Contesting Post-Racialism

Conflicted Churches in the United States and South Africa

R. Drew Smith, William Ackah, Anthony G. Reddie, Rothney S. Tshaka

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626745056
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de los pueblos negros

Contributions by William Ackah, Allan Boesak, Ebony Joy Fitchue, Leah Gaskin Fitchue, Walter Earl Fluker, Forrest E. Harris Sr., Nico Koopman, AnneMarie Mingo, Reggie Nel, Chabo Freddy Pilusa, Anthony G. Reddie, Boitumelo Senokoane, Rothney S. Tshaka, Luci Vaden, Vuyani Vellem, and Cobus van WyngaardAfter the 2008 election and 2012 reelection of Barack Obama as US president and the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela as the first of several blacks to serve as South Africa's president, many within the two countries have declared race to be irrelevant. For contributors to this volume, the presumed demise of race may be premature. Given continued racial disparities in income, education, and employment, as well as in perceptions of problems and promise within the two countries, much healing remains unfinished. Nevertheless, despite persistently pronounced disparities between black and white realities, it has become more difficult to articulate racial issues. Some deem "race" an increasingly unnecessary identity in these more self-consciously "post-racial" times.The volume engages post-racial ideas in both their limitations and promise. Contributors look specifically at the extent to which a church's contemporary response to race consciousness and post-racial consciousness enables it to give an accurate public account of race.

IV. Theology and (Re)Vitalized Race Consciousness

Collisions between Racism and the Truth of the Cross

Leah Gaskin Fitchue
Ebony Joy Fitchue

Introduction

This essay wrestles with a deep-seated contradiction at the heart of the American experience and at the heart of white Christian thought and practice. This contradiction refers to the problem of racism, as manifested in white Americans and their (1) pathological obsession with the lynching of black people; (2) psychological dependency on white supremacist arguments as a means of relieving doubts as to their superiority (whether those doubts emanate from themselves or from non-whites); and (3) unwillingness to acknowledge the distortions engendered by racism within American life. This last remains true even when whites are confronted with powerful reminders, whether in the form of empirical evidence (social and psychological analysis and data) or in the form of doctrines and symbolism at the heart of the Christian gospel (and therefore central to American culture)—specifically the cross. In making this argument, this essay draws on two different types of scholarly resources: psychological theories of racism, as outlined by scholars such as Michael D’Andrea and Judy Daniels; and theo-historical analyses of racism, as found primarily in the work of James H. Cone.

In his challenging book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James H. Cone tackles what few scholars have dared to approach: the symbolic connection of the cross and the lynching tree. As he himself states, one is a universal symbol of Christian faith, the other the quintessential symbol of black oppression in America. While separated by two thousand years, they bear a similar identity in that both are related to death. The commonality, however, ends there. The death on the cross is uncontestably the most beautiful gift of selflessness in the history of humanity. In contrast, death by lynching is the most heinous act perpetrated by white people tragically obsessed with what they erroneously believe to be the entitlement afforded by their white skins. As Cone reminds us, courageously exploring the connection of these two symbols, “An unspeakable crime, [lynching] is a memory that most white Americans would prefer to forget.”¹

As two black women born and raised in America, we know something about the tension of memory and identity. The problem with memory and being black is that one is always challenged with just how much recollection about the lived experience of blackness in America one can entertain and remain sane. This is the critical problem every black person in America has to face every day, as he or she navigates the “two-ness” of black reality.

W. E. B. Du Bois introduced America to this “double-consciousness” concept in his classic work, The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois describes the phenomenon as an ingenious survival response to the plight of black people living in a racist America,

a world that yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.²

Regrettably, the contortions of slavery, slave codes, separate but equal, and other legal atrocities have effectively numbed the historical consciousness of generations of black people, who have suffered oppressive practices in the United States for nearly four hundred years. They have chosen silence over madness. There comes a time, however—if one surrenders to the prompting of the Holy Spirit—when the struggle to make sense of being a black Christian in white America reaches its limit, and one refuses to be contained in silence and darkness. Triumphantly denouncing the manipulated trickery of black internalized oppression, one plunges forth out of darkness in search of the light of truth.

Cone speaks to that emergence, and he rips aside the veil of hypocrisy, demanding that we, as black Christians, risk the inevitable pain of recall and give voice to the fact that the cross and “the lynching tree represented the worst in human beings and at the same time, ‘an unquenchable ontological thirst’ for life that refuses to let the worst determine our final meaning.”³ Cone throws down the gauntlet, challenging the fraudulent “two-ness” of a democracy that mouths creeds of equality, while treating non-white citizens as less than equal. In doing so, he urges white Christians to gainsay the myth of white superiority, the cost of which is a compromised democracy that affirms a contaminated vision of justice and violates its core principles of equality.

Cone had lived his “two-ness” surrounded by the myth of white skin superiority, beginning with his birth in the lynching state of Arkansas. It is important to note that during his youth, America was dealing with the “Negro problem.” Gunnar Myrdal’s landmark 1944 study, American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, captured the dichotomy between the values of liberty, equality, and civility set forth in the “American Creed,” and the nation’s inhuman treatment of its black citizens:⁴ “[F]or here the ‘Creed’ operated in a ‘double direction’—on the one hand forbidding inequitable treatment of any human being, while on the other requiring dehumanization of the black victims to justify the departure, in their case, from its proclaimed values.” “Race prejudice” was needed “for defense on the part of the Americans against their own national Creed.”⁵

This paper explores some of the challenges of the myth of white skin superiority as justification for a “two-ness” democracy and its relationship to the truth of the cross and the lynching tree. It also explores the historical and psychological impact of racism on blacks and whites alike, with examination of the latter informed by compelling psychological theories and analysis provided by Michael D’Andrea and Judy Daniels, and by other scholars researching the psychological harm done to racists by their own racist sentiments and behaviors.

A premise of the present essay is that Cone’s juxtaposition of the cross and the lynching tree provides our racialized America an opportunity to confront its racism and thereby take appropriate steps to move beyond it. These issues pose difficult challenges for churches, theological schools, and other faith-based institutions, which must speak up if America is to be given a second chance to model both liberation and reconciliation for all of her people. Given that the black church was born in protest and called to liberate an oppressed people, it does not have the freedom to remain silent about Cone’s conversation about the intersection of the cross and the lynching tree. Neither does the white church. While its origins may differ from the black church’s, as theologian Walter Wink observes white and black churches have the same calling, which is “to practice a ministry of disclosing the spirituality of these Powers … that are not off at the edge of space somewhere, but are in our very midst as the interiority of earthly institutions, systems, and structures.”⁶ The role of the church in this journey cannot be understated, because only through confession, forgiveness, and redemption can we hope to find justice, acknowledging as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, that justice is impossible without love.⁷ Further, the church is where we derive our faith and empower ourselves by living the meaning of the cross and, in the words of Cone, “snatch[ing] victory out of defeat, life out of death, and hope out of despair.”⁸

Cone and the Truth of The Cross and the Lynching Tree

The thesis that it is impossible to live the myth of white skin superiority and simultaneously live the truth of the cross expresses a contradiction experienced by Cone and other blacks. It was a truth Cone had been carrying in his spirit since his first book Black Theology and Black Power (1969), which he wrote in an “effort to relate the gospel and the black experience—the experience of oppression as well as the struggle to find liberation and meaning.”⁹ Cone states,

Consumed by a passion to express myself about the liberating power of the black religious experience, I continued to write and speak about this spiritual revolution erupting in the cultural and political contexts of the African American community. This message of liberation was “something like a burning fire shut up in my bones,” to use the language of Jeremiah; I (was) weary with holding it in, and I (could not) (Jer. 20:9).¹⁰

By the time Cone wrote The Cross and the Lynching Tree, he was simply taking another step along what has been for him a tedious journey with American racism. Growing up in the segregated South in the 1940s and 1950s, he had an up-close-and-personal experience with lynching. Daily he learned about white supremacy and its terroristic violence. He learned that “white people were virtually free to do anything to blacks with impunity.”¹¹ He heard black people talk about the horrors of the Ku Klux Klan, and he saw the crosses that served as the staggering symbol of the Klan’s philosophy of white supremacy. Cone knew, even as a youth, that the atrocities his family and the black community experienced were unjust. Early in life, he learned that to know the truth and not be able to speak it is the gut-wrenching burden of living a double consciousness in a flawed “two-ness” democracy.

This is how the lie of white skin superiority seduces its victims into a covenant of co-dependency as one is made to deny the truth. The flaw of white skin superiority is that, each time it seduces its victim, it re-victimizes, having to recommit to the denial that white skin superiority is a lie. A lie requires high maintenance and constant reinforcement owing to the fear of exposure. Slaves and free blacks in the South understood the unarticulated and suppressed fear of whites, who could not gaze into the eyes of blacks, where the truth could be read. Black men and women were lynched for defiantly looking back at whites and telegraphing their knowledge of the lie:

Nothing was more detested by whites than the idea that blacks were equal to them. “You don’t act in a way to make white persons feel that you don’t know they were white”, commented an Arkansas interviewee about Jim Crow. Any word or body movement that was perceived to be insufficiently deferential, like standing upright and looking a white person in the eye could get a black beaten or killed.¹²

Here we stand in the intersection of racism and the truth of the cross. The cross, as a symbol of liberation, redemption, and selfless love counters oppression and keeps hope alive in Christ Jesus, even in the midst of despair, deception, and delusion. As historian Alexander Saxton points out, nineteenth-century racial doctrines that had abetted the myth of white skin superiority began to be challenged during the first decade of the twentieth century, and “showed signs of crumbling under the impact of scientific criticism and political and economic changes throughout the United States.”¹³ However, a consequence of the nineteenth-century shift from “theological to biological thinking” proved disastrous for African Americans, in that the new sense that human beings belonged to the “biological universe” caused the “unsophisticated white man,” as Myrdal says, “to arrive at the opinion that blacks were biologically inferior.”¹⁴

A similar kind of interpretive lens is provided by another black scholar, Dwight Hopkins, who, in addressing white supremacy in Down, Up, and Over: Slave Religion and Black Theology, claims total condemnation by Jesus. According to Hopkins, it is not unusual for “white churches, religious institutions, and the broader society to make racial classifications that discriminate against the biological make-up and physical characteristics of black folk.”¹⁵ In so doing, these persons and institutions do not display any awareness that to act in this manner is counter to the very ethics of Jesus. The lie of white skin superiority, having been practiced from generation to generation, is so protracted that white people have managed, in the name of white supremacy, to impose a white skin color on Jesus in order to establish a normative relationship between themselves and Jesus, and a dissonant relationship between Jesus and those who are not white. Hopkins says, “Yet Jesus condemns color supremacy because the forced normativity of whiteness creates a false idol at the center of all humanity…. in North American society, race still matters, due to the wicked spirit of white supremacy.”¹⁶

In his home church, Macedonia AME Church, Cone learned that black Christians loved and trusted their Jesus and could tolerate their lot because they were modeling how Jesus went through his experience of suffering. Cone references historian Lerone Bennett Jr.’s reflections on the pain of black suffering which, says Bennett, was “at the deepest level … what it was like to be crucified … and more: that there were some things in this world that are worth being crucified for.”¹⁷ The hymn “Jesus K...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Periodizing the Discourse on Black Christianity and Race
• II. Race, Social Divisions, and Restructured Ecclesial Spaces
• III. Religious Cultural Impairments in Assessing Racism’s Social Costs
• IV. Theology and (Re)Vitalized Race Consciousness
• V. Concluding Thoughts
• Contributors
• Index