FOR THE WHITE CHURCH

Intro

My story in Oakland with police: squad car telling me to get along, assuming I was buying drugs. Then telling me to get out, get safe.

Then Berkeley: I naively called criminal justice system to help me. I had no ill will to these two Black young men. But I saw how there was a much larger history, a wider reality at work. Bigger than the individual police. Bigger than my personal virtues or motives.

This is a parable fo the white church today: naive about a much larger system, a history of its own. Our naivete and “innocent” participation in it (“But I’m not racist!”) needs to end sooner than later. A system that was geared to benefit us, so we don’t see it.

We work for years helping men and women in prison be empowered to alter their family story. We see men and women learning to parent their kids in ways they’d never experienced themselves, creating clean and sober homes, raising their kids in a faith they never had, sending their kids to college. It’s about changing our heritage, stepping up to create generational change.

So saying we, individuals, aren’t racist, misses the point. It’s about taking responsibility to acknowledge the heritage and history of a racialized hierarchy that our ancestors baked into he laws and culture of our land.

It’s not about taking the “blame” for the sins of the fathers, so to say. But if we don’t step up and clean up the sins of our fathers, who will?

And how can we be sure we’re not still perpetuating those sins if we can’t even look at it and talk about it, with some humility and sorrow?

“White supremacy” used to sound extreme to me, the stuff of skinheads and swastikas. Not nice, normal church people!

For most of my life I was taught that racism was, essentially, people of different skin colors having trouble getting along, having prejudices against each other. That’s what many of us were taught in grade school, a shallow and saccharine definition children might understand.

In that definition, just talking about “race” can feel divisive, when we should be all getting along.

Similarly, when a man has spent years physically beating and economically controlling a woman in the home, would you describe their ongoing conflict as simply “not getting along.” No. You have to talk about the history. You have to talk about abuse. About one side maintaining oppressive power over the other.

I’ve come to learn that racism is an “ism”: a theory, an ideology. It’s the ideology Europeans invented to justify owning other people we kidnapped from Africa and other continent to become beasts of labor. “This isn’t cruel because these people aren’t humans like us: see their different skin color? They’re an inferior “race” and it’s natural to corral them into ships and chain them and sell them and whip them. And we, with lighter skin, we are the “White race,” with a god-given superiority to rule and govern them.”

Race-ism.

The theory that there are different races—darker skin colors being a lower “race” of human, whites being a superior “race.”

We, a long heritage of white European and Americans, invented “white”ness as a sinister myth of our superiority and right to dominate God’s other children with different skin colors and from different continents of God’s good earth.

PRISON CHAPLAINCY’S DARK ROOTS

Charitably taking religious services into places of captivity for the spiritual betterment—indeed, salvation—of the captives.

Blind Eyes

Someone recently quoted to me the story in the gospels of people debating if someone is condemned for the sins of their fathers. In a way to dismiss the history of genocide, generations of enslaving Black people in America, legal lynchings, Jim Crow laws.

I see the story of Jesus differently: the person in question was “born blind.” What a perfect description of me and many white Christians. We were born blinded to the history, laws, culture and structures created long before us, designed for us not to see. And Jesus doesn’t condemn him, true; rather, Jesus opens the blind man’s eyes!

This is the goal: not to condemn ourselves as white Christians, but to let Jesus heal us and open our eyes.

White Supremacy

Not neo-nazis or KKK. Simply the long history of a culture built on the idea that light-skinned Europeans are superior to the dark-skinned communities we abducted and enslaved for labor. We labelled ourselves as “white,” a distinct, separate and superior “race.”

The history is simple and sad: We invented invented race-ism—the ideology that our different skin colors made us completely different races of species—and built it into the foundation of American society. We have two centuries of cultural practices, laws, housing market policies, institutions all built on this longstanding worldview where there is a hierarchy of human value.

Learning how many of these laws and traditions and histories were shaped by this ideology that still is slow to be undone—that’s our work. White supremacy won’t go away all on its own. No more than abuse or alcoholism will magically disappear from a family’s next generation unless we talk honestly about it, its damage to others and ourselves, and how to not carry it forward.

Racism:

I learned in 2020 there’s a different definition that what I was taught. Not about disliking people of color. Racism like all “ism”s is an ideology with a long history. Race-ism was created by white Europeans: we invented the worldview that we could genocide some people of color, kidnap and buy and sell and own people of color, because they are a different “race.” We created a hierarchy of human value. The devlish ideology our ethnic ancestors developed taught that the white “race” was created by God to be superior to other people with different colored skin.

Whiteness and racism was invented by us.

And white churches were part of this, every step of the way.

Step Deeper:

Slaveholder religion

Ownership and Repentance

Many people have told me this is some liberal myth, dismissing the “guilt” this puts on White people.

This saddens me. I would think Christians would be the leaders in embracing the reality of our sin, our fallenness, embracing confession, repentance, and receiving forgiveness and cleaning of these historical sins from God.

Men and women in prison can lead us here.

They have struggled to face the reality of the harm they’ve committed and been humbled to take ownership of their dysfunction they used to think was normal.

The goal moving forward: not awkardness (why we kept this for deeper into the journey). Lean into relationship. But the goal is greater humility.

And sorrow.

And awareness. We be less blind to the larger history that started long before us. We can be healed, have our eyes opened, and not repeat the sins of the fathers. And, just maybe, be part of the redemption story.

Further Reading