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

by Drew G. I. Hart

Beginning with some basic concepts, I explained that whiteness is a social construction. If you go back to the fourteenth century, you can’t find anyone identifying a people group as white. Whiteness, I explained, was created for the purpose of consolidating power and dominance over other people groups. Hence, as a social construction, whiteness is specifically about domination and violence.

Not respecting the space for people of color and trusted allies to come together,

You have a witness

Assuming that one’s intrusion into an uninvited space is harmless and innocent is a common routine.

Continuation

Racial terms are commonly used in white rhetoric. Race isn’t actually avoided, but discussion about racism is. When race is talked about in white dominant culture, naming and discussing the life of people of color (and often their problems) is the extent of racial talk. There isn’t much room for discussing whiteness, whether historically or in its present sociological form.

For the church, what matters most is not whiteness but the revelation of God found in Jesus’ body, life, teaching, death, and resurrection as detailed in Scripture and encountered in Spirit. This means that white Christians must renounce the desire to control other people’s lives and must reject the innocent savior complex, which sees everyone but oneself as in need of transformation. When deliverance and intervention is needed, the church looks to God.

To be black in America is to embody flesh that has been marked by white people for four hundred years as despised, immoral, improper, threatening, and in need of white supervision.

Almost too real to accept

The black church has work to do.

Amen

As long as black people were themselves the problem—a problem that needed to be controlled by white society—then the white dominant group could continue claiming innocence for the social realities that existed. No guilt, lament, or repentance is necessary when you tell yourself that people are simply getting what they deserve.

Apparently, actual firsthand experience or intimate relationship isn’t a prerequisite for being an expert on black people’s problems. Stereotypes from the media seem to be sufficient.

The task for us as a church is to allow the resurrected Jesus to be present with us, inspiring us toward risky and controversial love, even when society tells us that the recipients of our love are not worthy.

those who violently colonized you ought not set the standard of what is proper and respectable.

Those who held to the doctrine of respectability hoped that the trajectory of white supremacy would shift if black behavior changed.

I want to know the other options or was this a straight up survival tactic

Knowledge is never neutral, and how we use it is also a moral and ethical issue.

Too many in the American church have perpetuated the myth that this land was built on Christian principles rather than on stolen land and stolen labor.

The church can turn away from its false belief that it is Christian destiny to dominate, control, and, when it desires, destroy everything and everyone in its way.

Merely focusing on obeying the law is an intentionally shortsighted and irresponsible posture for disciples of Jesus. With that logic, a Christian who lived in 1850 would have had to fully endorse slavery. I believe that Augustine was right when he said, more than fifteen hundred years ago, that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Jesus does not make lording over others an option for his disciples.

Others do “black theology,” “Latin American theology,” “womanist theology,” or “peace theology.” White men, however, seen as universal and objective—as though they hover over culture rather than participate in it—merely do “theology.”

The experience of racism or poverty or gender discrimination is assumed to make others subjective and therefore ill–equipped to teach the pure, unadulterated Word of God.

The living and resurrected one did not, and still does not, incarnate into the life and disposition of the oppressor.