Part II, The Cry for Justice

Why Do White Americans Tend to Blame the Victim, but not the Oppressor?

The clever and effective white false teaching goes like this:  white superiority and white privilege are natural and normal, evenly divinely ordained; black inferiority is the cause of high poverty and crime rates, of individual, family and community dysfunction.

The biblical teaching, which is ignored even by those who believe every word in the Bible is divinely inspired, is:  oppression crushes, humiliates, animalizes, impoverishes, enslaves and even kills persons created in the image of God.  This sentiment is repeated 555 times in the Hebrew OT.   Strangely, there is very little theological literature on this very important subject.

Applied to modern America, the truth is that white oppressors---from the first British colonists down to 2016---have crushed all non-whites.  White ethnocentric oppressors have crushed, humiliated, animalized, impoverished, enslaved and killed blacks, Native Americans, Mexicans, etc.

The damage done by white oppressors creates black dysfunction.  Damage precedes dysfunction.  White oppressors have created, maintained and redesigned various systems of oppression---from slavery to segregation to mass incarceration.  Unending oppression creates unending poverty and dysfunction.  But false teaching twists the historical and social facts and blames the victim, not the oppressor.

Silence from the American pulpit allows this demonic system to continue from one generation to the next generation.  Warning:  the Temple which was a 'den of robbers'---a system of oppression---was destroyed by God using the Romans in 70 AD.

In no way, shape, or form should any of the stained glass windows in the National Cathedral reflect American oppression.

Love and Justice:  The Biblical Siamese Twins

Love and justice, love and justice, love and justice; the foundational principles of the OT Law and Prophets; the foundational principles of the NT kingdom of God.

If love is separated from justice, it becomes only a warm feeling with little power to fundamentally change things.  Biblical love is an action word; biblical love should always result in doing justice.  Loving one's neighbor means doing justice in behalf of your neighbor, especially your ethnic neighbor.

But even love and justice are not enough.  Love and justice must be preceded by repentance and followed by release.  When Jesus first introduced the kingdom of God in Matthew and Mark, he preceded this offer of the kingdom with the requirement of repentance.  For white Americans, this would mean repentance from participation in or tolerance of systems of oppression (sins of omission and sins of commission) followed by release of the oppressor poor.

If your understanding and practice of love and justice does not include repentance and release, it is not much more than pious platitude.  By the way, any talk about freedom that does not include justice is shallow, hollow, deceptive.  Remember slaves were freed but not given justice; soon they lost their freedom to neoslavery---segregation, sharecropping, prison gangs, and lynching.

America is full of pious talk about freedom and love; but seldom are they combined with Jubilee justice, kingdom justice, that ends systems of oppression, that fully releases the oppressed.