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.

Bill Kristol, neocon par excellence (if you can even use the word “excellence” when talking about a neocon, which you can’t…I’m still irritated that the NYT picked that guy as the “conservative,” though I’m not surprised. It is the NYT, after all.) has written an abysmal response to Obama’s speech. In the first few paragraphs, Kristol noted that he “didn’t shudder” at all the things that he considered disingenuous political positioning on the part of Obama (accusing him of not addressing difficult questions, using “ridiculous and unfair comparisons” to make a point, and “doing a disservice to the best” in the black community). No, none of those things bothered Mr. Kristol. That’s politics as usual, and that’s how he’d like to keep things. Here’s what really bothered him:

The only part of the speech that made me shudder was this sentence: “But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now.”

Allow me to paraphrase: “Please, Mr. Obama…stick to politics as usual. Lie, propagandize, whatever. Just don’t make us talk about race. We need to ignore that discussion.”

Allow me to sarcastically dissect the rest of this piece:

As soon as I heard that, I knew what we’d have to endure. I knew that there would be a stampede of editorial boards, columnists and academics rushing not to ignore race. A national conversation about race! At long last!

“Endure.” Oh, poor Mr. Kristol. You’ll have to “endure” a discussion on race. What will you do? How will you survive?

Of course, memories are short. In 1997 President Bill Clinton announced, with great fanfare, that he intended “to lead the American people in a great and unprecedented [if he did say so himself] conversation about race.” That conversation quickly went nowhere. And just as well.

Phew! We dodged a bullet that time. Hopefully we can do the same this time.

Alright, I’m not going to go through the entire rest of the article. But, look. Mr. Kristol is, I’m sure, weary of the political positioning of the left, which has done every bit as much to perpetuate racism as (and perhaps even more than) many on the right. The answer to not having the conversation at all is NOT doing another rehash of the liberal side of the conversation.

Here’s what bothers me: he cites Moynihan in 1969 – which is, what, 5 years after Civil Rights legislation? – saying that “the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect,’” and says Moynihan was right.

Folks, that is shocking. Let’s do a quick review of American history up till that point – White Europeans showed up here a few hundred years before, and then stole and enslaved countless Africans in the process, many of them dying along the way, the rest being treated as less than human to varying degrees until, at least legally, 1964. By just five years later, a white guy in power was saying, “It’s time to stop talking about race now, isn’t it?”

Over forty years later, the effects of hundreds of years of racism continue, and folks like Kristol are just weary…why do we have to keep talking about this? Come on, we white folks made everything equal back in the 60s.

I’m a libertarian. I look forward to and pray for and hope to work for a time when Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “dream” is fulfilled. But you can’t do that by not talking about the problem, or pretending it’s gone. You can’t do it with a welfare state, either. What I’m suggesting is that there is a different option available to us – something other than either a welfare state or a “color-blindness” that has to be just as blind to the ongoing walls of racism that still exist. Even Kristol admits, “problems remain” (though I’m wondering if he’s ever taken the time to think about and write about those problems with the passion with which he writes against any discussion on race…or perhaps he’s too busy plotting American Empire…). If “problems remain,” then we still need to talk. I’m kindly suggesting that it’s a lot easier for a white man like Kristol to say, “We don’t need to have that conversation.” It’s a lot harder for a poor black man to say the same thing.

I’ve been reading John Perkins, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of that, because I’m looking for a distinctly Christian way forward – one which eschews the welfare state but still recognizes a deep, ongoing racial problem in the U.S. that needs to be addressed. Perkins seems to be the man for that discussion.

I’m 29 years old, and I’m already crazy skeptical and cynical when it comes to politics. So when I started reading comments this afternoon about how Obama’s speech, which I didn’t catch when it happened, was perhaps the greatest speech on race ever given by a politician, I had my doubts.

I watched the speech a few hours ago. Goodbye, doubts. America needs to listen to this speech until it sinks in. He put on the table all the issues I was hoping to discuss, and he said, much more eloquently, everything I’ve been trying to say. I’ve said multiple times that we never actually have a conversation about race because political sensationalism always takes over. Obama said the same. I said that Wright wasn’t a racist, even if I think his method of exposing racial injustice is manifestly unhelpful. Obama said the same. He laid out most of the important starting points for a real race discussion in America, and put forth a view of how we got to where we are today.

Will the conversation actually happen? Well, there cynicism takes over again. But if you’re a reader of this blog, please take 40 completely undistracted minutes to watch the speech, and then take time after to think. Jot notes while he’s talking, if it’ll help. I won’t be returning to the “Racism 101″ series until after Easter, and I don’t need to; this speech laid about a lot of really important things, and I think it should be the focal point of discussion for a while.

Peggy McIntosh: White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (pdf). It’s years old now, so some of it’s out-of-date; but it’s eye-opening nonetheless.

I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege. I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.

This is a very controversial piece, and I freely admit I may have to rethink some of this as discussion moves forward. Additional Point: One of the things I’m trying to do with this series is to demonstrate that one can agree with “liberals” or “progressives” (for lack of better words) on the causes and definition of racism without it becoming part of the Republican vs. Democrat power-play divide (”racism” vs. “race card”) on this issue (and also, one can agree on the causes and definition, while proposing a different solution to the problem).

Jon did a Google Reader share yesterday (Google Reader rocks, by the way) of the new video circulating of Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright (whom I’ve defended here previously), and many of his inflammatory statements about race (and a few on terrorism) in America. No doubt this is going to cause a firestorm. The Clintons will have to tread carefully here, as they’ve recently run into difficulty over the Ferraro gaffe. They’ll probably use it as part of their new “Obama is unelectable so you should nominate Hillary even though she lost” plan. Conservative pundits – though likely not McCain himself, who won’t want to revisit his “gooks” statement of 2000 – will be all over it in the general election.

Just for the record, watching rich white conservative men react with righteous indignation at Wright’s claim that rich white men run the country is, well, kind of appalling. ‘Cause whatever else you think of Wright, he’s, you know, right on that one.

The politics of all this makes it impossible, once again, to actually talk about racism. I’ll note that it is amusing (and by amusing, I mean “really sad”) the way this plays out. It goes sort of like this:

• White conservative person makes a statement about the effect race has on a vote.
• Liberal person claims “Racism.”
• White conservative accuses liberal of “playing the race card.”

And we never actually talk any deeper about whether or not racism was involved (or what racism even is). Ferraro’s comments are a good example (I know she’s not a conservative, but it illustrates the point). Ferraro’s statement that Barack is winning because of his race is a matter of sociological opinion/discussion, of course. I’d disagree with her (I think if Barack were running the same campaign as a white man, he’d have had this nomination wrapped up a month ago), but that’s a legitimate conversation of . But the question that many are unwilling to address is why Ferraro made the comment and what its effects are, and the answer to that seems to me to be – it’s an attempt to inject a racial element into the contest prior to PA’s primary, in order to favor Clinton.  So whether or not her statement was “racist” or “bigoted,” its effects are to use race in order to achieve a certain end (power for Clinton).

Here’s what I like about the fact that Jeremiah Wright is getting attention in this election, despite the fact that he’s over-the-top and there’s much he says with which I disagree: with a candidate like Obama in play, we might actually end up having a discussion about racism. It won’t happen in the media, but it just might happen across America anyway.

What I’m trying to do here is not to have the typical middle-class-white-man disingenuous “righteous anger” at someone like Wright, and to give his thoughts, as a representation of the black community, a fair and challenging hearing (this is America, right?). We tend automatically to deflect the arguments of people like Wright and never to really think about them. So, implications for political campaigns aside, here are the discussions about Jeremiah Wright’s views that I want to have (these are real questions, not simply rhetorical). I’ll show my hand right off the bat by putting my responses in brackets.

• Is Jeremiah Wright incorrect to say that since its founding, this is a nation that has favored whites at the expense of blacks? [No, not at all...and this is the fundamental conversation that needs to be had when it comes to defining and understanding racism in America.]
• Is Jeremiah Wright incorrect to say that America is an arrogant nation? [In some ways, we are humanitarian and do a lot of great things around the world, no question about it; but yes, we're an arrogant nation. That's standard as far as empires go.]
• Not taking Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America” statements entirely out of context (”damn” was set up in contrast to “bless,” he’s talking about judgment/cursing), are his statements that America is deserving of judgment for its sins incorrect? [No, of course not. The point of his statement here is a good one: American leaders assume and invoke the blessing of God while doing things that He abhors. It's the sin of presumption Wright's getting at here. I don't think Wright or anyone else wants American destroyed in a cataclysmic judgment from God.]