Last month was Black History Month. Along with invitations from several African American communities, I was given the opportunity to speak at Bethel Seminary in San Diego. They invited me as the Black History Month speaker. I used to be better at accepting that invitation and then presenting the gospel in sermon. But with my current title of Associate Dean for Black Church Studies at the Divinity School at Duke University, I am torn between which message is appropriate to deliver.
While the gospel is always and anywhere a timely message, it may be another year before some will look straight on at the devastating reality born of racism. Still, I find it hard to expect that the mere reporting of historical practices of apartheid and segregation, oppression and discrimination, or exclusion and inequality will result in changed behavior. If so, the world would already be a very different place. Books line the shelves. The list of contributors is long: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Benjamin Mays, Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Hope Franklin, Maya Angelou, Nell Irvin Painter, Nikki Giovanni, Valerie Bridgeman, John Perkins, William Pannell, Thomas C. Holt, Henry Louis Gates, and Cornel West. And that’s only the names of those African Americans most would recognize. So many other scholars have provided a record of the wrongs, hopes, and possibilities on the topic of Black History. It’s not that the information is unavailable.
It may be the difficulty of trying to process the onerous information. How does one receive a history that rehearses repeated actions and attitudes of oppression and discrimination? Should the audience nod in agreement with the descriptions that indeed are horrific or shake their heads in dispute at the proposal they participate in such behaviors? Denial on the part of the listener suggests deceitfulness on the part of the presenter. Now both hearer and speaker take positions of defensiveness, each trying to maintain a semblance of dignity born of integrity. Feelings of antagonism give rise to the very division between so-called racial groups that the event seeks to dismantle. It is difficult to recognize the habits and practices I do without thinking are in fact perpetuating the very reality I think is wrong.
Or maybe, the problem is an unwillingness to acknowledge the institutional structures that enable continued division and misunderstanding across racial lines. Can we recognize the difficulty of supporting an economic system based on privately owned businesses when hurdles abound for African Americans whose access to financial backing and prime real estate was only insured less than 50 years ago? By then White America already owned and controlled the majority of this country’s wealth. As well-established businesses struggle in the failing economy, the harder hit will of course effect less established minority businesses. It is difficult to see that the very way we do things, the very way we’ve always done things, may in fact be wrong.
Can we acknowledge that most of our images of racial difference continue to actually characterize economic and intellectual difference? The projected Black culture continues to suggest aborted education, broken English, and deficit economics define the African American experience. Portrayals of affluence within the African American community seems limited to entertainers and sports celebrities. Condoleezza Rice’s status as an African American hero is criticized because of ideological differences and the disrespect of President Barak Obama too often suggests blatant racism as well as partisan politics. We don’t seem to know how to describe racial diversity within cultural sameness and won’t describe cultural difference without drawing attention to racial identity.
And there’s the rub. The very fact that I choose to speak of race in this blog, highlights the problem. I could have kept silent by writing only the paragraph below. But in order to truly wrestle with what we believe about the power of God to transform the world, I wanted to present a real conundrum. I use race because as a Christian, now living in the south, I am convinced that the most insidious effects of sin in our culture can be made evident in the practices of racism. Just as sin pervades human nature, racism permeates our culture. As an African American, living in the 21st century, I experience the effects of exclusion in the past as inequality in the present. And my experience of racism has been the least of all compared to most.
So I begin again.
While it may be another year before some will look straight on at the devastating reality born of racism, the gospel is always and anywhere a timely message. I remain convinced that the transformation of this world will result only when the followers of Christ practice a radical Christianity of repentance, reconciliation, and justice.
That change will come only when the presence of the Holy Spirit enables us to admit that injustice exists in the way we legislate healthcare, grant citizenship, imprison lawbreakers, employ personnel, and educate youth. That change will come only by knowing the intention of God for his people to love their neighbors (and so-called enemies). That change will come only when we practice community as a living example of holiness. That change will come only when we in the church realize our practices of good are not civil or even moral responsibilities but demonstrations of what the world will look like when God’s kingdom comes on earth. And to admit that, to know that, to practice that, to realize that requires a scriptural imagination born of familiarity with the biblical revelation that in Christ God is actively reconciling this world to himself.
I guess that’s why I think it is always appropriate to teach and preach the revelation of God in Scripture.
