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

by Drew G. I. Hart

For white Americans, however, and anyone who has been part of a dominant culture around the globe, dominant-group socialization is normally not as obvious. Those living as part of a majority, dominant culture are less likely to be conscious of their own socialization. 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. Individualistic frameworks prevent people from seeing that their viewpoints are not quite as original as they would like to believe.

Many white Americans tend to think that everyone else is “cultural” or “ethnic.” They view themselves as just “average Americans” or “normal.” This is especially the case the more racially segregated one’s life is, because one’s own culture determines the norm and is thereby preferred in the public square, in local institutions and schools, and among peer networks. In such contexts, it’s not hard for people to blindly take for g...

Not being conscious of one’s own cultural socialization can lead to thinking that one’s perspective is not just a vantage point but the vantage point. Not recognizing that everyone has been socialized by society quickly results in assuming that our way is the right way, and hence God’s way. In America, the white dominant cultural way is often assumed to be the right way. The culture, values, and norms of the dominant group get translated into the universally right and moral way of life.

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. This epistemological divide—that is, the partition between our different ways of knowing and perceiving—is an even greater reality in the church than among the rest of society.

Throughout most of American history, the majority of white Americans, having been socialized by the values and perspectives of the majority culture, didn’t think we had a racial problem. The white community has hidden its own hand from itself, unable to see the racialized and often ugly and violent practices in which it was complicit.

That is right: the relative social status of being a part of the newfound “white male citizenry” proved to be more valuable and more important to many people than linking arms with the people who actually had more in common with them economically and socially. The invitation from the elite to participate in the relative psychological gain of white identity and social life outweighed the absolute realities with which these European men were living. The small advantage of white identity blurred the reasoning of these men.

We are all people of our time. We either renew our minds and become transformed or we conform to the dominant ideologies that convince us that we are moral despite what is going on around us.

Guess what? When polled in May 1946, nearly seven out of ten white Americans surveyed believed that “Negroes in the United States are being treated fairly.”1 Yes, you read that right: in the midst of Jim Crow segregation, the terror of the KKK, the open torment and intimidation by the White Citizens’ Council, and the regular violence against black people in America, who had no protection or judicial recourse, most white Americans did not think there was a racial problem. Yes, these numbers included Christians too.

That almost seven out of ten white Americans could think that black people were being treated fairly at such a time of unrest and suffering calls into question the capacity to which any dominant cultural group can discern an oppressive moment with even a little objectivity.

As racism mutated in different eras in America, each adaption proved to be just as deceptive for those in the dominant group—not because of their race, but because of their social networks and social location. What we are considering now are the implications of 350 years of misperception by those within dominant society. The dominant group has been unable to recognize, see, or know racial injustice in America because their socialized intuitions shielded them from seeing the concrete realities.

Given our history, do we really believe that a people group that benefited from the racial system—socially, economically, politically, or merely psychologically—and whose intuitions were repeatedly wrong for the first 350 years has now suddenly, 400 years in, gained an advantage in interpreting these moments over those whom have been historically oppressed? Even more implausible is that, at this exact moment, the majority of black people who have been right about their own experiences for the past 350 years also instantly, and all at the same time, lost their ability to interpret their own experiences.

Is it likely that the white dominant group and the black marginalized group instantaneously swapped roles regarding who perceives injustice more precisely? Or is it more plausible that dominant culture remains at a limited vantage point for determining what is happening today? To affirm that white people are suddenly getting it right and that black people have simultaneously lost their capacity to interpret their own experiences seems an unhelpful response not based on serious reflection of our past nor the testimonies of African Americans in the present.

The issue before us is the epistemological divide that exists between the dominant group and those living on the underside of the social hierarchy. Those oppressed by dominating and controlling powers tend to hold a different view of the situation than those benefiting from life in a cultu...

Míguez Bonino asserts, “A social location determines a perspective. It conceals some things and reveals others. We have sometimes referred to this in terms of ‘the epistemological privilege of the poor.’ The poor are not morally or spiritually superior to others, but they do see reality from a different angle” than those in power do.2 Therefore, I am suggesting that people on the bottom are better situated to know what is real, and that what they know to be reality is closer to the real thing than the perceptions of those in a dominant social position.

Some people think that because our judicial system has made a verdict on an issue—decisions that are usually in full agreement with dominant cultural norms—justice has spoken and the discussion should be over. This flows out of a naive assumption that our legal system is actually the source that dispenses justice, rather than God.

Black people, however, often know that a verdict and the true reality do not coincide. Jesus’ own experience of being arrested at night, put through an unfair trial, and then given a state-sanctioned execution should be the interpretive key for Christians in understanding the inability of empires to dispense true justice.

Judicial complicity in the dominance of our social hierarchy, especially in light of the system’s history, must leave us deeply skeptical about any government’s ability to truly let justice roll down like waters.

White American Christians in our society must do something seemingly absurd and unnatural, yet very Christian in orientation: they must move decisively toward a counterintuitive solidarity with those on the margins. They must allow the eyes of the violated of the land to lead and guide them, seeking to have renewed minds no longer conformed to the patterns of our world.

Bonhoeffer wrote: It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short from the perspective of the suffering. If only during this time bitterness and envy have not corroded the heart; that we come to see matters great and small, happiness and misfortune, strength and weakness with new eyes; that our sense for greatness, humanness, justice, and mercy has grown clearer, freer, more incorruptible; that we learn, indeed, that personal suffering is a more useful key, a more fruitful principle than personal happiness for exploring the meaning of the world in contemplation and action.

No matter where I have lived, I have eventually had to come to terms with the reality that racial hierarchy is always present, and that whiteness, without fail, matters.

So what does it mean to be white? Saying that someone is white is saying more than just that someone is of European descent and heritage, though that is normally all we mean when we use the term. There is a gap between how we use the term white and the way that whiteness functions on people’s behalf in society. White is the pseudoscientific and socially constructed category used to centralize power among a certain portion of humanity and at the direct harm and cost of people of color, especially Native American and black life in America. And it is not a static category. Whiteness subtly shifts and changes over time as necessary.

To be white is not only to be Euro–American; it is also to identify with, and participate in, the life of a sociopolitical collective that created this artificially constructed racial identity to accomplish something. People move from identifying with a particular European people group—for example, the Irish—to identifying as a white person for a reason. This is a decision European immigrants made over and over again in America, such that the definition of and borders around who was white continuously expanded. In the seventeenth century, only Anglo–Saxon Protestants were considered white, but the definition eventually grew to include Irish Catholics, Italians, and other groups who were initially excluded. This was politically strategic. It formed a large enough collective power in society that continuously reproduced a system of advantage for whites at the direct expense of people of color. At the very minimum, being white has meant benefiting from and obtaining an ongoing preference and advantage in a nation and economy built on the stolen land of Native Americans and the stolen labor of African Americans. Being white usually means never having to think about it that way during one’s day–to–day life.

America is a thoroughly racialized society dominated and controlled by white people in a manner that advantages them because of their whiteness. Even poor whites, who are economically deprived, will find at critical moments that, all things being equal, being white is more socially advantageous than being black. And many people don’t realize just how socially constructed a white identity is, and how it has been conveniently changed over and over again to let some people in and to exclude others. What defined a white person several centu...

It is important to remember that there is no authentic, biological substance to the idea of race.2 Europeans constructed black and white categories for a reason. Whiteness mattered because it provided economic, social, and political benefits. For example, immigrants in the early twentieth century understood very well what white status meant if...

People can talk all they want about reverse racism, but when the rubber hits the road, most people know deep down that racial profiling, in all its different manifestations, would disadvantage them if they were black. In the dominant culture of America, blackness has been the antithesis of whiteness, its polarizing opposite. It has been placed at the far bottom of the social hierarchy that, consciously or unconsciously, places whiteness at the top.

Whiteness matters when it advantages those seen as having pure European ancestry. Whether you are considering government leadership, the heads of corporations, or even Christian organizations, it becomes clear that white people are disproportionately represented across the board. They often get their positions because they know someone—a friend, church member, or relative—who is positioned to help them and not necessarily because they are the most qualified person for the job. Whiteness can’t promise a good life, but it does provide a social system that operates to most Euro–American persons’advantage.

Many people are unaware of the various white advantages that have been offered legally in our country, falsely thinking that slavery was the only significant differentiation. In reality, things like redlining, housing discrimination, and other historic racialized practices offered great advantages, socially and economically, to white households. Just one example is the Homestead Act of 1862, which “gave millions of acres to white settlers…. Overall, 1.5 million families got ownership of 246 million acres of land from the various homestead programs, nearly as much land as Cali...

What people do not understand is that African Americans were simultaneously being denied access to these large wealth–accumulating programs. The authors of The Color of Wealth note that an 1826 law prevented African Americans from preemption rights, and that in 185...

White Americans have benefited from some of the largest government handouts in history (beyond, of course, the stolen land and stolen labor). And even for those who have not directly received any of those white benefits, just being white meant access to live in, do business with, and benefit from communities that had created their wealth through such racially stratified and oppressive practices and policies. My brief account doesn’t even scratch the surface of the ways that the white dominant group has received concrete social, political, and economic benefits from racial oppression.

If there are systemically disadvantaged people, then there must be over–advantaged people. How often do we talk about particular people and communities as “over–advantaged”? We feel free to talk about how someone is from a “disadvantaged” neighborhood or school, but we do it as though that community lives in a social vacuum. It is as though someone

Talking about whiteness can seem a bit innocuous, because we usually don’t talk about it in terms of the apparent systemic social advantage and hierarchy. And even if we were to talk about such realities, we are nonetheless taught to get all the advantages and privileges we can grab hold of in America. We can begin an honest assessment of the situation only when we acknowledge this fact: the systemic advantages from which you unconsciously benefit are simultaneously harmful to someone else.

Blackness and criminality, when combined, create social death for many people.

These realities are often hard to accept. For white people to acknowledge these social advantages in regard to their families, friends, coworkers, church members, and themselves is difficult. The stumbling block for many people is the conviction that their social networks couldn’t possibly be racially prejudiced because they are full of such nice people. How could such nice people be racists?

My time living on a Christian college campus allowed me to see deeper within the logic of whiteness. I saw how a culture of niceness could be combined with the dangerous ideologies that are death–dealing to communities of color. In particular, the unrelenting white gaze on black bodies, although leveled by friendly people, unveiled for me the ways that blackness meant, for many, guilty until proven innocent. It was a culture in which racial minorities frequently had to prove themselves worthy of respect.

Again, when I talk to white Christians, many seem to have trouble believing that someone from their neighborhood, church, school, family, or social network could have antiblack racist perceptions. The folks in their networks are all just so nice. Somehow, American society has allowed the idea to prevail that it takes mean people to perpetuate white supremacy. We have bought into the idea that our friendliness is evidence that we couldn’t have adopted subtle antiblack ideologies so common in dominant culture. For too long, too many have assumed that nice white people couldn’t be complicit with a white–controlled and white–dominated society, because they are so fun to be around.

But the truth is that white racism doesn’t exist only in the KKK bogeyman of the past. Instead, it is pervasive within the air of dominant culture in subtle, nuanced, and often unconscious ways. To acknowledge this doesn’t mean that your network is full of mean people. I don’t question the fact that many white people are extremely nice, but I still believe that most are socialized by and partici...

White racism has always been veiled by “civil” culture. The first necessity is to interpret society’s way of life with high ideals. More than just nice, it is civil, fair, equal, and just. In our day, the colorblind rhetoric is a mutated form of this approach. Notice that it is primarily white conservative Americans, and decisively not African Americans, who praise colorblindness as our path toward a better future. Dominant culture has an advanta...

One of the central concepts around race, communicated over and over again by dominant culture, is that we ought to be colorblind and that talking about race has no place in our society. But two hands work collaboratively in our white supremacist culture, and the “colorblind” hand is just one of them. The...

American life is saturated in racial practices and sentiments. Most white people live extremely racialized and segregated lives, even when they live in diverse neighborhoods (though that itself is rare). And our society is so permeated with racism that we can actually predict many people’s life experiences and opportunities based on their race.

The depth of our racialized society is beyond most of our comprehension. And this is precisely because the first hand has done such a powerful job in normalizing our racialized lives. White supremacy thrives off unexamined claims of colorblindness while simultaneously engaging in highly racialized practices.

One of the challenges we now face is that the culture and norms of the white dominant group are always presumed to be right and moral, and not in need of patient and careful investigation. This is evident wherever Western European colonizers and missionaries have imposed their culture and values through mission and church life. Today, you could go to every continent on the earth on any given Sunday and find Western–style church buildings with organs and pianos on opposing sides of the pulpit and with pictures of white Jesus prominently positioned. The pastors and most of the church members will likely be wearing nonindigenous clothes, their Western best: suit and tie or dress. Familiar melodies of Western hymns will play a significant role. And oddly, many of the Christian people of the town will bear Western names. Why do they do all this? Well, it is because they have been given the gospel of Jesus Christ, right?

The missionaries came promising Jesus. But Christianity was so entangled in Western culture that the missionaries imposed Western civilization on people in the name of Jesus rather than vulnerably bearing witness to the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus in word and deed and then letting the Holy Spirit do its work. It seems that it was not Jesus’ body at the center of Western Christian life and imagination. Instead, as Willie James Jennings has put it, “The body of another has remained at the center of our relational imagination, the body of a powerful, white, Western man, the image of self–sufficiency, social power, and self–determination.”

Upon conversion, indigenous people often had to get Western haircuts, wear Western clothes, learn Western languages, and even change their names to Western ones. Often they were severed from their indigenous roots, culture, and community altogether. All things had become new, but people were rarely being taught to embody the way of Jesus through loving their enemies, caring for the Samaritan–like other, liberating the oppressed, and being peacemakers, all things Jesus actually taught. Indigenous Christians have often adopted these aspects of Jesus’ ministry subversively and despite the emphasis of the Western missionary church.

So why was Jesus, the poor Messiah from Galilee, transformed into a white man? Well, if Jesus is the revelation of God and the clearest picture of who God is, then his image has powerful significance. In transforming Jesus (both physically and culturally) into a white man, people of European descent gained a controlling interpretive grip not only on Jesus but also on the God revealed in Christ, and therefore on all the church.

The development of whiteness grew out of a people who saw themselves as benevolent saviors to the world. Then, having consolidated enough national might to act on it, they went out and conquered other people. They did all this while continuing to see their own group as innocent in the midst of ongoing oppression and violence, and they believed they had a universal standpoint from which to objectively label the rest of the world.

Dominant groups are always in danger of thinking that their perspective is synonymous with God’s perspective. They frequently lack the humility to question their own ways and to be vulnerably open to the marginalized people in their society.

If dominant groups tend to universalize their norms, and if they sense that they are God’s divinely elected nation, then you can expect overconfidence in interpreting social realities. I believe this overconfidence is one of the main reasons that white Christians were some of the loudest advocates for slavery and Jim Crow as they are today for black and brown incarceration, anti–immigration reform, and the labeling of most practicing Muslims as “terrorists.” Often it has been the small, outsider white Christian traditions that have at least partly perceived some of these failures in white perception. This was true of the Mennonites and Quakers of Pennsylvania in 1688, who wrote the first petition against slavery. We haven’t yet realized how dangerous it is to conform our lives and our minds to the patterns of this world. And we don’t yet know what it will require to have our lives transformed and our minds renewed. Until we do, many in the church will lead the way in “white is right” thinking.

Jesus himself has been distorted and then employed to do work in oppressive systems. Of course, the true living and resurrected one is not the manipulated Jesus, who has endorsed violence and oppression for centuries. God, who is reconciling the world back to God’s self, was revealed in a particular Form and in a particular Way. The Form and Way are that of Jesus of Nazareth, who invited people to repent from the old social order and to turn toward God’s kingdom by following after him. Jesus emptied himself and took on human form. And yet it was not a universal form, according to Paul; it was the embodiment of a slave. Jesus aligned himself with and called to himself a people among “the least of these.” The “called–out ones” of Jesus (ekklesia) were gathered from the margins of society, from which a new community could be fashioned. Of course, Jesus invited the rich and the powerful to repent as well, and to join what God was doing, but for them this meant a radical reorientation of life. This new community would be distinct because, according to Jesus, it embodied a different kind of life from that of the Roman oppressors. The Romans “lord over” others, but “it must not be this way” for Jesus’ followers (Matthew 20:25–26). To follow Jesus meant to renounce domination and alignment with the worldly powers. Instead, people who followed Jesus exemplified justice, mercy, and faithfulness in their lives, the weightier matters in the Scriptures that are often neglected (Matthew...