Race, Prejudice, And Power In The Church (2 Responses)

Response 1

Rev. Theodore Moore

“When whole groups benefit from collective harm done to others, those same groups must take responsibility as perpetrators.”

What appears to be an easy solution or “fix” is entangled with many misconceptions that have been perpetuated by racism.  In my life time, the only time I remember hearing a group publically take responsibility for the harm done by slavery was the service at St. Peter’s in Perth Amboy, spearheaded by Mother Deborah Piggins.  It was a moving and memorable example of taking responsibility as perpetrators of the injustice of burying slaves without the benefit of a name, date of birth and death.  In addition, the recognition of this institutionalized racism, sanctioned by the church in the past, underscores the need to actively search and identify additional historical as well as current examples of racially based injustices. 

What concerns me is the failure to recognize a present day system of mass incarceration that is causing collective harm to people of color.  The implementation of another form of a racial caste system is essentially taking the identities, potential and voting privileges away from people of color in a systematic way. The foundation for this system seems to be based on a racially based change in the severity of the penalties and sentences for violation of drug laws of this country.   The systematic removal of young Black and Latino males from society and the development of an underprivileged “caste system” have been achieved through the construction of penal institutions and sentencing of young Blacks and Latinos.  This has been accomplished in part by increasing the penalty for the use and possession of crack cocaine (used predominately by people of color) and decreasing the penalties for the use of cocaine (used predominately by whites).  Meanwhile our tax money has funded the expansion of private penal institutions to house the staggering increase of Blacks and Latinos arrested under these laws.  We need to recognize this injustice as well as the corruption that has accompanied this perpetuation of a modern day racial caste system.  These penal institutions exist mostly in rural and suburban areas. These suburban communities have benefitted by adding the prison population to the total census thereby increasing congressional representation.  There appears to be very little if any outcry against this injustice.  Read “The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander” for details.

“Race is a false and misleading social construct without basis in science or theology.  The idea of race was invented by sixteenth-century Europeans, imported by seventeenth-century American colonialists, constitutionalized by our eighteenth-century American forefathers, and perpetuated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a tool to measure human worth and distribute power and privilege. In the twenty-first century the results remain an unbearable weight over a divided society.”

Why are we continually forced to use this system to categorize people?  There is no justification for the continued use of this “racial classification” without a scientific or theological reason.  One section of applications for employment, loans and other legal documents continues to require information on racial background.  We all belong to the human race.  The continuation of this unscientific classification does little but provide a method of continued discrimination in hiring, loan approvals and housing.

“Even the Bible has been racialized… For centuries, the Bible was used to define and defend racism. The use of biblical foundations to justify racial classifications continues to be accepted today.  Understanding how the Bible has been wrongly racialized and used as a tool of racism is one of the most important steps in understanding and eliminating racism in the church.”

Slave owners, politicians and church leaders invented a race-based Bible that identified white people as the true people of God and all other people as something less than the people of God.  Fantasy stories were invented to authenticate the hoax, including the belief that Noah’s son Ham, who was condemned because of sexual sins, was a black African.  These fantasies have been perpetuated by both Black and White.  In the Black community one of the fantasy stories used to counteract the perpetuation of a white Jesus described the Saviors hair texture as woolly suggesting that Jesus was Black.  The Bible does not suggest or mention what His hair texture may have been.  These false concepts have been handed down from generation to generation by both Black and White designed to authenticate white supremacy and maintain a racial caste system.








Response 2

Rev. Joan Fleming             

Do white Christians truly have a deeply rooted “collective” consciousness that privileges our own kind and “disenfranchises” people of color?  We certainly hate to think so, but in many Sunday School rooms today pictures of a white Jesus still decorate the walls—and imprint a false image of our Lord in children’s subconscious.  Author Joseph Barndt would point to this as but one symptom of the deeply ingrained assumptions that have guided and controlled the Church’s thought and action since that first Anglican celebration of Holy Communion on Virginia’s shore in 1607.  Today, we still have “black” and “white” congregations, a living legacy of race, prejudice and power that brings the assumptions of the past distressingly into the present.

The city parish I served as rector prided itself upon its Colonial heritage.  Its fine stone tower pre-dated the Revolution and was claimed as the site where the Declaration of Independence received its third public reading.  Across town, barely a mile away, there is another Episcopal church, much smaller, architecturally undistinguished, and somewhat down-at-heel.  The basement frequently floods.

This is the “black church,” begun as a “mission” of the Colonial parish, its flock still almost entirely people of color—though nowadays mainly of Caribbean origin.

I have often speculated about the cultural context out of which this mission

was born.  The story—from the white side—is that funding was generously made available to black congregants of the older parish in order that they might start their “own” church and be independent.  The story—from the black side—is that the funding was a kind of bribe to get rid of members of color.  Some deeper background to these two stories can be discerned from a couple of sources.

Old Christ Church and Bishop Croes, a parish history written in 1896, contains the following reminiscence:

“In [the] early days of our century, there were still many slaves surviving among us. … [and] to keep the young negro-lads in order while in church, and also to make sure that they came to church, a long, low-seated, high-backed bench was provided for them, which was placed at the foot of the east window, directly underneath the pulpit, and facing the congregation, so that they might be seen of all men.  You may rest assured that, under such unfavorable circumstances for pranks, there was very little sky-larking indulged in by the youthful darkeys.”

St. Alban’s mission was organized a century later, when slavery was a thing of the past, in 1921.  But why, one wonders, just then?  Interestingly, research reveals that in 1923/1924, a new pipe organ was installed in the gallery of the Christ Church sanctuary.  Planning for its installation must have begun right about 1921.  It is an altogether logical deduction that because black members had traditionally been seated in the gallery where, according to the 1896 history, “a number of pews were set aside [for] the grown negroes,” funding a mission church at just that time for the Christ Church members of color may also have had an entirely practical motive—to free up gallery space for the planned new organ. 
           

A people’s “collective consciousness” can retain the deep memory of such covert insults for generations.  For the “perpetrators,” though, amnesia often conveniently obliterates them.