We, the White People

Racist faith, that belief system which invests ultimate meaning in the biology of white skin color, has permeated American history from its beginning. Thus, while this nation has experienced times when the dream of racial equality and human solidarity seemed close to realization--such as the years following the American Revolution, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s--the specter of racism has persisted. And despite past and contemporary assertions that race is a declining factor in American life, racism's resurgence, whether following the World War I crusade to "save the world for democracy" or the World War II effort to preserve "the four freedoms" or during the Reagan administration's attempts to "make America strong again," is blatantly clear. From whence does this persistence come and how can its tenacity be explained?

This year the United States celebrates the bicentennial of its Constitution, a document noble in its ideals of human freedom and far-reaching in the implications of its affirmation that the constituted government derives its being and power from "the people." It is a document heralding freedom from all tyrannies and asserting by natural rights that the people may compact together to govern themselves.

While historians debate how inclusive the term "we, the people" was concerning white males--for example, whether propertied or non-propertied--there is little debate that women, Native Americans, and black peoples were not intended for inclusion in the compact. Over the past two centuries, scholars, jurists, presidents, and the American people have debated whether the Constitution contains truths that transcend the time-centered understandings of its framers and whether there is an inclusiveness present in the document that the framers' historical narrowness cannot conceal.

Although black people had been in the colonies since 1619, their participation in society had been circumscribed by their conditions as indentured servants and slaves. By the 1660s this status as slaves became fixed for life. Thus to be a slave was to be black, and the blackness of one's skin was a mark of one's status.'

Those who possessed white skin were masters, and those of darker hue were slaves. In the case of free blacks, their free status was secondary to their racial classification. Even though the percentage of whites owning slaves was always small, those whites who did not own slaves could identify with and aspire to the privileged class who did.

More important--and this is crucial to an understanding of American racism--no white man, whatever and however debased his circumstance, need consider himself less than a slave. His sense of self, his sense of being, and his place in the world were formed and fashioned by the presence of the black others, who mirrored in their bondage and perpetual servitude his whiteness, his freedom, and his limitless possibility.

If Jean Paul Sartre was right in his book Anti-Semite and Jew, then white Americans have needed black Americans psychologically, as much as the anti-Semite needs the Jew, in order to forge a sense of their own selfhood and being as a people and a nation. That black presence as an economic, political, social, and psychological reality, although not directly mentioned in the final draft of the Constitution, was crucial to the outcome of the Constitutional Convention and the formation and future direction of this nation.

FOR A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER of delegates to the Constitutional Convention, the institution of slavery was a present and future means of economic prosperity. At a personal level, their fortunes, prestige, status, and place in society were based upon the enslavement of black people.

Other delegates to the convention sought an end to the slave trade and slavery, finding the two incompatible with democratic principles. Following the War for Independence, some northern and middle colonies abolished slavery, noting that their successful struggle against tyranny would not allow them to hold others in chains. Their detractors countered that these actions cost little since slavery had not been a profitable venture in those environs.

However much the delegates agreed or disagreed over slavery and other issues, the vast majority sought to create a mechanism of governance that would endure. The interests of black people, then and now, were secondary to the issues of nation-building and union. Abraham Lincoln expressed this sentiment many years later when he indicated that if he could save the Union by freeing none, some, or all of the slaves, he would do whatever was necessary to achieve his objective. Rare indeed was the white person, however enlightened, who did not share basic assumptions about the inferiority of black people and the superiority of white people.

Many whites who hated slavery did not love slaves, or free blacks for that matter. Significant among those who abhorred the "slavo-cracy" and its extension prior to 1860 were those who worked to deny blacks entrance to the Northwest Territories, lobbied against their being enfranchised, approved segregated educational systems, prohibited interracial marriage, and blocked black participation in state militias. White working men, while denouncing slavery as antithetical to free labor and the rights of working men, demonstrated and rioted to prevent blacks, free and slave, from laboring beside them, and so structured their organization that blacks were prevented from joining them. Free blacks were perceived as their economic competitors, and, undoubtedly at the unconscious level whites saw them as a threat to their own precarious lower-class social status.

Even white abolitionists were known to draw the line in their interactions with blacks when it came to socializing and personal relationships. Black abolitionists bitterly complained that their white supporters' advocacy of racial equality often stopped at the platform, the pulpit, and the rostrum.

In many ways the treatment of free blacks during the antebellum period is irrefutable proof of the persistence of racism even when the status of slavery had been removed. Being neither slaves nor free, free blacks often inhabited a "no man's land" in American society between whites and slaves. They had few rights by law and were often subject to harassment, intimidation, prejudice, discrimination, and violence by the white majority.

Despite their circumscribed and precarious existence, free blacks established churches and religious denominations, newspapers and periodicals, fraternal organizations, burial societies, schools, insurance companies, small businesses, and other self-help entities. They petitioned state legislatures, and the state and federal courts when possible, for redress of grievances. They also met in national conventions to demonstrate their solidarity with one another and with their separated slave sisters and brothers. They supported causes designed to abolish slavery, and the free black community of Philadelphia was a major contributor to the work of white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and the Liberator magazine.

These "free" people led lives that called into question America's racist assumptions about their character, their moral and intellectual endowment, and their abilities as children of God. It is a testimony to their courage and endurance that the free black community survived, despite white society's indifference, its open hostility at times, and its constant refusal to recognize their existence as a viable reality in America. The community was despised and ignored primarily because it did not match the black image resident in the white person's mind.

THE FOUNDERS OF THIS NATION faced a dilemma posed by the conflict between freedom and slavery. A people proclaiming as the bedrock of their political existence the concept of human liberty as a natural endowment given by God nonetheless held others in chains. Thus, the United States was founded upon political and moral ambiguities so profound that its characterization of itself as a land of freedom and human liberty has to it the sound of hypocrisy. And after 200 years, the national conundrum is yet with us.

The query preceding the Civil War, Can this nation survive half-slave and half-free? was also raised at the Constitutional Convention. Moderate and judicious men, although keenly aware of the dangers posed by the question, looked the other way, leaving to the generations to come the responsibility of providing an answer. The founders compromised their higher principles of freedom and human liberty for all on the altar of freedom and human liberty for some.

Freedom and human liberty as an ideal would in practice be the inheritance of white men, and the material capitalization of that legacy would be grafted upon the backs of black people. White freedom, liberty, and opportunity were therefore dependent upon black servitude, oppression, and life-long subjugation. Black freedom and human liberty were sacrificed for the benefit of the fledgling democracy.

One of the pivotal ironies of American history is that the "noble experiment in democracy" would not have been possible without the presence and sacrifice of black people. In a similar ironic vein, the black presence would become the prism through which the American dream of equality and human freedom would be measured throughout our history.

While racism, defined by George D. Kelsey as "a rationalized pseudoscientific theory positing the innate and permanent inferiority of non-whites," did not come to full fruition until the mid-19th century, many of its tendencies were present during the formation of the colonies. Winthrop Jordon in his book, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, attests to this by noting that white racial antipathies toward blacks based upon color, cultural differences, and social rank and status, were present in colonial America.

Blacks were perceived "as a permanently alien and unassimilable element of the population." Thomas Jefferson in his day and Abraham Lincoln in his time strongly doubted that blacks and whites could ever live together in America on an equal basis. Both men advocated the colonization or removal of free blacks from America, and Lincoln considered such a plan for the ex-slaves following emancipation. The reasons for these views are complex, but at the root of them are the racist images that whites held concerning blacks.

According to George M. Fredrickson's The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914, blacks were considered physically, intellectually, and temperamentally different from whites and believed to be inferior to whites in fundamental human qualities. Because whites considered such differences either permanent or open to exceedingly slow change, they believed that blacks and whites should be kept apart socially and in other ways possibly injurious to the white majority. If blacks were to be a part of the society, it was felt that they should hold an inferior position to all whites.

Whites believed that the position and place of black people in American society was not governed by the greed, hypocrisy, and power of whites, but by black people's own deficiencies and negative endowments. The victims were blamed for their circumstances, and white America was absolved from all responsibility and guilt in its racist and mythological formulations of racial superiority. Perhaps a people rooted in the belief in Christian Providence and God-ordained rights had to justify the enslavement and continued subjugation of others by enumerating the motes in the others' eyes, while failing to see the beams in their own eyes.

RACISM, WHICH IS A MODERN phenomenon, purports to use science as the hallmark for its truth. It holds that certain races are naturally superior or inferior. Nature, not environment, holds the final decision.

By the mid-19th century, racist theorists in America and Europe, employing the writings of Charles Darwin and Edward Spencer, presented "scientific" evidence confirming the superiority of white Western civilization over any other peoples of color. The last three decades of the 19th century saw European imperialism at its height as white Christian civilization subdued Africa and significant portions of Asia.

The United States joined the colonial power club with its defeat of Spain in 1898 and its acquisition of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. During those three decades, the progress of the Civil War and the Reconstruction years was overturned, and white racism and its supremacist doctrines were ascendant in both the South and the North.

Black people were relegated to the lower rungs of American society. Political participation and the right to vote were rescinded by subterfuge, threat, intimidation, economic reprisal, physical injury, and death. Lynchings increased, as did the historic proclivity of white rioters to burn and pillage helpless and unprotected black communities.

No institution was immune to racist views, and the Supreme Court in an 1896 decision Plessy v. Ferguson gave its imprimatur to Jim Crow, the legal substructure of racism. The North, preoccupied with industrialization and making money, delivered black people once again into the hands of those Southerners who knew them best. Racism, and its attendant white supremacy ideology, had triumphed.

It would take black people and their allies 58 years to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson with the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. And it would take nearly 100 years to confirm the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution through the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The vast majority of pseudoscientific data undergirding the racist ideology of the past has been disproved, although a few contemporary racist ideologues continue to promote their theories. Yet racism as described in these pages has not been routed, seemingly, and many are the reasons for this circumstance.

THE CONSTITUTION HAS continued to live, and its elasticity has allowed that others perhaps not originally recognized in the compact are, nevertheless, significant partners within it. Black people, on the whole, have held to that document more because of what it might become than for what it was originally. America has changed, and its posture as a world power has occasioned a need for social cohesion and relative peace within the country.

The advent of new nations in Africa and Asia arising out of the ashes of European colonial empires prompted the United States to reconsider its position vis-a-vis these new nations, and this has affected its treatment of its own black minority. Black people have changed from an overwhelmingly Southern rural people to an overwhelmingly urban populace, more assertive, more self-assured and--for a minority group within the minority--more self-sufficient.

Participation in two world wars, albeit in segregated units, and full participation in an integrated military in Korea and Vietnam has further strengthened the resolve of most black people that America, whatever its shortcomings, is still their country. Within the past two decades, a small but significant number of blacks have been elected to public office, and more young black people are attending institutions of higher education than ever before (although the numbers are decreasing due to governmental cutbacks in scholarships and financial aid). It is not a rarity today to see blacks positioned in middle-management slots in major American corporations. We even have a black candidate for president of the United States. Still, there is no cause to be sanguine about America's continuing racial dilemma.

The Reagan administration is determined to dismantle many of the civil rights gains of the past two decades. The attorney general and the Department of Justice have entered numerous friend-of-the-court briefs supporting efforts that challenge affirmative action, voting rights extensions, and the government's right to withhold federal funds from schools that discriminate on the basis of sex and race.

Perhaps more ominous than the above is the atmosphere that this administration has spawned. Racial incidents at the Citadel in South Carolina and in Howard Beach, New York, and; the continual absence of black people in decision-making positions in government, business, banking, news media, sports, and higher education is cause for alarm. Racism is alive and well in America. It was central to our becoming a nation, and it has been a continuing fact in our evolution as a people.

RACISM AT ITS CORE is a sin and an idolatry because it not only calls into question God's creation, but offers a counter-deity--biology or nature--as the subject of adoration. Racism values and devalues life according to its hierarchy of the good.

Accordingly, the lives of those with white skin become more valued than those of other skin colors. As public policy this faith is enacted in a prison population made up of poor, uneducated, and black and brown people far in excess of their percentages in the population. Black and minority infants die at an alarming rate, and teen-age and young adult homicide figures among blacks are depressingly high. While 11 percent of the U.S. population is black, 25 percent of all AIDS cases are in the black community. Hispanics, who make up 7 percent of the U.S. population, account for 11 percent of AIDS cases. Black unemployment continues at its historic range of at least twice the national average for whites. Native American unemployment in some areas approaches 50 percent. It is doubtful that American society would tolerate such figures among the white population.

Racism assumes the power to define the self in relation to others and to structure reality in ways that appear to corroborate that definition. Since blacks were considered ordained by nature to be less than whites in every way, white power sought to institutionalize that "truth" into the very fabric of American life.

For example, racist thought insisted that blacks were lacking in intellectual endowments, thus every effort had to be made to deny black people education and learning. During slavery it was unlawful to teach those in bondage to read and write, and free blacks were often denied the most rudimentary educational opportunities as well. Following the efforts during Reconstruction to institute free public education for all in the South, these same legislatures, with the tacit approval of the North, constructed an educational system in which the vast majority of public education funds went to segregated white schools.

This disparity in educational opportunities for blacks in the South continued until the middle of this century. In the North, with the rise of suburbia and the flight of whites from the cities, urban public education has become increasingly identified with black and brown minority children, and the commitment to publicly financed education has weakened in some quarters. One must ponder whether the questions about public education's efficacy as a tool for social advancement reflect America's estimation of the worth and academic abilities of its minority constituents.

The theme of "America, a white man's country," has been a recurrent one in U.S. history. From the 1820s and the extension of the franchise to non-propertied white males to the contemporary utterings of neo-Nazis, one hears the "America for whites only" refrain. There maybe a hint of this in the efforts of some Americans to make English the national language of the United States. The fear of being inundated by foreign hordes, so prevalent during the period of the second great European migration to America, from 1880 to 1914, may provide a partial explanation for the present concern that white middle- and upper-middle-class women are having fewer children. The fear then and now focuses around the possibility that white people will be overwhelmed by the more prolific black and brown peoples.

RACISM SEEKS TO DEFINE the being of others and subsequently to deny their God-given humanity based upon skin color and racial designation. Racism calls into question the nature of God and God's creative order.

American churches have for the most part capitulated to this racist ideology. Sometimes in its pronouncement, more often in its silence, and most certainly in its institutionalized life and practice, the church has given sanction and blessing and occasionally theological justification for racism. While abolitionist fervor during the years before and immediately following the Civil War was a striking example of the religious impulse emanating from the Second Great Awakening, and despite the church's involvement in the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and '60s, its overall stance as a proponent of racial equality has been weak and ineffective, when not downright antagonistic.

The God of white American religion has been a captive of its own racist ideology. It fell to black American churches to call to the remembrance of white and black Christians the biblical affirmation that God made all the nations to dwell upon the face of the earth. Despite their beleaguered circumstances and virtual invisibility in white, Christian America, and their long-standing obligation to provide black people "a shelter in a time of storms," black churches have been in the forefront of the struggle for a racially free and just America.

The primary task of the black churches has been to make theologically real and relevant a God who creates with meaning and purpose and who sides with the oppressed. In the face of society's never-ending efforts to deny the basic humanity of black peoples, black churches have taught their members to know with certainty that "if anybody asks you who I am, tell them I'm a child of God."

Black church theology has apprehended a God who joins with God's people in fighting their battles and in their efforts to overcome, a God who so identifies with God's people through the life, ministry, and sacrifice of Jesus that the weakness of the Son shows most gloriously the strength and power of God.

Calvin S. Morris was associate professor of pastoral theology at Howard University Divinity School in Washington, D.C. when this article appeared.