Abstract
Racism has no scientific basis or definition. It is a learned behavior that puts one group of people above all others. Racism puts a burden on the society that artificially crafted it, and it suffocates the Church infected by its ideology. The Church can overcome racism by more intentionally creating a beloved community that transcends the pillars that sustain racist theories. Christians and non-Christians are responsible to promote the enduring values that have defined humanity, such as generosity, kindness, perseverance, and humility. Incidental characteristics, such as the color or tone of one’s skin, when highlighted, insidiously give an unfair advantage to one group over another. The psychological damage caused by racist ideology can become inconsequential when the Church takes the risk to become a beacon for the promotion of justice. If the Church fails to overcome racism and neglects the role of becoming the champion of a beloved community and nurturing a race-transcending society, the Church has lost its heritage and its hope.
Keywords
Introduction: What is racism?
Racism is the most reprehensible ideology in the modern world, yet it is the least scientifically-based doctrine, giving unfair advantage to one group of people who believe in their inherent superiority to all other groups. The claim of superiority made by racist ideology arises as a result of human incidental and inherent characteristics, such as the color or tone of one’s skin. This bias fails to take into consideration human defining properties and enduring timeless values, such as generosity, courage, kindness, perseverance, and humility.
At the International Summit of Baptists against Racism and Ethnic Conflict at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, in January 1999, a Kenyan theologian and church leader defined racism as “the dogma that one ethnic group is condemned by nature to congenital inferiority and another group to congenital superiority.” 1 One can also define systemic racism as a combination of prejudice plus power. Racial prejudice and power are a sine qua non to establishing and maintaining institutional racism, leading to criminal behavior with impunity in contemporary societies.
Racist theories worldwide have often made a distinction between groups of people based on common biological traits or heredity. Some groups of people, it is claimed, are more warlike, bestial, and uncivilized, whereas others are talented musicians, civilized, and productive. In religious language, a frequent speculation is that a superior group is endowed with skills to lead, whereas others are predestined to be dominated. 2
One of the persistent problems of racialized societies is the fear of those who look different and who express different religious and cultural identities. At the Baptists against Racism Summit in January 1999, scholars and church leaders made serious efforts toward making the first decade of the twenty-first century a decade of racial reconciliation and justice. Denton Lotz, then General Secretary of the Baptist World Alliance, remarked that “the Atlanta Covenant calls for Baptists worldwide to make the decade 2000–2010 a decade to promote racial justice.” 3
A major pitfall of the contemporary age of information technology is the loss of strong communities, often typically associated with Eastern and African cultures. “I am because we are” is a common statement in African cultures, but the worth of a strong sense of community has also been acknowledged by philosophers and scholars in the western world. Karl Jaspers writes, “The individual cannot become human by [oneself] . . . Alone, I sink into gloomy isolation—only in community with others can I be revealed in the act of mutual discovery.” 4 Weak communities lead to weak social cohesion, translating to the fallacy or the assumption that interpreting people who are different is more advantageous than understanding them. Perhaps what the technological age needs is a strong sense of community that would lead to a more holistic approach to understanding the common humanity we share. This change could come only through more interactions and human connectedness in contemporary societies. Understanding people who are different is more important than interpreting them. Humanity would also experience a new confidence in the promotion of interconnectedness and would learn that the opposite of faith is not only doubt, but also fear. Where social interactions occur, human beings have tendencies either to retreat out of fear or to interpret what is unfamiliar or unknown. The gray areas of human existence are more interesting than the black and white areas, and one gains life fulfillment by interacting with people who are ideologically and culturally different.
In his remarks as the honorary chair at the Atlanta Summit in January 1999, former US President Jimmy Carter offered a practical approach to ameliorating the problems of racial injustice and the lack of strong communities in the United States: “The result would be to get to know each other and to remove what has, in my opinion, been the last rampart of racial segregation—and that is the Christian churches of our region. The schools have been integrated. The courts have been integrated; the workplace has been integrated; [but] the churches have not been integrated.”
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Timothy George, a respected Church historian and the dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Alabama, states: True healing and reconciliation will begin only when we are able to identify and exorcise the demons which hang like vampires on our souls. And this includes the Baptist soul for, as we know, slavery, segregation and apartheid have all been defended by Baptists and many others, as a divinely appointed way of life. We dare not forget this history, for it continues to shape our attitudes and actions in ways that are sometimes hidden from our own conscious awareness.
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The roads to racial reconciliation will not be paved by the government or international organizations. The roads to lasting racial justice and hope for wounded societies and churchly institutions deformed because of racism will be paved by the Church and other religious communities. This reality is partly because neither systematic racism nor racial injustice dehumanize the victims, but instead the acceptance of it by the Church and other religious communities in the United States does.
Four identified pillars of racism in the contemporary world
Racism has no justifiable basis, but at least four identifiable pillars have sustained racism and made it an endemic part of contemporary societies worldwide. They include: (i) the abuse of opportunities in literary tradition about Africa, (ii) pseudo-scientific inquiries, (iii) religions, and (iv) anti-miscegenation laws in colonial North America.
The abuse of opportunities in literary tradition about Africa
I became acquainted with the darkness of racial typology and its corrosive effects in US society when I migrated from West Africa to the United States in the 1980s. I started realizing that the African continent itself has been denigrated both culturally and politically. I was never overtly made aware or constantly reminded that I was racially or culturally different before I came to the United States. My new world has been infected by racial typology, and it would be difficult for me to understand my identity in the western world without learning the ABCs of the Civil Rights Movement. Prior to coming to the United States, I knew only that human beings were created male and female, not white and black.
The Africa and her people I left behind in the 1980s are illustrious, graceful, complete, serene, hopeful, creative, durable, and unimaginably cooperative with the rhythm of nature. I had to learn how to cope with racism, knowing that to be free from racial typology in the United States was difficult, if not impossible. I started to question what many Americans in my generation have taken for granted.
In the 1980s, one of the first books I read by a western author about Africa was Heart of Darkness, written in 1902 by Joseph Conrad (1857–1924). The book describes Africa and what Conrad experienced as a “carcass of some animal . . . pieces of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty rails.” 7 In Africa, most of us would not see the Heart of Darkness as an emissary of light, but rather as a lower sort of apostle. The book would make many Africans feel uncomfortable, to say the least. The book did not sway my mind or persuade me that the continent of my birth was “a dark continent.” Perceptive African readers would get the sense that, the way nineteenth century Europeans who colonized Africa viewed the continent, early Europeans were themselves in darkness about Africa.
Conrad visited Belgian Congo only once in his life, a short visit that formed the basis of his novel. He visited colonized Congo in 1890, wrote the Heart of Darkness in 1899, and published it in 1902. The book was hailed in the western world as the first original twentieth century novel about Africa.
If one could imagine, however, an African intellectual coming to the United States for one month and spending that month with the Amish people in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and returning to Africa to write, portraying the Amish people as the best representatives of the people of the United States of America, one would get a glimpse of the danger of telling such a one-sided, comprehensive story about the vast continent of Africa. Works like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness crystalized negative opinions about Africa in the minds of many people in the western world, leading to deformed views and skewed and unbalanced opinions about Africa. This viewpoint ultimately reinforced racism in Europe and elsewhere in the western world.
Pseudo-scientific inquiries
Scientific investigations have shaped modern minds against the African continent and her peoples. Scientific inquiries are socially and culturally embedded activities. One cannot equate scientific data about race typology with righteousness and truth. Cultures influence what one is looking for, what one sees, and how one sees. When released, the skeletons from the ancient closet of racism would be embarrassingly cold to behold. An incontrovertible truth is that science does not prove, it probes. 8
In the nineteenth century and before the publication of Heart of Darkness, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859). Although Darwin did not discredit the monogenetic 9 view about human origin, scientists in the United States began to question it, and some abandoned the monogenetic view about human origins altogether. In other words, scientists speculated that human races are separate biological species and that additional “Adams” and “Eves” must have existed. The chief proponents of this idea were called polygenists. The concept was initially popularized in the United States, fostering racial typology and used as a rationale to understand blackness.
Samuel George Morton, for example, won worldwide respect when he began his collection of human skulls in the 1820s, before the publication of Darwin’s works. When he died in 1851, no fewer than one thousand skulls were found in his house in Philadelphia, with friends and foes referring to his house as the “American Golgotha.” 10
Morton was not interested, however, in scientific inquiries about race origins or the factors responsible for divergence in human skin pigmentation. He gathered skulls because he wanted to test his controversial hypothesis, namely that a ranking of races could be established objectively by the physical characteristics of the brains, particularly by their sizes. Thus, for Morton, larger skulls meant larger brains, and larger brains meant superior race, and superior race meant superior intelligence. Unique entitlements and privileges could be associated with a particular group, and one could project a divinely ordained intent of God for the superiority of one group over all the others.
Although his own data proclaimed loud and clear that all human beings are created equal, Morton refused to see that factors more than the size of the brain would be required to determine the superiority or inferiority of human beings. He wrote several articles defending the presumption of human races as separate, created species. He would fill the cranial cavities with mustard seeds, and then pour the seeds back into a graduated cylinder in his “science” laboratory and read the skull’s volume in cubic inches. None of his experiments yielded his anticipated results of the inherent inferiority of one type of specimen. Morton became dissatisfied and complained bitterly that the seeds did not pack well or that they were too light for black skulls. Morton deliberately looked for skulls that would fit his desired results. He knew ahead of time, for example, which skulls belonged to whites and which ones belonged to blacks. He would pick up a threateningly-large black skull, fill it lightly, and give it a few irregular shakes. Then, he would take a white skull of the same size, shake it hard, and push mightily to force it to accommodate more seeds. One can perhaps say that racism became a learned behavior and caused psychological damage in the western world today because of pseudo-scientific claims. J. Philippe Rushton included in his own experiment the cranial cavities of the “Oriental” people in the United States at different ages. His conclusions are not vastly different from that of Morton. 11
It is scientifically futile to attempt to prove that because of separation by geography, difference in skin color, or the diversity of cultural expression, one person is intrinsically and ontologically different from another person.
Religion
Progress toward tolerance, mutual respect, and racial unity has been painfully slow and marked with repeated setbacks because the Church has not been fully integrated. Racial harmony or unity is unattainable unless and until the Church is integrated and each congregation takes concrete steps toward the eradication of racism.
Neither white nor black Americans should assume that the responsibility for the elimination of racial tension and its corrosive effects in our society belongs exclusively to the other group. All citizens have been affected negatively by the embedded racism in our societies. 12
One is not born either white or black, and no genetic factor makes one person white and another black. One becomes culturally and socially white or black as a learned or acquired identity. To become black means that one accepts as right and natural a system that, subtly or blatantly, declares one to be unintelligent or inferior to all other people. To be black is to become part of a system of beliefs, habits, or laws that generally rate that person inferior. To become white, on the other hand, means that one accepts as right and natural a social system that, subtly or blatantly, declares one group the more intelligent, beautiful, and gifted of all people. 13
A person is not white or black because of visible characteristics such as the color of the skin, the shape of the nose, the color of the eye, the thickness of the lips, or the color and set of hair or body shapes. A person is white or black because he or she becomes white or black as a result of the influence of society.
In Liberia, an African nation-state closely associated with the United States of America since 1847, culture, not color, defines one’s classification. A person with European culture in dress, speech, or table mannerisms is regarded as “white,” regardless of skin color. Thus, a person who could be classified as “black” in the United States, such as former US President Barack Obama, would be classified as “white” in Liberia.
Anti-miscegenation laws in colonial North America
A series of anti-miscegenation laws were passed in colonial North America, crystalizing racism in modern society. Colonial Maryland and Virginia were especially notorious for the laws that effectively took away the rights that people of African descent enjoyed as citizens of the British Commonwealth. Before 1681, slaves could purchase their freedom as white indentured servants after serving for seven years. In all British colonies in the seventeenth century, both indentured servants and free slaves could vote, own properties, eat together, participate at political events, and marry whomever they chose. Both people of African descent and Europeans enjoyed similar conditions and faced the same opportunities once they were free of indenture and slavery. 14 In 1664, however, Maryland passed a law that prohibited free Africans from marrying European women. Any white woman who married a non-European man was punished by enslavement for twenty years. The anti-miscegenation laws prohibited marriages between a white person and a non-white person. The term “white” in reference to human beings occurred for the first time in 1664 in Maryland.
In 1691, anti-miscegenation laws in Maryland were amended, and it became illegal for white people to marry people of African origin. White men had intimate relations with African women, but very rarely were they punished for their transgression under anti-miscegenation laws.
Following Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion of 1676, laws against organized labor were tightened. The main target was the people of African descent. In 1681 and a decade later, both Maryland and Virginia passed laws that made it illegal for people of African descent to hold public office, marry white people, own weapons, and testify against white people in courts. The upward mobility that all people of any national origin enjoyed throughout the British Commonwealth had evaporated completely by 1691. Ever since that last decade of the seventeenth century, whiteness as a tool of division has remained undefined as a human category, in part because white is a color, not a race; black is a color, not a race. What gives hope is to affirm today that human beings are Arabs, Aborigines, Indians, Europeans, Africans, and Latinos.
In 1790, the United States passed the Naturalization Law to make provision for citizenship for those born outside the United States. In this law, the first requirement was that one must be “white.” White people who married people of African descent could lose their citizenship as punishment. The law was not only to discourage white women from marrying Africans, but also to make white women “available” only to white men. These laws have consequences, and not until 1952 was the Naturalization Law amended.
One can say that the year 1681 was in North America what the year 1948 was in South Africa, when apartheid became legalized and segregation based on incidental characteristics of the color of one’s skin determined where one should live, go to school, work, and who one could marry.
The scale, scope, and extent of psychological damage of systemic racism
In the past fifty years or so, the word “black” in the western Christian vocabulary has undergone substantial and significant changes of meaning. Much confusion in our society about race is the result of our failure to recognize these changes.
Bernard Lewis, retired professor of history at Princeton University, recalls his experience when he joined the British army in 1940. Lewis was asked to complete a form in which a “race” category was introduced to him. He remembers: This was the first time I had seen the word “race” in an official document, and, given the circumstances at the time, I was at a loss what to write. If asked the same question nowadays, I would unhesitatingly write “white” or “Caucasian.” It would not have occurred to me to do so then. For me at that time, white was a color, not a “race.” “Caucasian,” except among anthropologists, meant natives of the region of the Caucasus Mountains. The only people who were currently using the term “race” in official documents were our enemies [Nazi Germany], and I was sure that the British Army did not want to know whether I was or was not Aryan. I, therefore, sought the guidance of the Sergeant, who explained to me that as far as the British Army was concerned, there are four and only four races—English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish. Even an African recruit—and there were some already—was obliged to choose one of these four. The choice was of course entirely voluntary. You put down what you felt yourself to be . . . An African would not say, “black” but would select one of the four options in the document.
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This story of Bernard Lewis underscores the artificiality of modern racial typology. Laws, political inclinations, and cultures, and not science and religions, are the deciding foundational factors in racial classifications. Even census leaders often rely on the changing attitudes in society before making decisions on racial categorization. In 2015, the Obama administration sent a document to the Census Bureau instructing that, beginning in 2020, people of the Middle East and North African Arabs would be classified as “white” in the US census. Thus, not only will the United States have “black African Americans,” it will, in the future, also have “white African Americans.”
The Church needs to deal with racism in contemporary societies more intentionally and become more vigilant in recognizing how persistently racial typology is re-conceptualized over time. All religious communities also must deal with racism and how categorization by race prevails in different parts of the world, causing oppression, subjugation, exploitation, weak communities, societal paralysis, and spiritual guilt. A more subliminal issue the Church needs to raise to promote racial justice and model race-transcending societies is how social and cultural structures, like racism, often contain within them contradictions, inconsistencies, and even potentially antithetical meanings that can be manipulated. Racial typology has devalued modern African contributions to Christendom, and all Christians have been diminished by it.
One might raise the question of whether it is possible for the Church to promote race-transcending societies. Is living in non-racial societies in the future possible or only fantasy? Human beings are prisoners of their past experiences. One could not eradicate racial and tribal typologies and prejudice overnight even if one tried; we can, however, acknowledge them and their corrosive effects on societies. Racial typology remains one of the major causes of modern crises in the world. We cannot perpetually be in self-imposed prisons of our own making. Thus, the Church can lead the way in promoting race-transcending societies.
Racial categorization has dehumanized all of humanity, whether we think of ourselves as black or as white. Those who saw themselves as white also suffered under apartheid in South Africa, and not only in South Africa. When African Americans were relegated to the back of the bus in the United States, white Americans were also not free because they were “relegated” to sit in front of the bus, even if they desired to sit at the back.
Racial typologies have negative impacts on our society and have been exploited politically and socially to infuse societies with misery, an inferiority complex, and subjugation. To correct the ontological and psychological damage caused by racism, part of the mission of the Church in the twenty-first century must be to celebrate our common human identities without highlighting them.
One of the problems in modern societies is the assumption that race is a natural and God-given ontological category. Race should not, however, lock humanity into separate groups and typologies. I have observed that racial categorization is sociological, and the term “race” is a state of mind that oscillates between white and black in all of us, equally solid and unreal, as if body and soul have been kept apart and joined only by the thin thread of desire, greed, artificiality, materialism, incoherence, and individualism. The path to harmony in the modern world must be established by the Church through love, compassion, and the radical risk of friendship with those who are different from us.
Not accepting the mystery that God loves the other person as much as God loves me is fundamentally wrong. In 1965, Jonathan Daniels accepted this mystery. He was twenty years old when, in August of 1965, he threw himself in front of a bullet that was meant to kill Ruby Sales, a beautiful African American teenager, now a public theologian in the United States. I have met many African Americans, men and women, who would do for whites what Jonathan Daniels did for Ruby Sales. Jonathan Daniels was saying to modern societies that racism cannot be and must not be the alpha and omega of human civilization.
Racism in the United States is not only a social or political or economic problem; it is also, and more fundamentally, an ontological and spiritual defect. Discrimination or prejudice of any kind strangulates and suffocates the Church. Racism not only contaminates the Church, but also disfigures the image of God in all of us. When it comes to exposing the sins of racism and prejudice, churches have kept their lamps under a bushel. The Church, however, can correct racism and foster beloved community in the modern world.
Do we say that the African Christians are our fellow human beings and therefore must be assimilated into the fabric of Christendom? The human “sense of solidarity is stronger when those with whom solidarity is expressed are thought of as ‘one of us’ where ‘us’ means something smaller and more local than the human race . . . Therefore, to say that ‘she is a human being’ is a weak, unconvincing explanation of a generous action.” 16 Put in contrary terms, to say that a family member should live without hope is more outrageous than to say that a fellow human being should live without hope. The Church is more persuasive when it asserts that my fellow Americans are my fellow Christian family members.
Conclusion
I began this short treatise on racism with a definition of the term. I would like to conclude with a more mature definition. Racism is an unscientific, learned behavior that puts one group of people above others because of visible skin pigmentation, attributing to that group unearned political, economic, and educational privileges in modern societies. Racism insidiously leads to political pride and spiritual arrogance, but it also propels citizens to pride of wealth and feelings of superiority of one’s culture. Any church of God should consider racism as heresy, and every follower of Christ should consider it anathema. In the modern era, the eradication of racism should be one of the central missions of the Church. The result of its eradication will give hope to a defective society. All of God’s children in modern societies will model and more tangibly reflect the kingdom of God in ordinary time. If the Church fails, however, she has lost her heritage and her hope.
Furthermore, if the Church fails to take part in the eradication of racism, her refusal means a willful rejection of participating in God’s kingdom, described by Paul: In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. (Gal 3:26–29, NRSV).
The Scripture is not as elastic about what does not promote unity and love as many Christians today might think. If Paul were writing a letter to Christians in the western world in the twenty-first century, he would have included the phrase, “You are no longer white or black, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
Footnotes
1.
Douglas W. Waruta, “Social-Historical Structures of Racism,” in Baptists Against Racism: United in Christ for Racial Reconciliation, ed. Denton Lotz (McLean, VA: The Baptist World Alliance, 1999), 25; see also Ruth Benedict, Race: Science and Politics (New York: Viking Books, 1940).
2.
A beautiful biblical category of free will and predestination was exploited by a controversial Calvinistic doctrine in South Africa by the Dutch Reformed Church to justify the system of racial separation known as apartheid. When the National Party came to power in 1948, separations between the majority Zulu and the Afrikaners, Cape Coloured, and the Indian population in South Africa became legalized.
3.
Lotz, Baptists against Racism, 7.
4.
Quoted in Robert M. Baird, ed. The Philosophical Life: An Activity and an Attitude (New York: University Press of America, 1983), v.
5.
Lotz, Baptists against Racism, 179.
6.
Timothy George, “Afterword,” in Lotz, Baptists against Racism, 182.
7.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Penguin Books, 1902), 22.
8.
See David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 361.
9.
The monogenetic view of human origin is that all human beings came from a single father and mother and that all human beings have a single origin.
10.
See Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), 50–69.
11.
See J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, 2nd abridged ed. (Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute, 2000).
12.
See Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 8.
13.
Margo Jefferson “On Defining Race, When Only Thinking Makes It So,” The New York Times (March 22, 1999): E2.
14.
In her book, Jacqueline Battalora explores the moment in time when “white people,” as a separate and distinct group of humanity, were invented through legislative means and enactment of laws in colonial Virginia and Maryland. The book argues that the underlying reason was based on limiting the conjugal rights of the people of African descent in order to ensure that European women would be “available” only to whites. See Battalora, The Birth of White Nation: The Invention of White People and Its Relevance Today (Houston: Strategic Publishing, 2013).
15.
Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 110.
16.
See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 191.