This blog is primarily about Christian ethicist, Jennifer Harvey's excellent book entitled Dear White Christians (2014). This both a review and a commentary on her must read book, though at times a heavy read. She calls for a paradigm shift, a radical reorientation, for white American Christians; this is a hard truth that most white Christians will deny and reject; they will continue on in their white supremacy ways.
My revised title to make her thesis clearer would read like this: Dear [Evil]* White Christians: first repent**, then do justice***.
* "Evil" highlights the profound moral crisis all white American Christians are a part of in God's eyes, even though most white Christians are only dimly aware of or would flatly deny it.
** "Repent"---thoroughly repent of white supremacy which began with the Puritans and continues in 2015.
*** "Justice"---the white American church, on a massive scale, must engage in the doing of Jubilee/shalom/kingdom of God justice to release America's millions of oppressed peoples.
After living for 88 years in America in both the North and the South, after living for 35 years in poor black communities, after reading the ground-breaking book Dear White Christians, after rereading the Daniel 9 prayer (a prayer of confession and repentance for the nation)and the Nehemiah led justice revival which released the oppressed and restored justice(Nehemiah 5), I have concluded that all white pastors of all white churches should pray this of confession/repentance:
God Almighty, holy and just God, we confess that we have greatly sinned against both you and our fellow Americans: Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, Filipino, Puerto Rican, Cuban and Haitian Americans.
First we confess our false and pervasive sense of superiority, our arrogance, our oppression, that we believe our fellow, non-white citizens are inferior, criminal, lazy and dysfunctional. Instead, we confess that we are the evil inferior ones.
As white pastors and white churches, in the spirit of Nehemiah and Zaccheus, we pledge to engage in works of repentance, restitution and justice. We have neglected to preach and practice Leviticus 25, the Messianic passages from Isaiah, Isaiah 58, Luke 4:18-19; Acts 4:32-35 and James 2. We pledge to preach and practice the whole truth of the gospel.
After a person reads Dear White Christians and The New Jim Crow, also ALICE in New Jersey, he/she becomes keenly aware that theology has not kept up with these social crises. We need a new biblical emphasis on "Repent, for the kingdom of God is here." We need to repent of both personal sin and our involvement is social evil---whiteness and richness, of white Anglo ethnocentrism and oppression from the early 1600s down to 2015. This repentance demands a paradigm shift, a radical reorientation, a fundamental rethinking of both our interpretation of the Bible and of American history. We must reject rich white privilege, white self-righteousness.
We will have to give the highest priority to God's kingdom and his justice, a justice for the oppressed poor, to release the oppressed and repair the damage that oppression has done.
In the white community, dangerous and deceptive half-truths are being taught as the whole truth. This is especially true in the white evangelical church in the area of social evil and social justice. I am not referring to cultic type of false teaching, but mainstream history and theology. Either sins of omission (neglect of justice and the love of God), or sins of commission (participation in ethnocentrism and oppression); there is no middle ground, no neutral ground.
I was educated in evangelical Christian colleges and later I taught at evangelical colleges. I am now 88 years old; rarely have I found a white evangelical scholar with a deep understanding of ethnocentrism and oppression, of the kingdom of God as justice. The typical white evangelical is taught both historical half-truths and biblical half-truths---the cross without the kingdom, justification without justice, love without justice, personal sin but not social evil, faith without works of justice.
In terms of history, supposedly, America has a Negro Problem---crime and dysfunction; in reality, the White Problem of ethnocentrism and oppression has caused/created the Negro Problem. America supposedly has a savage, uncivilized Indian problem; in reality, we have a greedy, white colonial, imperialistic problem proudly symbolized by the St. Louis Arch. Or we have a founding fathers problem, a rich, white, Anglo-Saxon, male elite problem, many of whom owned slaves or participated in a slave economy.
The following one-liners by three black leaders highlight the white American problem:
From the Reverend Bill McGill: "The Christian Coalition should stop preaching the lie that this country was founded on Christian principles and values, and teach their children that only a godless people would be responsible for Indian genocide and African enslavement."
From Mississippian, Lee Harper: "For injustice ran deep and cloaked itself well among those things that appeared just."
Lawyer, Michelle Alexander: "We have not ended racial caste, we have merely redesigned it [mass incarceration]."
From Jeremiah 7: "Truth has disappeared."
From Daniel 9: "We have done evil things, rebelled, dodged and taken detours around your clearly marked paths. We have turned a deaf ear to your prophets. . . . all we have to show for our lives is guilt and shame, the whole lot of us." The Message
The reconciliation/love your enemies/integration/beloved community paradigm did not go deep enough into the oppression justice problem, did not demand repentance from centuries of oppression, did not repair the damage done by oppression. No one blended the strengths of both King and Malcom X. Malcom raised the white oppression issue better than King. But whites then and now rejected Malcolm's 'radical' but correct ideas.
Reconciliation and love without repentance from oppression and the doing of justice are not much more than pious platitudes. Even King, four months before his death, began to realize this; He said:
"In 1963 . . . I tried to talk to the nation about a dream I had had . . . I started to see it turn into a nightmare. . . . I watched that dream turn into a nightmare as I moved through the ghettos of the nation and saw black brothers and sisters perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. . . . Yes, I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes."
White America remembers King for his "I Have a Dream" speech, but few know about his "I Live a Nightmare" (my title) speech. We know only half-truths about the civil rights movement. Had both Martin and Malcolm lived another ten years, they might have joined forces. I highly recommend James Cone's book Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare.
Joe Feagin is in my opinion the premier white expert on racism (Racist America, 2000); he declares:
"The current prosperity, relatively long life expectancies, and relatively high living standards of whites as a group in the United States, as well as in the West generally, are ultimately rooted in the agony, exploitation and impoverishment of who were colonized and enslaved, as well as in the oppression and misery of their descendants."
But self-righteous white people seldom repent; instead they rationalize away their social sins and cleverly blame the oppressed for their evil. Harvey documents and then issues a strong call for repentance, restitution, repair by doing justice.
In her excellent book, Dear White Christians, Harvey discusses three powerful paradigms; paradigms are fundamental ways/worldviews of thinking and living; paradigms are not philosophical abstraction; they describe social reality. Harvey does specifically describe whiteness/white supremacy as a paradigm, but she treats it as such.
A whiteness paradigm, a reconciliation paradigm, a reparations paradigm. The white supremacy paradigm (ethnocentrism and oppression) has dominated all of American history from the colonial era down to the present. After living in America for 88 years, after reading Dear White Christians, I have concluded that white America, and especially white Christians, are incredibility evil, dense, stupid and deceptive. Some advice: don't ever associate with one of them---you might become contaminated.
A relatively small number of white Christians, churches and denominations have tried to improve race relations in America by using the reconciliation paradigm. This well meaning approach has largely failed or only superficially succeeded because the reconciliation paradigm has left out two crucial concepts---repentance and justice. WHITE AMERICAN CHRISTIANS ARE TOO SELF-RIGHTEOUS TO REPENT, TOO BIBLICALLY ILLITERATE TO RELEASE THE OPPRESSED, TO DO JUSTICE. These American Christians have inflicted enormous damage on Native Americans, African Americans and other ethnic groups. Personally, I think judgment is just around the corner.
To fit biblical terminology better, I would rename the whiteness paradigm, the ethnocentrism-oppression paradigm; I would rename the reparations paradigm, the justice paradigm.
Markers of a paradigm shift might be:
* from hubris to humility
* from rationalization to repentance
* from self-righteousness to justice
* from reform to revolution
* from partial change to paradigm shift
* from tokenism to transformation
Will American theologians catch up to the issues raised by Dear White Christians, The New Jim Crow, Martin and Malcolm in America and ALICE in New Jersey (see also "ALICE shows working poor aren't making it" Globe Gazette?
Next, a few quotations from Dear White Christians:
"to be white is to exist in a state of profound moral crisis."
"The moral crisis of whiteness throws the reconciliation paradigm into complete chaos because 'whiteness' is a difference we simply cannot and should not embrace and celebrate---at least not yet," because repentance has not yet taken place; we cannot reconcile with current social evil.
"Race is real. Race is powerful. But race is also a social construct. . . . the construction of race is deeply and directly linked to white supremacist social structures. In the way it becomes clear that "white' and 'Black,' for example. are not parallel differences." Whites are the oppressors and blacks are the oppressed; they are equal in social evil.
"race was not a problem of general or generic brokenness. It was a problem of oppressor and oppressed. And empowering the oppressed---beginning by naming oppression and oppressors in unflinching terms---was essential to actually transforming the fundamental nature of thos relationships."
"reconciliation en masse without redress of such conditions as so much babble, abstraction, and absurdity. . . . In a reparations paradigm, repentance replaces cultivation of multicultural sensitivity.
Repair and redress of harm done replace learning to better embrace difference."
