The Slave Bible: The Unfortunate Reality of Competing Theologies

As a “person of faith,” I have long struggled with trying to understand why racism persists and why God, whom I call “good,” allows it. I am angry at those who adhere to, believe in and practice white supremacy. I find myself angry when I walk around and see white people who don’t have to worry about their safety just because of their color; I envy the white mothers who do not have to worry about their sons being shot by police officers who shoot first and ask questions later. I am angry that white supremacy includes discrimination not only against blacks, but for all people of color, women, and people of different sexualities. I am angry that the outrage from this president was very subdued following the mass murder at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, and that he said nothing at all about the two black people, one man, one woman, shot and killed by a crazed white man, who had such disregard for black people that he thought nothing of killing the man in front of his 12-year-old grandson. I am angry that so many white people don’t have a clue as to what people of color have to think about on a daily basis.

In my anger, I still struggle. I think it shows the insensitivity of white people when they say things that are offensive to black people and immediately scoff at the notion that they might be racist, and call their statements a “joke.” What they say is not funny, and worse, they know exactly what they are doing and saying. (https://www.nbcnews.com/video/hyde-smith-defends-public-hanging-comment-in-mississippi-senate-debate-1376441923880?v=raila&) I am offended that the Brian Kemp, the newly-elected governor of Georgia, won through a calculated strategy of voter suppression, and I am angry that not only is he not repentant about it but that few members of the GOP spoke against what he was doing. He says he’s “moving on,” which can’t be hard to do in that he accomplished his goal of basically manipulating the governorship from Stacey Abrams by using his power as the Georgia Secretary of State.

I am angry that African American people continue to bear the brunt of unequal treatment; I am angry that the bulk of people in prison are African American, largely because of the “war on drugs,” and I am angry that so many white people are “afraid” of who they believe to be “bad” people while concurrently are supportive of whites who now have permission to sell marijuana, the “crime” for which so many African Americans wound up in prison.

There’s more …but my point is that I have struggled with trying to find God in all of this. I wonder why God allows evil to exist, yes, but I especially wonder why God has allowed white supremacy to linger as a force in this world. I wonder why God does not and has not shut this ideology down, which is a travesty to the cause of the “beloved community.” Oppressed people all over the world wonder about God and suffering; I remember a little girl who, when Pope Francis visited her country, cried as she asked the pope why God allowed children to suffer? (http://www.catholicdigest.com/from-the-magazine/ask-father/201611-07why-does-god-permit-innocent-children-to-suffer/)

I struggle because there is a Bible which supposedly we all use – but I learned last week that in the 1800s, white slaveowners developed what they called “The Slave Bible.” (https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2018/february/freedom-in-christ-how-this-bible-was-used-to-manipulate) It was brought to the attention of a group of us sitting in a session of a conference on poverty, led by Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, the co-chair of The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call to Moral Revival. It was she who pointed out that this Bible, on display at the National Bible Museum in Washington, D.C., was carefully constructed by whites who wanted enslaved blacks to remain “in their place.” This bible omits the story of the Exodus. It eliminates many of the prophets and in the book of Revelation, it has no mention of freedom or a “new heaven and new earth.” Their object, said Theoharis, was to make sure black people didn’t get the notion that God was on their side, that God was a supporter of freedom for all.

There were a couple of issues for me. First, I felt betrayed for some reason. The Bible, I was taught, was a holy book. I have often said that it would never happen that the Bible could be re-written, because of its holiness – but clearly, that was not the case. White supremacists, for all of their twisted beliefs in what God allows, are very insecure and will do (and have done) all they could to maintain their power. But to learn that they changed the Bible to support their ideology was a shock, and I don’t really know why.

This new nugget of knowledge made me disrespect even more the white evangelical subset of this society. As they have ostensible ignored their so-called commitment to “family values” in supporting a president who lies, who disrespects women and the Constitution of this country, I have been bothered and troubled. I have long wondered how they and anyone who oppresses others can justify their actions in that we (I thought) have one Bible with one set of rules and laws for us all. But that has not historically been the case, and those who were taught from the Slave Bible learned “scriptures” in a different way than I could ever have imagined. The bible of the slaveowners was meant for enslaved Africans, but clearly, it was familiar to white people and used by them as well. Enslaved Africans, it should be noted, rejected what this bible taught them as they 1) heard sermons delivered by abolitionists who preached that God was good, that he believed in freedom for all, and that slavery was wrong, and 2) enslaved Africans learned to read, and they were able to learn themselves what was in the untampered “holy book.”

We are all products of our upbringing and whites who believe in white supremacy were raised to believe that way. They have not disappeared and will not any time soon, but wouldn’t it be great if God would just put a holy hand on the earth and push this horrendous ideology out of existence?

Competing theologies have contributed to the national and international disgrace called white supremacy. The people who believe in and practice white supremacy believe they are right and they believe that God ordains and sanctions their actions. Apparently, the Slave Bible helped them get to where they are, and that is troubling.

A candid observation …

On Terrorism and White Men

CNN anchor Don Lemon is taking some heat today because he said that white men are the biggest terror threat to this country. (https://www.businessinsider.com/don-lemon-says-on-cnn-the-biggest-terror-threat-to-the-us-is-white-men-2018-10) This he said as a Jewish community in Pittsburgh reels from the actions of an angry white man who killed 11 people who were worshiping in their synagogue, and as families of two black people grieved the murders of their loved ones by a white man who is said to have said to another white man who tried to stop him, “whites don’t kill whites.”

Don Lemon

In spite of the pushback, what Lemon said is true. According to data compiled in a February 2018 article which appeared in Mother Jones, (54 percent of 97 mass murders committed since 1980 were committed by white men.)

Entire cities inhabited by black people were destroyed by mobs of angry white men, including the Greenwood community of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Elaine, Arkansas. While some of the attacked cities managed to survive the attacks, the fact is that many blacks were killed in cities including Rosewood, Florida (https://timeline.com/all-black-town-rosewood-wiped-off-the-map-by-white-mob-73ca6630802b) and East St. Louis, Missouri.

Angry white men murdered African Americans, many still in uniform, when they returned home after their tours of service. The horrific beating of Isaac Woodard is one of the best-known attacks which fall into this category. He was beaten by a mob which included law enforcement officers because he dared ask a bus driver to stop so that he could go to the bathroom. In Elaine, Arkansas, an African American soldier, Leroy Johnston, who had spent nine months in a hospital recovering from wounds he received in the war, was pulled from a train and shot to death by angry white men. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/death-hundreds-elaine-massacre-led-supreme-court-take-major-step-toward-equal-justice-african-americans-180969863/)

White men lynched black men (and women as well) with impunity, knowing they would most likely never be held accountable. White men lynched a young teen named Emmett Till, who reportedly whistled at a white woman. Thousands of black men were killed by mobs of white men. (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/emmett-lynching-america/)

Records show that nearly 4000 blacks were lynched in the South from 1877 to 1950 (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/us/history-of-lynchings-in-the-south-documents-nearly-4000-names.html). White men attacked the Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Between 1982 and 2018, 59 of 104 mass killings, which I consider to be acts of domestic terrorism, were committed by white men. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/476456/mass-shootings-in-the-us-by-shooter-s-race/). The targets were not always black people, but the facts show that it has been white men who have been the primary assailants in mass killings.

It is disingenuous for anyone to raise an eyebrow at what Don Lemon said, given the available history. White men were known to lynch black people at will, for “crimes” including registering people to vote or being out too late at night. These are not made up stories; they are recorded history.

It is baffling as to why white men in this country have been so angry for so long. The world is at their fingertips, or so it seems, but maybe the anger comes because “the American dream” eludes so many Americans, including white men. Maybe they are angry because they have not been able to benefit from what they believe is their right as white men. Again, it is notable that they have not always targeted people of color; they have killed many of “their own” as they have expressed their rage through mass killings.

As bitter a pill as it may be to swallow, Don Lemon was correct. In these days of heightened racist and hateful rhetoric, it is very possible that this country will so more white men lashing out.

Our society has basically looked the other way when it has come to acknowledging how radicalized white men have terrorized and killed so many people. It is and has been domestic terrorism. Rather than criticize Lemon, perhaps we should all do a careful study of history and work to understand why what he said is true.

A candid observation …

The Impotency of Silence, White Supremacy and Lessons from My Mother

One of the best and most powerful lessons my mother taught me was the lesson of “guilt by association.”

“If you’re with someone who’s doing something wrong and the police come, you’re going to get arrested too, even if you haven’t done anything.”

She told all five us that at a very early age, and it stuck to me, on me and in me like white on rice. So when, for example, I was in Berkeley, California one summer and was out shopping with someone I considered a friend – and she urged me to put a swimsuit I liked into my bag, I panicked. She had lifted several swimsuits and wanted me to “join the fun.”

My mother’s words stung me like a swarm of angry bees; I pretended to go along with her, saying I was going to go back in the fitting room and try on a couple more and would meet her in a few minutes outside.

I did nothing of the sort. I went into the dressing room and stayed long enough to see her going away from where we had been and I made a beeline to another door out of the store, got on a bus and headed back to my aunt’s home.

That was in the middle ages; there were no cell phones back then, nor the internet. She called my aunt’s home several times but I never talked with her again. I didn’t tell on her, but I just stayed away.

I thought about that lesson as I was thinking about the rabid racial hatred that is swirling around us in the present time, and I was thinking about the silence of so many white people in light of all that is going on, making them as guilty of racist behavior as the most vocal racist.

Audre Lord, an African American, Lesbian, feminist writer and poet, wrote, “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” She also said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Silence is a tool appreciated and exploited by the system of white supremacy; the thought seems to be on the part of many “progressive” whites that if racism isn’t talked about, then it doesn’t exist. The use of silence also seems to be an insurance policy for some whites who appear to think that if they are silent they cannot be condemned for being a participant in an evil system which knows no boundaries to its quest to control, manipulate and destroy the lives of black people.

At the heart of white supremacist thought is the innate belief that black people are inferior. “The white race” as a construct cannot figure out why black people even exist; in the 19^thcentury, some scientists and white theologians posited that there could not be one god, but there were, in fact, many gods, a slap in the face of the principle of monotheism. Black people had been created by another god, and, that being the case, it was OK to subjugate, oppress and discriminate against them. Their white god didn’t see anything wrong with and would not condemn those who were full of racist hatred and who participated in and sometimes initiated acts of violence against blacks. They could easily lynch someone on a Saturday night and go to church the next morning to sing hymns, hear a stirring sermon and maybe even receive or pass out Holy Communion.

There have been a fair number of whites who say they hate racism, but they do not say much about it. They rest in the comfort of whiteness, protected by their silence; their whiteness is like a tree which provides shade on the hottest of days. They get offended if called a racist and are annoyed when the word “racism” is used in relation to some of the oppression which goes on, but internally, they know that the talk about racism and the harm it causes is not superfluous, but is damaging many, many lives.

The fear of speaking out is understandable. In our history, those whites who spoke against racism were called “n”-lovers. They were ostracized and suffered in ways that ought not to have been the case. Silence was easier. But silence is complicity. Those who have shied away from actively helping to end racism are like friends of a person who is shoplifting. They are equally as guilty.

The current administration is bold with its belief in and practice of racism; the code words and phrases used have endeared the president to white supremacists, whose desire to “make America great again” is really a push to “make America white again.” Blacks, they believe, must know their place and stay there, and those whites who disagree dare not say too much for fear of the fallout.

People in this country have bowed to the petulant South, which has never gotten over its defeat in the Civil War, but the defeat did not mean the end of the war; it just meant that the war would be fought in a different way. The tools would be Jim Crow, lynching and other violent acts (which is none less than domestic terrorism), voter suppression, discrimination in housing, employment and finances. The war goes on; the troops of the South ever increase, while the metaphorical “Union,” i.e., progressive whites, have laid their weapons down and have basically let those who believe in racism have their way.

But the silence of progressive whites is toxic and, in the end,, will not save them. Even as the policies and practices of white people in power continue to compromise the lives of black people and other non-white, non-Christian people, the wounds caused by this metastatic condition will not heal. The poison which is the foundation of white supremacy will continue to seep out and infect everyone. As long as white supremacy is alive and well, nobody is safe.

And no, your silence will not protect you.

That day in the store, once I realized my “friend” was shoplifting, I ran. I may have saved myself from being arrested but I often wonder if I should have “squealed” on my friend. I wonder sometimes if she kept doing that. But it didn’t matter; what I realized was that I had my own demons that I hadn’t corrected and being silent about them has not healed me or saved me. I, too, have found myself in situations where I chose to be silent rather than to speak up.

We cannot successfully run from evil; we have to face it and it is in the facing that we begin to weaken it. Too many of us are afraid to publicly come out against racism; the cost, we fear, is too great.

I would posit a different thought: that not confronting racism, calling it out, cutting it off at its knees, will result in chaos that will rage out of control. Our silence is not helping us; it is leading this country to a bad, bad place.

A candid observation …

The Pain of Ignored Mothers

One of the things that bothers me – and which has bothered me for a while – is that in this nation, where police brutality and racially-motivated crimes result in the death of a young African American person, few people seem to care about the pain of the mothers – and fathers as well – but for purposes of this piece – the pain of the mothers.

Everybody who is human has a craving and a right for justice. For so long however, in this country, there has been no justice when people of African descent have been killed – by police or by deranged people who live in racism. My thoughts keep going back to Mamie Till, the mother of Emmett Till – who demanded that the mangled and destroyed body of her son be displayed in an open casket so that the world could see what “they,” meaning hateful racists – had done to her son.

Mamie’s courage, strength and tenacity were exemplary. When she traveled to Money, Mississippi to claim the body of her son, stories say that the stench of his rotting body filled her nostrils as she stepped off of the train. The undertakers in Money had wanted to bury Emmett quickly, but Mamie refused. She wanted to see her son, and could only identify him by the ring he had on his finger, which had belonged to his father. She held up somehow, and got him back to Chicago for the funeral, indeed inviting the press to take pictures of him so that “the world could see.”

. 05-lens-till-slide-RDKW-superJumbo

Then, this remarkable woman went back to Money for the trial of the two white men accused and on trial for his murder. She endured horrible treatment from local whites, but she would not be deterred. She wanted justice.

She probably knew that justice would allude her, because she was, after all, a black woman, as had been her son, and the two men accused of lynching him – J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant – were white, and so she probably was not surprised when, after about an hour the all-white jury brought back a verdict of “not guilty.”

But her heart had to have been broken. She had no son and she had no justice for his murder.

Every time a young black person is killed by “law enforcement,” and grand jury refuses to indict the accused officer, or the jury – still usually all-white – refuses to convict them, my heart aches for the mothers. My heart has ached for them all – from Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown to Jordan Davis to Ty’re King to Henry Green to Eric Garner …the list seems endless. I have been in the presence of some of the families when verdicts of “not guilty” have been delivered, or when a grand jury, led by system-infused prosecutors have led the members of the grand jury to free the accused officer – has done just that.

I have heard the wails and seen the tears, and I have lost many tears myself. The depth of this injustice, based so deeply on white supremacy and racist actions which white supremacy spawns, is almost too deep to fathom. Yes, the families of the deceased get settlements from their respective cities, but those awards always seem bitter to me.

No amount of money can assuage the spirit of a parent who has lost a child.

The fact that so many white people do not understand how awful it must be to carry two suitcases – one containing the reality of the unjust death of a child and the other containing the pain of not having been able to get justice for that child – is troubling. Why can’t this society, which boasts of being “Christian,” see and hear the cries of the mothers, the ignored mothers who must somehow find a way to keep living in spite of such intense loss?

I am only speaking now as a mother; the fathers of these lost children suffer deeply as well. I have seen interviews of the fathers of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and Jordan Davis. These grown men break down and weep – and there is nothing adequate to wipe those tears – but more importantly that pain – away.

Every day, these parents have to get up and keep living, though they want to die.

Mamie Till held her own. She had that funeral. She showed the world what “they” had done to her son. She kept on living. She kept on working with people, trying to get them to not be afraid of working for justice.

But her heart never recovered. She lived with that heaviness that all mothers, all parents, must live with and carry every day, knowing that in spite of God, the hatred of white supremacy continued to reign in this country, ripping young lives away from life and throwing them away – and acting like it’s all OK because those lives just do not matter.

On this day, I think of ignored mothers, and know that some way, some how, this madness has to stopA candid observation …

The Cowardice of Racists

The unfortunate and tragic events of Charlottesville revealed again that white supremacists live in their hatred but are wont to expose themselves as such.

Charlottesville was different from white hate activities in the past where participants terrorized people of color usually at night, brandishing torches and covering themselves with white sheets so nobody could see who they were.

The participants on Friday night and Saturday were bold and let their faces be shown, partially because they feel empowered and emboldened by the current US president.

But the cowardice pushed through in the violence they committed. Being violent is an easy way out. Trying to kill what you do not understand is an act of cowardice because it keeps one from doing the work of being a human being. It is easy to proclaim hatred for something which one has objectified because it forms Buber’s classic I-it relationship. Such relationships are not “relationships” in the classic sense at all, but rather creates an environment where the object is considered to be non-human and therefore, not worth the time to getting to know and understand.

If I do not regard you as a human being, I cannot empathize with you…and I will not.

That is a cowardly way to live because it gives an excuse for not examining one’s own feelings, and why they are as they are. Racists almost never come face to face with themselves and are therefore capable of destroying the “objects” of their hatred with not a whisk of emotion. That’s why racists in our history were able to lynch black people on, say, a Saturday night and go to church and either take or distribute Holy Communion. In their minds, there is no disconnect. They cannot acknowledge that they are wrong because they do not believe they are wrong.

This was evident in the “statement” given by the president. There was absolutely no compassion, no passion, no anger, no rage – nothing – as he uttered his prepared statement. This from a man who has publicly flogged his attorney general and the former head of the FBI; this from a man who nearly blew his top when acts of terrorism were committed in other countries. But on this occasion, the president was bland and disconnected from the pain and the terror displayed by angry white men who say they are on the road to making America “great again.”

He could show no passion because he has no passion when it comes to racism. His actions to date have indicated that he believes in white supremacy, and the policies coming from his administration indicate that he wants to put it back into its rightful place.

He was being “politically correct” to the likes of David Duke in his statement. He does not want to lose the support of whites who, like him, believe in white supremacy.

And so he buckled under the pressure. He gave a perfunctory statement and seemed uncomfortable doing so. He showed that he is more afraid of the David Dukes of the world than he is of a man like Kim Jong Un or Vladimir Putin. He did not, could not dare to threaten his white supremacist supporters, keeping true to his tradition of threatening and bullying people with whom he disagrees or who disappoint him.

He agrees with what was done yesterday. And they did not disappoint him.

It is ironic that many of this president’s supporters say they like him because he “tells it like it is.” They say he is “strong,” I guess equating bullying with being strong.

But he doesn’t have the strength to “tell it like it is” when it comes to racism. Few racists do. The white nationalist culture is a tough one and will excommunicate those who fall out of line, if the stories I’ve heard about what happens to those who “defect” are true.

The president showed the cowardly underbelly of the sickness called white supremacy.

He is not strong at all, but as a leader, is about as weak as they come.

A candid observation …