final days forum

A post-racial America? Not yet.

Jefferson Memorial, originally uploaded by nathanborror.

I remember a visit several years ago to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. I spent time contemplating as I read the panels in the monument's interior. Words like this kept me there for awhile:

"God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Establish a law for educating the common people. This it is the business of the state and on a general plan."  From monticello.org

My musings always led me to believe that Jefferson knew the right thing to do about enslaved Africans, but could not bring himself to do it. Incredibly, however, his writing enabled the efforts toward enfranchisement that came later. But I mourn the freedom his words could have brought his generation.

This white southerner and founding father comes to mind at the end of a historic week. On the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the eve before the presidential inauguration, I attended  The Dallas Leadership Institute's symposium for the holiday.

Journalist Diane McWhorter, who grew up in Alabama, discussed the cultural and political racism fellow white southerners accepted in 1963, the year Dr. Martin Luther King wrote  "Letter from a Birmingham Jail."  She won a 2004 Pulitzer Prize for her chronicling of the era in "Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climatic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution."

Author Diane McWhorter at The Dallas Leadership Institute event on  Jan. 19. Photo courtesy of Tysha Randle.

Joining McWhorter at the symposium was theologian and cultural historian the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker. He was a strategist in the Civil Rights Movement and typed the famous Birmingham letter for King. This man who once served as the executive of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference talked about the tactics the civil rights workers used, like allowing children to demonstrate in Birmingham.

He talked about the sacrifice his family endured as blacks, and recounted how he was restrained by a journalist when he learned his wife had been struck by an Alabama law enforcement official. If he had not been restrained, Walker could have lost his life.

The Rev. Wyatt T. Walker with symposium guest at The Dallas Leadership Institute event. Photo courtesy of Tysha Randle.

The code of dual citizenship our country accommodated, despite the freedoms Jefferson's words invoked, stood out for all to see in 1963. A bomb placed in a church killed four girls. Police employed dogs and water hoses to deter demonstrators. Rumors swirled that an outsider bombed the church and that demonstrators placed steaks in their clothing to lure dogs toward them, McWhorter told symposium guests.

The symposium brought back the troubles of that year, and how it was not so long ago that America openly sanctioned a red-white-and-blue version of apartheid. Because that history is not so far from us, to call this time in the nation "post-racial" is premature, unless we understand how deeply the nation embraced an infrastructure of difference between people.

The white southerners in Birmingham who sanctioned this system were church-going and family-oriented, McWhorter said. She even suspected that her father, a member of the privileged class, somehow played a role.

And, as McWhorter said, the nation's "national obsession" with closure should not hasten a false, incomplete healing.

May I add that when unattended, true healing is a complicated task because the breadth of the offense dims, and the resistance to forgiveness builds. This fresh page in history need not be as fitful as Jefferson's apparent struggle to do the right thing at the dawn of our nation's birth. America can flow further on this current of good will.

For a fully redeemed church -- shorn of its own clenched fists throughout all congregations and ministries, repentant of linking a pure Gospel with racial intolerance toward anyone -- can lead the way.

Judy Howard Ellis

What lies beneath: race-based theology and color sickness

UPDATE: 1/10/07 -- YouTube Links that were on this story are now missing. I have deleted the references to this site.

Clutch Magazine's Sylvia Arthur writes a moving account in Dying to be White about skin bleaching in Ghana. These African women are exchanging their black-wonderful tones for lighter skin shades through dangerous treatments. Arthur writes:

"The reason for this potentially life-endangering practice is purely vanity. Women who bleach do so because they believe that men prefer their lighter-skinned counterparts. Also, in some African societies light-skinned people are perceived to be more intelligent than those with a darker hue."

The color sickness that still haunts some of us African-Americans -- she's light-skinned with good hair, she's dark-skinned with nappy hair -- manifests in Africa with the fixation on skin bleaching. It's disheartening. How must the Father of Heaven ache to watch His children wallow in self-hate: blacks who want to alter their blackness, whites who want to bronze themselves to the point of harmful illness, Asians who bleach their skin white. 

And how grieved He must be that Western culture attributes glory to white images of beauty alone. The fashion industry primarily focuses on the white aesthetic, although people of color are scattered throughout the glossy magazines, celebrity images and runway shows. Arthur writes in her piece:

"The consensus is that the only way to counter the disturbing trend is to wage a multi-agency campaign warning people of the dangers of bleaching. But as long as images of Western beauty continue to flood African markets and berate the natural black aesthetic, the problem will persist and claim even more lives than ever before."

The thoughtful church of Jesus Christ has a role to play in correcting this economy of self-hatred. It must reinforce the Christians' duty to honor people as God-made individuals. Unfortunately, Christianity often was used by the twisted as the club to bury the aspirations and healthy self-image of people of color.

A richer theology detangles race and faith and informs us on how to interact with each other.  We should discourage the use of these products and hold accountable those who use color as a measure of character or employment-worthiness. Perhaps well-meaning, but unnecessary sentences such as I don't see color; I treat everyone the same, should be replaced by reality-based language.

We actually do see the God-hues of a person and that's OK. How someone appears need not determine how that person is treated. So, instead of the platitude, why not simply say: I respect all people and celebrate their uniqueness?

God made each generation and placed them among the regions He designated. Consider Acts 17: 24-28, when Paul was in Athens. This passage is from the New American Standard version, courtesy of StudyLight.org:

"The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as ^Rthough He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, `For we also are His children.' "

And because He made the world and all things in it, He created skin colors and declared them very good.