Dirty Laundry?

My pastor is a master story teller; here is her best story:

"A young couple moved into a new neighborhood.  The next morning while eating breakfast, the wife noticed her neighbor hanging out her laundry.  She commented: 'Those clothes don't look very clean; maybe she needs better soap.'  Her husband looked, but remained silent.  For three weeks, every Monday he would hear some version of these same comments.  But the following wash day, his wife was surprised to see a nice white wash on the line next door.  She commented: 'Look, she finally learned how to wash clothes.  I wonder who taught her.'"

Her husband responded quietly, 'I got up early this morning and washed OUR kitchen windows.'"

This story about what looked like 'their dirty laundry was really our dirty windows' fits perfectly for a revisiting of Jennifer Harvey's excellent but disturbing book entitled Dear White Christians.  It could be subtitled  Dear White Christians: Your Windows Are Dirty.  Evangelical Christians, your windows are dirty; Liberal Christians, your windows are dirty.  Stop complaining about the supposed dirty laundry hanging on your black neighbor's line; first wash your own dirty windows.

Because of massive self-deception, you don't really see how dirty your windows are---smeared with ethnocentrism and oppression, with power and privilege.  Confess and repent; find a powerful detergent and wash your own windows, make them spotless.

Most white Christians see the poor, and especially poor blacks, as having lots of dirty laundry.  But in Luke, Jesus doesn't see the poor of Palestine (and around 80 percent were poor or near poor) as the number one problem in society.  Instead, he makes it crystal clear that the rich were THE problem.  And far too often the religious rich who ran the Temple as a 'den of robbers'.

In America, most white Christians see poor blacks as THE problem, not themselves.  Their dirty windows distort not only black life, but also, because of the dim light, they falsely see themselves as the normal ones, the chosen, godly and righteous ones.

According to Jennifer Harvey, who has probed American history deeply, it was good the abolitionists eliminated slavery and that the civil rights movement ended legal southern segregation.  But in neither movement did Christians think and act deeply enough, biblically enough.  Here are some quotations from Dear White Christians:

"Whiteness (white superiority, white privilege) covers up the very connections we must see and disrupt if we are to make genuine progress toward racial justice."

"It is stunning how quickly and with what ease white Protestants turned to long-standing images of Black people as threatening and scary to shape their response" to the Black Manifesto.

"Had whites perceived the nature of oppression differently, it would have been obvious to those debating and denouncing Forman's tactics [regarding the Black Manifesto] that the question of whether it was immoral to disrupt worship was meaningless without first asking whether the manifesto's charges were true."

"In other words, the moral logic of reparations is justice.  A debt has been incurred, it remains owed, and repayment of that debt is morally due.  The moral logic of reparations is decidedly not charity or compassion."

Black Americans "have been systematically oppressed and suppressed by white people, and the effects of that subjugation remain pervasive in our life together, both within and beyond Christian communities."

"We know that the suffering and marginalization of Black communities in the United States remain, according to virtually every measure of social being, stark and abysmal relative to that of their white counterparts."

Lisa Sharon Harper: "Dear White Christians is a must-read.  This kind of unflinching analysis is both rare and powerful.  Through thorough analysis accompanied with prophetic vision, Harvey decodes the mystery of the failure of the racial reconciliation movement and offers clear direction forward toward the repair of our racialized society."

An extended paraphrase of the title Dear White Christians; Dear Self-deceived, Unrepentant White Christians, full of ethnocentrism and oppression, neglectful of justice; REPENT and REPAIR.