After a pretty lengthy discussion at the BHT on race and several posts here, I decided to try to root myself in some Christian thinking on race, and it’s been helpful. This discussion is so multi-faceted and complex that it’s difficult enough to get all the assumptions on the table in the first place, let alone gain understanding.
I’m finding that John Perkins et al (the CCDA folks) do what I’m attempting to do (though they, of course, have actually lived it for decades, whereas I’m just starting that process), and that I’ll have a lot to learn from them: they take contemporary sociological thinking on race and put it into a Christian context with a Christian solution. I’ve written before of “color-blind racism” and the impossibility of not seeing color in a society so marred by racism. That I learned from Bonilla-Silva, in an essay that is sadly no longer freely available through Google scholar.
But Spencer Perkins and Chris Rice make the point well in their essay on racial reconciliation in Restoring At-Risk Communities. This part of the essay is Rice, who is white:
But a new twist on the definition [of race] was introduced…in those years. Though four hundred years of the old, overt racism is gradually disappearing, a subtle but lethal strain of the disease remains. While its effects are still separation and distrust, its symptoms are not as obvious as lynchings, forced segregation, or telling ethnic jokes. We call it passive racism. And we need to learn how to detect it in ourselves and in our institutions.
Passive racism is a way of looking at the world that is much like wearing racial blinders – not bothering to see and understand the effects of race because we don’t have to in order to survive…
Probably the most glaring example of White blinders is the fact that as the majority culture, we don’t have to deal with race. We say “I don’t see color,” but the reality is we don’t have to see color. I can walk away from…Black people and the whole mess of race any time I like. I can cross town tomorrow and enter the White world and know I will be treated well and not be denied opportunities because of my color. But my Black friends don’t have that option. (p. 116-17)
There’s great discussion on “passive racism” in Beverly Daniel Tatum’s book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? But the work of Perkins and Rice here in this essay gets at some of the same themes being talked about even in Critical Race Theory, but set within a Christian context of thinking.
Both analyses are needed. We cannot get beyond race problems without rooting ourselves and our identities in God’s story, but neither can we bring the message of the gospel to our contemporary racial issues without deep understanding of how sin has manifested itself specifically in racism, specifically in our culture.
For those following this series: thanks for sticking with it and offering your comments as I struggle through it.
