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The Ubiquity of Racism |
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| The following is an edited combination of two other essays on this site: one where I talk about why I went to the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr. and one reflecting on experiences in Alexandria, Louisiana. | ||
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Beyond
discussions about the War Between the States is the underlying racism that
characterized both the South and the North of the nineteenth century. I bring
to the table the perspective of a person who was raised within the one
part of the United States that saw itself as being occupied by a foreign
army. Many people cannot comprehend what it was like to be brought
up within this proud heritage by a generation of people who included folk
born less than a decade after the end of Reconstructionist rule.
That pride was the kind of pride that is the peculiar quality of those who
know that they are looked down on by others, kind of the inverse of the
mind of Christ: the most secure human who ever walked on our planet
was also the most humble. The more insecure we are, the more we mask
that to ourselves through pride, because deep down, there is the fear that
the dominant view about us may be correct. That latent fear of the
possibility of the actual inferiority of a subject people living under
others was one of the things that the late Thurgood Marshall demonstrated
when he successfully argued Brown v. School
Board, using Kenneth
B. Clark’s The Genesis of Racial
Identification and Preferences in Negro Children, in the 1954
Supreme Court case. This
kind of “culturalist,” really “racist,” sense of “punishing”
history’s losers is reinforced in the dominant culture. After all,
history is written by the winners, and the winners also make movies.
This is a gross overstatement, but . . . outside of Birth
of a Nation, (about which President Woodrow Wilson commented
that it was “all too true.”) and Gone
with the Wind, few Hollywood films ever presented the Southern
take on the War. That’s why the poorly acted, poorly edited, Gods
and Generals has become The Rocky
Horror Show of a new generation of angry, White, Southern
males. (Hey! I liked it, too—so much so that I also bought
the DVD, but it was poorly acted, and the cinematic version of
Presbyterian deacon, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, sometimes appeared
to be a cross between Osama bin Laden and Benny Hinn, with a little bit of
Woody Allen sexual angst thrown in to boot—okay, okay, I know that’s
really hyperbolic.) The perception of
White, Southern, Christian males is that we are the last
politically correct target of lampoon by outsiders. African-American
comedians can use the N-word, and Jewish comedians can joke about Jewish
greed and get away with the K-word, but outsiders cannot. This is
not the case with those whom outsiders call “Rednecks.” It is
acceptable to joke about Southern Whites having few branches in the family
tree. Inasmuch as the modern view of race is relatively new,
by-passing it, I’ll say that it is still somewhat socially acceptable to
exhibit “racism” against Southerners. I
also briefly lived and worked in New York, Pennsylvania and Kansas, and
found that “racism” is just as ubiquitous there as in the South.
Why is that? Why is there ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and
Tibet? Why was there the rape of Nanjing? The
Ubiquity of “Racism”
Any
easily noticeable difference between human beings may be exploited by
Satan to bring about division in the Church. One can take the case
recorded in Acts 6:1, “In those days when the number of disciples was
increasing, the Grecian Jews among them complained against the Hebraic
Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution
of food.” In Acts 6 it was neither religion, race nor gender, but
culture that became the basis for offense. Both groups were women,
both were Jewish and both were Christian; the difference lay in the degree
of openness to Greek civilization the one group had as over against the
other. Some of these widows were born and raised in Palestine, spoke
Aramaic and had kept a very Kosher house. Others were Jews of the
Diaspora; they came from a tradition that had made a measure of peace with
the Greco-Roman world. The
fact of the matter is that the Hellenistic, Jewish, Christian widows were
being discriminated against: “their widows were being overlooked
in the daily distribution of food.” This is a classic
example of what I like to call “benevolent” racism, what others call
systemic racism. (Though, of course, in Acts 6, it had nothing to do
with what we today call race, because race, as we talk about it, is a
modern concept.) It was benevolent in that it was not deliberate,
not done with malice aforethought; it was the fruit of systemic divisions
within the human family. Here
is an example from my own life: a couple of decades back I was an
officer in the Rotary Club. At the time, no Rotary Club in Central
Louisiana had any Blacks or women. The superintendent of schools,
the state senator and other political folk, as well as the CEOs of most
major companies were all Rotarians. Business wasn’t necessarily
done at lunch, but business connections were established there. All
things being equal, apart from federal law, Rotarians did business with
other Rotarians. It was not that Rotarians hated or viewed as stupid
or dishonest those in Kiwanis; it was simply that people like to deal with
their friends. When you are negotiating an insurance deal for two
thousand employees, and Joe Schmoe is a fellow Rotarian, you are going to
tend to favor his offer over that from the guy in Kiwanis, other things
being roughly equal. I
think the discrimination that was being practiced in the Church in Acts 6
was like that. On the part of those doing it, nobody meant to do it;
nobody was even aware that it was happening. But it was happening,
and those who were being discriminated against were keenly aware of
it: “the Grecian Jews among them complained against the Hebraic
Jews.” That
certainly has something to say about race in twenty-first century America,
because America is a thoroughly racist nation, at least in the sense of
systemic or “benevolent” racism. When Blacks and Whites serve on
a board and share power in decision-making, the Whites, in particular,
must be extremely sensitive that they do not give offense. Merely
intending no offense is not enough; Holy Spirit wrought sensitivity is
essential. Why
Most Whites Are Ignorant of Black Thinking
My
political science professor, an Episcopalian teaching at Presbyterian
College, told us, “I can accept a Black on equal terms in an impersonal
relationship, or I can accept a Black in a personal relationship as long
as he is not my equal, but I cannot accept a Black on equal terms in a
personal relationship.” In
so many ways I find that remark still characterizes human relations in
America today. I grew up in a strangely contradictory society. I had
regular contact with African-Americans, but never in an equal
relationship. My Black nursemaid took good care of me, and I loved Amy.
Later we moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Mattie entered my
life. These were kind and loving women who were gentle and knew how to
raise children. As
I recall, my aunts and uncles had Black servants who were treated as part
of the family, but never with equality. When I visited my father’s
sister on her ninetieth birthday, I noticed her servant James. His eyes
looked funny, the way that they do when people need surgery, so I said to
my aunt: “Inez, James’ eyes look like he may have cataracts.” “I
don’t know, Robert, I was always taught never to look a Niggrah in the
eyes,” she responded. Her
response startled me. I had known James all my life. He had gone to work
for my aunt’s husband as a little boy, and he was now around seventy,
having worked for her most of his life. Even though most of that time it
was part time, not a day went by that he didn’t check on her. He even
telephoned my aunt when he was away visiting relatives in New York. He
obviously loved her and she obviously loved him, but she had never looked
him in the eye. She
was always “Miss Inez,” while he was always simply James. Her husband,
my father’s brother-in-law, was born roughly five years after the end of
Reconstruction, and he held to the values of the old South. He was a kind
and paternalistic man. He did not hate African-Americans. Their presence
did not make him uncomfortable. When a Black friend needed something, “Mr.
Henry” would take care of it. It was his duty, and he never begrudged
this expense. Before
daylight, their Black cook would arrive. How I remember those wonderful
breakfasts: hot hominy grits, eggs, sausage and Viola’s homemade
biscuits, served with real butter. Her midday dinners were even better:
fried chicken, butter beans, rice and gravy, macaroni and cheese, and more
biscuits. Nobody could cook as well as Viola. I still savor the memory of
her meals. This
was the world into which I was born. These were the African-Americans that
I knew. They all seemed happy and kind. I was “Mr. Robert” when I went
back into the kitchen to chat with Viola or James. She never seemed to
mind the intrusion of a curious little boy watching her cook on the old,
Black iron stove. I was always treated as an honored guest. Over
the years, whenever I would go to South Carolina and visit my aunt, I
would always visit with James. Sometimes that meant that I would travel
down to where he lived and visit him in his home on the way out of town,
but I always went to see him—he was part of my family. Viola died many
years ago, but I last saw James in the late summer of 1998. I was in South
Carolina and took my family to see my aunt. It was just short of her 102nd
birthday. After visiting with her for a while, I went out in the yard,
where James was working. He still called me “Mr. Robert.” But we
hugged each other and spoke affectionately. He had a stroke less than a
month later and died shortly thereafter. That
was one side of race relations in the South in which I was born—it was
warm and personal but terribly unequal and demanded a measure of deceit
from the African Americans who successfully navigated the intricacies of
that paternalistic world. But I did not understand that for years. When
I was a junior in high school, I worked as a desk clerk in a small hotel;
the bellhop was a middle-aged Black man. He was introduced to me by his
first name, Charles. He educated me more than anyone else about the Black
experience. “Do you think I like acting like a fool—smiling and
laughing at White folks making fun of me? I got to feed my kids, and the
more I act like a fool, the more food I can put on the table.” Charles
got me to think. He was the first Black who was really honest with me. It
had never dawned on me that the kindly African-Americans of my childhood
had had to keep us in the dark about their true feelings. Their very
survival depended on it. Under Charles’ tutelage the contradictions of
my upbringing began to register. I
had only known adult African-Americans; I had never met their children.
Many of the White children that I grew up with did not have any kind of
personal relationship with African-Americans. I had gone to all White
schools, and African-Americans were oftentimes the objects of scorn and
twisted humor. Older boys bragged to me about riding through “N. i. g.
g. e. r. town” and shooting African-Americans with twenty-twos. They had
replaced the lead with wax. This other side of my life, the public side,
was completely devoid of African-Americans. My
first job was pumping gas at Chapins’ Shell Service in Myrtle Beach,
South Carolina; I was thirteen, and Daddy believed that I needed to learn
how to work for other people. We had three restrooms: “Men,” “Women”
and “Colored.” When our only Black employee quit, the “Colored”
restroom was never cleaned again. It had no light bulb and was nasty. My
father was a health officer; once I was with him when he inspected a Black
school. “Separate but equal,” he said, as he got in the car, “there’s
not a damned thing equal about their schools . . . used books, worn-out
equipment, buildings needing repair.” Daddy believed in being fair: “N.
i. g. g. e. r. s. love me, because I treat them just like White people.”
To the best of my knowledge my father never mistreated a Black person. He
was a kind and decent man, a good father and an active churchman. But my
Daddy was a racist, and he taught me to be a racist, too. In
so many ways my mother exemplified the contradictions of my society. Mama
would drink coffee with our maid in the kitchen. She cried with her and
went to the funeral when Mattie’s father died. After I became a
Christian, I asked Mama about African-Americans coming to our church, she
responded, “Oh, Robert, I couldn’t stand it if a Niggrah man sat down
next to me!” How well I remember Daddy coming home from a session
meeting and proudly telling us that the elders had passed a resolution on
how to handle these agitators: “We agreed to meet them at the door and
ask why they had come. If they tell us that they are here to worship, we’ll
tell them they have their own churches to worship in and send them away.”
Mama was relieved. This
action on the part of the officers of my church was not isolated. Back in
the sixties, my wife and I worked at Thornwell Orphanage; it was under the
oversight of the Synods of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida of the
Presbyterian Church U.S. Black children weren’t allowed there. My alma
mater, Presbyterian College, finally admitted a couple of
African-Americans my senior year. I remember a chapel sermon preached by
Bob Jones, Jr., back when I had attended his university. “Blacks have
never had a successful civilization.” “They are only happy when they
are in the role of a servant.” It was in flight from that world that I
went to the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., back in 1968. South
and North
During
the four years that I was in seminary—three in Philadelphia, one in
Pittsburgh—I became acquainted with Northern people. Since I was married
and had to work at least part time, I discovered that there was at least
as much bigotry up North as there was in the South; it’s simply that the
non-Christian Northern folk with whom I worked were less honest about
their prejudices than the non-Christians in the South. Once again, to
quote my political science professor: “I can accept a Black on equal
terms in an impersonal relationship, or I can accept a Black in a personal
relationship as long as he is not my equal, but I cannot accept a Black on
equal terms in a personal relationship.” In
many ways the South is becoming more like the North; it has become more
hypocritical, and relationships between African-Americans and
European-Americans have become much less personal. By and large, racism on
the surface is gone; there are lots of changes that have come. The
nineteen sixty-four Civil Rights Act has guaranteed many things, but
underneath, in so many ways, little has changed. Illiteracy
among African-Americans is far greater now than it was fifty years ago.
There is still great disparity in everything from jobs to housing. Streets
are poorer; streetlights are left burned out more often; mailboxes are
harder to come by. And Black folk, especially males, are far more likely
to be stopped by the police. I
know the response that is usually given by White conservatives to these
things, but I wonder about corporate responsibility. My ancestors on both
my mother and father’s sides owned slaves. In many places in the old
South, it was illegal for a Black to be able to read or write. A marriage
between African-Americans was not accorded the same legal status as that
between European-Americans. Families were broken up: fathers and mothers
were sold and separated, sometimes by hundreds of miles. African-American
“Racism”
Many
African-Americans will not admit to racism because they believe that “an
oppressed person cannot be a racist,” but they certainly will admit to
struggling with very negative feelings about Americans of European
ancestry. Since I am the only White minister who has consistently attended
Black functions over the years: Martin Luther King Day, the “City-Wide”
Revival, and pastors’ anniversaries—a really big event in the Black
Church—and since I have spoken up in public for Black folks, including
having testified in court against a fellow White—a White college
professor who had tried to defraud a Black minister—I have been somewhat
accepted as a peer by local Black ministers. It has been an
eye-opening experience. The
men that I regularly pray with and with whom I have on occasion swapped
pulpits in the past, are devout Christian pastors, but they sometimes
struggle with hatred for White society and White people. Why is
that? One
Baptist pastor, who is a retired public school principal with a master’s
from Columbia University, serves as a case in point. He is
originally from North Louisiana (that’s Baptist Louisiana as over
against Roman Catholic, South Louisiana). His father was a Baptist
minister who spoke out about the poor quality of Black schools. His
complaint brought a quick response: their home was burned, and my friend’s
mother almost died in the fire. My friend’s uncle was lynched.
(Not an uncommon thing in the first half of the twentieth century—it
happened up North, too, even in places like Minnesota and Nebraska.) When
the federal government desegregated the school system, my friend was sent
to a rural, formerly all White school—not a happy experience.
Whites tend not to realize that the integration of the public school
system has cost Blacks a lot more than it ever cost Whites. Another
pastor, whose background I cannot give in a public forum because I would
not compromise what he told me in confidence, once shared this story. His
mother worked as a maid, and he often did yard work while his mother
worked inside. One day their employer gave him some money to go to
the store to buy some things and included enough money for my friend to
get some candy. While he was gone, this White man raped his
Mama. What recourse did they have for justice? The anguish of
his powerlessness has stayed with him all his life. Our
city, Alexandria, Louisiana, was scene to a wholesale massacre of Blacks
by the United States Army: ‘On January 10th., 1942, the
U.S. Army experienced its bloodiest, most controversial and most highly
censored racial incident in its history. This racial explosion took place
in Alexandria, Louisiana, in a section of town know as “Little Harlem,”
on Lee Street.’ One of the doctors in my congregation remembers
seeing a machine gun nest on the top of city hall for some time
afterwards. Another brother, now a White business man and one of our
elders, was a paper boy back then. He threw papers in the Black community—“They
tipped much better than the rich Whites did.” All he knew about
the riot was that he “lost some customers. . . they were there Saturday
afternoon, but not there on Monday.” Because Pearl Harbor had just
happened, the federal government clamped news of the story down absolutely
and quickly. The incident has served to control Blacks in Central
Louisiana; most refuse to talk about it. The
Deception of African-Americans
Deception
of Whites has been a necessary tool of survival for almost four hundred
years. Blacks picked up very early what White folks wanted to hear
and became very adept at communicating it. What was the alternative?
Death? Being fired? Being jailed? Being beaten? One of my great uncles was
a Sheriff in the Low Country part of South Carolina. One day he had
a flat tire and ordered a Black man who was passing by to change it . . .
the man refused. Words were exchanged, and the man “cussed”
Uncle Ned, who chased the man down and hit him in the head with a
shotgun. But the man got up again and ran away. This led to Uncle
Ned’s saying, “The N.i.g.g.e.r.’s got his brains in his heals.”
This tale was sometimes told with peals of laughter at family gatherings
when I was a boy. The
price for going from the cotton field to the kitchen was usually due to
playing by the White man’s rules, and that included flattering “Mr.
Charlie” about what a fine Christian gentleman he was. It is why I
think that White folk should not always take at face value what Black
people tell them when it minimizes the difficulties and discrimination
they still encounter. Fear of reprisal by the White establishment is very
deeply seated in most older African-Americans. White conservatives and a
handful of Black conservatives dismiss Black religious and political
leaders as “welfare pimps.” But what does the Black community
really think about this charge behind closed doors, out of the hearing of
White folks? Most Whites will never know. How sad! A
Problem that Is not Getting Better
The
nineties were a disaster for race relations: the trial of the
officers who beat Rodney King, the O. J. Simpson trial, but most of all
the Clinton Presidency—William Jefferson Clinton and his cadre appear
deliberately to have set out on a strategy of racial polarization in order
to galvanize the Black vote. Black hurt has now been coupled with
pessimism, a radically different situation than the fifties and sixties,
when Blacks were optimistic and beginning to trust Whites who reached out.
Race relations on the White side have not gotten better either; it’s
simply that racial discrimination has become more subtle, so subtle, in
fact, that most racists cannot detect it in themselves. Think of the
future when Hispanics displace Blacks in terms of political clout as the
largest minority—where will Black rage be then? Hope
Beyond the Government, a Different Approach from the White Man’s Burden
and Paternalism I
used to fret over my congregation being almost always exclusively White,
now I try to strengthen the Black Church and promote Black pastors to my
White friends. Jesus
is the only hope for our hopeless mess. Politicians have failed;
public education has failed; jails have failed. The Church of Jesus
Christ must not fail. I
think that the answer to racism is actually very simple; its cure is the
reverse of my old political science professor’s statement: “I
can accept a Black on equal terms in an impersonal relationship, or I can
accept a Black in a personal relationship as long as he is not my equal,
but I cannot accept a Black on equal terms in a personal relationship.” In
other words, I must reach out to another person as an equal and
prayerfully work toward the kind of intimacy that makes real communication
and trust possible. Personal
Honesty About Sin
Somewhere
along that journey toward intimacy, I have to be honest about my own
struggles with racism, and I eventually admit to what almost all Blacks
believe about almost all Whites: I am a racist—in my case a “recovering”
one. I confess that sometimes I revert to the way I was programmed
to think as a boy. For example, if I see a White woman with a Black
man, I have an instant, negative, visceral reaction—far more so than if
I see a White man with a Black woman. Sinless
perfection isn’t what is demanded in God’s kingdom; honesty,
confession and repentance are. Just as sometimes when I notice a
fine looking woman, I have to exercise that eye covenant that Job talked
about in 31:1, so with regard to mental racial profiling, I have to make
some quick choices about not thinking the way that is “natural” for me
to think. Somewhere deep inside me, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray
are lurking; their Bell Curve thingy just fits so well with what I “was
carefully taught” by preachers, public school teachers and my
family. My wife, who was raised Baptist, remembers her preacher
teaching them that Blacks were a high order of apes put here by God to
serve White people—and that was in the second half of the twentieth
century, in an urban church of a couple of thousand members. When
I join in singing “We Shall Overcome,” I am also singing about my own
jihad within myself. Honesty on my part invites honesty on the part
of my Black friends. My
closest friend in the ministry is a Black Baptist preacher, the one whom I
mentioned above whose house was torched back in the forties in North
Louisiana. How we became friends is an interesting story. I
had become convicted that I was to reach out to three other pastors to
meet to pray for our community, and one of these men was Black. I
called Pastor Banks and asked for an appointment. He met me at his church
one morning, and we talked back and forth. It was very awkward, he
was sniffing my motives like a watch dog does a strange cur. We
gently jostled with each other’s theologies and after about thirty
minutes, he invited me to go into his sanctuary for prayer. We both
knelt down on the pulpit chairs and prayed. He went first.
Then I started. I don’t know what happened. Maybe I was just
nervous, but suddenly I became conscious that I was praying like a Black
preacher: accent, inflection, cadence, volume. Now,
I may be crazy, but I’m no fool. You just don’t do that.
People would think that you are mocking them. I was so startled at
hearing myself, I almost stopped, but I didn’t. It almost seemed
like I couldn’t; it seemed like it wasn’t me praying. Then I
became aware of something else—my back was wet. The Black minister
was still on his knees, but he was over me and tears were rolling down his
face, so much so that they had dripped down his cheeks, onto my shirt and
wet through to my back. From
that day on almost fourteen years ago, we have been fast friends. We’ve
swapped pulpits; he and his wife and my wife and I sometimes go out to
eat. We have done a lot together. Most of all we pray together in a
small group of pastors. I
had tried something like that decades ago, but it hadn’t worked.
Being a theological hotshot who still reads Greek and Hebrew, I came with
“the White Man’s Burden.” Smart ol’ Presbyterian Bob came to
enlighten the Arminian, Baptist, King James reading Africans. When
those watch dogs got one sniff of me, they knew that I didn’t belong in
their neighborhood. Humility
and Brokenness
In
the late eighties I came with a measure of brokenness. My small
measure of erudition hadn’t kept me from life’s troubles and
failures. In the seventies, I had descended from my Presbyterian
Ivory tower, sure I had a perfect family, church and theological
system. In the late eighties, I came having offered to resign from
my pastorate because of family troubles, my wife having been run over by a
log truck, my church having split and tending to a somewhat senile,
live-in parent. I came as a needy man looking for fellowship.
I came to learn from older pastors, occasionally sharing things the Lord
had taught me, too. My
goal is getting people together that way. Racism will die one
relationship at a time. But it’s a relationship, not just a quick
trip over to the other side of town to ease a load of White guilt.
And relationships cost time and effort. Unless the Lord does some
kind of weird prayer thing like he did with my pastor friend and me, it
takes a long time to build. Part of the reason for that is that
White folks get to feeling guilty and they reach out, but when work,
church or family duties beckon, the commitment slowly dies. Bottom
line: I would like to see every White pastor begin to pray about
establishing a relationship with one Black pastor, just one. Center
the whole thing in Jesus and nothing else. Begin to meet for prayer
on a regular basis. Open up and share your problems—get real, get
personal, take risks. Eventually, invite the man and his wife to go
out to eat with you and your wife. Then have them over to your
house. Then you could go in a couple of different directions.
You could swap pulpits; you could each ask another couple to join you; you
could have a combined men’s prayer breakfast. But there is one big
caveat: go when you’re invited. Over the years, I’ve
repeatedly heard Black ministers say, “We always come into the White
community when you invite us, but you all don’t ever come into our part
of town.” The
burden is on all of us to change that. Cordially
in Christ, “You’ve
got to be carefully taught!”
You’ve
got to be taught to hate and fear, You’ve
got to be taught to be afraid You’ve
got to be taught before it’s too late, South Pacific by Rodgers & Hammerstein |
