I WAS ONCE told that “racism is our nation’s original sin.” This statement jolted me. While I didn’t dispute its truth, I have come to realize racism is much more complex than this.
In order to dismantle the structural sin of racism, we have to first set it within a larger context that acknowledges racism’s sociopolitical dependency and structural interconnectedness.
First: “race” is not real. It is not a scientific category; biologically, it does not exist. Race is a social construct, something built systematically. It has no inherent value or true significance beyond what we give it. In order for race to have real social consequences—which it undoubtedly does—there must be other phenomena at work that validate, sustain, and reinforce the social significance of race.
As a result of sin in our fallen world, human bodies are appraised and given a value based upon certain criteria. As a result of sin, men are privileged over women, white skin is privileged over darker skin, able bodies are privileged over disabled bodies. Historically, certain bodies are acclaimed while others are defamed. Race plays a starring role in this larger drama of embodiment.
Within this racialized schema, whiteness has evolved into an exclusive fraternity. Whiteness has been judicially regulated, legislatively reinforced, and institutionally endowed with power. Whiteness bestows privileges upon its preordained clientele.
While privilege is only one small part of whiteness, and while not all of these privileges are realized (or even equally distributed throughout its membership), these privileges are uniquely accessible to its members.
It’s important to note that whiteness is not the only operative privilege; there is also privilege associated with gender, class, nationality, and able-bodiedness—and thus privilege should be understood as stackable, meaning that many individuals possess multiple privileges. Nevertheless, it is vital to understand that not all privileges hold the same historical weight, value, and social significance. Whiteness is expansive. Social stratifications such as gender, class, and nationality function within it. Whiteness is a social sentinel; it names boundaries and polices purity.
Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, illuminates the relationship between race, legislation, policing, and incarceration. She writes: “Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: Black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.” Her crystalized “meaning of blackness in America” is what both legitimates the killing of unarmed African Americans and undergirds the nationwide protest professing #BlackLivesMatter.
Ferguson awakened the nation from a colorblind stupor. It relaunched a national conversation on race. As that conversation unfolds, many are realizing that Ferguson isn’t an anomaly: It’s a microcosm of our country.
Statistically speaking, Ferguson police arrest black people at a rate nearly three times higher than people of other races. At least 1,581 other police departments across the U.S. arrest black people at rates even more skewed than in Ferguson. USA Today found “at least 70 departments scattered from Connecticut to California arrested black people at a rate 10 times higher than people who are not black.”
In 2010, the New York Police Department released data indicating nearly 90 percent of the roughly 600,000 people that officers “stopped and frisked” each year were African American and Latino (less than 15 percent of these stops occurred in response to any sign of criminal activity). A 2014 study found that “young black men are 21 times as likely as their white peers to be killed by police.” Racism is disproportionately debilitating for non-Euro-American communities, but racism affects everyone.
This is what racism looks and feels like today. This is why “hands up, don’t shoot” is both an orchestrated call-and-response mantra and a dangerous taunt—dangerous because of the many examples of police overriding this fundamentally recognized signal of surrender.
Sin has cognitively perverted humanity and, as a consequence, we treat each other as enemies instead of neighbors. Because of the unholy trinity of social stratification—racism, classism, and sexism—we seldom see each other as brothers and sisters in Christ. The enduring presence of this injustice isn’t simply a stain upon our national legacy—it’s also an indictment upon our church. Sin dehumanizes and negates the Imago Dei inherent in all human beings. Instead of seeing each other as fellow image bearers, we see each other as competition for the spoils of American Empire. We respond to each other based on a capitalistic logic that pits us against one another, as opposed to a baptismal ethic that calls us into solidarity with one another.
We fear each other, largely because we don’t know each other; we don’t worship together, fellowship together. As a result, we don’t see our identities as bound together. While there are many reasons for these realities, one of the least discussed is how we have institutionally concealed our murky racial history within triumphalist folklore in both our nation and our church. Until we acknowledge these realties, we will remain unrepentant.
MYTHOLOGY IS a story we tell to uphold a certain belief or practice. It is at the crux of the American Empire. It’s strategically deployed to distract citizens from realizing the true foundations of the United States and its prosperity: colonization, genocide, slavery, and exploitative legislation that made it all legal.
Catholic theologian Daniel Groody writes, “Symbolically, empire represents any power that arrogates to itself the power that belongs to God alone, or any group or institution that subjugates the poor and needy for its own advantage.” Mythology cultivates a social climate where racism and ethnocentrism are camouflaged under the guise of patriotism. Thus, our national mythology enables rhetoric that stimulates a metanarrative of U.S. exceptionalism. The ability to see ourselves as exceptional—a nation uniquely chosen and favored by God—serves to obscure our history of socio-political and economic corruption. This mythology allows the U.S. to enshroud the criminality, immorality, and oppression that has cultivated gross social inequalities. It valorizes this country’s Euro-American forebearers and romanticizes their intentions.
For example, mythology depicts our country’s ancestors as innocent, hardworking, moral individuals able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps through rugged individualism. Consequently, this myth allows some Americans the luxury of self-definition. This self-definition is then exploited to depict our nation as the land of equal opportunity for all, the embodiment of democratic freedom, and the ambassador of justice worldwide—even though it is not.
Through these constructed façades, the U.S. has engendered blind allegiance from the vast majority of its citizenry, while simultaneously and systematically stymieing marginalized people groups’ efforts to disrupt the oppressive status quo. Ferguson and the Occupy Movement are prime examples of this. These two seemingly disconnected movements are inherently linked because they oppose exploitative legislation that targets and decimates the rights and livelihood of marginalized populations. These movements are also connected through our nation’s widening wealth gap, along racial and ethnic lines. According to Pew Research Center, “the wealth of white households was 13 times the median wealth of black households in 2013,” and more than 10 times that of Latino households.
By successfully rearticulating and institutionalizing oppressive revisionist historical accounts of the U.S. and its evolution into the world’s superpower, our nation has auspiciously used academia and the media to simultaneously justify its prosperity and ensure that racial minorities, as well as women of all races, remain psychologically vulnerable, siloed, and subjugated. This climate of socioeconomic repression frequently breeds internalized oppression, especially within young, vulnerable, impressionable children who are extremely malleable. These children frequently grow up seeing themselves, their families, communities, and race/ethnicity/gender as “less than.” They compare their own lived realities with those afforded the benefits and spoils of the “American Dream.”
Every day we are indoctrinated with fabrications about this country’s history and its relationship to our present-day gross inequalities. It is a coercive schema akin to victimizing the victim.
As a result, many marginalized minorities encounter a greater propensity to suffer from psychological trauma—the most common manifestations being internalized hatred, suicide, and cognitive dissonance around being both a U.S. citizen and the reality of being treated as less than other citizens.
OUT OF THIS kind of desperation, pain, and lived experience, the church has historically mined some of its richest and most robust theological reflection.
One only has to look at biblical narratives of those on the margins: people such as Hagar (Genesis 16), Zipporah (Numbers 12), and the woman at the well (John 4). Each of these women suffered persecution because of their embodied nature (gender, race-ethnicity, and/or class). These women endured discrimination from both those inside and outside of the church, even church leaders. Nevertheless, God met them in uniquely intimate ways. God affirmed their dignity and the creational intent behind their embodied nature. God restored them into the broader community. God offered a unique response of loving support to these wounded women, showing how we’re supposed to respond to the oppressed, victimized, and ostracized members of society as God’s people in the world today.
Sadly, this is where our present situation becomes despairingly bleak.
Many churches and religious institutions fail to contextualize and teach the Bible in ways that address corporate sin and structural injustice. Congregants are frequently taught that racism and the institutional oppression that breed gross inequalities are strictly “social problems” that have nothing to do with the gospel. Despite all the good the church has done, its legacy also includes racism, patriarchy, a lack of concern for the poor, and an inability to transcend Eurocentric expressions of our faith.
How will we begin to make amends? We must have authentic conversations about racism, power, and privilege. We’ll have to begin distinguishing “Americanisms” from the gospel. We’ll need to live out our faith proclamations through our actions. We’ll need to exegete society alongside scripture.
Within our own context, giving sight to the blind and setting the captives free means helping people to see how propaganda binds them. Only then can the church become a haven of truth and reformation.
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