It took me nearly 60 years before I finally understood. Yes, the ground had been laid in the preceding decade as I increasingly challenged some of my past tribal narratives. But it took two separate events within the space of a week to nail this lesson home once and for all. That there was structural unequalness between the races in society and that my understandings on America’s racial issues were woefully incomplete.
We are storytelling people acutely committed to defending our narratives. Changing those narratives is hard work, especially when they arise from a cultural tradition embedded deep within our subconscious. It usually takes life events of great love or pain to push through those boundaries. In my case, it was love.
I can still picture myself sitting in a friend’s living room. There was an event that day and the house was packed. Most people had moved into the kitchen and family room. That’s where the food was and it was time to eat. Just a few of us remained in the living room and while waiting for the lines to shorten, I struck up a conversation with an African-American woman whom I had seen for years but never spoken to one on one.
We talked about work, family, church, and life in general. She was a professional woman, well-educated and respected. Somehow, we got on the subject of cars. They had an expensive European car and an older American car which had seen better days. The older car was a burden to drive and on one of her travels in that car to a professional meeting in Kirkland, she recounted a story of how she got lost and kept circling and circling trying to break free of Kirkland’s confusing back streets.
She spoke about feeling trapped. The more she tried to find a way out, the greater the fear. She just knew someone would call the police, believing she had no business in such an upscale neighborhood. It was a scenario she had experienced before, a perverted form of Newton’s 3rd law of motion. To wit: a black woman driving a run-down car in an affluent neighborhood yielding a likely reaction from the police and all of the uncertainty that follows.
I’ll never forget the sense of terror she conveyed that day. The residual fear was palpable just like it was a week later when we had another professional African-American woman in our home. Her son was embarking on a journey from college to another part of the country where a new job awaited him. His journey required traversing vast remote areas noted for aggressive policing, especially towards people of color. As long as he started early enough, all would be fine. He’d be able to pass through these areas in daylight with the rest of the journey in more friendly territory.
But his day had started off with a broken-down car and by the time it was fixed, the morning was gone. It meant driving at night through a region with a reputation and all of the uncertainty that follows. Once again, I witnessed the emotions from a terror-filled woman. We prayed and she paced, and she paced and we prayed until she heard from her son that he was in a safe place.
A Journey of Discovery
Walter Lippman’s observation “for the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define and then see,” rang true that week. I found a world of discovery awaiting me. I listened to a friend about the “talk” he gave to his racially different adopted son, a “talk” he never had to make with his naturally born white children. I began reading books, embarking on my own journey of exploration for a United States I had never known.
I read Martin Luther King’s (MLK) book Stride Towards Freedom and his Letter from a Birmingham jail. I discovered an insightful, godly, and learned man different than the communist and womanizer man I had been taught. I then read MLK’s “Where Do We Go From Here” where he lays out a vision for achieving equality in jobs, wages, housing, and education. He saw the racial problem in America as systemic, where “the persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Negro demands will necessitate structural changes in society.”
I read The Warmth of Other Sons, a beautifully written book, and learned about the “Great Migration” – a phrase I had never previously heard. It’s a story about six million African-Americans fleeing the harshness of the Jim Crow South to the supposedly “better” cities of the North and West. Once there, however, they find a different kind of thumb on the scale, encountering a new form of discrimination through housing and jobs. As MLK once said: “Let us not fool ourselves, we are far from the Promised Land, both north and south.”
I read The Color of Law and discovered that urban ghettos didn’t happen by chance. They were created over decades through a private-public partnership with a goal of protecting white interests. At the core were a range of de jure discriminatory actions (government based) in areas such as zoning, taxation, federal financing and subsidies, and highway construction routes. Private discriminatory actions (de facto) such as redlining and urban flight then filled in the spaces, leveraging the federal, state, and local government policies for maximum impact.
I read The New Jim Crow and learned how the war on drugs put a thumb on the scale for black men in America. It was a war unequally waged, marked by decades of racially selective targeting, sentencing, imprisonment, and parole enforcement. It left a racial legacy of unequal impacts through a gauntlet of private and legal restrictions imposed on those who have served time. Although the causes are highly debated, the statistics are shocking and cannot be swept under the rug. And whatever the cause, justice has not been blind and the scales rigged for a whole class of Americans.
I read The Color of Compromise and learned how much of the church promoted or at least accommodated racism since the first arrival of slaves in 1619. Yes, many white Christians opposed racism throughout history. But too often they were the exceptions rather than the rule. During the antebellum era many Christians, even some of the great “heroes of the faith,” owned slaves. Others supported racial prejudice and/or abuse, a perversion of God’s order which continued into the next period of bondage, Jim Crow. Still others chose to stay stayed silent, preferring in the words of MLK a “negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
I read The Bible Told Them So and learned how many southern white Christians, following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, asserted the principle of colorblindness while preaching and practicing a segregationist Christianity. They saw scripture as supporting their racialized stance and practices. Then by asserting “colorblindness,” it allowed them to be “faithful to scripture” while navigating the perceptions of society.
I read Divided by Faith, a sociological study on faith and race in America. There I learned despite the many actions by evangelical leaders to address the problem of racial discrimination (e.g., Promise Keepers), the data are clear. White evangelicals are more likely to be part of the problem than part of the solution to closing the racial divide in America. They are unable to “see” the persistence of systemic discrimination in America because of a set of theological and cultural presuppositions. All they can “see” is individual sin, hence there is only one solution: individual repentance from sinful individuals.
But Christ’s defeat of sin and death through the cross is much more than that. It’s joining God in the renewal of all things through the launch of His Kingdom. In Andy Crouch’s words, we are called to work “for the peace, security, justice, and prosperity of their city and their neighbors, loving them in word and in deed.” But by restricting the gospel to the plan of salvation rather than, in the words of Emerson and Smith, “integrat[ing] their faith with knowledge of race relations, inequality, and American society…[evangelicals] allow their cultural constructions to shape one-dimensional assessments and solutions to multidimensional problems.”
I read the stories of African Americans through books like Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness by Austin Channing Brown. I read even more books, all illuminating a different part of an America, past and present, I never knew existed. I then pored over academic articles and found a troubling set of data supporting the findings in those books.
I learned how Alexis de Tocqueville, the legendary and astute observer of American society once said “I do not imagine that the white and black race will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere. An isolated individual may surmount the prejudices…but a whole people cannot rise.”
De Tocqueville saw the United States as composed of two foreign communities, one white and the other black. And if slaves were freed, he predicted this divide would just grow deeper, a conflict that “perpetually haunts the imagination of Americans, like painful dream.”
A century later following the end of slavery but still in the midst of Jim Crow, Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish scholar studying race in America, found honest, hardworking white Americans to be relatively satisfied with race relations. Yes, there were a few “bad apples” they said, but relations between races were good and improving across the majority population. When pressed by the gross inequalities and oppression highly visible during Jim Crow, they were surprised and taken back by the question. They weren’t aware there was a problem. Myrdal concluded what de Tocqueville a century earlier had observed. Even though slavery had been abolished in the intervening years, American was a divided, unequal, society and one side seemed comfortable with that.
Racialization is a Variable
The data shows race has and continues to be the largest social cleavage in America. In fact, that cleavage continues to deepen even after all the legislative progress America has experienced in the past 150 years. Now if you asked people today if “are Africans not fully human” or “do whites have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods” and compare against historical responses, you would conclude racism is declining.
But the racialization of America functions as a variable in history. And we fail to understand it when we treat it as a constant, viewed through the lens from an era preceding ours. Hence, it’s important to ask the right question, a question that addresses the current state of society. For example, the normative belief in early American history of “Africans are not fully human” diminished during the Jim Crow era. But that era brought new racial goalposts defined through segregation, discrimination, and disenfranchisement.
Similarly, the normative belief during Jim Crow of “whites have a right to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods” diminished following the passage of the Civil Rights Act. But our current era, following the civil rights legislation of the 1960s has brought new goalposts of legacy impacts due to the persistence of inequalities in wealth, employment, education, housing, health, and judicial areas established during Jim Crow. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, little has changed in terms of societal division born of sustained racial inequalities according to the Kerner Report in 1968, the Eisenhower Foundation Commission in 1993, and the 2018 report entitled “Healing Our Divided Society.”
When such persistent disparities march together in lockstep, something other than chance is going on. There must be underlying variables common in impact across life experiences and time. But what are those variables? As you would expect, many answers abound and here they create an even wider division among the races.
Three General Hypotheses
On the one side are those who see racialized differences arising through differential benefits based upon race and sustained through policies, institutions, and societal norms. Its these structural differences which change the goalposts and they operate covertly, seemingly invisible to most whites.
Others see society as yielding equal opportunity without any lingering racial goalposts. Any differences are due to conditions cultural in origin, an outcome of work habits, character, and moral control. Under this individual-based worldview, society delivers an equal opportunity to every person and it’s up to each one of us to shape that into a successful future.
Still others assert that these differences are old news, outdated narratives which distort the current prejudicial state of American society. The tide has turned and now its white Americans which face the headwinds from racialized policies.
My next several posts will explore these hypotheses from a data and theological perspective. But until then, I’ll let the great statesman Frederick Douglass (1853) have the last word:
“A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us. As a people, we feel ourselves to be not only deeply injured, but grossly misunderstood. Our white countrymen do not know us. They are strangers to our character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our history and progress, and are misinformed as to the principles and ideas that control and guide us as a people. The great mass of American citizens estimates us as being a characterless and purposeless people; and hence we hold up our heads, if at all, against the withering influence of a nation’s scorn and contempt.”