February 18, 2024
This is the first Sunday in the Season of Lent, and I want to build on something I just learned. That is, the name Lent comes from the Old English word, “lencten”, meaning “springtime.” Defining Lent this way captures how preparing for a new growing season begins when the ground is still cold and dormant, and the fields look dead.
And it points to Lent as an opportunity to address ourselves to the necessary work of breaking up whatever’s become too hard and dense within us, adding spiritual nutrients and readying the soil/soul for whatever spiritual seeds that the Holy One has offered for us to grow next, individually or as a faith community.
The theme for this Lenten season is Liberating Church, a theme chosen by the Racial and Ethnic Justice Ministry Team. In the next six weeks, we’ll take the opportunity to explore a truer, more complex story about America. It’s the story of white dominance in America. In the process, we’ll look at some of the relationships between the American Christian Church and American racism.
In an important way, the work of learning about and acknowledging the truth that White racism has been woven into America’s history is also a necessary work of breaking up the false national narratives, which have become hard and dense within us. We need to break up our grounding identity, and ready our hearts, minds and souls to receive seeds for new life, nurtured in the light of Christ.
Our vision is that as we know more of the truth of where our country and the American church have been, we will become clearer how our church, as one small part of the body of Christ, can align ourselves more fully with Christ’s liberating work in the world.
In particular, over the weeks ahead, we will be exploring White Supremacy, a term that is often hard to be open to, to accept and take on. I know it was for me: I had arguments, with myself and others, about that term, and suggesting other alternatives. Finally, I came to see its ugliness as a value: it pins us to the hard truths of what Americans have created.
What we mean by White Supremacy isn’t the racist hostility of declared white hate groups. Instead, We’re referring instead to interlocking political, economic and cultural institutions and systems [ways of doing things] in which whites are overwhelmingly in control of power and material resources. And, importantly, this control is reinforced by conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement.
Today, I want to explore strands of the damage done by White Supremacy that maybe are not as obvious or as talked about. And that is to consider how people with light skin get shaped into white people by life in a White Supremacy culture.
It’s so clear, of course, that the harm caused to white people by the spiritual distortions and deceptions of White Supremacy cannot be compared to the atrocities suffered by Blacks, indigenous people, and other people of color here and globally. We should never lose track of that, and in the weeks ahead, others on the Ministry Team will unwrap some of these histories.
It’s also important, though, to name and try to understand Whiteness. Why? How does that matter? I was led to return to the writings of James Baldwin, one of our country’s greatest writers and wise ones, to help me approach an answer. In his short book, The Fire Next Time, Baldwin gives considerable attention to the distortions, delusions and engineered blind spots in the consciousness of white Americans. I want to quote just two passages that helped me to face into Whiteness—and in what spirit to do it. (he’s writing in the early 60s, using words in use then)
“ White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.” [22]
This passage points out and strongly underlines an important truth: that essential work toward ending White Supremacy has to be done within white hearts, minds, and souls. And then Baldwin lays out that this same work will also be the healing and liberation of white people:
The white [person] is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: the price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the Blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind….In short, we, Black and white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation—that is, if we are really to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women. [97]
These two quotes provided incentive and direction for what I say today.
My inquiry today is: how can we who have light skin start to take up this work of heart and mind toward owning our involvement in American racism, and toward our own liberation? And I suggest that we begin with understanding how we came into a sense of our Whiteness. How, in the time and place where each of us was raised, did it get planted and developed? What was said? What was not said? What was done or not done? And what does that have to do with White Supremacy?
Our stories of coming into a racial identity will be different: but I would claim that each of us has such a story. We have a racial autobiography.
I’ll start my own racial autobiography by describing my world as a kid. All around me in my Midwest suburb were people whose light-tone skins looked like mine—and by ALL I really mean all: all the people in my neighborhood, all the people in my very large church, (where by the way, there were statues and stained glass windows where Jesus, Mother Mary and the saints were all represented as white, mostly dark blonde and blue-eyed.) All the kids in my school, all the people who walked or drove cars in the streets, or worked in the retail stores, all were light-skinned.
The people in the picture books that were read to me were light-skinned; and in the shows we watched on TV, the pictures in newspapers, and later in the history books: the same thing. This was true for me until I was about fourteen. I suspect a good number of us growing up when I did had similar experiences—maybe not quite as extreme.
Here’s an essential thing to recognize: The light-skilled world around me that appeared so natural then– there was nothing natural or necessary about it. The world of my upbringing was white by design and essentially by decree. My city and its suburbs had been designed by one of the most infamous city designers of the early 20th Century. His goal was the development of entire residential neighborhoods that would attract an “element of people who desired a better way of life, a nicer place to live.” His ideas about what that meant included use of racist and anti-Semitic restrictive covenants in property deeds in all his subdivisions. He worked with my city and then other cities to create zoning codes that embodied similar policies. Much of his approach was later adopted by the federal government in other U.S. regions in a practice that has become known as Redlining.
That is, what seemed so natural to me growing up, was actually an environment deliberately designed as White Supremacist space.
Racial and ethnic covenants in real estate deeds are no longer legally enforceable, and it is now illegal to discriminate on the basis of color in real estate transactions. But White Supremacy is hard-baked into structures over time. When I look at the map of my city used for red-lining, and a map of my city now showing highest percentages of Black residents, something jumps out so starkly: there is an exact identity between the maps of one particular long line running from north to south. It’s the line down the same street chosen artificially in the 1940s for redlining.
And, White Supremacy culture and understandings have ways of getting hard-baked into our brains as well. These can be more difficult to describe, but here’s one example:
For decades, I had no sense of being white. After my all-white grade school, I went to a modestly-integrated high school, and later an ever-so-slightly–integrated state university in the Southwest. But a little later, I had moved into my multi-racial space: I worked on local multi-racial campaigns to elect people of color to the City Council, which led to friendships across racial difference. I was living into awareness of race and ethnicity, but still not aware of being white.
It’s hard to know what you don’t know, but I finally got a sense of this odd gap. I began to understand it in a couple of way. The first rests on a truth about of our identity formation generally: which is that who we think we are depends in very great part on the people around us, –and what they mirror back to us. Who do my parents convey that I am? Am I lovable? Am I funny? Am I clever? Am I trustworthy? And how about the neighbors? My teachers? My peers? Am I someone who they want to be around? Am I capable? Or am I somehow too much? Or not enough?
But whiteness? Whiteness was not reflected back to me. And whiteness wasn’t reflected back to me because it was taken for granted by all the people around me. A Black scholar studied how college students described themselves—which characteristics they mentioned and which they didn’t. She found that aspects that were left out were largely areas where a person is a member of a dominant cultural group. Those elements of their identity were so taken for granted by them that they go without comment. It is taken for granted by them because it is taken for granted by the dominant culture.
The shadow of coming so late to a sense of one’s white identity is that through the period prior to that change of perception, is that we were also shaped, unconsciously in my case, to perceive the people in our world as either ‘regular’ or ‘other’. A small example, but a telling one, is that when white is my environment’s ‘regular’ or normal, then my perception of say, a friend of mine, is affected. If my friend is white, I wouldn’t think to say “my white friend”; but I would be much more likely to say a friend was “My Black friend” or “my Hispanic friend.” That’s important not because that’s how I would say it, but that this is how I would see it.
There are so many invisible assumptions that have gotten hardwired inside us by White Supremacy: one of the tricky things in getting free from them is that they have arrived in us in non-racist terms, as simply the truth of things. I don’t think it would be overstepping to argue that white people have been educated into a certain kind of ignorance generation after generation.
We were brought up to believe that opportunities for achievement and material success are distributed according to talent and effort, and people can make it if they really want. So if one hasn’t succeeded in these ways, the assumption is that they didn’t try or didn’t have the right stuff. This was a racist argument without the word “race” There was no recognition or acknowledgement that White Supremacist limitations to decent housing, to good schools, to good employment, or access to powerful social networks had any decisive importance.
All this is still relevant. White Supremacy hasn’t gone away. In a fair number of states, there is political action to try to return to textbooks that tell the same distorted and untruthful story that I received in my schooling. White Supremacy is fueling much of our present political moment. I raised my kids here in an urban environment on the Eastern seaboard, where they had the opportunity to attend schools where white kids were a minority. While their experience, was substantially different than mine, it was still influenced, especially in their schools, by marks of White Supremacy embedded in how life unfolded— more so as the kids grew older.
I return now to the theme for this season, Liberating Church. Joseph Barndt, a Lutheran pastor, and an anti-racism trainer, organizer, and writer, wrote that all people, regardless of color, are prisoners of racism. He meant that we are all, willingly or unwillingly, made to be part of the collective structures of systemic racism we’re calling White Supremacy.
He also believed that imprisonment was at the heart of the American church’s racism, its internalized white identity, and he wanted to address the church’s imprisonment in its own theological language. He started by pointing out that the Bible explains how and why sin exists in two central ways.
The first way is described in the Bible as a deliberate act on the part of an individual sinner. The sin is a choice made intentionally, and to be rectified, the sinner must admit to the sin, repent, and receive forgiveness.
The second way the Bible portrays sin is not as an intentional act, but as captivity imposed by the power of evil. This Biblical understanding recognizes that we can become entangled by forces beyond an individual’s own power. Sinners commit sins because they are prisoners of sin. In this situation, they must be rescued and liberated from sin by the powerful work of God in creation.
Systemic racism is real and powerful: it undermines and diminishes our ability to act freely and to live God’s call to love others as God would. Racism is a collective and social sin, and ending it requires rescue, liberation, healing and rebuilding.
For all of us, tied up as we are in this systemic evil, we need the spiritual truths of both approaches. We need both to repent for what we have done with intention—to apologize, ask for forgiveness and work for repair and reconciliation. And at the same time, we need to take seriously how we have become caught within a powerful life-destroying system. To be set free from this systemic evil, we must align ourselves with a power greater than our own will. We need the God of Love abiding within us, and we need a Liberating Church to support us. And for these we pray this morning.
