circulates in the church, we see that in reality Jesus and the Pharisees shared the same social world. Much of their conflict came from differences exposed by proximity.

What kind of God is this? That God has been revealed as a crucified liberator from Galilee should dismantle our earthly conceptions of divine wisdom and power. The American god of dominant culture seems foolish and weak once we realize that God has chosen to especially restore, liberate, reconcile, and transform our world from below. This God dwells among the socially vulnerable and marginalized, who have always been discounted by the dominating and controlling group in society.

That Christian piety and oppression could so easily coexist should be horrifying. It can happen, though, because the Jesus being referred to in America rarely had any resemblance to the subversive life embodied in the gospel narratives of Scripture. Rather than creating a new order, the American god has too often been the sustainer of this old order, white supremacy and all. The god passed down from generation to generation in dominant culture legitimized our racialized hierarchy.

For too long, the church has gone about its business as though nothing were wrong. Meanwhile, it has been a racialized organism, not only fractured relationally but actually practicing, perpetuating, or remaining silent to the racial oppression of others. And yet Jesus, in his birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection, has been the answer available to us all along. According to our sacred Scripture, Jesus lived a life that nonviolently subverted the powers and confronted the establishment. The wisdom and power of God, of a different sort from earthly wisdom and power, is something we are invited to participate in as God’s church. We are the called-out ones—not from the world, but from being patterned by the wisdom and power of this world through our sinful practices and mind-sets.

2. “Hush harbors” or “brush arbors” refer to the secret gathering places of enslaved Africans, as they would come together to worship God in spirit and truth outside of the watchful eye of white supremacist surveillance. 3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 8 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 514–15. 4. Rita Simon and Mohamed Alaa Abdel Moneim, Public Opinion in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 13; Hazel Gaudet Erskine, “The Polls: Race Relations,” Public Opinion Quarterly 26, no. 1 (1962), 139.

Many dominant-culture Christians never even imagine that they might need to interrogate their own intuitive responses to racism.

To break the cycle of ignorance to racism and faulty intuition, members of dominant groups must learn to not trust their own gut, as they have been socialized outside of the life experiences of marginalized groups. Instead, they must follow our Lord, Jesus Christ, who in his own day stood in solidarity with Samaritan outcasts, vulnerable women, the hungry, poor, and the socially rejected.

Could it be that the social place in which we stand ought to be as close as possible to that of Christ’s own life? Could it be that we would then see the world more truly and more clearly than we currently do?

African Americans, as well as other people of color who have had to navigate life as minorities, often accept the reality that they have been socialized. Cultural socialization is much easier to understand and recognize when your way of doing things is constantly labeled and differentiated, and often mocked. When your traditions, wisdom, stories, and values are constantly scrutinized or pointed out, it is not hard to see that you have been raised in a distinct cultural context.