Last week I noted that Jesus’ entrance into our world showed that he was qualified to be an empathetic advocate for us.[1]
· he “saw” people[2] (loaded word)
· he listened and thoughtfully responded (the Rich Young Ruler[3]; the woman who touched his garment[4]; the woman caught in adultery[5])
· he spent time with them (that crazy ‘friend of sinners’[6], an insult Jesus embraced).
· He invited himself into their homes (Zaccheus[7]).
· He went to their unclean neighborhoods (Samaria[8]).
· He poured out his life for them. (#crucifixion)
· He offered them hope. “I have come that you might have life (John 10:10).”
This is what the love of God looked like expressed through Jesus. We model the loving example of Jesus when we see, listen, spend time together with others, seek to sympathize and empathize, and pour out our lives so that we might faithfully and lovingly re-present Jesus in hope-filled attitudes, actions, and words.
I mentioned last week that there is a movement of people leaving white evangelicalism (#leaveloud) because of ongoing frustrations with how the legacy and ongoing reality of racism is (or isn’t) being addressed. It doesn’t feel to them like the church is a place where the heart of Jesus for those hurt by sin is on display. Their experience is that the church is refusing to see and listen and take the ongoing legacy of the pain of racism seriously. That feels a lot like a refusal to love by a refusal to empathize.[9]
Maybe this is happening because there are a lot of ways for this discussion to potentially go wrong, and we are seeing that on display as our nation tries to address it. But I also know this: not talking about is a way that will definitely go wrong, so am walking into this praying that this will go right.
I have preached a lot of sermons calling out sin and discussing the impact with which sin lands on the victims of sin. If we don’t see sin for what it is and talk about the chaos and destruction it sows in the world, several sobering things follow:
· If we don’t rightly name sin for what it is, we can too easily dismiss sin, not see sin, or fall into it rather than pursue righteousness.
· If we don’t rightly name and see this sin, we will not see the victims of sin; if we do, we won’t see how profoundly it lands.
· If we don’t see how profoundly it lands, sin will continue without Christians moving into those sin-ravaged places and stopping the chaos and pain and bringing gospel healing to those who are the victims of it.
· If we don’t move into those sin-ravaged places, especially as it shows up in the legacy of the church, the presentation of the gospel and the experience of doing life together with God’s people are going to suffer great harm.[10]
So we are going to look at racism in American and specifically American church history. I’m not preaching this because I have seen things in this church that provoked me to it. If what follows feels really personal to you, then you’ve got something going on I don’t know about. I’m not going to shame you, or tell you that you are a racist, or that being white automatically makes you complicit in racism. As far as I know, nothing I cover today will overlap with what you have done in your life. If it does, own it. If it doesn’t, don’t project false guilt onto yourself.
I am preaching this as an exercise in being part of the broader American church in which we practice a couple important things.
· First naming sin clearly, in this case the sin of racism. I will define it as the dismissing, demeaning, objectifying, discarding and/or brutalizing of image bearers off God simply because their ethnicity or melanin differs from one’s own. Globally, racism is not unique to one group of people. In the United States, the legacy of racism directed at particular groups of people by other groups of people is focused in particular ways, and that’s what we will look at today.
· Second, seeing and listening so we can know and understand how legacies have shaped our collective national and American church history so that we might clearly intervene with righteousness and move both victims and perpetrators toward healing and restoration. In the Old Testament, the Israelites constantly recited their history. They did not forget. Read Daniel’s prayer in Daniel 9. He begs for God’s mercy for the actions of generations past, because their legacy lived on.
· Third, letting that knowledge provoke us to love well so that we might have more wisdom on how to be faithfully and lovingly present in attitude, action, and word with those who have both experienced racism - and perpetrated it.
· Fourth, so that the community of the church becomes a compelling place that embodies the heart and mind of Jesus for a world that is groaning from the weight of sin in every corner as it awaits redemption.[11]
Because I have been reading and listening to black and Native American evangelical writers and podcasters this past year, it is their history on which I will focus. There is going to be an avalanche of information. If it feels like a lot, it is, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. I beg of you to see and listen in order to build sympathyand provoke empathy, so we can be a loving, righteous and ultimately hope-filled presence in our culture and with our brothers and sisters in Christ.
* * * * *
· The Indian Wars begin in 1609. They won’t end until 1924, by which time the Native American population had dropped by 95%.[12]
· Slavery starts in the New World as early as 1619, when a Dutch ship that had stolen 20 or so Africans from a Portuguese slave trading ship called São João Bautista, or Saint John the Baptist, landed.
· In 1694, Massachusetts offered the first bounties for the heads and scalps of American Indian children; in 1695 it specified £25 for women or children “under the age of fourteen years, that shall be killed.”
· The map of the massacres of Native Americans is unsettling. These massacres included the killing of women and children.
· Various colonial governments sought to limit property ownership among chattel[13] slaves. For example, a 1692 Virginia law provided that "all horses, cattle and hoggs marked of any negro or other slaves marke, or by any slave kept” would be given to the white poor. This is the beginning of the crushing of generational wealth.
· Some Christians were leading abolitionists. “The same Bible that racists misused to support slavery and segregation is the one abolitionists and civil rights activists rightly used to animate their resistance. Whenever there has been racial injustice, there have been Christians who fought against it in the name of Jesus Christ.”[14]
· Yet far too many professing Christians were the opposite. Jonathan Edwards owned household slaves. George Whitefield bought a South Carolina plantation and became a slave owner before leading a push to get slavery legalized in Georgia in 1751. As you might imagine, Christians and preachers owning slaves was a lot for slaves to process.[15]
· The Baptist General Committee eventually issued statements in 1785 and 1790 opposing slavery. After some pushback, they decided it was a civil issue not a church one, and churches could do whatever they wanted. [16]
· There were 700,000 slaves in this land in 1790 (92% of the black population); 3.9 million in 1860 (89% of the black population).[17] About 25% of Southern households owned slaves (as high as 49% in Mississippi).[18] Note the screen shot from a google image search for “slave trade.”
· The 1790 Naturalization Act permitted only "free white persons" to become naturalized citizens, so only free white people could vote, serve on juries, hold office, and in many cases, own property.[19]
· Dating back to the 1800s, Native American kids were put in boarding schools – of which a third were run by Christian missionaries - to “Kill the Indian and save the man” as Capt. Richard H. Pratt's put it in an 1892 speech at George Mason University. They were isolated from their families and trained into low-paying vocations. More on this later.
· The American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816 by Presbyterian minister Robert Finley, sought to send freed slaves back to Africa as an alternative to emancipation. “Could they be sent to Africa, a three-fold benefit would arise,” the first reason being, “We should be cleared of them…” The ACS founded Liberia for this reason.[20]
· The Trail of Tears moved 60,000 Native Americans between 1830 and 1850 from their homes in what was known as the Indian removal. Thousands died before reaching their destinations or shortly after from disease.[21] This is only the most notorious of many similar events.[22]
· When the Supreme Court ruled against Dredd Scott (1857), a slave who sued for his freedom, Judge Roger Taney wrote that black people were of “an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race,” and “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
· In 1859, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was founded by slaveholding members[23] of the Southern Baptist Convention.[24] “The founding fathers of this school were deeply involved in slavery and deeply complicit in the defense of slavery.” (Albert Mohler)[25] The SBC recently issued a thorough apology, though some lingering issues remain (see addendum). [26)
· In 1846, the Episcopalian church ruled that no “colored congregation [will] be admitted into union with this Convention, so as to entitle them to representation… They are socially degraded, and are not regarded as proper associates for the class of person who attend our Convention.”
· 1861 - 1865: Civil War.
· On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln, who hated slavery, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed enslaved people in the Confederate states. The 13th Amendment officially ends slavery in 1865.
· In the South, the federal government never followed through on Sherman's Civil War plan to divide up plantations and give each freed slave "40 acres and a mule." The only compensation for slavery was $300 per slave ($5,000 in today’s money) - not to the slaves, but to slaveholders.
· Laws kicked in right away in the South that led to indentured servitude through prison labor. In South Carolina, a law prohibited black people from holding any occupation other than farmer or servant unless they paid an annual tax of $10 to $100. Then when they couldn't find (or afford) work, they were arrested for vagrancy (not having a job). It was hard to win a case in court, because the judges and police were often former Confederate soldiers.
· The 1862 Homestead Act gave away 270 million acres.[27] It was available to any U.S. citizen who had never fought against the U.S. Government. Guess who couldn't legally be a citizen because they weren’t white and it was not yet 1868? (#The Fourteenth Amendment)[28]
· Carlisle Indian School (1879) and other boarding schools started with the aim to "civilize" and "Americanize" the Indian.[29] Survivors have described a culture of pervasive physical and sexual abuse. Medical attention was often scarce; in the early years, more died than graduated. Nearly 200 Native children are buried at the entrance of the Carlisle Barracks.
· By the time the 1880s rolled around, “The legal system entrapped thousands of black men, often on trumped up charges and without any due process protections, and earned money for sheriffs and state treasuries by selling their labor. It was worse than slavery.”[30] Every southern state leased convicts; 90% of all leased convicts were black.
· 1868: The Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to black people. The government specifically interpreted the law so it didn’t apply to Native Americans, who would not win the right to citizenship until 1924.
· The Fifteenth Amendment was passed by Congress and ratified during the Reconstruction Era (1870). African American men were not only granted voting rights but even held political office. It was an excellent change that generated hope, but only lasted a short time.
· When Reconstruction collapsed with the withdrawal of Federal troops in 1877, voting rights for black men in the former Confederate states were restricted or taken away by local laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, intimidation, and fraud. The “grandfather clause” restricted voting rights to men who were allowed to vote, or whose male ancestors were allowed to vote, before 1867 – which was, or course, not black men.[31]
· General Ulysses S. Grant (late 1800s): “The settlers and emigrants must be protected, even if the extermination of every Indian tribe [is] necessary.” The following year, General Philip Sheridan reportedly proclaimed, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”
· After the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre (300 Lakotaa men, women and children killed), author L. Frank Baum – you know him as the writer of the Wizard of Oz - wrote two editorials about Native Americans. After the killing of Sitting Bull, Baum wrote: " With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by the law of conquest, by a justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians… better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are."
· Following the Wounded Knee massacre, Baum wrote, "The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”
· President Theodore Roosevelt (early 1900s) said, "I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are. And I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."
· Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821-1877), who coordinated the butchering of black and white Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, went on to become the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Many Klan members actively participated in their local churches; more than a few preached on Sunday.[32]
· By the early 1900s, nearly every southern state had barred black citizens from voting, serving in public office, on juries and in the administration of the justice system.[33]
· The revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1900s was largely the effort of Thomas Dixon Jr., an ordained Baptist preacher who wrote a admiring book on of the KKK called The Clansman (1905). D.W. Griffith adapted this into the first blockbuster movie, The Birth of a Nation (1915).”[34]
· There were 4,084 racially motivated lynchings in twelve Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the 1950’s.[35]
· Here’s a map of lynchings just from 1930-1931. Multiply that by a lot for the big picture.[36]
· Ida Wells, one of the founders of the NAACP, called out D.L. Moody for downplaying the issue of lynching: “American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in Hell Fire to save the lives of black ones from present burning and fires kindled by white Christians.”
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Starting now, there are still people alive today who experienced these things.
· 1921 brought the Tulsa Massacre, in which a highly prosperous black community known as Black Wall Street was attacked and pounded into rubble after a black boy accidentally jostled a white woman in an elevator. Hundreds were killed; more than 1,400 homes, businesses, schools and churches were burned; nearly 10,000 people were left homeless. The destruction of ‘legacy wealth’ is almost incalculable.
· The newspaper headline the next day read, “Two White People Killed In Race Riot.” The Tulsa race massacre was barely mentioned in history books until the late 1990s.[37] Two years before that was the “Red Summer,” a summer of violent race riots sparked by things like a black boy on a raft floating into the white people’s section of Lake Michigan in Chicago.
· That’s the tip of the iceberg. Here is a map[38] that shows the massacre of black people in America history.
· The unofficial “last hired, first fired” policy pushed the black unemployment rate following the Great Depression to 50% - 70% in 1932 – a rate double and triple that of whites.
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My grandma, who is 96, lived through some of the previous things (years of lynchings) and everything that follows.
· The KKK experienced a resurgence in the 1910s through the 1930s,
with three to five million members in the North alone.[39] “It’s estimated that 40,000 ministers were members of the Klan, and these people were sermonizing regularly, explicitly urging people to join the Klan.”[40]
· The Social Security Act of 1935 provided a safety net for millions of workers. But it excluded two occupations: agricultural workers and domestic servants, who were predominately African American, Mexican, and Asian. (That was rectified completely in 1954 by President Truman).
· The 1935 Wagner Act (collective bargaining for unions), which helped millions of workers join the middle class, permitted unions to exclude non-whites. Many unions remained nearly all-white well into the 1970s. In 1972 every single one of the 3,000 members of Los Angeles Steam Fitters Local #250 was still white.
· In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) introduced our modern mortgage lending system, which included redlining policies in over 200 American cities. Redlining was a way of helping the government decide which neighborhoods would get home loans and which would not.[41] The redlining overwhelmingly highlighted communities with black residents.
· Between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed $120 billion of home loans. Less than 2% went to blacks, who constituted 12% of the population. Of the 350,000 new homes built with federal support in northern California between 1946 and 1960, fewer than 100 went to African Americans. That is .0003% of loans for 5% of the population.[42]
· When courts began overturning redlining and race-based zoning laws, the government began building highways right on the former boundary lines at the request of community members.[43] At times, highways were routed purposefully through minority communities. The government took property by eminent domain, and black neighborhoods lost homes, businesses, churches and schools.[44] Constructing interstate highways through majority-black neighborhoods eventually reduced the populations to the poorest proportion of people financially unable to leave their destroyed community.[45] (#”urbandecay”)
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My Mom was born in 1942. Everything that follows has happened in her lifetime.
· The Negro Motorist Green Book was published from 1936 to 1966 (three years before I was born), to help black motorists travel without getting in trouble. John Lewis recalled how his family prepared for a trip in 1951:“There would be no restaurant for us to stop at until we were well out of the South, so we took our restaurant right in the car with us.... Stopping for gas and to use the bathroom took careful planning. Uncle Otis… knew which places along the way offered "colored" bathrooms and which were better just to pass on by. Our map was marked and our route was planned that way, by the distances between service stations where it would be safe for us to stop.”
· Many hotels, motels, and boarding houses refuse to serve black customers; by the end of the 1960s, there were an estimated 10,000 “sundown towns”[46] across the United States, named because of signs that read, “N*****, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on You in This Town.”[47] I worked as a camp counselor in Hazard County, Kentucky in the summers of 1987-1989. There was a town nearby that was unofficially still a “sundown town.”[48]
· The Black Hospital movement took place from 1865- 1960s.[49] Black patients were usually not admitted to white hospitals or hired as staff, especially in the South, and for a long time could only get an education at a select few colleges in the North and Midwest. You can imagine the toll this took on the health of the black population.[50]
· 1952 was the first year since 1882 that there were no recorded lynchings in the United States. The photo you see is not unusual.
· In 1954, a regional meeting of clergymen in the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) featured a speaker discussing a “Christian view of Segregation.” At that conference, the pastor of First Baptist Church in West Dallas gave a sermon entitled “God the Original Segregationist.”[51]
· By 1956, hospital integration was common in the North (83% of hospitals providing integrated services). In the South, only 6% of hospitals offered unrestricted services to black patients; 31% did not admit black patients under any conditions.[52]
· The United States passed civil rights bills in 1957,[53] 1964 and 1965. The 24th Amendment (1964) finally assured voting rights for black citizens.
· When the Supreme Court declared that schools needed to be integrated in the 1950s,[54] those bothered by this started segregation academies, which were founded between 1954[55] and 1976.[56] Wikipedia lists 200 of these schools.[57] 25 of them are clearly Christian. One even has evangelical in the name.
· Over fifty bombings from 1947-1965 in a slowly integrating white neighborhood earned Birmingham the moniker “Bombingham.”[58] In September of 1963, four young black girls were killed when KKK members detonated a bomb in Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.[59]
· The “urban renewal” that followed “urban decay” displaced millions of Americans. Black Americans (13 percent of the population in 1960) were at least 55 percent of the displaced. James Baldwin called it the “negro removal” for good reason. The Chancellor of the University of Chicago noted that urban renewal was “an effective screening tool” for “cutting down the number of Negroes”. His notes from a board of trustees meeting read simply: “Tear it down and begin over again. Negroes.”[60]
· The National Black Evangelical Association branched off from the National Evangelical Association in 1963, largely motivated by frustration over white evangelicals refusing to get involved on civil rights issues.
· In 1964 – the year in which three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi - Bob Jones University gave segregationists Strom Thurmond and George Wallace honorary doctorates.Bob Jones Jr. described Wallace as a man “who fought for truth and righteousness.”
· The Fair Housing Act of 1968 finally put an end to legally sanctioned redlining policies. That’s the year before I was born.[61]
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I was born in 1969. Everything that follows has been in my lifetime.
· Kentucky ratified the 13th Amendment in 1976.
· A segregation academy was established in Escambia County, Alabama in 1970. I lived there. I was 1 when it was founded. My mom tells me that segregationists harassed our family when we attended a black church for a while in the early 70s.
· The Indian schools as a movement lasted until 1978.[62] I first learned about the Indian schools from a student at NMC whose grandparents went to school at the one in Harbor Springs, which closed in 1983.[63] His presentation to the class broke my heart.
· The IRS’s guidelines about racial integration being tied to tax exempt status in 1978 sparked outrage among many Christians. Congress received tens of thousands of messages. “What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the Equal Rights Amendment. [It was] Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of… segregation..”[64]
· From 1981 to 1997, the United States Department of Agriculture denied loans to tens of thousands black farmers that were provided to white farmers in similar circumstances. Two lawsuit resulted in settlement agreements totaling 2.31 billion dollars.[65]
· Just after Emancipation, African Americans owned only 0.5 percent of the total worth of the United States. But by 1990, a full 125 years after the abolition of slavery, black Americans still possessed only a meager 1 percent of national wealth.[66]
· Mississippi ratified the 13th Amendment in 1995.
· Educational inequalities continue. Equally sized majority-nonwhite districts get $23 billion less in funding every year than majority-white districts.[67] Why? Because schools are funded by property taxes, and the Supreme Court (Milliken v. Bradley) in 1974 ruled that a school district line can be drawn anywhere for almost any reason.[68] Many lines were drawn along the lines that started “urban decay” and defined “urban renewal.” This funding discrepancy has huge educational and economic implications.[69]
· Health care inequalities continue. The black population has been hit the hardest of all ethnic demographics by COVID-19 due in part to the impact of racial discrimination that has a legacy to this day (housing, education, vocation, distrust of health care #tuskeegee[70]…).[71]
· Hate crimes have risen against Asian-Americans since the coronavirus started. This is largely attributed to how the constant drumbeat of the “China Virus” has focused anger and frustration on the Chinese as a group. Google “hate crimes Asian.” Nearly half of Chinese residents have report incidents tied to their ethnic background since the pandemic began. This is in line with the history of discrimination against Asians in our history.[72]
· In 2021, students at a local high school in Traverse City started a slave market online and bought and sold minority students while making terribly demeaning comments about them. I have friends in town who are now reconsidering sending their daughter there when she is old enough because they are concerned for her safety, as she would have been a target. A Texas high school made the news this year for the same reason.
· Last month, someone in Traverse City stood up at the local school board meeting – streamed for the community to see – and felt quite comfortable using the n-word multiple times. In the screen, a black man sitting behind her is visibly undone by what she is saying. I know this man.
· I haven’t even touched on the issues swirling around race and law enforcement, and that issue is the one we read the most about in the news. See this link from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.[73)
A brother in Christ named Esau McCauley, author or Reading While Black, gets the final word on this section:
“And what more shall we say? For the time would fail me to tell of the lynching tree, the Red summer, the dogs and the water hoses, the sit-ins, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., the people who defied governors and presidents, braved mobs, and sang victory, people of whom the world was not worthy. The history of Black people in this country is a litany of suffering.
Yet we are definitely more than this suffering. There is a thread of victory woven into the tale of despair. We are still here! Still, sometimes it’s hard to see that thread when the cloth is stained with blood. When a Black person learns the history of our suffering and then continues to experience the aftershocks of the seismic disruption of slavery in our ongoing oppression, a feeling of rage or even nihilism begins to rise.
Our suffering is not an inadvertent consequence of an otherwise just system. It was designed to be that way. What are we do with this anger, this pain? How does Christianity speak to it? What does the cross have to say, not simply to human suffering, but the particular suffering of African Americans?
* * * * *
This is what many of our black and brown brothers and sisters are weeping about. This is what breaks the heart of God as he sees the impact of racist sin. If we want to have the eyes of God, we must see what God sees. If we want to have the heart of God, we must feel what he feels. What breaks his heart must break ours.
When we spend more time saying, “But I don’t like how the world is responding to racism,” rather than saying, “Here’s how we as Christians should be responding to racism,” we are in trouble. It looks like the world is more serious about addressing injustice and sin than we are. It might even seem like a hostile environment if there is a barrage of complaints about talking about the reality and ongoing legacy of racism.
I’ve heard the argument that minorities are better off in the U.S. today than in any other time in our history, so we should all just relax. That may be true by comparison to times of slavery and lynching and bombings and massacres, but…that’s a low, low standard. People can be at a better place than ever and still be in a deeply unjust place.
· Nobody tells the victim of domestic violence that since the physical abuse is over, the onging verbal and emotional abuse is just fine because, “You’ve never been in such a good place before!”.
· Nobody suggested to the children of Israel that the wilderness was sufficient after they left slavery in Egypt. The goal was a land flowing with milk and honey; the goal is righteousness and justice.
We are never called to “settle” short of that. Gospel-centered love requires us to imitate Jesus’ example:
· “I see your pain.”
· “I hear your story.”
· “I will weep with you as you weep in hopes that we can rejoice together when it is time to rejoice.”
· “I want to walk with you into this injustice and offer a gospel-oriented solution. How can we support each other on a path of restoration and hope?”
Esau McCauley gets the last word yet again.
Hungering and thirsting for justice is nothing less than the continued longing for God to come and set things right. It is a vision of the just society established by God that does not waver in the face of evidence to the contrary. Mourning is not enough. We must have a vision for something different. Justice is that difference.
Jesus, then, calls for a reconfiguration of the imagination in which we realize that the options presented to us by the world are not all that there is. There remains a better way and that better way is the kingdom of God. He wants us to see that his kingdom is something that is possible, at least as a foretaste, even while we wait for its full consummation. To hunger for justice is to hope that the things that cause us to mourn will not get the last word.
What does all of this have to do with the public witness of the church? Jesus asks us to see the brokenness in society and to articulate an alternative vision for how we might live. This does not mean that we believe that we can establish the kingdom on earth before his second coming. It does mean that we see society for what it is: less than the kingdom. We let the world know that we see the cracks in the facade.
Hungering for justice is a hungering for the kingdom. Therefore the work of justice, when understood as direct testimony to God’s kingdom, is evangelistic from start to finish. It is part (not the whole) of God’s work of reconciling all things to himself. - Esau McCauley
My challenge to you this week: See and listen to your brothers and sisters in Christ who have been wounded by the sin of racism. Just see and listen. Let your heart be broken and your spirit provoked on behalf of God’s children. The following resources were recommended to me. None of them are perfect; probably all of them will have some conclusions or side conversations with which you disagree, and perhaps rightly so. I encourage you to take a deep breath and keep on going. This is an exercise is seeing and listening. We don’t have to agree with everything in order to learn important things.
Listen to/watch:
· Southside Rabbi: Season 2, Episode 12, “Floyd, Chauvin, and the War on Empathy.” https://soundcloud.com/southsiderabbi.
· The Holy Post: “Let’s Talk About Race In America” (Parts 1 and 2) https://www.holypost.com/articles/categories/videos
· Leave Loud – Jemar Tisby’s story. His podcast Pass The Mic has a lot more insight into similar stories. https://thewitnessbcc.com/leave-loud-jemar-tisbys-story/
Read:
· “The Bible and Race” by Tim Keller. https://quarterly.gospelinlife.com/the-bible-and-race/
This is the first article in the series on justice and race by Keller that includes: “The Sin of Racism” A Biblical Critique of Secular Justice and Critical Theory and “Justice in the Bible”.
· Reading While Black by Esau McCaulley https://www.ivpress.com/reading-while-black
· African American Readings of Paul: Reception, Resistance, and Transformation by Lisa M. Bowens
· The Color of Compromise, by Jemar Tisby. https://www.amazon.com/Color-Compromise-American-Churchs-Complicity-ebook/dp/B07BB6R827
ADDENDUM #1
The SBC, which issued an apology for its racist history, is still struggling to address this issue. See the attached addendum, a recent letter from Russell Moore to the SBC. Here is a letter sent in early 2020 to the trustees of the Southern Baptist Convention’s[74] Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission by its then-president, Russell Moore.[75]
My family and I have faced constant threats from white nationalists and white supremacists, including within our convention. Some of them have been involved in neo-Confederate activities going back for years. Some are involved with groups funded by white nationalist nativist organizations. Some of them have just expressed raw racist sentiment, behind closed doors.
They want to deflect the issue to arcane discussions that people do not understand, such as “critical race theory.” There is no Southern Baptist that I know, of any ethnicity, who is motivated by any critical theory but by the text of Ephesians and Galatians and Romans, the Gospels themselves, the framework of Revelation chapters four and five.
From the very beginning of my service, I have been attacked with the most vicious guerilla tactics on such matters, and have been told to be quiet about this by others. One SBC leader who was at the forefront of these behind-closed-doors assaults had already ripped me to shreds verbally for saying, in 2011, that the Southern Baptist Convention should elect an African-American president.
This same leader told a gathering that “The Conservative Resurgence is like the Civil War, except this time unlike the last one, the right side won.” I walked out of that gathering, as did one of you.
Another SBC leader… let me have it when I said that white Christians should join our black Christian brothers and sisters in lamenting when young black men are shot, and that the moments of Ferguson and Eric Garner and the Emmanuel AME Church murders should motivate the church to address these questions with the gospel embodied in reconciled churches bearing one another’s burdens. [He responded by saying] that only those with guns would prevent black people from burning down all of our cities.
This is just a tiny sample of what I experience every single day. I am called a liberal—someone who believes in the inerrancy of Holy Scripture, in the authority of Holy Scripture, someone who has spent my life defending such concepts as the exclusivity of Christ for salvation. I am a “liberal” in this definition not because I deny the inerrancy of Scripture but because I affirm it.
I believe in the inerrancy of all Scripture — including Luke 10 and Ephesians 2 and 3 and Romans 12, and all of it. I believe that no sin — including… racial hatred — can be forgiven apart from the blood of Christ and repentance of such sins.
My concern about such issues is not because I believe in “social justice” (although, in the literal meaning of those words, of course I do, as the major and minor prophets tell us), but because I believe in the doctrine of hell. I believe in standing against racism not just because I love our African-American and Hispanic and Asian-American and immigrant brothers and sisters in Christ (although I certainly do), but also because I love bigots.
And I believe that unrepentant sin, not brought to the light of Christ and cleansed by the blood of Christ, through the gospel, leads to hell. I really believe in hell. That’s why I’ve been clear for twenty-five years on abortion, on sexual chastity and morality, and on racism.”
ADDENDUM #2
We also have a narrative that immigrants from Central America are violent rapists and murderers. Meanwhile, the incarceration rate of the U.S.-born (3.51%) was five times the rate of the foreign-born (0.68 %)... the lowest incarceration rates among Latin American immigrants… are the Salvadorans and Guatemalans (0.52 %), and the Mexicans (0.70 %). Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens…our findings help us understand why the most aggressive immigrant removal programs have not delivered on their crime reduction promises and are unlikely to do so in the future. From 2012-2018, US-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes. In addition, the proportion of arrests involving undocumented immigrants in Texas was relatively stable or decreasing over this period.” (https://www.pnas.org/content/117/51/32340)
Why do we keep insisting on an overarching narrative that paints immigrants as violent “animals”? If they are, we are - in spades - and we don’t refer to ourselves as animals. Maybe we shouldn’t call them that either.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Hebrews 4:15 “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize (literally, “to have a fellow feeling with” in both Strong’s and the NAS Exhaustive Concordance; Thayer’s Greek Lexicon says “to be affected with the same feeling as another”) with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet he did not sin.” (NIV)
[2] Matthew 5:1; 9:36, for example
[3] Mark 10
[4] Matthew 9
[5] John 8:1-11
[6] Matthew 11: 16-19 & John 8: 1-11
[7] Luke 19
[8] John 4
[9] Alister McGrath, an atheist who became a Christian, has noted that Christianity flourishes in nations that have had terrible atheist leadership…and atheism flourishes in nations where the church has a terrible track record. People don’t just leave a worldview because another one is nice. They leave because they think another one is better.
[10] The Bible is clear that there is a legacy of sin that gets passed down (Exodus 20:5; Exodus 34:7; Deuteronomy 5:9), and I think that impact is not only in how the descendants of the perpetrators are influenced but in how the descendants of victims are as well. And yet Ezekiel is clear that, when we are committed to righteousness, our history is not our destiny any more than our ancestors’ history is our destiny (Ezekiel 18:19-20)
[11] The early Church had its own divide: Jew and Gentile. Paul reminded them that now through Christ, “You who were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility” (2:13-14).
[12] By the close of the Indian Wars, fewer than 238,000 First Nation people remained from the original 5 -15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.
[13] People becoming private property on the same level as livestock.
[14] Jamar Tisby, The Color of Compromise
[15] Read African American Readings of Paul: Reception, Resistance, and Transformation by Lisa M. Bowens.
[16] Interestingly, a ground-swell of southern preachers in opposition to slavery found that they were simply dismissed or not paid by local congregations. In this sense, the broader colonial culture dictated the ethics of preachers, rather than the other way round.
[17] According to the US Census Bureau. Even by the most minimal calculations about how long slavery lasted, African-Americans have been free in this country for less time than they were enslaved.
[18] https://theconversation.com/american-slavery-separating-fact-from-myth-79620
[19] Still, remarkably, one in every seven urban African American families in the upper South managed to acquire land by the eve of the Civil War when local areas were more accommodating.
[20] Abraham Lincoln thought it was a good idea to send freed slaves to Liberia or Haiti. In 1862 he said to a black audience: “You and we are different races—we have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us; while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.”
[21] Notably, the Supreme Court under John Marshall upheld the Cherokee’s case against the State of Georgia which had initiated the removal process. President Jackson said, “(Chief Justice) Marshall has made his decision, let him enforce it.” This is perhaps the most flagrant violation of the Constitution ever made by a president. Approximately ¼ of the removed Cherokee died on the Trail of Tears. Other tribes were also removed, but the Cherokee with their favorable Supreme Court ruling and unjust removal were
particularly heart-breaking.
[22] Here’s another one. The 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, which caused outrage in its own time, has been called genocide. Colonel John Chivington led a 700-man force of Colorado Territory militia in a massacre of 70–163 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho, about two-thirds of whom were women, children, and infants. Chivington and his men took scalps and other body parts as trophies, including human fetuses and male and female genitalia.[122] In defense of his actions Chivington stated, “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! ... I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians. ... Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_indigenous_peoples#Indian_Removal_and_the_Trail_of_Tears
There were worse ones. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/search-site-worst-indian-massacre-us-history-180959091/
[23] They purposefully aligned with the confederacy. https://religionnews.com/2021/06/11/resolution-9-rescinding-critical-race-theory-civil-warsouthern-baptist-history/
[24] They broke away from northern Baptists in 1845 over the issue of slavery.
[25] https://eji.org/news/southern-baptist-seminary-documents-history-of-racial-injustice/
[26] “We lament and repudiate historic acts of evil such as slavery from which we continue to reap a bitter harvest, and we recognize that the racism which yet plagues our culture today is inextricably tied to the past.”
[27] “In the Great Plains, they found success. A significant colony (as it was called) of about 150 people thrived at Blackdom, near Roswell, N.M., during the opening decades of the 20th century. Dearfield was home to more than 200 homesteaders.”https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-disappearing-story-of-the-black-homesteaders-who-pioneered-the-west/2018/07/05/ca0b51b6-7f09-11e8-b0ef-fffcabeff946_story.html
[28] The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 opened 46 million acres of federal land specifically for African Americans (at least at first). Many former slaves could not afford the fee, and Southern whites prevented many blacks from getting information. In addition, most of the land was forest and swamp. Only about 1,000 black homesteaders. Benefitted. https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/Southern-Homestead-Act-of-1866/632079. Meanwhile, the 46 million acres of federal land given away was Native American land that was simply taken. The total land that has been taken by the US government since the 1800s: 90 million acres. (https://iltf.org/land-issues/)
[29] http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/teach/kill-indian-and-save-man-capt-richard-h-pratt-education-native-americans
[30] https://eji.org/news/southern-baptist-seminary-documents-history-of-racial-injustice/
[31] https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/vote
[32] Frederick Douglass (1817-1895): “For between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked… I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
[33] https://theconversation.com/exploiting-black-labor-after-the-abolition-of-slavery-72482
[34] Jemar Tisby, The Color Of Compromise
[35] There were other lynchings that were not racially motivated. http://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/
[36] After the 1906 Race Riots, a confederate soldier and governor of Georgia named William Northern, a Southern Baptist leader, helped organize Christian anti-lynching activists, though he assured people that stopping lynching would not undermine white supremacy or lead to racial integration.
[37] “In 1997 a Tulsa Race Riot Commission was formed by the state of Oklahoma to investigate the massacre and formally document the incident. Members of the commission gathered accounts of survivors who were still alive, documents from individuals who witnessed the massacre but had since died, and other historical evidence. Scholars used the accounts of witnesses and ground-piercing radar to locate a potential mass grave just outside Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery, suggesting the death toll may be much higher than the original records indicate. In its preliminary recommendations, the commission suggested that the state of Oklahoma pay $33 million in restitution, some of it to the 121 surviving victims who had been located. However, no legislative action was ever taken on the recommendation, and the commission had no power to force legislation. The commission’s final report was published on February 28, 2001. In April 2002 a private religious charity, the Tulsa Metropolitan Ministry, paid a total of $28,000 to the survivors, a little more than $200 each, using funds raised from private donations.” https://www.britannica.com/event/Tulsa-race-massacre-of-1921
[38] From the Decolonial Atlas.
[39] This is also when confederate monuments began to be built in earnest.
[40] Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise
[41] https://www.thoughtco.com/redlining-definition-4157858
In 1947, home loans from the GI Bill after WWII disenfranchised black war veterans. “In New York and the northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI bill supported home purchases by non-whites.”[42] 6% of soldiers were black; .02% got loans.
[43] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-how-racism-shaped-interstate-highways
[44] “The real estate business practice of "blockbusting" was a for-profit catalyst for white flight, and a means to control non-white migration. By subterfuge, real estate agents would facilitate black people buying a house in a white neighborhood, either by buying the house themselves, or via a white proxy buyer, and then re-selling it to the black family. The remaining white inhabitants (alarmed by real estate agents and the local news media),[78] fearing devalued residential property, would quickly sell, usually at a loss. The realtors profited from these en masse sales and the ability to resell to the incoming black families, through arbitrage and the sales commissions from both groups. By such tactics, the racial composition of a neighborhood population was often changed completely in a few years.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Government-aided_white_flight
[45] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#Government-aided_white_flight
[46] https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781620974681
[47] Wikipedia! Also, there are still at least 5 towns in the United States whose names come from the acronym ANNA – “Ain’t No N***** Allowed.”
[48] Two quotes from an article noting responses from readers concerning sundown towns. https://www.propublica.org/article/reader-responses-the-legend-of-anna-illinois-sundown-towns
“This reminds me of a shocking event from my teens. In the late 60’s, my dad and I were waiting with our new housekeeper at a bus stop in Burbank, CA, when the police pulled up and told us our housekeeper had to be out of town before sunset-so disillusioning, horrifying, sad.” — @JBEnglish1
“The place was Golden Valley NC. I saw the sign in 1997. I could not find the picture, but I remember the sign, ‘The sun never set on a black man in Golden Valley’ - right on the side of the road. I couldn’t get it out of my mind for a long time, and still think about it.” — @No_Bod_There
[49] https://guides.mclibrary.duke.edu/blackhistorymonth/hospitals
[50] Sometimes, the white hospitals did active damage. In 1932, the Tuskegee Institute, working with the United States Piublic Health Service, began a study on syphilis originally called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” During this study, they lied to 200 black men whom they told were being treated for syphilis, when in fact they were not, even though a treatment was available. In th e1970s, a class action lawsuit paid out 10 million dollars to wives, widows and children. https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm
[51] As noted in The Color of Compromise. In the mid-1950s, pastors of Christians in Kirkwood, Georgia actively urged their members not to sell their homes to black people. “ ‘If everyone simply refuses to sell to colored,’ the pastors assured residents, ‘then everything will be fine…Please help us ‘Keep Kirkwood White’ and preserve our Churches and homes.” This happened more often than we would like to think.
[52] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448322/
[53] Eisenhower (R) signed it into law, but two other factors worked against Eisenhower. First, the bill only covered federal elections, not state and local. That would be fixed by Kennedy and Johnson. Second, MLK publicly expressed disappointment over Eisenhower’s lack of support denouncing segregationist violence in the South.
[54] “The U.S. Supreme Court issued its historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 347 U.S. 483, on May 17, 1954. Tied to the 14th Amendment, the decision declared all laws establishing segregated schools to be unconstitutional, and it called for the desegregation of all schools throughout the nation.” (Wikipedia)
[55] When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.
[56] When the court ruled similarly about private schools.
[57]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy#List_of_schools_founded_as_segregation_academies[n_1]
[58] At the end of this, in May of 1963, police in Birmingham, Ala., aimed high-powered hoses and loosed dogs on black men, women and even children who were determined to actually do the school integration the Supreme Court had granted 9 years earlier.
[59] https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/birmingham-erupted-chaos-1963-battle-civil-rights-exploded-south-article-1.1071793
[60] http://bostonreview.net/race/brent-cebul-tearing-down-black-america
[61] I haven’t even covered the so-called Urban Renewal movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and how it took homes and businesses from tens of thousands of poor black families. https://thinkprogress.org/top-infrastructure-official-explains-how-america-used-highways-to-destroy-black-neighborhoods-96c1460d1962/
[62] About one-third of the 357 known Indian boarding schools were managed by various Christian denominations.
[63] Eric Hemenway, director of archives and records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, said in a 2017 interview, “We hear devastating stories of kids who survived the school and they grow up to be our elders and, you know, they talk about the situations they went through and how that affected their ability to raise children and develop relationships with other people because of what happened to them at the boarding schools.”https://www.michiganradio.org/post/harbor-springs-boarding-school-worked-erase-odawa-culture-until-1980s.
[64] The Color of Compromise
[65]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_United_States#Reconstruction_Era_to_World_War_II. In 2017, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. settled for $55 million over allegations that independent brokers charged African-American and Hispanic borrowers higher rates than white borrowers from 2006 to 2009, violating of the Fair Housing Act.
[66] A lot of information came from an article at https://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-03-02.htm
[67] https://www.vox.com/22266219/biden-eduation-school-funding-segregation-antiracist-policy
[68] https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/07/07/888469809/how-funding-model-preserves-racial-segregation-in-public-schools
[69] This graph from the New York Times shows the implications of this well: economic hardship takes a toll for a lot of reasons, and economic ease opens a lot of doors. There can be complex reasons for these discrepancies, but general patterns emerge clearly along economic lines, lines which have been repeatedly re-drawn for centuries. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-race-and-success-how-your-school-district-compares.html
[70] For Native Americans, one source of that distrust is the 70,000 women sterilized against their will in the in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/kzvpqv/this-film-is-exposing-the-forced-sterilization-of-native-americans?fbclid=IwAR1jX8QfvOmOQt8zwoohML7B9WJVvo3fnAy91jpF7eyx55z-hSRTdN0S5Mk
[71] See https://www.healthline.com/health-news/covid-19-affecting-people-of-color
Also https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-05-blacks-minorities-hardest-covid-.html
And https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html
[72] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/03/a-long-history-of-bigotry-against-asian-americans/
[73] https://www.nacdl.org/Content/Race-and-Policing
[74] “The world's largest Baptist denomination, the largest Protestant and the second-largest Christian denomination in the United States, smaller only than the Roman Catholic Church according to self-reported membership statistics.” (Thanks, Wikipedia)
[75] https://religionnews.com/2021/06/02/russell-moore-to-erlc-trustees-they-want-me-to-live-in-psychological-terror/?fbclid=IwAR19AnVipn-RwqpdWZ7_fPApWWC45Z0xCcnCe-SB2n-42TxnhVtzPI1nf7E
