By Jim Shoopman
In the years before the Covid dispersal, I participated in a weekly, early morning Christian accountability group. We talked about things that people were too polite to bring up at worship or Sunday school.
One early Monday morning, while protest events related to the shooting of another young unarmed Black man were taking place, a member of our group expressed frustration and bewilderment with all the protests. “It’s like, the Black people don’t want to be equal – that’s not what they want. They want to be in charge! They want to be more than equal!”
As the one “preacher” in the group, tasked with bringing the devotional each time we met, I tried to respond with an insight I had shared when teaching on the ethics of race relations. Because the university where I teach is full of aspiring engineers and pilots, I had applied a simple physics metaphor. From a physics perspective, to make any wall stand against a push, , the wall must “push back.”
This might not make intuitive sense, because the pushback of any wall is not visible, but is built into what we call the “reinforcements.” To better illustrate, imagine that I push against you. You will fall down unless you are quite literally pushing back against the force I exert. In the same way, although it does not look like it, a wall cannot stand up straight unless it is actually pushing back against the forces leaning against it.
The same has to be true in order to achieve any social or legal equality for most minority groups. In order for Blacks, Latinos or Asians to overcome the forces pushing against them by the white majority, they have to continually be pushing back, otherwise, they will fall to the ground like an unbraced wall. The Holocaust metaphor is far from exact, because what goes on in America is not the same thing; but the Jews of World War II in Europe had too little reinforcement for their wall; it utterly fell, destroying two-thirds of European Judaism. I tried to explain to my friends that pushback was a necessary tool of survival. They sat silently. I have no idea whether it made any difference.
Pastors and lay leaders of Christian congregations outside the fundamentalist sphere struggle with how to address this wave of white backlash against an aggressive drive for racial equality in law enforcement and other areas of American life. Many moderate and non-fundamentalist congregations are “mixed breeds” socially and politically. Whereas fundamentalist congregations have ideologically “purified” their congregations against both theological and political liberalism, moderate and liberal congregations tend to tolerate a wide range of opinions. Because we do not qualify our understanding of Christianity with any sort of political litmus test, our congregations are rich with a variety of views and because we have made a virtue of avoiding partisan politics from the pulpit, we are afraid that if we bring issues of racism up in worship or Bible study, we will be accused of “preaching politics instead of the gospel.”
People with racial fears are quite sensitive about being labeled “racist,” so pastors are reasonably worried what the reaction might be, should the congregation be faced with a challenging look at white privilege. They might quickly be accused of teaching “Critical Race Theory.”
In the meantime, pressure from the left contends it is not enough to simply avoid racism. The truly prophetic virtue is to be “anti-racist.” This term generally describes taking active, concrete steps to oppose racism. To connect this with the metaphor above, about the wall pushing back, one is more specifically anti-racist when one helps reinforce the wall against racism by pushing back. An anti-racist takes active, concrete steps to oppose racism wherever it may be found.
This sounds exciting, ethically compelling, biblically prophetic, and a possible invitation to career suicide for the white minister. It is disturbing and painful to imagine bringing up racial justice to a congregation struggling just to rebuild from the Covid year—especially if it’s a congregation that has almost no direct contact with Black people – churches with only one or two African-American members, if any.
How would a biblically prophetic preacher begin? Unfortunately, this article will not provide any series of concrete steps. I am only a professor and no longer have to think like a practical parish pastor whose decisions on such matters must surely be gut-wrenching right now. As an educator, not surprisingly, my recommendation is to start by educating. Our pastors should take some time to really understand how things got to this place in this country. Most of us have a vague, general idea that racial prejudice exists all over the world, but with special vehemence here in the United States.
The slaves were freed by Lincoln during the Civil War. Congress better ensured the vote along with some social welfare assistance in 1964, and we elected a Black president in 2008. Yet somehow deep-seated racial prejudice still seems to impact our society. George Floyd is murdered by a police officer; black citizens are reported to the authorities regularly for such offenses as bird watching, setting up a lemonade stand, or lounging at a pool in some white enclave. While racial prejudice does exist in other nations, it doesn’t exist to this level or degree in most other cultures. Church leaders could begin by learning how it got this way.
An American pastor could begin by reading the 2019 book, Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, by Harvard scholar and African American studies specialist Henry Louis Gates. (The title is taken from a line in “the Negro National Anthem” entitled Lift Every Voice and Sing.) There are other excellent books on American racism, but as a single accessible volume by a distinguished scholar, full of revelatory color plate pictures that show the story as well as Gates can tell it, this book is one excellent place to start.
Professor Gates is a familiar figure to many readers, having made news in 2009 when he accidentally locked himself out of his own home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and, being Black, was briefly arrested for breaking and entering. President Obama, ever the professor himself, tried to turn the whole misunderstanding into an educational opportunity by hosting a “beer summit” at the White House between Gates and the white officer who had arrested him, with Obama and Vice President Biden serving as intermediaries. The matter quickly blew over and since that time. Gates has become well-known as the host of a PBS television program that traces the ancestral roots of famous persons. He has a much more substantial academic reputation as a research professor at Harvard as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. His primary academic focus has been African American literature, but his work frequently overlaps into historical study. He has written 22 books (three of those co-authored), edited 12 others, and has credits related to 17 documentary films. Suffice to say, he is a serious authority in his field.
The book I recommend and review here grew out of Gates’ 2019 PBS documentary, Reconstruction: America After the Civil War. The documentary is available on the PBS streaming platform and on DVD. Even as a two-part presentation, totaling four hours, it is not as extensive as the book, but it makes a serviceable accompaniment or lesser substitute for Stony the Road. The book itself covers more ground in greater detail and has the “bookish” virtue of allowing a reader time to stop, meditate, google a subject, underline, highlight and review. There are at least 65 pages of color prints that alone are worth the price of the book. This book provides a rare and remarkable educational tool.
Gates follows a useful chronological historical format, but often becomes analytical or meditative at points. These may be fascinating digressions for the academic, but not always so much for the time-constrained pastor who is just trying to understand his or her world. While these digressions are meaningful, consider this a forewarning that Gates is a chatty academic tour guide who may take you on an occasional detour; but your patience will be rewarded.
The book explains how Reconstruction was a serious attempt on the part of the Federal government to rebuild the states of the southern rebellion, to create a more equitable society in which freed Black slaves could be educated, employed and allowed some part in democratic self-determination through voting and holding political office.
In the early years after the Civil War, former slaves were enthusiastic about political opportunity. According to one of Gates’ sources, “One Northerner, covering an 1868 election in Alabama, wrote that African Americans ‘in defiance of fatigue, hardship, hunger and threats of employers, with tattered clothes and without shoes, stood in line to vote …” (24). In the early years of Reconstruction, they elected numerous black congressmen, governors and other political leaders. Former slaves were given education, jobs and political opportunities that had been exclusively privileges of white citizens. So it was no surprise that defeated Southern whites, both wealthy and poor, felt these privileges had been stolen from them and given to their former African-American property. It had proved impossible to hold a race of people in slavery and have respect for them on any level. A sense of rage bubbled over in countless ways to avenge these losses of white privilege to a body of people they had always held in contempt. A large part of the remainder of Gate’s book recounts the overwhelmingly powerful effort from every part of American institutional life to reinforce the belief that African Americans were unworthy of the privileges of American citizenship.
Southerners eagerly sought to rehabilitate Southern identity, reframing the cause of the Civil War as a States Rights matter rather than slavery, memorializing their southern heroes as gracious officers and gentlemen in a glorious “lost cause.” (The current struggle with taking down Confederate monuments and changing fort names is a long-belated response to that effort at “rebranding” the Confederate identity as a noble struggle for freedom rather treasonous and racist.)
For many old Confederates, their most immediate and essential mission was to wrestle back white supremacy of the ballot and political power. The struggle against Black political and social equality often turned violent. One source relates that “at least 10 percent of the black members of constitutional conventions in the South in 1867-68 became victims [of Klan violence], including seven who were murdered” (26). Gates quotes one Missouri newspaper editor of the time: “No simian-souled, sooty-skinned, kink-curled, blubber-lipped, prehensile-heeled, Ethiopian Gorilla shall pollute the ballot box with his leprous vote” (28).
Gates documents in his second chapter a more foundational effort to reframe racism as either religiously or scientifically justified. Conservative Christians who rejected the newly-developing theory of evolution were taught to see the Black man as an entirely separate creation (hence not truly human) (65), or as a result of Noah’s “curse on Ham.” the disrespectful son, whose descendants were condemned to eternal servitude (57).
At the same time, the concepts of eugenics, a concept later vilified when championed by Nazis, got off to a roaring start in the United States. Long before the Civil War, there had developed a popular pseudo-science called “craniology” and “phrenology,” suggesting that intellectual and ethical development could be predicted from the size and shape of the skull, with white European skulls being the high standard. This “science,” little noted in the 1830s and 40s “caught fire in the United States during the middle part of the 19th century” (60), in reaction to Reconstruction.
While the common man might not have read works of theology or science where these theories were expounded, they constantly heard their trusted preachers and learned public lecturers expansively boasting “the bible clearly teaches,” or “the assured results of the most careful scientific research clearly demonstrate” that the African and his descendants were intellectually and morally incapable of governing themselves, much less anybody else. From there, it was not hard to justify a lower place in economic-political development through the arguments of “Social Darwinism,” a popular and not very accurate adaptation of Darwinism, applied to the Industrial Revolution, which suggested that only the strongest in a given setting survive and thrive. This misuse of Darwin helped to justify the place of all the poor during the Gilded Age, and most especially justified the view that white Europeans were superior to everybody else.
The importance of all this, of course, is that it provided a foundation of assumptions from which one could argue in an endless loop for the natural inferiority of the African – by God’s will or evolutionary development, whichever a given audience preferred. From either perspective, it was easy to argue, “they have no rights that man dare respect – not even the right to live” (75).
While such dangerously hostile attitudes were preached in the Church and in the academy, condescending whites bemoaned “the negro problem.” While the “Jewish problem” of Europe was approached with aggressive hostility by the Nazis, in America, the negro problem was often approached with a paternalistic view to keeping African-Americans dependent, while all the time assuming, based on either the Bible or science, that they were incapable of caring for themselves.
In support of all this theory, both hostile and paternalistic, white authors wrote novels, songs, short stories and minstrel shows geared to represent Blacks as ridiculous, comic or dangerous, but never capable. Gates lingers over long-popular media figures like “Uncle Remus,” first written in 1881 as an ex-slave who chose to return to the good old plantation.
Gates also writes much about America’s first full-length motion picture, Birth of a Nation, screened at the White House by Woodrow Wilson in 1915. The film established a powerful image of Reconstruction Era black legislators as slovenly, barbaric opportunists, and poor black men as naturally predisposed rapists, deserving of the many lynchings perpetrated in the southern states. The movie glorified the birth of the Ku Klux Klan as a necessary extra-legal corrective, needed to protect innocent white women from animalistic Black men prone to rape and murder.
Popular images of the Black were, like popular European images of the Jew, rife with contradiction. They were perceived as lazy and docile, good only for the hardest work, stupid and foolish yet clever and cagey, dirty and slovenly and yet the very people you wanted to keep your house clean and care for your children.
At this point, it is useful to forewarn the casual reader that the chapter just described is heavily documented with names and works that become challenging to keep straight. While this book is written for the broader public, Dr. Gates writes with the habits of a faithful academic and, as a matter of integrity, it is important to him to document his sources thoroughly. So many readers might join this reviewer in having a notebook close by to keep the players straight. Even so, the effort is worth its price in patience and the third chapter is remarkably informative.
Gates’ third chapter, “Framing Blackness: Sambo Art and the Visual Rhetoric of White Supremacy,” pulls the curtain back on a nearly universal tendency in that time to represent the physical image of the Black American as alien and subhuman, what Gates calls “an avalanche of imagery” (128). Gates quotes one source to explain, “Show people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become” (133), so that “when a white person confronted an actual black human being, [the African American] was ‘an already read text’” (132).
The color plates following the chapter tell the story. Scores of companies, selling every kind of common household product, used grotesque, cartoonish images of Black folk in ridiculous poses, often exaggerated facial and bodily features and demeaning captions, so culturally common that virtually every American consumer had seen them a multitude of times. The most shockingly demeaning were the numerous images of Black infants and men captioned as “alligator bait” (164-165). Gates notes that, “Between 1889 and 1918 … more than three thousand lynchings took place precisely as these racist images of Black people increased in popularity” (134). Another popular image, often sold in the South, were postcards with photographs of lynchings, often accompanied by poetry.
In “Chapter Four: The New Negro: Redeeming the Race from the Redeemers,” Gates discusses the struggle of Black leadership to overcome this onslaught against the character of African Americans. The white losers of the War Between the States, in their struggle to claw themselves back to power, had inundated audiences all over the world with messages from racist religion, science, politics, novels, music, poetry, advertising, live entertainment and finally motion pictures, to sell the notion that Black people were, just by virtue of racial descent, unworthy of the privileges and powers of American citizenship. In response Black leadership put forward the concept of “the New Negro.”
This final chapter provides excellent history on the Black response to the racism of “the New South.” The chapter is also the most laden with analysis and speculation that some readers may find a distraction. Gates is particularly fascinated and troubled by the many meanings suggested for this term “New Negro.” The phrase is first suggested by early African American leader Booker T. Washington, who proposed that Black people could earn their way into the hearts of their countrymen by surrendering the political and social rights taken from them in the failure of Reconstruction, instead becoming great and good manual laborers, who work harder and better than anyone, finally to be accepted.
Washington’s opponent in this, W. E. B. Dubois, one of the great intellectual leaders of the early 20th century, insisted the New Negro was nothing more or less than a new generation of African Americans who had outgrown the slave identity, some elevated by education and empowered by a sense of capability. Gates goes on to describe the efforts of Black intellectual Alain Locke, who tried to channel Dubois’ early sense of Black pride into the efforts of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, part of a huge African American effort, often centered in Harlem, New York, but not limited to that locale, to demonstrate that a people capable of great arts were capable of any other contribution to a culture.
Coming out of Harlem were poems, novels, paintings, sculpture, drama and music – especially the Black spirituals, jazz and the blues, often regarded as the most distinctly American contributions to the arts of the world. As Gates observes, great art could not or did not change the perceptions of racist white people — but did perhaps change some self-perceptions within the Black community, through which African Americans had found their sense of self, quite apart from what white Americans might think of them.
While Gates doesn’t say so, phrases like “black pride,” “black is beautiful” and “black lives matter” surely stem from these early African American efforts to overcome their disenfranchisement by insisting on their own capability and human dignity.
Gates’ book does not give any clear directions on how white pastors should respond to “critical race theory” or “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations. The book does, however, give us clarity on how we got here, and that is a very important start. It is not enough just to recognize and reject the irrationality of racism. We probably cannot deal with it effectively just by saying, “Well, now you are just being irrational.” We start dealing with it more effectively when we point out that American racism begins with a set of assumptions that have been passed down from one generation to another through a very specific history.
There is a reason why, in America, a much higher percent of Black Americans are imprisoned or killed by police on suspicion that they might be violent. Other nations have racist notions. Only recently, after Prince Harry of England married an African American woman, Harry says there was some anxiety among royalists about what color their baby might be. Even so, Britain has not dealt with quite the vehement disenfranchisement and legalized violence suffered by people of African descent in America, which stems from an immediate post-Civil War history that continues to impact common American perceptions – an outraged sense that the liberals of the Federal Government have taken rights and privileges that belong only to “true Americans” (white people) and given them to an undeserving alien element (non-white people). As southern novelist William Faulkner famously observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” (Faulkner, 73). We see this clearly in the vociferous reaction to the results of the latest presidential election.
In words astonishingly reminiscent of current headlines, Gates quotes a 1902 Southern novelist’s reaction to the 1868 passage of a post-Civil-War reconstruction constitution for Georgia, passed with African American votes. The outraged Southern spinmeister describes the polling situation this way:
Beginning on the 20th, [in 1868] the election was to continue for three days, a provision that was intended to enable the negroes to vote at as many precincts as they could conveniently reach in eighty-three hours. No safeguard whatever was thrown around the ballot box, and it was the remembrance of this initial and overwhelming combination of fraud and corruption that induced the whites at a later day, to stuff the ballot boxes and suppress the votes of the ignorant (103).
In other words, this “New South” writer justified subsequent white cheating on the grounds that the Black voters must have cheated first, making it necessary to meet Black guile with white guile. This “past” that Henry Louis Gates instructs us in, is not even past and has obviously still not yet been dealt with. Political leaders espouse exactly the same gibberish 100 years after Reconstruction.
If there is a long-term solution, it is hard to see where it comes from if not from the churches that are supposed to be repositories of truth, justice and love. So perhaps the place to start is by learning the truth of our story, which should help us realize why the wall has to push back.
— Dr. Jim Shoopman is associate professor, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
In-text citations are:
— Faulkner, William, Requiem for a Nun. New York: Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, 1950.
— Gates Jr., Henry Louis. Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy and the Rise of Jim Crow. New York: Penguin Press, 2019. References provided as in-text parenthetical page numbers referring to Gates’ book.
