STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT WHITE SUPREMACY, WHITE RELIGIOUS LEADERS, AND SYSTEMIC INJUSTICE

 

©Wendell Griffen, 2023

In 1999, I made the following comments in a paper titled Race, Law, and Culture:  A Call to New Thinking, Leadership, and Action.[1]

The great need for our society regarding racial equity in the 21^st Century is new thinking, new leadership, and new action about racism and racial justice.  Without new thinking, new leadership, and new action about racism and its results, we will merely perpetuate past mistakes and re-institutionalize centuries of ingrained racism.  The question is whether we, as a society, have the character to embrace new thinking, accept new leadership, and rise to new action concerning racism, an issue that has been always with us but about which we are virtually phobic.

…By racism, I mean the belief system by which persons are subordinated, subjugated, and otherwise accorded inferior status and treatment due to race.  Racism has infected American thinking concerning history, economics, law, culture, and religion from the time that the first European explorers arrived in what they termed the “New World,” found non-white people living a culture that spanned back several centuries, and dared to claim the land for the European rulers who financed their travels rather than respect the presence and superior rights of the people they found on the land.  What began as arrogant ignorance and sheer racism by Columbus regarding where he was and to whom that land belonged set the pattern for future dealings between white and non-white people in this country.  White explorers took by force or stole millions of acres from the indigenous Native Americans.  Africans were kidnapped by the millions and shipped across the Atlantic to provide a free labor force upon which the economy of the colonies was based.

…

This nation has yet to officially admit – let alone remedy – the glaring reality that treaties with Native Americans were negotiated, broken with either the quiet assent or the open endorsement of the government, and that the thinking behind those actions is largely responsible for inequities facing Native Americans today…We have yet to admit the racism that resulted in Chinese exclusion laws in the West and acknowledge the fact that similar treatment was not applied to immigrants from Europe.  Somehow our obsession with power and notion of manifest destiny made us oblivious to the blatant racism practiced against the Mexican people of Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona during the last [19^th] century that resulted in the loss of millions of acres of land that had been owned for generations.  We forcibly removed American citizens of Japanese ancestry from their homes, communities, work, and businesses during World War II and interned them like prisoners of war solely because of their ancestry.  The United States Supreme Court sanctioned that blatant act of institutional racism in Korematsu v. United States just as it had sanctioned the institutional racism of slavery in Dred Scott v. Sanford and racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson…

Unless and until we admit that racism produced these and countless other stubborn, stupid, and sick results we will not create a different society in the 21^st Century.  American law, history, economics, religion, social life, and culture have been so permeated by racism and racist thought for such a long time that nothing short of new thinking about that racism and its effects on our national life bodes real chance for producing racial equity in the new century…

The prevailing thought in American law and culture regarding racism and racial injustice follows the ages-old presumption of white superiority over non-white people and what one social ethicist [Dr. Robert Terry] termed a belief in “the rightness of whiteness.”  Thus, the very mindset that produced the theft of Native American land, enslavement of Africans, discrimination against people of Asian ancestry, and belittling of the Hispanic culture (including the Spanish language) has driven and continues to dominate American thinking about religion, government, law, economics, education, and societal life in general.[2] 

It is clear to me now, more than two decades after I wrote those words, that my call for new thinking, new leadership, and new action was justified. It is even more clear that my call has not been heeded. 

Although many in the United States celebrated the election of former President Barack Hussein Obama in 2008, racial inequality is as pervasive in 2023 as it was in 2007, 1999, and at every other period of history.  A June 6, 2018, article in The Guardian newspaper by Jamiles Lartey addressed the tiresome effort to deal with everyday racism in America and the need for what one commentator termed “a movement against racist policies.” [3] 

Respectfully, I contend that “a movement against racist policies” is not enough.  Communities of color have challenged, protested, and condemned racist policies for centuries.  It is time that we admit that the problem is much deeper, yet has always been obvious.  Racial injustice continues and has persisted across the entire history of this society – legally, economically, politically, socially, and culturally – because white supremacy and racism is now – and has always been - sacralized. 

 By sacralized I mean that white supremacy has always been considered sacred.  Whiteness has always been the standard of “rightness.”  It is, therefore, a fundamental mistake to view and treat white supremacy as merely an attitude or a set of practices and policies.  White supremacy is something approaching a theology in this society. The historical evils I’ve already mentioned and contemporary evils (such as mass incarceration, state sanctioned abuse and homicide of black and brown people by police agencies, racist immigration policies that target persons from South and Central America, South Asia, Africa, and Muslims, dislocation and other economic oppression of communities of color through gentrification and other commercial schemes, and the refusal to engage in the long overdue work of reparations) are based on the conviction that white norms and values are morally, ethically, intellectually, and culturally superior.

 White politicians in Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and Virginia banned teaching and learning the truth about systemic racism, male privilege, and human diversity in public high schools, colleges, and universities. Governors Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Arkansas), Ron DeSantis (Florida), Greg Abbott (Texas), and Glenn Youngkin (Virginia) believe, at bottom, that the only legitimate perspectives and remedies for racial injustice are those fashioned and/or accepted by white persons based on white notions of morality, dignity, intelligence, and privilege.  African American Studies, critical race theory, gender studies, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are banned in those states because race is not merely a social construct for those leaders. White supremacy is a theological construct. White norms, goals, perspectives, and aims define – alone – what is right, good, true, healthy, fair, and otherwise worthwhile.   

 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about this disturbing reality in 1963 in his Letter From Birmingham City Jail, and confessed his great disappointment with “the white church and its leadership,” in these words. 

I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshippers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers say, “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother.”  In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.  In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard so many ministers say, “Those are social issues with which the gospel has no real concern,” and I have watched so many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which made a strange distinction between body and soul, the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi, and all the other southern states.  On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at her beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward.  I have beheld the impressive outlay of their massive religious education buildings.  Over and over, I have found myself asking:  What kind of people worship here?  Who is their God?  Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett [Ross Barnett was Governor of Mississippi] dripped with words of interposition and nullification?  Where were they when Governor Wallace [George Wallace was Governor of Alabama] gave the clarion call for defiance and hatred?  Where were their voices of support when tired, bruised, and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?[4]         

          Dr. King realized that white supremacy and racism is, perversely, sacralized as the demonic – and dominant – theology for this nation. He was saddened that white religious leaders were incompetent to challenge it, denounce it, condemn it, and fight it as sacralized evil. And he understood, sixty years ago, that racial justice cannot happen where white clergy are unwilling to ‘desacralize” white supremacy, and denounce it as diabolical.   

 Police officers routinely get away with slaughtering unarmed black and brown people because white supremacy has sacralized police brutality against black and brown communities.  White religious leaders have the challenge of “de-sacralizing” police brutality against black and brown people.  That will require them to denounce police brutality as demonic. 

Real estate speculators and developers are allowed to dislocate communities of color – now as in the past – because white supremacy has sacralized the idea that white presence on land and white perspectives about who should be on land and decide how it is used are more valuable and valid.  White religious leaders face the challenge of “de-sacralizing” gentrification and other neo-urban renewal schemes.  That will require them to denounce gentrification schemes as demonic. 

          Militarized white people who openly carry firearms are lionized as protectors of public safety and civil liberty.  However, people of color from the Native Americans to the Black Panther Party have been vilified for insisting on the right to defend their communities from homicidal and otherwise abusive white assaults.  Consider how Israeli settler violence against Palestinians is ignored and Palestinian responses to it are condemned. White religious leaders should “de-sacralize” and condemn white supremacist discourse, deceit, and hypocrisy about “gun rights” as demonic. 

White religious leaders should declare that the poisoned water in Flint, Michigan, Jackson, Mississippi, and other locations where Black, indigenous, and impoverished people in other places such as Appalachia is sacralized evil.

 White religious leaders should teach and preach that white supremacist disregard for the historical inequities inflicted upon Haiti, Niger, Palestine, and Puerto Rico is sacralized evil. 

 White religious leaders should tell their congregations that supporting Donald Trump – a known bigot and cheat – to lead the nation is sacralized evil. 

 White religious leaders should tell their congregations that abusive and homicidal conduct against black and brown people is a version of the same sacralized evil that dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, massacred indigenous people at Wounded Knee, and tolerates Israeli apartheid policies against Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. 

 White religious leaders should tell their congregations that politicians who falsely label African American studies, critical race theory, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives “indoctrination” are committing sacralized evil.

 These and other unjust situations are happening because white supremacy has been sacralized. White people are often not morally, socially, culturally, emotionally, and ethically able to recognize white supremacy, let alone fight it, because white religious leaders refuse to help white people de-bunk white supremacy.  

Dr. King understood this, and wrote about it in 1963, from a Birmingham, Alabama jail cell. Sixty years later, white religious leaders still refuse to admit that King was right. Sixty years later, white religious leaders are still unwilling to do the tough work of challenging and condemning white supremacy, its diabolical agents, and enablers.

 Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Greg Abbott, Glenn Youngkin, and other local, state, and national white supremacist politicians are bedeviling the United States. White religious leaders have refused to connect them to the evil theology of white supremacy, let alone condemn their white supremacist policies.

 As the 60^th Anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington becomes a memory, one thing is clear. Until white religious leaders change, white supremacy and systemic racial inequities will continue, worsen, and eventually destroy the prospect for freedom and justice in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

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[1] Wendell L. Griffen, Race, Law, and Culture:  A Call to New Thinking, Leadership, and Action, 21 U. Ark. Little Rock Law Review, 901 (1999). 

[2] Supra at 902-905, citations and footnotes omitted.

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/06/everyday-racism-in-america-how-to-fix-it?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=277303&subid=23869947&CMP=GT_US_collection. 

[4]  Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter From Birmingham City Jail, found in A Testament of Hope:  The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (edited by James Melvin Washington),1^st HarperCollins pbk. ed, p. 299 (1986).