"File:Black Lives Matter Minneapolis Protest (28246559695).jpg" by Andy Witchger is licensed under CC BY 2.0
This reflection was shared in the virtual service of Haven Berkeley Faith Community on Sunday, May 31. Video of this reflection can be found here, beginning at minute 11, followed by our time of collective response.
In a season that’s been hard for all of us in some way, this week has stood out amongst them. Story after story in our news headlines or our social media feeds has broadcast the truth that has long been with us. It is not new news, but after a week like we have lived through, we must confront the reality afresh. We are living in a divided nation which does not now and never has provided to its inhabitants equal protection under the law. We live in a racist society. In saying that, I mean that our society is built on and still functions through the upholding of white supremacy. Whiteness prioritizes and protects the lives of those who pass as light skinned, or of European descent, and devalues or even destroys the lives of those who do not, particularly those who are black.
What is this force we call whiteness? How does it function as the fuel that keeps racism in our country running?
First, we must remember that whiteness does not only impact white people, but it impacts people of all races, and rewards to various degrees people of color who uphold the social hierarchy that our nation has established from its founding; a social hierarchy that values white lives the most and black lives the least.
Whiteness is at work when a white woman named Amy Cooper calls 911 because a black man named Christian Cooper calmly challenges her entitlement as she breaks the rules in Central Park, and lets her dog run off-leash. It is whiteness that tells this self-professed “non-racist” liberal woman that the state will respond to her practiced claim of the fear of blackness and take her side. It is whiteness that tells this woman that her pride and her “freedom” to do as she pleases are of more value than the man’s safety and well-being.
Whiteness is at work when white folk defy shutdown orders, claiming they infringe upon their personal rights, but show no concern for the rights of the black and brown people who are dying at disproportionate rates as a result of the virus among us. Whiteness was concerned about the pandemic until it realized who was dying from it. Whiteness is at work when unmasked white people gather to worship, gather to party, gather to spit in the faces of the frontline workers who are trying to protect themselves as they provide essential services. Whiteness tells white demonstrators that they can storm a capital building armed with destructive weapons and not fear being threatened by the police. Whiteness understands that in this, it is different than blackness.
Whiteness enables police brutality. Whiteness kneels on the neck of a black man named George Floyd and keeps kneeling. Whiteness does not listen to the words “I can’t breathe”. Whiteness is not moved by the cry of the dying, for whiteness only values his black life as a tool to build the power of whiteness. Whiteness gives the police the benefit of the doubt, but never the black man or woman being terrorized by them. Whiteness does not interpret riots as “the language of the unheard”. Whiteness values buildings over black and brown bodies. It values property over people. Whiteness uses the legitimate protest of distressed people of color to serve its own ends, with little concern for how its actions impact the movement for racial justice.
Whiteness is not simply at work in the neo-Nazi, or the AltRight vlogger or the die-hard Trumper. Whiteness often wants to believe that it is “not racist”. It is present in the guilt of the self-described liberals who publicly lament the loss of black life; who tweet, and post, and put the signs in their window that read “Black Lives Matter”, but who are not willing to examine the ways in which their (our) inaction in more substantive ways continues to uphold the power of whiteness. Whiteness paralyzes these would be allies and tries to justify their unwillingness to put themselves forward to risk arrest, their inability to confront the racist words, ideas and actions of their own family members or friends, or to more deeply examine and unlearn their own fear of blackness and brown-ness.
Whiteness is quick to speak and slow to listen. Whiteness often wants to lead but not to follow. Whiteness thinks it knows best how to solve whatever the problem is. But whiteness often refuses to see how its solutions ultimately serve to uphold whiteness, rather than dismantle it.
The good news is that we do not worship a white god. We do not worship a racist god. Whiteness is a false god. It is an idol. It is not a reflection of the Divine. Our hope for building the just world we long for lies not in the solutions whites like me can provide, but in a Divine Spirit who calls us into a human community that affirms and celebrates that every human life reflects the image of God. We worship a God who is revealed as Black, as Indigenous, as Asian, as Latinx, as undocumented as Muslim, as Jewish, as Hindu, as queer, as trans, as disabled, as poor, as elderly, and yes as white, too.
Our tradition has language for patterns of behavior that take us in the wrong direction, away from what this multi-faceted Divine heart would call us to. In ancient Greek the word was hamartia, a word that meant “missing the mark” - heading the wrong way. We translate that word into English and say “sin”.
Many of us don’t like to talk about sin. We’ve seen that language used in ways that are too moralizing and seem to be more about controlling personal behavior than building connection to the Divine. And while this is a fair critique, I think we do ourselves a disservice when we abandon the idea of examining what has us going in the wrong direction. Our brothers and sisters of color particularly know that nothing we are saying today is new. Nothing we’ve seen this week is new. Black communities have been terrorized by police on the daily for decades, if not centuries. But until there is a concerted effort to divest from the worship of this false god we call whiteness, until there is a personal and collective turning from this sin of racism, there can be no change. We will continue to move away from the heart of God.
In our tradition, we are called to confront our own sin through confession and repentance. We name the ways we have fallen short. We name the places we have missed the mark. And we repent, which literally means, to turn again. We orient ourselves and our communities in a different direction.
So I am a white pastor. I confess my own complicity in the power of whiteness. I acknowledge the ways I have benefitted from a system that has protected me and not my brothers and sisters of color. I confess the ways my good intentions have not gone far enough to make meaningful impact in disrupting the evil of white supremacy. And I commit anew to reading, to listening, to learning, to doing the work of understanding the ways whiteness still infects my heart and impacts my thinking, and to leading, as best as I am able, a community that is continually challenging itself to participate in the dismantling of white supremacy; that is learning to go beyond being not-racist to being truly anti-racist.
I invite all of you to join me in this work. To find your own appropriate spaces for confession, where you can examine and name the ways your heart has been invested in the worship of this false god. And then to take meaningful action. If you haven’t already, I encourage everyone on Haven slack to join our #socialjustice channel. There we will be posting resources for practical ways you can further your learning and get actively involved in this work. If you’re not on slack, you can also check our emails for information on ways we can take action together. Expect us to be hosting more film discussions, perhaps a reading group, and other ideas for ways we can grow together in this season. For those who are able in the midst of covid to take the streets, there is a protest you can attend Monday afternoon led by young people of color in Oakland, and there are a number of car rallies taking place this week you could participate in, too. We will put that info up on slack or you can reach out to me for the details.
In all of this, I invite you to join me and examine the ways, whether you are white or not, that you have been impacted by whiteness, and to work with this Spirit of the living God that we remember anew today to be liberated from every false god that keeps us from living into the renewal of all things that our resurrecting God is committed to. Amen.