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June 4 - June 25, 2016
Blackness is a visible marker that justifies suspicion, brutality, and confinement by white society.
With these weapons of mass distraction being deployed, many people ignore the ongoing suffering and the deep racial division that is pervasive and has never gone away. But right below the surface, for four hundred years, deep disagreements about race in America have been boiling.
The majority of white people believe that racism is a national problem rather than a problem in their own communities.1 Many
we cannot assume that every black Christian is necessarily joining God in divine transformation and resisting white supremacy through active justice and peacemaking.
Churches have often been the least helpful place to discuss racism and our white-dominated society. If racism is talked about at all, it is often addressed on isolated Sundays set apart for grieving some national event or engaging in sparse and limited pulpit swaps.
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.
However, the common white Christian plea to just “see people as people” is undermined by the highly racialized life of the average white person.
Drug use ought to be considered primarily a public health concern rather than seen through the lens of criminality, but the so-called war on drugs has targeted poor black and brown neighborhoods.
If the response to our racialized society is turning away from and ignoring these outcries rather than dealing with them, how will we ever participate in God’s transformational work in a Jesus-shaped way?
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.
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.
He seemed, like most people in the church, to comprehend the problem as though it were a horizontal divide between two people on equal standing. If that were the case, then our problem could be fully solved with strategies that mirror cross-cultural exchange programs.
Racism isn’t first and foremost about a horizontal divide; it is a vertically structured hierarchy. Social hierarchy and power have defined, in varying degrees, human worth, beauty, and significance in society.
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.
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.
Instead, we must come alongside the crucified of the world in solidarity, as Jesus himself did, so that we can have our minds renewed.
Rather, the person committed to Jesus follows him to the margins and cracks of society, entering into what I call “counterintuitive solidarity” with the oppressed. Revelation, inspiration, and understanding come in the context of following the crucified Christ in the world.
If the church is going to manifest the “beloved community,” we must keep track of any time anyone is deemed as less valuable than others.
Rather than remaining open to the stories and experiences of people who have been historically oppressed, people in dominant culture frequently employ cliché phrases that begin with dismissal and encourage willful denial.
The possibility for mutual transformation is cut off when we don’t at least remain open while listening to dissenting perspectives in society.
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.
In this view, racism is “a racialized systemic and structural system that organizes our society.”
The very location and circumstance of Christ’s birth was a symbol and sign of God’s solidarity with the socially oppressed and outcast.
Where the old order dominated and violently lorded over others, the kingdom of God arose from the bottom, margins, and cracks of society, freely inviting people to share in the peace and justice of God made available in the presence of Jesus.
According to Jesus in Luke, Jerusalem was unwilling to look to the Prince of Peace and would thus be forsaken and unprotected. Thereby Jerusalem would be left vulnerable under the whims and brutalities of the Roman oppressors.
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.
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.
Individualistic frameworks prevent people from seeing that their viewpoints are not quite as original as they would like to believe.
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.
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
Dominant cultures have a way of disguising their own oppressive practices from themselves with strong proclamations of innocence and benevolence and universal principles of equality.
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.
Likewise, I have seen online and in person many people interpret what is going on from the social position of dominant culture. Many white people have quickly dismissed black Americans’ experiences of racism in American society. Their own experience and intuition continue to tell them that race is not a significant factor in this country.
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.
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.
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.
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.
King began naming the “Giant Triplets”—racism, materialism, and militarism.
Discipleship is the cure for dominant cultural blinders that leave people’s intuition and vision impaired and unreliable. Not going with your gut, when it is socialized by dominant culture, and moving toward counterintuitive solidarity with the oppressed, must be understood as a Christian discipline, as necessary a practice for Christian formation as is praying, gathering in Christian community, reading Scripture, sharing resources, worshiping, and giving thanks.
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.
the systemic advantages from which you unconsciously benefit are simultaneously harmful to someone else.
Regardless, it was clear that the culture interpreted white teen bodies as basically innocent and harmless, except for the most severe and extreme situations.
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.
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.
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.
A popular African proverb articulates it perfectly: “Until the story of the hunt is told by the lion, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
Not keeping sight of their own specific cultural influences leads to assuming that their views are “universal,” “right,” “neutral,” and “objective.”
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.
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.
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.
