AMERICA
REVISITING RACISM
M. Shawn Copeland
Black theology and a legacy of oppression
COLOR
LINES. This wall, pictured in 2005, was built in the 1940s to enforce
residential segregation in Detroit. The wall still stands, even though
neighborhoods on both sides are now uniformly African-American.
For
white people living in the United States, the entanglement of
Christianity with chattel slavery and antiblack racism forms a set of
deep and confusing paradoxes. As a nation, we understand ourselves in
terms of freedom, but we have been unable to grapple with our depriving
blacks of freedom in the name of white prosperity and with our tolerance
of legalized racial segregation and discrimination. As a nation, we
have been shaped by racism, habituated to its presence, indifferent to
its lethal capacity to inflict lingering human damage. Too often,
Christians not only failed to defy slavery and condemn tolerance of
racism; they supported it and benefited from these evils and ignored the
very Gospel they had pledged to preach.
Not surprisingly, 11 a.m. on Sunday morning
remains the most segregated hour in Christian America, yet most white
Christian theologians have given little attention to slavery or racism.
In the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
the black liberation theologian James H. Cone denounced the lukewarm
responses of mainline Protestant and Catholic Christians to the plight
of black Americans as well as the willful blindness of Christian
theologians. He declared racism to be America’s original sin and
proposed the concept of black theology.
When confronted with this unseemly history,
many Catholics argue the “immigrant thesis,” which dates the bulk of
Catholic European immigration from the 19th century, thereby exempting
Catholics from earlier slaveholding and active participation in racism.
This is not the case. Many Catholic planters in the 17th, 18th and 19th
centuries acquiesced in and prospered from slaveholding, and many white
Catholic neighborhoods in the 20th century intentionally staved off
housing integration. Most Catholics have heard little, if anything,
about black theology, and given our national insistence that we now live
in a “post-racial age,” many may wonder whether such a theology is at
all relevant. Recurring public acknowledgments of landmark events in the
modern black struggle for civil rights provide opportunities for
reflection on our nation’s recent past and for an examination of
conscience.
Time of Turmoil
The years extending roughly from
1954 to 1968 remain a controversial yet pivotal period in American
history. These 14 years were marked indelibly by the courage and
suffering, prayer and resolve of American women and men of all races and
religions who dedicated themselves to secure basic civil rights for the
disenfranchised, the segregated and oppressed black women and men of
the nation. These were the years of Brown v. Board of Education, the
Montgomery bus boycott, Dr. King’s leadership of the civil rights
movement, the involvement of black and white college students in
sit-ins, freedom rides and voter registration drives. These were years
of bombings and burnings, of police wielding batons, water cannons and
cattle-prods, of sanctioned torture and murder of blacks and those
whites who fought for justice alongside them; of protest and marching,
mourning and rebellion. Montgomery, Little Rock, Jackson, the
Mississippi Delta, Selma, Birmingham, Cicero, Memphis, Watts and Detroit
were other stations of the cross.
Given Dr. King’s thoroughgoing appeal to the
Hebrew prophets and the teachings of Jesus, the civil rights movement
could not but present a challenge to the consciences of Christians and
Jews. Catholic vowed religious women and men, along with priests,
seminarians and lay people, Jewish rabbis, Protestant pastors and
ministers joined protests and marches; several Catholic members of
Congress supported civil rights legislation; bishops of many Christian
churches denounced racism as a sin; and some Catholic bishops either
integrated parochial schools under their direct control, or condemned
publicly the most egregious instances of discrimination. Many individual
Catholics made a difference. But what John Deedy argued in his 1987
book American Catholicism: And Now Where? still rings true: The
Catholic Church in the United States, as an institution, had a marginal
effect on the civil rights movement.
Despite passage of the Civil Rights Acts of
1957, 1960 and 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing
Act of 1968, the masses of black people in the United States remained
disenfranchised, segregated, discriminated against and mired in poverty.
Sidelined by intentional presidential and bureaucratic refusals to
deploy government resources and enforcement, these laws proved to be
little more than legislative gestures. When in 1966 Stokely Carmichael,
then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, took up
the phrase “black power” (most likely from a speech given by Congressman
Adam Clayton Powell at Howard University), he disrupted the ethos of
the civil rights movement and captured the frustration many blacks had
begun to feel about nonviolence as a strategy for social empowerment.
The notion of black power was freighted with
manifold meanings. In an economic sense, black power called for black
ownership and control of economic and institutional resources in black
communities—housing and schools, businesses and industries, banks and
health care, land and real estate. Supporters of black power reasoned
that even if blacks were guaranteed the exercise of political rights,
without economic resources they remained locked in a distinctive type of
colonial subjugation and economic exploitation. In cultural expression,
black power advanced an aesthetic aimed to eradicate the internalized
self-hatred that extended and deepened the psychic effects of slavery.
Ron Karenga and Amiri Baraka (a k a LeRoi Jones), both activists and
writers, were among its most notable advocates, and James Brown sang its
slogan in the song “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.”
Cultural nationalism promoted research,
adoption and creative adaptation of African rituals and practices, but
too often in uncritical ways. Since blacks already were racially
segregated in schools and housing, black power argued its embrace as
separation and demanded that blacks build up their communities and
ebonize academic curricula. This was also a poignant period. The sudden
and violent deaths of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr.
and Robert F. Kennedy sowed suspicion and conspiracy theories that left
the nation anxious, wounded and jaded.
Black theology emerged from the existential,
discursive and cultural energy generated in black people’s struggle for
human dignity, liberation and flourishing. Through black theology,
James Cone aimed to demonstrate that, as he wrote in his book For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church,
“the politics of black power was the Gospel of Jesus to
twentieth-century America.” Just as Jesus put his ministry at the
service of “the little ones”—the physically impaired and ill, the
outcast and the poor—so, too, black power was committed to the
liberation of the black outcast and poor from oppression. In his 1969
book Black Theology and Black Power, Professor Cone questioned the meaningfulness of the Gospel to:
powerless black [people]
whose existence is threatened daily by the insidious tentacles of white
power. Is there a message from Christ to the countless number of blacks
whose lives are smothered under white society? Unless theology can
become “ghetto theology,” a theology which speaks to black people, the
gospel has no promise of life for black [people]—it is a lifeless
message.
Despite the passionate language and polemical tone of Black Theology and Black Power,
James Cone’s theology remained a Christian theology, taking into
account the complex religiosity of the enslaved Africans and their
descendants as well as the tradition of radical advocacy of the historic
black church. Professor Cone sought to give voice to the seething pain
black people felt at the betrayal of the Gospel through the indifference
and racist behaviors of too many white Christian clergypersons and lay
people. Thus, he distinguished sharply between sacred Scripture as the
word of God and sacred Scripture as it had been manipulated to serve the
social and cultural interests of white Protestant and Catholic churches
and their memberships. Black theology demanded a new consideration of
the cultural matrix that is the United States in light of God’s
revelation in Jesus of Nazareth.
Against ‘Elegant Racism’
Under James Cone’s inspiration and
practical commitment to training doctoral students, for more than 45
years theologians of the black theology movement have sustained within
Protestant Christianity one of the most provocative, intellectually
stimulating and methodologically innovative movements in Christian
thought in North America. Initially, these mostly male scholars failed
to confront sexism and homophobia within the black community, but in the
ensuing period black theologians have put forward an agenda dealing
with issues of gender, race, class, culture and sexuality as these have
been posed by womanist theology (that is, theology that takes the
differentiated historical, religious, cultural and social experiences of
black women as its starting-point).
Black theological reflection calls attention
to the perspective of oppressed black men and women as its point of
departure; critically probes the meanings and consequences of the
religious, historical, cultural and social experiences of black people
in the United States; critiques the schism between Christian practice
and Christian teaching in relation to race and gender; and contests the
persistence of white supremacy and racism.
Public displays of vicious anti-black racial
animus have become rare, although racially reactionary opinions are not
hard to find. Disdain for these reactionary comments can afford us
moments of self-congratulation: “We are colorblind. We have put race behind us; we
have elected an African American as president.” But our self-righteous
reactions to displays of boorish racism distract us from what Ta-Nehisi
Coates aptly described in The Atlantic (5/1) as “elegant racism,” which
is “invisible, supple, enduring.”
Elegant racism is embedded in our vicious
national practices of housing discrimination, redlining and real estate
covenants. “Housing discrimination is hard to detect,” Mr. Coates
writes, “hard to prove, and hard to prosecute.” Elegant racism
constricts black and Latino access to adequate public transportation,
first-rate schools, good jobs, good quality supermarkets and adequate
public services. Elegant racism accounts for the disproportionate rates
of incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos in comparison with
whites; elegant racism explains what Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow
describes as the “sevenfold increase in the prison population in less
than 30 years due to [putatively] rising crime in poor communities of
color.” Racism, Mr. Coates writes, is “elegant, lovely, monstrous,”
sinful and evil. Racism, America’s original sin, makes black theology
crucial and the collaborative theological critique of racism among white
theologians necessary.
In 1979, reportedly at the urging of their
black confreres, the Catholic bishops of the United States issued a
pastoral letter on racism, “Brothers and Sisters to Us.” The bishops
defined racism as an enduring evil in society and in church. Racism,
they stated, is a sin that divides the human family, blots out the image
of God among specific members of that family and violates the
fundamental human dignity of those called to be children of the same
Father. Yet we have a way to go before we can claim to live out these
truths fully as a church. John Deedy’s assessment of Catholics and race
rings as true today as it did 30 years ago: The church as a whole has
never gone “out of its way to make blacks feel welcome as Catholics” in
the United States.
Few white Catholic theologians have engaged
with the topic of racism or placed the condition of black Americans at
the heart of their scholarly work. The recent work of black Catholic
historians and theologians—Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., Cecilia Moore, Diane
Batts Morrow, Bishop Edward Braxton, Shawnee-Marie Daniels-Sykes,
S.S.N.D., Diana Hayes, Bryan Massingale, LaReine-Marie Mosely, Jamie T.
Phelps, O.P., and C. Vanessa White—has enlarged our knowledge of black
Catholic experience and enriched Catholic theological and ethical
reflection.
But a new generation of white Catholic
theologians, following the example of Jon Nilson from Loyola University
Chicago, have begun to alert us to the stranglehold white racist
supremacy maintains on our church and society—women and men like Jeremy
Blackwood, Laurie Cassidy, Katie Grimes, Alexander Mikulich, Maureen
O’Connell, Margaret Pfeil, Christopher Pramuk and Karen Teel.
Scholars like these, both black and white,
work in the service of faith—exposing racism’s sin against the body of
Christ, its defilement of the sacrament and celebration of the
Eucharist, its disruption of the bonds of charity and love that draw us
into union with God and one another, and its mockery of the self-gift of
the One who nourishes us with his very flesh and blood.
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