5th
Re-Imagining a Failed Post-Civil Rights America
We woke up in a different world today.
I confess. Though I voted for Brent Anderson, when it was announced that Barack Obama was elected our next president, I cried. And as I sat in my townhouse on North 33rd Street, a single tear rolled down my cheek about every 3-4 minutes for at least 2 hours.
Tonight, I am still overwhelmed.
Often I comment that I believe we live in a failed post-civil rights world. If you disagree, and happen to go to church, tell me, how diverse is your worshipping community? If it’s actually multi-racial and multi-cultural, you are among the blessed minority of people identified in what has been called the “Beloved Community.” If you disagree and haven’t had a dinner guest in your home from a different ethnicity or race in the past week, month, heck—even year, you live in a chosen and un-forced segregated social reality. If you disagree, pop open your cell phone and tell me how many of your last 20 calls were to someone from a different race than you.
And look, even though we just elected a black (technically, bi-racial) president, it doesn’t mean we’ve leveled the playing field. It certainly doesn’t mean we’ve realized the ideals of our nation’s civil rights movement. And it doesn’t mean that non-whites should stop “complaining” (oh man… do people really still want to insinuate that the legitimized racial dissatisfaction in our country is “complaining”?) about racism, disparity or ethnic-bias.
What all of this does mean is that we are entering the beginning of a new social consciousness regarding race—one that is long overdue (and I got nearly 30 comments on this little lined tucked into my Facebook status… wow, is it really that controversial?).
This new social consciousness will help us all translate what has been our racialized America. Now, don’t get pissed (just yet)—I didn’t say racist, I said racialized. The differentiation is important.
Racism is obviously an evil that we can not and will not tolerate. Racialization however is a real and present danger that we must confess and address.
Much has been written on the changing future of our so-called Christian society. In The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Philip Jenkins speculates that by 2050 only one of five Christians will be non-Hispanic whites. In a post-Christian West, our faith has to be understood within a global context.
Lamin Sanneh in Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West, writes, “The worldwide Christian resurgence is proof of the religion transcending ethnic, national and cultural barriers.” Sadly, today our society and the church are still very segregated. In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. called 11 o’clock on Sunday morning the “most segregated hour in America.”
How far have we come since 1968? How much further do we need to go? Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith point out that our religious values and the educational advantages of Western Christians should define us as one of the least segregated communities in the world, but in fact we’re still among the most (Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America).
It’s statistically proven that university-educated persons have the least problem with racism, and, as Christians, we know Christ broke ethnic divisions with his life and ministry. However, in America today, it is the university-educated who live in the most segregated neighborhoods and who attend churches that consist of the least diverse memberships. If we’re not a racist church, we’re at least “racialized” meaning (according to Emerson and Smith) “a society wherein race matters profoundly for differences in life experiences, life opportunities, and social relationships … [it] can also be said to be ‘a society that allocates differential economic, political, social, and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines; lines that are socially constructed.’”
Further, “at its core, contemporary racialization is characterized by separate networks and differential access to valued resources, such as health, wealth and status.”
If our lack of multi-culturalism is, in fact, more of a structural issue than an individualized one, then the burden to establish authentic Kingdom communities must fall on the dominant consciousness. We must move from a homogenously congealed, racialized institution to an organic Kingdom community and a whole “Beloved” society.
And I’m not saying Obama will usher in this new reality. But I am saying that it’s about time we elected a president who’s not a white Western male. Hopefully it will provoke within us a refreshed imagination that will awaken us from the stagnated ghetto of racial homogenization we’ve isolated ourselves in.
Look, no one thinks that Obama is the Messiah, he’s not a dictator, and we don’t live in Zimbabwe. He will have to work with and through a cabinet, negotiating and submitting to the votes of the Senate and Congress, and of course he will, as he has stated, listen to the voice of the American people. Given what he’s inheriting from George W. Bush, he might never succeed (who could?).
And you, the small-minded person (I almost de-friended you last night…) whose Facebook status reflected the suppressed, parochial racist in your lack of imagination, let’s be clear: we did NOT elect a “frigg’n terrorist” or the “anti-Christ” or any of the other deplorable things you wrote (I hope someday you will feel ashamed of yourself).
What we did yesterday was amazing.
What we did yesterday was introduce the beginning of a new era. If you are black, you helped accomplish and fulfill what MLK (among many, many others) lamented and spent his life as a prayer for us all. If you are white, you found the courage to support the so-called “other,” and relinquished the illusion of what you have over-identified as an inappropriate power-base that doesn’t solely belong to you, but is contained within every human being and needs to be affirmed for all of humanity.
So, today, for the first time in a long time, I’m actually proud to be an American (and yes, this will come as a surprise to you if you know me). I’m proud of what my country did. And I hope it’s not the last time I feel this for a long time.
