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July 4 - July 24, 2020
Many studies have confirmed that our racial attitudes and behaviors are influenced by our social environment.
our nation collectively and quietly accommodates the terrorizing of black people’s everyday lives.
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.
Many black Christians have partially internalized and reproduced the very same antiblack sentiments and racialized frameworks constructed to subjugate us.
Having two-way conversations on racism is challenging when white people respond to discomfort with either defensive emotionalism or white fragility, which is the inability to deal with stressful racialized situations.
Colorblind ideology is the twenty-first-century continuation of white Christian silence to racism.
The truth of the matter is that I wouldn’t have been on track to a PhD without becoming intimately familiar with the various ways that white people think. My so-called success means that I have had to know what it takes to meet white standards, whether they are formal or informal.
Amen
he could choose to never engage with or be changed by the range and beauty of the black community. Nor would he be penalized for it.
No one would question his qualifications if he didn’t know how to navigate black communities and cultures or understand the daily realities of most black people in America. Immersion in and understanding of the black community have never been routinely expected or necessary for employees, politicians, scholars, doctors, teachers, or pastors.
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.
Just Black fashion, music, dance, food, etc.
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.
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
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“you are different from them”
The meanest thing that can be said
It was as if our friendship had no bearing on breaking their stereotypes of other black students at all. In their racial framework, I was the exception to the rule that allowed them to gaze at other black students as thugs or charity cases.
Goes with previous note
Nothing, including the black church I had grown up in, had prepared me for white Christian community.
That's profound
How could my time among white Christians have been more painful for me as a young black male than my time among white non-Christians?
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.2
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.
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.
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
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It is not Paula Deen’s pitiful but individual ideology that is most harmful; it is the entire racialized society that is sick and that ignores the daily welfare of people who are of African descent. In fact, Paula Deen can only come to be and think as she does within a society like ours. When we point the finger at Paula Deen, we misdirect all of our attention to one small, isolated symptom of a much bigger root problem. I hope that we can begin to redirect the focus back to an entire people group that has benefited from an economy built on stolen labor and stolen land and that continues to
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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.
Vincent Harding
As Christians, we have developed all kinds of fancy theological tricks and justifications that allow us to circumvent Jesus as recorded in Scripture.
The Jews were a covenant people so they
could be a blessing to the nations, not so they could be an exclusively favored people before God.
by AD 70, Jerusalem was literally destroyed by the Roman Empire.
Divine power isn’t beating earthly rulers and authorities at their own tyrannical game; rather, God undermines and subverts their power in a way that to us looks very much like earthly weakness.
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. People have assumed that white American “old-time religion” was synonymous with the kind of religion that God
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
Everything we may with some good reason expect or beg of God is to be found in Jesus Christ. What we imagine a God could and should do—the God of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with all that. We must immerse ourselves again and again, for a long time and quite calmly, in Jesus’s life, his sayings, actions, suffering, and dying in order to recognize what God promises and fulfills. What is certain is that we may always live aware that God is near and present with us and that this life is an utterly new life for us; that there is nothing that is impossible for us anymore because there is nothing
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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,
we are forced to talk about racism more publicly. When that happens, we find ourselves once again face-to-face with this stark reality: we do not even agree about what is going on, let alone what should be done about it.
When polled in May 1946, nearly seven out of ten white Americans surveyed believed that “Negroes in the United States are being treated fairly.”
I wonder what this number would have been before the awakening of 2020
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.
theologian José Míguez Bonino.
The challenge here is to trust the intuition of oppressed people over against one’s own gut and experience, which has proven to lead dominant groups astray.
King began naming the “Giant Triplets”—racism, materialism, and militarism. These three issues, he believed, were intertwined and central influences over American life.
And it's still true today
Ironically, dominant society will proclaim colorblindness at one moment and then the next moment will have no problem calling out “black–on–black violence” instead of just seeing it as human–on–human violence. When something is believed to be problematic in African American communities, colorblind rhetoric disappears, and blackness is quickly named without reserve. I have never heard anyone talk about the problem of “white–on–white violence” even though, according to statistics, this type of violence occurs at very similar rates as that of black–on–black violence.
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.
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
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Court decisions on white status were based on a mix of supposedly scientific criteria and the common understandings of the day, leading to a mess of contradictions. Syrians were deemed white in 1909, 1910, and 1915, but not in 1913 or 1914. Asian Indians won white status in 1910, 1913, 1919, and 1920, but not in 1909, 1917, or after 1923. The persistence of immigrants in suing for whiteness is evidence of the financial and social benefits that came with white status.
After all, no one sued to be considered Asian, much less black3.
White men with a conviction, however, only had a 17 percent positive response.
Black men without a conviction only had a 14 percent positive response. This means that white men with a conviction have more positive employment responses than black men without a conviction.
Somehow, American society has allowed the idea to prevail that it takes mean people to perpetuate white supremacy.
That's the facts Jack
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.
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.
