Overcoming the Wounds of Racism
Yesterday’s problem was the color line. Today’s is admitting it still exists.
BY ART J. GORDON (’16)
It was November 24, 2014. As a
nation, we went about our average day: Starbucks, work, school, pastoral visits. But this was the day we looked forward to hearing the results from the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, investigating the death of black teenager Michael Brown. Many were hopeful—after all, it is 50 years removed from Selma and the Voting Rights Act. We have a black president and black attorney general.
But at 9 p.m., after a 20-minute speech by Prosecutor Bob McCulloch, the grand jury decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson. A prosecutor with the power to indict a “ham sandwich”1 could not indict Darren Wilson. Riot and protest ensued. Less than two weeks later, there was reason to hope the grand jury investigating the death of 43-year-old Eric Garner in police custody would secure an indictment—after all, there was video footage. But again, there was no indictment—except for Ramsey Orta, the 22-year-old Hispanic who recorded the event. The challenge for racial justice of the 21st century is not the blatant “Bull Connors”2 of old, but the quiet, aversive racism that sneaks up as a cancer, hard to prove or be conscious of until its culmination.
The night of the Garner decision, it felt like a part of me died. I couldn’t muster the strength to do anything. How could the justice system fail its own people again? It was a sad time in this nation, and many mourned.
Perhaps Jeremiah would understand the pain we are in. In the early seventh century BC, the Kingdom of Judah had initiated reforms to bring the nation
to spiritual unity and social continuity. But along the way, the people who said they were a nation after God oppressed foreigners and ignored the poor. In a situation so broken and unjust, Jeremiah loses hope for any cure and utters the rhetorical question, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” (Jeremiah 8:22)
This present moment is painful for those hurt from the wound of racism and the challenges that hinder racial justice. We are hurt by legislation that says “stop and frisk” and “stand your ground,” and by Senate Bill 1070, Arizona’s draconian anti-illegal-immigration law. Our prophetic witness, like Jeremiah’s, gets discouraged sometimes. It’s the same discouragement Martin Luther King, Jr. felt after the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, the same discouragement activists in Ferguson felt. Racial justice seems like an idealistic hope that can’t fully be realized.
W. E. B. Du Bois proposed that the problem of the 20th century was the color line;3 but the problem of the 21st is acknowledging the color line. In 1986, social psychologist John Dovidio proposed a theory called Aversive Racism, contending that this form of racism essentially denounces racism while upholding it.4 It is conscious in its efforts to be anti-racist and subconscious in racism. It’s dangerous. Cancerous. Difficult to prove.
It’s dangerous because it says, “Our university is diverse, and has a 20 per- cent Asian population,” yet denies that the same 20 percent is voiceless on campus. It’s cancerous because it says, “We have a multicultural congregation,” but fails to mention that the leadership is not diverse. It’s difficult to prove because it will march with you at night in the streets of New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC, chanting “black lives matter,” but that same very night will switch sidewalks as you approach.
Jeremiah realized that same contradiction. His people felt God was on their side even while they oppressed others. After all, were they not a chosen people? After all, aren’t we America—the city on a hill, the land of hopes and dreams, “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”5? But how can we be when we deny racism with our lips but support it through our hearts? We need healing.
With the words “Thus says the Lord,” Jeremiah spoke truth to power, and critiqued the strongholds of national pride and denialism. He challenged the egotistical prophets who only mustered Band-Aid solutions to the wound of idolatry. Today calls for a prophetic witness across denominations and the nation to expose the cancerous wound of covert racism. Prophetic witness can expose corporations that profit on prison labor, businesses that exploit undocumented immigrant labor, Islamophobia in universities, and white privilege in society.
This is where the Church can be a living witness. To be truly prophetic,
we must follow what Howard Thurman calls “the religion of Jesus,” which encompasses the virtues of love, justice, and righteousness.6 This is the balm in Gilead. It is when public policy reflects Christ’s ethic that wounds can begin
to heal. It is when the judicial process makes justice its nature that we can begin to heal. It is when one uses benefits of racial privilege to make change
in social structures. Under Christ’s Spirit, laws can be inverted: we can “stand our ground” against aversive racism, and “stop and frisk” unjust legislation.
It is a new day. Yet the wounds still hurt. But let us not “be weary in well doing,”7 for we shall reap justice. It’s a new day, so let us proclaim that “there is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole, there is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”8Condensed and adapted from the sermon that won Gordon the 2015 Donald A. Wells Preaching Prize from the Massachusetts Bible Society.
Footnotes
1. Josh Levin, “The Judge Who Coined ‘Indict a Ham Sandwich’ Was Himself Indicted,” Slate. com, http://www.slate.com /blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/11 /25/sol_wachtler_the_judge_who _coined_indict_a_ham_sandwich _was_himself_indicted.html.
2. Bull Connor was the com- missioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, who achieved notoriety for turning fire hoses on civil rights campaigners in the ’60s.
3. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Pocket Books, 2005), 3.
4. John F. Dovidio and Samuel L. Gaertner, “The Aversive Form of Racism” in Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism, ed. Dovidio and Gaertner (Orlando, Florida: Academic Press, 1986), 61–89.
5. Pledge of allegiance to the flag; manner of delivery, 4 USC § 4.
6. Howard Thurman, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1981), 114.
7. Galatians 6:9 (King James Bible).
8. “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” African American spiritual.