America's Unholy Ghosts

The Racist Roots of Our Faith and Politics

Joel Edward Goza

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532651458
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

America's Unholy Ghosts examines the DNA of the ideologies that shape our nation, ideologies that are as American as apple pie but that too often justify and perpetuate racist ideas and racial inequalities. MLK challenged us to investigate the "ideational roots of race hate" and Ghosts does just that by examining a philosophical "trinity"--Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith--whose works collectively helped to institutionalize, imagine, and ingrain racist ideologies into the hearts and minds of the American people. As time passed, America's racial imagination evolved to form people incapable of recognizing their addiction to racist ideas. Thus, Ghosts comes to a close with the brilliant faith and politics of Martin Luther King, Jr. who sought to write the conscience of the Prophetic Black Church onto American hearts, minds, and laws. If our nation's racist instincts still haunt our land, so too do our hopes and desires for a faith and politics marked by mercy, justice, and equity--and there is no better guide to that land than the Prophetic Black Church and the one who saw such a land from the mountaintop.

1

Prelude

Revolution, Evolution, and the Lies that Racialize Our Land

Revolution

America lives amidst a cultural crisis at the intersection of race, religion, and politics. Cultural crises arise when a society’s cherished illusions begin to die and force societies to re-examine their foundational principles, ideologies, and ways of life. New visions and ways of being always cost us the death of old illusions and ways of living.

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn released the groundbreaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In his book, Kuhn upends the illusion of science as a field of study that produces steady progress through a disciplined and religious devotion to the rationality of the scientific method. Instead, Kuhn argues that progress in science comes through the implosion of existing paradigms and worldviews. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein: we know these geniuses’ names not because they brought forward incremental change, but because when faced with a crisis they provided truthful and revolutionary ways to understand our world that changed how we lived.

What made Kuhn’s book groundbreaking was how he framed his argument to use the history of science as a springboard to discuss the nature of revolutions that shifts society’s paradigms and worldview at large. Perhaps what also made the work groundbreaking was the decade of the sixties in which Kuhn published his book—for if the sixties marked anything, the decade marked paradigm shifts that challenged traditional ways of life.

At the intersection of race, faith and politics, our lives find their shape in the unresolved strife and unfinished business of that era. If the sixties inaugurated a revolution, it never resolved the revolution it began. In fact, Martin Luther King, perhaps the only truly revolutionary political and spiritual genius our nation ever produced, thought that the revolution he helped inspire was just beginning and that the most important work lay beyond his own lifetime.

Martin Luther King divided the civil rights work into two eras. Phase one of the civil rights era marked a face-off regarding the rights of African Americans to participate fully in the life of our nation, confronting the realities of Jim Crow segregation and the racist restrictions of the South’s voting booths. Part of the 1960s revolution was that for the first time televisions tied together living rooms across the nation by bringing ideas and images from around the world into the intimate confines of the American household. The leaders of the movement understood that it is within the context of the household that most Americans form their core convictions, and King and his allies manipulated this new instrument with remarkable success to display the violence of the American way of life. With striking brilliance, the movement replaced the images of race relations in the South crafted through movies like Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation with the images of Bull Connor releasing his ravenous dogs. America was not ready for what it witnessed within the intimate context of their living rooms, and the movement continued to labor until America could no longer stomach what it saw and proved ready to change the laws of the land.

Phase two of the civil rights movement involved the fight to translate the rights of African Americans into the results of racial equality in housing, wages, education, and opportunity. In the words of President Lyndon Johnson to the students of Howard University, the aim was to translate “equality as a right and theory” into “equality as a fact and equality as a result.”7 Though the hard-fought victories of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 brought phase one of the civil rights movement to a victorious close, phase two proved much more elusive and much less victorious.

The seeds of phase two’s ambitions trace back to the earliest days of the movement. Within a year of the Montgomery bus boycott, King released his first book, A Stride Toward Freedom, wherein he called for an examination of “the ideational roots of race hate.”8 As the movement matured into its second phase, King increasingly called for confrontation with the founding ideologies of our nation. King believed our society was sick and that there was something singular about our nation’s sickness that traced back to the very roots and ideologies that birthed the American experiment. In an essay published shortly after his assassination, King reflected on the status of the civil rights movement. “It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism.” King wrote that the struggle exposed “evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society.” The more intimate King grew with our racial sickness, the more ending Jim Crow and opening Southern voting booths felt like baby-steps rather than strides toward freedom. The more the movement revealed regarding the character of the relationships between race, faith, and politics, the more the movement revealed the need for a “radical reconstruction of society itself.”9

Yet, the radical reconstruction—a revolutionary racial reformation—never took place. The push for rights to results was largely lost in translation and our cultural crisis roiled on. Rather than a revolutionary reformation that got to the roots of race hate and reconstructed society upon more equitable foundations, America embraced the status quo and pursued the politics of evolutionary racial progress. Evolutionary racial progress entails none of the risks inherent in radical revolution. Yet, when a revolution of ideas is required, an evolution of ideas only extends the life of thinking designed to fail.

The Age of Illusionary Inclusivity & the Evolution of Racist Ideas

Though the Civil Rights Act failed to result in racial equality, America proved ready to turn the page on readjusting America’s racial imagination. In 1968, the finger that helped turn the page from revolutionary racial reformation to patient evolutionary progress belonged to none other than Richard Nixon. In accepting the Republican nomination, Nixon declared: “We live in an age of revolution in America and in our world.” But for Nixon, the only revolution we needed was “a revolution that will never grow old. . . . the American Revolution. The American Revolution was and is dedicated to progress, but our founders recognized that the first requisite of progress is order.” He declared that King and the movement weakened the nation’s laws and empowered “the criminal forces in this country.”10 The cure to the country’s crisis resided in an evolutionary approach to progress and a religious recommitment to law and order. Nixon’s rhetoric worked like a train-track switch that altered the direction of America’s ambitions on race reform from the pursuit of King’s beloved community to Nixon’s land of law and order.

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Assisting Nixon in law and order rhetoric was then California Governor Ronald Reagan. On the day of King’s funeral, Governor Reagan mourned “a great tragedy that began when we started compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.” Rather than calling the nation to repent of racism, Reagan lamented King’s refusal to submit to Jim Crow’s authority over black lives.11

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Rather than birthing a new racial rhetoric, Nixon declared his emphasis on law and order was a continuation of America’s original revolution. That America’s original revolution perpetuated—rather than healed—our nation’s racial wounds was a reality that failed to subdue the speaker or audience’s confidence in his logic. That night, Nixon effectively brought an end to the civil rights revolution without bringing racial equality. Rather than a racial reformation, America swapped Jim Crow segregation for Nixon’s colorblind age of law and order. Despite colorblind claims, the new era proved an age equally rife with inequalities along racial lines.

From slavery to Jim Crow to the colorblind age, racism always required mythologies to provide the illusion of harmony and progress in the midst of the crisis. The foundation for keeping the illusion of racial progress in the colorblind age was the perpetuation of segregation. Though the color line proved every bit as entrenched as the days of segregation,12 the lack of explicitly racial laws formed the illusion of racial inclusivity. And illusionary-inclusive, color-blind communities with loving families, sincere churches, and good schools proved fertile soils for racist ideas and worked to integrate a racial obliviousness all the deeper into the core of white identity.

Upon a foundation of segregation, education helped fortify the illusions of inclusivity and covered over the failures of our society’s racial evolution. At school, children learned to celebrate the civil rights movement, memorized selective portions of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and celebrated the accomplishments of exceptional black people. The celebration of exceptional black folks reinforced the conviction that our nation not only progressed in race relations but closed the book on racial injustice. Lost in the stories of exceptional black folks were the realities of the radical racial inequalities that shaped the life of everyday black folks.

As America entered the twenty-first century, white folks possessed three decades of education about how America’s embrace of the civil rights movement had erased the lines of racial inequality. If unjust racial lines lived on, much of the education concerning our nation’s racial equality that white folks received consisted of lethal white lies. The truth was that despite the civil rights movement, America’s late-twentieth-century racism proved more subtle but not much less lethal.

At home, the education continued. If TV proved pivotal in opening the door to reconsidering race relations in the sixties, it proved equally critical in perpetuating myths about evolutionary racial progress in subsequent decades. TV sitcoms began contributing to such myths in the seventies, as shows like The Jeffersons featured a family moving on up in New York. A year later, What’s Happening provided a taste of black swagger from Los Angeles’s Watts neighborhood, without much taste of the rage that led to the Watts Riots only a few years before. The eighties introduced The Cosby Show, and America witnessed a black family living out the American Dream with just a little hard work and solid family values. The ninties unleashed the brilliance of Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Yet rather than focusing on the realities of Philly’s Westside, Will’s story picked up in the home of a judge in the suburbs of LA. From the sixties to the nineties, the Jeffersons and Huxtables of New York and the Thomases and Bankses of LA were the black families white families knew best. More often than not, they were the only black families who entered white living rooms.

When TV programming moved from black fictions to black reality, from sitcoms to the news, their audiences witnessed news networks addicted to stories that focused on how the crack epidemic wrecked inner-city communities and stories of welfare abuse. Audiences learned the myth that the color of America’s drug problem was predominately black rather than predominately white. The illusion about the color of addiction was then compounded through myths of an overfunded welfare system that black folk freely rode towards wealth without working.13 Rounding out the myths on drugs and welfare were myths about the economy. The rapid exportation of well-paying jobs across the nation proved unable to upend the cherished illusion of a benevolent economy seeking to provide for the families of everyone and anyone ready to work. Welfare, rather than job exportation, became understood as the critical threat to both America’s economy and morality. America’s racial inequalities were understood as the failure of black folks, not the failure of the American way.

Yet as critical as the sitcoms and news anchors proved to be in distributing racist ideas, no one proved better at using the TV cameras to promote white illusions than politicians. Campaign seasons reinforced white mythologies as white folks listened to politicians from both parties who sought to secure their votes by saying what white ears itched to hear. Both parties ran on the law and order train tracks Nixon laid down. From Reagan to Bush to Clinton, politicians of the 1980s and 1990s demanded doubling down on the War on Drugs with tougher crime bills and reduction to welfare provisions.14 All our politicians needed to protect the American dream from the threat of criminally lazy black folk was another vote for Nixon’s vision of law and order.

Some white families complemented their vision with a spiritual lens. Yet since American churches are ten times more segregated than their communities, more often than not their spiritual lens provided a Christianity colored white.15 Through this lens, faith filters through the fears and hopes of the white community making it impossible to determine where white culture ends and the Christian faith begins. From America’s inception, white churches selected particular passages of Scripture and designed theological systems that posed no threat to racist logics. The systems simplified over time and convinced those in the church that soul salvation was the primary function of the gospel. In the age of illusionary inclusivity, memorizing the “Romans Road” and John 3:16’s “for God so loved the world” was all that was needed for white redemption.

By limiting the focus to passages of Scripture involving piety, soul salvation, and obedience to rulers, the Bible’s prophetic tradition, whic...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• An Introduction
• Chapter 1: Prelude
• Chapter 2: Thomas Hobbes
• Chapter 3: John Locke
• Chapter 4: Adam Smith
• Chapter 5: Interlude
• Chapter 6: Because They Are Hard
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography