Towards Freedom from Racism

I share with you this spiritual journey that Jesus has taken me on towards freedom from racism. I am still on that journey. The undoing takes repetition, humility and determination. However, the joy of knowing I am moving towards becoming “part of the solution” instead of remaining “part of the problem” keeps motivating me.

There is also grace, God’s amazing grace, which is literally transforming me, by the power of Jesus death and resurrection. So often we treat things like racism as a “political issue” which requires hard, mental work (aka doing it in your own strength) which, at most, results in “well managed behavior so we don’t offend” but our hearts remain unchanged.

I have come to see that healing from racism is a spiritual issue, in which the Holy Spirit can renew my heart and mind from the inside out as I intentionally commit to these steps of repentance. Pastor Craig Duvel from Pineland Baptist Church outlined these, Repentance Steps, which can be applied to everything that robs us from being our whole selves as originally designed by God. I have applied these to the sin of racism.

As this is my prayer based on my journey some of these may be relevant to you, others may not. My hope is that the Holy Spirit will show you which actions and thoughts God wants to free you from. Let us lay down defensiveness and embrace the gift of repentance that leads to times of refreshing. (Acts 3: 19)

Inner Healing meets Social Justice - Forgiving my racist ancestors

My faith community has been exploring forgiveness and repentance on a deep personal level and I have been wondering what it might look like to apply these truths to social problems and systemic injustices. Although I acknowledge systemic injustices exist, I can only engage with these as an individual. I can’t take on responsibility for the whole unjust system. However, I want to explore what it looks like if an individual takes responsibility within an unjust system, and in particular focusing on the brokenness of racism. 

I will be using my experience of Jesus’s life and teachings as a framework for this spiritual exercise, as these have been vital in my own personal journey of healing and freedom. However, before I begin, let me briefly explore the key concepts of forgiveness, repentance and prayer.

Forgiveness before repentance - what comes first?

"For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, 

your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 

But if you do not forgive others their sin, 

your Father will not forgive your sins."  

Matthew 6: 14-15

Our being wronged and our own wrongs are so intertwined that usually we need to pursue both forgiveness and repentance. My pastor has, from experience, seen that often people struggle to find freedom from thoughts/actions that they don’t want to do (but end up doing) despite many prayers of repentance. He proposes that this stuckness could be because they haven’t forgiven the original injustice that took place against them, which in turn, has set in motion lies, feelings and emotions that drive their wrong behaviour from which they now seek freedom.  Being guided by this wisdom, I shall start with a prayer of forgiveness. I admit, it does feel counter-intuitive, but it has been fruitful for me in other areas of my life and so I trust the process. 

So, based on this above premise, before I deepen my repenting from believing the lie that "white is better and black is less" (Please read more about this here before you continue), let me start by forgiving my ancestors for their role in setting up or participating in racist systems that still plague our nation today.  

A bizarre story offering a deeper way of seeing

The story she told went something like this. 

Once there was a village living beside a river. One day the people of the village saw a baby floating down the river, and as expected, motivated by compassion they quickly mobilized to rescue it. One family offered to care for it whilst trying to think what the next step should be. However there was not much time to strategize as the next day more babies were found floating down the river, and more rescuing needed to be done. This continued every few days and soon, most people in the village were helping either to rescue or to care for the babies.

Then someone had the idea to find out what was going on upstream that was causing the babies to be in the river. So a group left the village to investigate. After walking a couple of days, they came across a large contraption, a big machine that was snatching babies from upstream villages and throwing them into the river.

I heard this rather disturbing story at The Justice Conference in 2017, where it was shared by speaker, Lisa Sharon Harper, in order to highlight the importance of, not just dealing with the symptoms of  social problems, but to find the root causes that might be driving the problems. It was a call to dismantle the systems and structures that were oppressing people.

Letting Go of Being White

So how do we respond to this notion that the white identity is based on the Big White Lie and that it was birthed in greed, dominance, theft and exploitation? 

I must admit, that it has taken me a while to write this post as it is a painful and messy topic. 

We have to acknowledge how deeply we are attached to our identities. Even identities that we haven't chosen for ourselves, but have been given to us by society. Based on my own journey, I have come to see that processing the injustices inflicted by the Big White Lie and the white identity has been similar to processing a major life loss. 

I hope that we can have an authentic conversation about our psychological response to the challenge of our identity. For too long, the focus has been on "not being racist" and this had led to surface-level political correctness. I am inviting fellow, pale-skinned folk to a deeper journey to freedom and healing which will truly allow us to live and engage justly with our society and folk with darker skins than us. Let's start by honestly looking at our emotional response to the revelation that our identity was created to oppress others. 

The Big White Lie

“But it’s all over! Let’s just get on with life and leave all that nasty racism behind” 

I am sure many may respond in that way after having read my first post on how it came to be that people were labelled white and black.

But it isn’t all over.  

Some things are, thankfully, over.

Slavery has been condemned as an evil; Colonialism is finished and countries have their independence; Scientific Racism has been renounced; Apartheid has ended and South African has a new constitution.

Somethings are not over.

Racism remains to oppress people of colour. However, I have found the term “racism” to be too broad and such a despised term that most white people can’t help but dismiss their personal involvement with it. I have found it helpful to create more nuance by using the following terms: 1. Raw Racism, 2. Discrete Racism, and 3. Tolerating  the Big White Lie. Let’s explore these a bit more. Only then can start thinking about how we respond – and this I will cover in a separate post.

Raw Racism

This is easy to spot. It includes physically attacking someone, hateful speech and name calling because of skin colour discrimination. It includes openly declaring one’s establishment for “whites only”. Most people will oppose this form of racism, except maybe the extreme right wing groups.

Discrete Racism

This is the basic discrimination against someone based on their having black or brown skin. Most of the time it is carried out in subtle and sophisticated ways as opposed to the crass aggression of the raw racism. Sadly this still happens here in South Africa in 2017. Here are some examples shared with me by friends living in Southern Suburb, Cape Town.

• shop security racially profiling suspects, and only following around people of colour.

• restaurants telling black patrons that they are full when they aren’t.

• landlords telling potential black renters the property is unavailable when it isn’t.

• tolerance of racist jokes.

• racial profiling in neighbourhood watch groups, only being suspicious of black or Coloured men and using code terms like  “bravo male” or “charlie male” to mask racial profiling.

• black adult still being called boy or girl e.g. “garden boy”.

Thankfully, these types of behaviour are, more and more, being "called out" in real life and social media and are broadly condemned when they occur.

Agreeing with The Big White Lie

Let’s start by looking at what is The Big White Lie. Remember that the terms “white” and “black” were not designed to be objective descriptions of skin colour difference, rather they were a statement of who is better and who is less. This thinking was underpinned by the belief that  “white is better and black is less”.  This lie has two parts to it: first, that white or Western ways are better, and secondly that white skin or Western ways are the norm or the standard.

It is only recently that I came to see the many ways I had been believing this lie. I had not been aware of it, as it felt so normal to me having grown up in South Africa. I propose that only a few white people in South African have escaped believing the Big White Lie on some level, and most are unaware that its even there. This is because the invisible barriers setup by this lie do not impact the lives of those with peachy skin. But, talk to a friend of colour and you will find out how real it is. Further, the Big White Lie has, over centuries, seeped into the fabric of the very institutions and organisations within our society.

Here are some examples, from the seeming innocuous to the life-threatening:

Becoming "White"?

I could almost feel something in my thinking shatter. It was when I was reading about how the white identity was specifically and intentionally created by peach-skinned people in order to justify stealing land and enslaving people with brown skin. The terms “white” and “black” were not designed to be objective descriptions of skin colour difference, rather they were a statement of who is better and who is less.  The label “white” is birthed in greed, dominance, theft, and exploitation.  I had never really thought about that. I knew that judging someone by their skin colour was racism and wrong, but never really thought about where this label had come from – I had assumed that it had  always been.  

When and how did people become white and black?

Until 1600 and 1700 people defined themselves by their tribe or ethnicity, not their skin colour. Certainly there was lots of prejudice, discrimination, superiority and inferiority, but these were along ethnic differences. This terms is called ethnocentrism. 

"Historian Dante A Puzzo, in his discussion of Aristotle, racism and the ancient world writes that: Racism rests on two basic assumptions: that mankind is divisible into superior and inferior stocks. Racism, thus defined, is a modern conception, for prior to the XVth century there was virtually nothing in the life and thought of the West that can be described as racist. To prevent misunderstanding a clear distinction must be made between racism and ethnocentrism. The Ancient Hebrews, in referring to all who were not Hebrews as Gentils, were indulging in ethnocentrism, not racism. So it was with the Hellenes who denominated all non-Hellenes - whether the wild Scythians or the Egyptians whom they acknowleged as their mentors in the arts of civilization - Barbarians, the term denoting that which was strange or foreign. 
The reference for this quote is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism. Read more about ethnocentrism at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnocentrism

So let’s look at the factors that worked together to lead to the creation of the term “white” and “black”