When Racism Shows Up
If you are white, then being Christian, or progressive, or both, or neither -- none of it protects you from the pervasive conditioning of white supremacy. It's not coincidental that we went from enslavement to lynching to de facto segregation to mass incarceration. As we are working to overcome the last of those, we are shifting into a time when black and brown people around the world will be overwhelmingly impacted by climate change, while the majority of white societies are likely to find mitigations because we have all the wealth and power.
We have to work for antiracist behavior, every day. We have to look at our politics, our psychology, our economics, our faiths, and more. I have to look at my intellectualism. I have to look at my choral singing, and my books, and my homeschooling. Every piece is mutated to serve white supremacy. Any one of us could have a racist choice or behavior spring up, seemingly out of nowhere, but really very easily traced. Here’s a recent example to ponder…
I recently participated in a letter campaign to a group on Facebook which advertises itself as Christian and left. (That’s USAn left, which anywhere else is solid center.) A member of that group, who also leads the antiracism group I’m a part of, a Black Christian woman, asked some accountability questions about their newest merchandise, which sported civil rights hero John Lewis's phrase "good trouble": Did they have people of color in leadership choosing the quote? and What were they going to do with the money they earned? Best move: answer the questions and have a conversation. Their move: attack, censor, block. Someone actually called her a racist; the admin team called her questions “concern trolling” despite the fact that they could have easily identified her as a true member, had they looked at their records.
This “left Christian” organization kept choosing the path away from antiracism and toward protecting their brand and their community. They deleted every letter we sent to their community wall (we avoided their active membership page); more, they started deleting and blocking their own members who voiced dissent. They came onto our group page with not only violent and abusive language, but also threats of the IRS, officials from Facebook and Paypal, a defamation suit, and more. One of their members “helped” their team by doing a public records search on the victim, and used it to attack in comments (although we already knew about it all because she doesn’t keep things secret).
We need to ask ourselves why we won’t believe the authenticity, sincerity, truth when BIPOC tell us their experience. Why we protect our reputations, our finances, our self-image, at the cost of rejecting people of color who are sharing their humanity with us.