Urbana.org All Things New Blog - race

White Guilt: Still Going Strong

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:01:00 -0600

For the first month of grad seminars, I’ve made occasional use of my fairly deep understanding of the issues of race and ethnicity, in contributing to conversations at which I’m a total newbie, like conversations on gender. For instance, I might use race by analogy to see if it might shed light on a gender problem.

But the other day, something gave me some pause in my (all-white) seminar on war and gender. A book we were discussing on the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, which had a running theme of African-American women’s experiences within the WAC, felt somehow wrong to me: the black women in the story were heroic and unchanging in a way the white women weren’t, and so I asked.

Invoking my newcomer/outsider status, I bluntly asked if white guilt is debilitating within the department, or the university at large. By debilitating, I meant that it prevents people from being free to think clearly. Everybody awkwardly waited for the professor to field that one, which she did, and in the affirmative.

Which gives me pause about invoking race for the future. White guilt can be a bludgeon and an obstacle to racial healing. White guilt developed, I’ve come to understand, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, when real healing and unity began to devolve into the politics of scarcity and institutional access.

I consider myself fairly free from white guilt—not in the sense that I have discharged whatever duties may befall to owners of white privilege—but in the smaller sense that I am no longer ashamed of being white when race is the elephant in the room.

It’s been a long-term growth for me, not the least of which relates to my twelve years at a numerically majority-African American church. I know who I am, and know what I’ve earned, and what has come to me for free, and I’ve dedicated the bulk of my adult life (I’m in my mid-thirties) to bringing racial healing to one particular congregation. I’ve been called names by black people and white people alike, and I just don’t care. Which is to say: if someone tries to bludgeon me with white guilt, it doesn’t really impress me.

That’s not to boast. A better man would have reached this stage years ahead of me. It’s a reflection of how much heart and pain I’ve put into the matter, and nothing more.

But it gives me pause to realize many of my white colleagues in the university may be subject to crippling fears whenever race comes up.

As a Christian who believes that some healing is instantaneous and some healing is a process, I must think twice before invoking race again. It could easily stifle people’s creativity and, more importantly, short-circuit their thinking about race. People don’t like to brush up against the same electric fence that has shocked them in the past, and if you zap people in a place they’re inclined to protect, they might learn to avoid the topic altogether.

And that’s not where hope lies.

It takes more than a fractured village

Fri, 01 May 2009 02:01:00 -0600

My pastor is wrapping up the dissertation for his Doctor of Ministry degree, an in my biased opinion terribly fascinating project: ministering to fatherless black men. Since I’ve got a bit of a reputation of a bookish type, he’s talked me in to helping him, by reading a selection of his resources, so as to be able to talk them over with him. It sure beats my usual: read things I’m interested in and nobody else.

And so, I, a married white man hailing from an intact home (and with a decent relationship with his own father), am reading all about issues of fatherlessness in African America.

And what I’ve learned is disheartening at all levels: there’s the part about how fatherless men of all stripes have to come to terms with their own manhood; there’s the question of why so many black families have no men in the homes, and there’s the question of how churches fail these young men, and (this is the dissertation bit, which I’m not really involved with) how churches can appropriately minister to them.

Two points have really stuck out to me:

The war of the sexes, a matter for endless joking, is a serious issue, as we should expect. But, as Bakari Kitwana says in The Hip Hop Generation: Young Blacks and the Crisis in African American Culture, it has hit African American life more than elsewhere, for reasons I haven’t seen explained. But: the war of the sexes has a real impact on young men being raised by single mothers. And although women are the ones carrying the biggest burden here, there are no winners, and all participants are perpetrators.
Successful marriages do not occur in a vacuum: as the National Research Council points out in A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society:

Historical and comparative studies suggest that nuclear families are most stable when marriage partners have common and overlapping group affiliations and when the family unit is supported by social circles of other families committed to norms of solidarity and permanence (p. 512).

I feel I’ve got a decent marriage of six years, and when I read this I realize this decency draws on the cumulative capital of the many successful marriages around me. Conversely, the several failed marriages around me (in your twenties you go to weddings all the time, in your thirties there are lots of divorces) mostly include failed marriages in earlier generations. There is something creepy here—when you realize how little control you have over your own destiny.

The corollary, of course, is how few things have to go wrong for a major impact on a person’s life. We are truly each others’.

To Be White is to Be Culturally Broke?

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 02:01:00 -0600

The Atlantic has a front-cover article out now going for controversy: The End of White America.

Mostly a survey of how white Americans are feeling about their own race, it’s a timely summary of the incremental cultural changes underway in recent years. As Barack Obama’s election has drawn all the attention from our conversations of ethnicity, here’s a reminder of something else going on.

Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University … , has observed that many of his white students are plagued by a racial-identity crisis: “They don’t care about socioeconomics; they care about culture. And to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, ‘I don’t have a culture.’ They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture … They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized. They don’t have a culture that’s cool or oppositional.”

What do you think? I bet Wray is dead on for how people feel, at least at a low level: it might not be on their minds every day, but I don’t know very many white person who would be comfortable answering the question, “is there anything positive about being white?”

[photo credit: Bavarian immigrant at Ellis Island, 1905, from New York Public Library at Flickr]

Boycott Durban 2?

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Durban 2 is coming, and a growing chorus of voices is demanding a boycott.

The UN’s World Conference against Racism, scheduled for April, is a review of Durban 1, which concluded on September 8, 2001, and which was largely forgotten after the terror attacks later the following week.

On the surface, we can all sign on to a statement against racism, but Durban 1 was not just racism in general. In was occasion for so drastically inflating the term “racism,” that it included everything from Zionism to colonialism to global capitalism—and accordingly meant nothing at all.

It was a classic case of mismanagement by a conference director so afraid of excluding anyone’s grievances, that the very serious issue of racism got sidetracked.

Durban leaders were correct in including systemic and economic justice in a discussion of racism—yet failed to retain control.

After several years of behind-the-scenes meetings, a second conference is in the works, and seems to be more of the same. Canada is currently planning on boycotting the meetings, as are several other Western countries, including Denmark, France and others.

The issues are the same as with any boycott: do you remain to influence, or do you leave, so as not to lend legitimacy?

Telling InterVarsity's Black History

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 02:01:00 -0600

One complaint I have about Black History Month materials, in offices and schools, is that we always return to the same national figures—Abolitionists, Civil Rights leaders, etc.

What might be more valuable in the long run would be local black history months, in which colleges, universities, corporations, organizations, and neighborhoods explore Black History within their smaller bodies.

So … are there local histories you’d like more known for Black History Month?

For instance, looking at InterVarsity and Urbana: here is to my knowledge the first African-American speaker at an Urbana convention. It's Ruth Lewis, speaking at Urbana 64.

What about you? If you're not part of InterVarsity, what black histories are part of your network? Forget Rosa Parks: hers is an important national story, but also an important story in Montgomery, Alabama. But what about your city? What about really local stories to your town?

My Story, and Yours

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 02:01:00 -0600

As of a few weeks ago, I’ve been a white member of a largely African American church for eleven years. That's a really long time.

It’s in light of this long-term relationship that Black History Month means something to me: inasmuch as my church is part of black history, black history is my history. And inasmuch as the black church will be part of heaven, black church history is our story, all of us who call ourselves believers. This is family, folks.

February is Black History Month. This informal ritual is meant as a corrective to traditional history-telling, which in the Western context has under-represented black contributions to history.

Black History Month’s ultimate goal is to work itself out of a job: Black History Month is held annually, to try to eliminate the need for an annual Black History Month.

This year, for black history month, I encourage everyone who is not black to ask yourselves: what part of this story is my story?

[photo credit: sxc.hu user alixmorse]

Let Us Take a Moment to Celebrate

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 04:01:00 -0600

On Sunday, the preacher at my church said:

"Now I can tell my son that he can do anything in this country—and really believe it myself."

As a white US-American, I recognize the historical significance of our having a black president. Whether he’s the right person for the job—that’s why we have elections. That’s why we’ll have another election in four years.

But to sit back for a moment and consider our national racial history—this is quite remarkable. I belong to a generation that had colorblindness shoved onto us: the only appropriate way to discuss race is by pretending it didn’t exist, or that racism ended with Martin Luther King.

I can recognize the significance, but as I listen to my African American friends, I hear an emotional resonance—even among the Republicans. People took their children to rallies, not for civics lessons, but to show them a new world of possibility that didn’t exist until now. (Or, as Andy Crouch would say, new horizons of possibility.)

This is a truly liberating moment for the dreams and imaginations of millions—even if Obama turns out to be a political dud. Everywhere I turn I’m seeing Obama’s face on clothing. Far more than before the election. Baggy-pants teens wearing gaudy Obama shirts. Teen girls at church with Obama bible covers. This is way beyond politics. This is water on a thirsty land. As my pastor said: “I never thought I would see this day, in my lifetime.”

The long-term impact will yet be seen, of course. But it is truly significant that those kids most likely to drop out of school are celebrating a political moment (as opposed to, say, a popular culture moment).

I have to celebrate along with these my family, even if I can only listen to the joy. All of us should take a moment to celebrate. If we can’t stand him, let’s celebrate for the teens in the hood, just for a moment, before returning to our political conversation in progress.

A More Diverse American Church

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 11:58:00 -0600

American Churches have grown far more ethnically diverse and more informal, according to a USA Today interpretation of a paper by Marc Chavez in Sociology of Religion.

“Informal” means drums, amens, and the use of projectors (vs. hymnals). Of course, anyone who has participated in the life of the Black Church for any period of time recognizes that noisy services are not in themselves informal; the rules are just more subtle and woven into the context.

More importantly, white churches are far more ethnically diverse than they were ten years ago, a noteworthy rate of change because, Chavez says,

"Religious traditions and organizations are widely considered to be remarkably resistant to change."

I’m going to have to read the full report; this stuff is important to me—a white member of a historically black church. Meanwhile, I take issue with the wording of one sentence in the USA Today report, which mainly focuses on black and white:

The increase in diversity is only among primarily white churches; majority black churches are as segregated as ever, Chaves says. Among primarily white congregations, the number reporting at least some blacks rose from 27% in 1998 to 36% in 2006-07 (…). (emphasis mine)

This wording, once again, puts the blame for segregation on Black people. This is important: church selection is voluntary, and almost every church in America would welcome a member from another race.

If white churches are becoming integrated, it’s because black people are crossing boundaries to join. If black churches are remaining segregated, it’s because white people are not doing the same.

This is not to discount the efforts among white churches over ten years to reach out to black people; not at all. This has been a concerted effort driven by a mixture of goodwill, religious conviction, and ambiguous feelings of guilt, but in my experience black churches have a long and deep commitment to diversity, but here and elsewhere get blamed for segregation.

[photo credit: flickr user su-chan]