Reparations

A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair

Kwon, Duke L., Thompson, Gregory

• Publisher: Brazos Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781493429578
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Christianity Today 2022 Book Award Winner (Politics & Public Life) Outreach 2022 Resource of the Year (Social Issues and Justice) Foreword INDIES 2021 Finalist for Religion "Kwon and Thompson's eloquent reasoning will help Christians broaden their understanding of the contemporary conversation over reparations."-- Publishers Weekly "A thoughtful approach to a vital topic."-- Library Journal Christians are awakening to the legacy of racism in America like never before. While public conversations regarding the realities of racial division and inequalities have surged in recent years, so has the public outcry to work toward the long-awaited healing of these wounds. But American Christianity, with its tendency to view the ministry of reconciliation as its sole response to racial injustice, and its isolation from those who labor most diligently to address these things, is underequipped to offer solutions. Because of this, the church needs a new perspective on its responsibility for the deep racial brokenness at the heart of American culture and on what it can do to repair that brokenness. This book makes a compelling historical and theological case for the church's obligation to provide reparations for the oppression of African Americans. Duke Kwon and Gregory Thompson articulate the church's responsibility for its promotion and preservation of white supremacy throughout history, investigate the Bible's call to repair our racial brokenness, and offer a vision for the work of reparation at the local level. They lead readers toward a moral imagination that views reparations as a long-overdue and necessary step in our collective journey toward healing and wholeness. Christians are awakening to the legacy of racism in America like never before. Reparations explores the church's responsibility for the deep racial brokenness at the heart of American culture, investigates the Bible's call to repair it, and offers a vision for the work of reparation at the local level. The authors lead readers toward a moral imagination that views reparations as a long-overdue and necessary step in our collective journey toward healing and wholeness. This book won a Christianity Today 2022 Book Award (Politics & Public Life) and an Outreach 2022 Resource of the Year Award (Social Issues and Justice). It was also a Foreword INDIES 2021 Finalist for Religion. "Kwon and Thompson's eloquent reasoning will help Christians broaden their understanding of the contemporary conversation over reparations."-- Publishers Weekly

1
The Call to See

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

The Call to See

On the rainy afternoon of February 1, 1968, two young African American men stepped out from the back of a city garbage truck and onto the suburban Memphis street. Hearing the truck pull up in front of her home, a White woman watched absentmindedly from her kitchen window as they loaded the trash inside the giant compactor. Suddenly she was startled to attention by the sound of screams and banging from outside, and she watched in horror as the two men—first one, and then the other—were pulled into the compactor and crushed to death in front of her eyes. In an interview with authorities later that night, she said, “It looked like the big thing just swallowed him.”1

The two men, Robert Walker, 29, and Echol Cole, 35, were part of an unseen generation of African American men who, fleeing the perpetual poverty and foreclosed opportunity of the farms of the Deep South, had come to Memphis in search of work. Their hope was that Memphis, the swinging city built on the bluffs of the Mississippi River, would provide the opportunity for a different sort of life than that offered by the endless expanse of the surrounding Delta. When they arrived in Memphis, however, most of these men found their conditions little changed. As in the Delta, the jobs typically available to African American men were the most physically difficult—storm and drainage work, street and asphalt repair, and trash pickup. And these jobs provided the least economic security. Almost all of these African American men were contract employees who started at $1.27 per hour, unpaid on days when weather prevented their work, and without any form of protection from the caprice of the supervisors who oversaw them. In spite of their hopes and labor, the poverty and diminished opportunity of the farms they fled were waiting for them in the city.

This was the lot of Robert Walker and Echol Cole, and also of the nearly 1,500 other men who worked alongside them in the city’s sanitation department. On an average morning, in heat and in cold, these men would wake before dawn and walk or catch a ride to the lot where the city’s garbage trucks were parked. As White supervisors slid behind the wheel of the truck, the African American men held on to the sides or, in the event of rain or snow, sat in the back with the trash. Stopping in front of homes, the African Americans would climb out and begin to pick up the bins of trash. These bins, typically lidless cans sitting open in the rain or sun, were filled with rotting, liquefying trash. Shouldering the bins, water and filth would spill over the sides or out of holes in the bottom and drip into their hair and down their backs as the men dumped the trash into the truck. At day’s end, because the sanitation department provided neither uniforms nor showers, the men left for home in the same filthy clothing in which they had worked all day. Because of this, they were unable to ride in cars or to take public transportation. They walked, in heat and in cold, to their homes where they would wait on their porches while family members hosed them down and picked maggots from their hair.2

No one knows exactly how Robert Walker and Echol Cole were pulled into the trash compactor that day. The most likely account is that after dumping the trash into the back of the truck, they sought shelter from the rain and climbed in as well. Somehow the internal wires short-circuited, starting the compactor with the men inside. But these are speculations. So much about that day was, as the witness said, simply swallowed.

What is clear, however, is that at the news of their deaths the anger of the sanitation workers—long simmering over their poor working conditions, poverty wages, and lack of negotiating power—began to boil over. In a matter of days, 1,300 sanitation workers went on strike. Every day for nearly two months they gathered at Clayborn Temple, the historic African Methodist Episcopal church in downtown Memphis. There they listened to the Reverend James Lawson, one of the architects of nonviolent resistance in the civil rights movement, remind them of their ineradicable dignity, the rightness of demanding civic recognition of that dignity, the necessity of nonviolence, and the transformative power of love. Then they rose from the pews, stepped through Clayborn Temple’s arched doorways, lined up, and made their way up Beale Street and down Main Street to city hall, just over a mile away.3

As in many cities marked by protest, the leaders of Memphis sought to obscure the nature of this cause. Some characterized the protest as simply a ploy launched by Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders to stir up trouble and gain attention. Others characterized it as a movement of violence launched by Black nationalists aiming to seize control of the city. Still others characterized it as a strategy of northern union leaders to extend their reach and enrich their organizations by establishing new labor unions in the South. But for the protestors themselves, the meaning of the cause was very simple: the truth of their own humanity. They came together, in defiance of American racism, and demanded to be seen and treated as human beings. Proof could be found in the signs that the protestors printed in the basement of Clayborn Temple and carried with them as they marched: a plain white background with four simple words in black:

I AM A MAN

These signs immediately became icons of the long African American struggle against racism4 in America, and remain so to this day.5 These signs were both a confrontation and a calling. With devastating simplicity, they confronted American racism, its multigenerational refusal to recognize the full humanity of enslaved Africans and their descendants, and the ways in which this racist refusal takes social and economic form.6 And yet in another respect, these signs called to America; they called America to renounce its racist blindness and to view African Americans in terms of their full humanity. They were, in other words, a call to see.

Ways of Seeing Racism

We have encountered many people struggling to answer this call, laboring daily to see the truth about American racism and the way it shapes both our individual and common lives. This is not true of everyone, of course. In every community, some are deeply resistant to seeing the truth about American racism and resistant to the vulnerability that this seeing entails. Even so, all across the United States—in churches in Memphis, college campuses in Georgia, auditoriums in Pennsylvania, dinner tables in Washington, DC, and cocktail bars in Charlottesville—we have encountered people who want both to see the truth about American racism and to respond redemptively.

Over time, however, we have noticed that while many people are concerned with racism in America and are committed to engaging it, few have thought deeply about the role of reparations. While many Americans see the reality of racism, they see it in ways that—while substantively true and ethically important—are not yet robust enough to lead to the work of reparations. Many of us need a different way of seeing race in America, one that makes reparations not only plausible but inevitable. The task of what follows is twofold: First, we explore three dominant ways of seeing American racism and the responses to which each of them inclines. Second, we gesture toward a different way of seeing American racism—to be more fully developed in chapters 2 and 3—that serves as the foundation of this work.

Racism as Personal Prejudice

In 2016, African American social commentator Heather McGhee was a guest on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal. McGhee, then president of Demos, a “think-and-do” tank that focuses on equitable democratic reform, was invited to discuss the role of progressive politics in the 2016 presidential election, then underway. During the call-in portion of the show, a White man from North Carolina spoke to McGhee with unusual candor about his own racism. Introducing himself, he simply said, “I’m a White male and I am prejudiced.” Given our cultural moment, upon hearing these words one might have expected either for this man to launch a fleet of justifications for his racism or for McGhee to shame him for it. However, neither did so. For his part, the man began simply to talk about his fears. For her part, rather than rolling her eyes or turning away, McGhee looked directly into the camera and gave this man her full attention. As she did so, he said something almost wholly unexpected: “What can I do to change, you know, to be a better American?” Upon hearing these words, she closed her eyes, gathered herself in kindness, and spoke directly to the camera:

Thank you, so much, for being honest, and for opening up this conversation because it’s simply one of the most important ones we have to have in this country. You know, we are not a country that is united because we are all one racial group that descended from one tribe and one community. That is actually, I think, what makes this country beautiful, but it is our challenge. We are the most multi-racial, multi-ethnic, wealthy democracy in the world. And so, asking the question you asked, “How do I get over my fears and my prejudices?” is the question that all of us—and I will say people of all races and ethnicities and backgrounds hold these fears and prejudices. Most of them are actually unconscious, right? You’ll say to yourself, “I’m not prejudiced” but of course we all have them. And so your ability to just say, “This is what I have, I have these fears and prejudices and I want to get over them” is one of the most powerful things that we can do right now at this moment in our history. So thank you.7

In the following days a video of the exchange began to show up on Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and other media outlets. Some viewers responded with contempt for the man, the ignorant southern racist who had the gall to ask an African American woman to help him with his racism. Others responded with criticism of McGhee, accusing her of coddling a fragile White man who should have been confronted instead. But many responded with something like gratitude—thanking both of them for showing us something that we rarely see: the willingness to have a painful conversation with both honesty and mutual care.

Embedded in this man’s question is a particular way of seeing American racism. Specifically, seeing racism as a form of personal prejudice, as a disposition of the heart and mind. In this view, racism is largely understood as a set of individual perspectives, attitudes, and biases that shape how we value—or devalue—human beings. As McGhee noted, one of the common humiliations of our inheritance is that each of us bears prejudicial judgments against other people because of the color of their skin and the cultural heritage that this color suggests.8

But if racism is a heart issue, then what must we do to address it? Throughout American history, the answer to this question has been relatively straightforward: change the heart. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, anti-racist activists and abolitionists developed strategies aimed at just this sort of change. Through tracts, multiracial speaking tours, and other literature, they sought to reshape the racist heart of Americans.9 During the early twentieth century, the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance continued this work by creating works designed to confront the racist blindness of White America and to help America, in the words of Langston Hughes, “see how beautiful I am and be ashamed.”10

In our own time, this work of dispositional change continues in families, churches, and schools. In each of these initiatives, across the centuries, the goal has in many respects been the same: to weaken the malignant power of American racism by transforming the dispositions of the heart and mind.

In the Christian tradition, the language for this deep internal change is personal repentance, a sacred dimension of the Christian vision of the moral life. We have seen many Christians—including ourselves—take up this work of repentance with respect to racism. And rightly so. In the Christian tradition, personal prejudice is a form of violence that harms the other by denying their God-given dignity. Seeing these prejudicial dispositions in the heart, the Christian begins the long, renunciative work of uprooting them from the heart and rebuilding new dispositions in their place. This is essential work, and we ourselves are deeply committed to it. Even so, this particular way of seeing racism as a personal prejudice that chiefly requires the work of personal repentance is not the complete picture.

Racism as Relational Division

In 1994, Spencer Perkins and Chris Rice published a book that became something of a sensation in the American church. The book, More Than Equals: Racial Healing for the Sake of the Gospel, was an extended treatment of both the necessity and practicality of living in cross-racial relationships as a way of bearing witness to the reconciling power of God. Perkins, the son of legendary African American civil rights activist John Perkins, and Rice, a northern White Mennonite who lived in an intentional interracial community in Jackson, Mississippi, stood side by side on the cover, and the book was heralded as “living proof that white and black Christians can live together.”11 At the heart of their argument was the claim that the Christian church in America desperately needed to transcend a debilitating contradiction in its life: being a community of reconciliation that contributes to a culture of social estrangement.

Writing in the early 1990s, they recognized a phenomenon that is easily recognizable in our own day. Though America has legally renounced segregation, we nonetheless remain profoundly segregated along racial lines. And the church itself—the community created to bear witness to the reconciling power of God—remains deeply segregated. For Rice and Perkins, the work of developing cross-raci...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Call to See
• 2. Seeing the Reality of White Supremacy
• 3. Seeing the Effect of White Supremacy
• 4. The Call to Own
• 5. Owning the Ethic of Restitution
• 6. Owning the Ethic of Restoration
• 7. The Call to Repair
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Cover Flaps
• Back Cover