Recently, my church, Forest Hill Presbyterian has taken up the awkward, unglamourous, and arduous task of racial reconciliation. We have moved beyond the rose hued optimism of the world as it should be and began the longer journey through the world as it is, and for that I’m #proudtobeapresby.
Still, it’s a thousand mile journey from admitting white privilege exists to renouncing it as sin in direct conflict with Christian ideology. Even my black friends criticize when I wax poetic about Christians living up to our pedagogy (that’s for you, TT ;-)
“You want the white people that you go to church with to give up their privilege because it’s the Christian thing to do?” my bestie asks, incredulous.
“Yes.”
“I can’t even with you.” she’s laughing now. I laugh a little too.
But I’m serious as a heart attack.
What I’m suggesting is ludicrous, it’s crazy, no doubt.
But I’m not wrong.
White people should want to give up white privilege because it’s a BRIBE.
Whiteness itself is a created category that has been continually amended throughout history, as recently as 1920. The semantics have changed, but the game remains the same. In 1860, less than five percent of the population owned slaves. This included small landowners who had one to five slaves, Haitian and Caribbean immigrants who owned slaves, and large landowners like Colonel Joshua John Ward, who owned six plantations that kept over 1000 slaves each.
The rest of the people in the country, a motley crew of European immigrants, criminals, and whores, worked and lived in conditions slightly better than slavery. Many were indentured servants (read, temporary slaves) whose room and board equaled their paychecks. They sold themselves into lifelong slavery to ensure the freedom of their children.
These people who would today be called white were battle scarred. Many had escaped famine, religious persecution, and war in their own countries only to come here and immediately be subjugated by the wealthy and powerful elite. Second and third generation immigrants had already been conditioned in the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion to tolerate a racially oppressive caste system.
Eighteen Sixty. Two hundred years of selective conditioning was in full effect. Five percent of the population controlled $3,500,000,000 worth of assets in the form of black bodies, and they all happened to live in the south. A national election was on the horizon. The Republican frontrunner was a Senator from New York (feel free to stop me when this starts to sound familiar). Senator William H. Seward held the support of the Irish, a rapidly growing group of immigrants who were treated as second class citizens. He was running on a Black Lives Matter ticket, and he had been adamantly opposed to the Missouri compromise.
"there is a higher law than the Constitution" which should guide American actions regarding slavery”, he said.
Along comes a moderate lawyer from Kentucky. Fresh off of a failed bid for Senator, Abraham Lincoln offers both the southern democrats and his own party members a tempting bribe:
“"We must not disturb slavery in the states where it exists, because the Constitution, and the peace of the country both forbid us — We must not withhold an efficient fugitive slave law, because the constitution demands it —
But we must, by a national policy, prevent the spread of slavery into new territories, or free states, because the constitution does not forbid us, and the general welfare does demand such prevention.”
--- Honest Abe, 1959
Yeah! Go Lincoln, it’s ya birthday-- wait, what?
All live(lihood)s Matter?
Well F@*$*~^%!
Republicans thought this more moderate take on slavery made Lincoln more electable (again, stop me if this sounds familiar)so he won the party nomination, and eventually the election.
The problem was, he only carried the free states.
The five percent of the population that had $3.5 billion worth of assets in the form of black bodies wanted to expand their wealth by expanding the slave trade into central and south America.
Slavery was, simply put, the economy of the future.
Although it was the basis through which 5% of the population was able to control 30% of the wealth, slavery was upheld as the very basis of white equality.
“Among us the poor white laborer is respected as an equal. His family is treated with kindness, consideration and respect. He does not belong to the menial class. The negro is in no sense of the term his equal. He feels and knows this. He belongs to the only true aristocracy, the race of white men. He black no masters boots, and bows the knee to no one save God alone. He receives higher wages for his labor than does the laborer of any other portion of the world, and he raises up his children with the knowledge, that they belong to no inferior cast, but that the highest members of the society in which he lives, will, if their conduct is good, respect and treat them as equals.”
Our equals that make less money, have less food, work harder, and live shorter, more miserable lives, he meant to say. The myth of white equality was such a powerful bribe that a few wealthy elite were able to motivate their impoverished brethren to go to war for a policy that in no way served their own interests.
Have you ever worked at a job where they give you a title that comes with no raise? It’s like, congratulations! You’re a senior account executive now! You work the same amount of hours, make the same amount of money, still don’t get benefits, but-- you get a nameplate now!
The bribe of white privilege allows 5 percent of the population to send 259,000 men and boys to their deaths to fill their pockets. It allows debt peonage laws to enslave thousands of black and poor white men to coal mines and railroads from 1860 to 1940. It allows a mentally ill white girl named Carrie Bell to legally be forcibly sterilized in 1927, patient zero of over 60,000 black and white institutionalized Americans who were victims of eugenics policy. It allows six year old Jeremy Mardis to be shot and killed by police in Louisiana and have his justice depend on a body camera. It paints Dylan Roof as a disturbed young man and Ahmed Mohammed a terrorist. This is the price of privilege, and it is steep.
The bribe allows white victims of policy designed to oppress and subjugate black bodies as acceptable collateral damage. It tells modern day whites that the greatest threat to their society is the oppressed, not the oppressor. It claims, in fact, that they are the oppressors, that any act of insubordination or reneging on the bribe is tantamount to the destruction of the very fabric of society.
It tells you indentured servitude is a form of freedom, when it is a form of bondage.
It tells you minimum wage is not poverty, twenty cents an hour is a fair wage for prisoners, only corporations deserve welfare, one thousand citizens killed by police is an acceptable amount, that two fifths of the nation’s population surviving on less than a living wage is a free market, that the world is fair, the dream is real, and that anyone who says otherwise is a radical.
Take for example #blacklivesmatter, a hashtag born out of the frustration black people felt about continually being murdered by police and denied justice. Instead of seeing this as a rallying cry for Christians in the vein of Matthew 25:45, many whites saw it as a pseudo threatening call to arms.
#AllLivesMatter! They countered; the indentured servants blind to their own bondage.
Here’s the problem with #alllivesmatter: the value of a white life has never been in question. American whiteness itself only exists in superior juxtaposition to blackness, therefore the logical conclusion is not:
(Only) BlackLivesMatter
but
BlackLivesMatter (Too).
Selective justice for black Americans is a threat to all Americans. When human bodies are considered acceptable collateral damage in the effort to maintain an egalitarian and free society, freedom itself is an illusion.
