Re-Imaging Racism through the Lens of Privilege
VOS Breakfast, Denver
May 27, 2003
Nancy Ramsay
I am proud to be a member of Voices of Sophia and honored to speak today.
Let me speak plainly: Racism poses life-threatening challenges to the very fabric of our national life, to the integrity of our religious institutions, and to our own salvation. Addressing these concerns “isn’t rocket science,” but resisting racism will require intentional education especially for European Americans and concurrent involvement in conversation and action by persons of all racial and cultural heritages.
Definitions and History
When I was a college student, I worked in a summer school attended by the children of tenant farmers in eastern N. C. Some of the children were African American and some were Euro-American. They were all dirt poor. I came to that experience believing the U.S. offered equal opportunities for all and success to those who work for it. I had learned this myth of meritocracy (Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 1997) quite well. But over the summer I recognized it was a lie. The pledge of allegiance with which class started each morning came to be excruciating for me because I realized the future of these children had already been stolen from them. It was very unlikely they would enjoy the same rights and opportunities I would. Fortunately, scripture had taught me this was not God’s vision for these children. But it took me a lot longer to learn to “see” that fighting the injustices that oppressed them was not just an external battle, my entitlements are part of the problem.
I believe the most crucial factor in moving persons toward involvement in the struggle for racial justice and reconciliation lies in how racism is defined because how we name a problem determines how we respond to it. I chose the title for this morning—“re-imagining racism through the lens of privilege,” in an attempt to convey my conviction about the priority of re-definition. The “veil” of racism lifted for me when I came to understand racism as an interlocking system of advantage based on race (Wellman, 1993). This re-definition shifted my attention from a singular focus on the barriers that disadvantage to recognize the important prior role that the multiple, interlocking layers of privilege carry in creating and reproducing racism. In other words I began to understand that I not only needed to stand in solidarity with others to deconstruct the barriers. I also needed to be about the homework of discerning and deconstructing the way entitlement accorded to me and other Euro-Americans reproduces those barriers. I believe my experience of being oblivious to privilege is common.
My research suggests that most European Americans define racism as the experience of disadvantage based on race. As I listen, I hear two versions of mis-definition.
(1) I hear many Euro-Americans limiting our definition of racism to individual acts of prejudice. So if we personally are not actively discriminating against others or knowingly supporting such discrimination, we are not racists. According to this definition, the only Whites who are called racists are those who actively discriminate such as members of the Klan. The commentary surrounding the Trent Lott situation illustrated well this reluctance among politicians to identify anyone as a racist.
(2) Sometimes Euro-Americans who consider ourselves progressive, might define racism as a system of disadvantage based on race suggesting our awareness of the interlocking political, institutional, cultural, and group factors that accompany individual behavior in establishing and perpetuating the barriers of racism. This definition allows us to work for justice for those who experience discrimination and to recognize more of the complexity of the problem, but defining racism as a system of disadvantage also continues to obscure accountability for the fact that these interlocking disadvantages arise as a consequence of an interlocking system of advantage.
The clearest image I have for clarifying what is at stake in re-defining racism to focus attention on privilege, lies in the images we saw often of Afghani women in burkas. You’ll recall that burkas include a small grid of material through which the woman can see. In my experience as long as Whites understand racism through the lens of disadvantage, we see only a small portion of the social and political reality in which we live. The Afghani women know there is a larger world they cannot see, but we Whites are oblivious to much of reality when we fail to acknowledge that we are privileged by this system of advantage based on race.
Part of what obscures the scope and depth of racism in the U.S. is an inadequate understanding of what race is and what racial difference signifies. Racial difference represents the tiniest fraction of our DNA. The concept of race is a social construction. Race varies in definition and significance across periods of history and in different cultures. Citizens of the United States live in one of the most racialized countries in the world. Many European Americans suffer from a false sense of certainty about the racial categories used so easily such as Latino Americans or Asian Americans. Latino or Hispanic describes a broadly diverse collection of nationalities and racial groups bound together by a language that helps to carry shared familial, religious, and cultural values. Asian may be a convenient umbrella term for European Americans but it includes more than 28 ethnic groups with widely diverse national, geographic, historical, linguistic, religious, and cultural characteristics (McGoldrick, Giordano, & Pearce, 1996). Labels we European Americans find convenient in fact more often obscure rather than disclose differences that matter in developing respectful relationships.
The idea of racial difference became the topic of speculation early in human history. As you might expect each author imagined her or his group as superior. About the time of European colonization, the concept of race took on economic and political significance because Europeans needed a way to rationalize their enslavement of Africans and the enslavement or genocide of native peoples. However, race did not necessarily describe skin color. The English, for example, referred to the Irish as another race as they conquered that country prior to turning the power of their empire toward North America. Shakespeare’s “Tempest” with the relationship between Caliban and Prospero offers us an excellent window into the fluid cultural process of determining what race would mean and imply for the interests of the British Empire (Takaki, 1993). During this period of history White was synonymous with Christian. The metaphor of melting pot was never an accurate description of the United States because the rules for being White were finally defined by the Anglo Saxon values of the British.
In his book, A Different Mirror: A Multicultural History of America, Ronald Takaki (1993) offers important remedial education for most European Americans by detailing how the concept of race and the institutionalization of racism took root in the economic practices and legal system of the colonies. It is my experience that European Americans often seem to find comfort in a kind of mystification about the origin and enduring effects of racism in this country. Takaki’s careful research discloses the inextricable relation of race and socio-economic class in the early history of the country. In the colony of Virginia, for example, the small group of planters rightly calculated that creating even small differences in economic and social privileges between poor Europeans and Africans and Native Americans would divide these groups that otherwise potentially might act on their shared economic and political interests. The planters knew a great deal about sin. Their plan worked. The die was cast to establish a hierarchy of race and class in the colonies. Of course religious rationalizations were also developed to reinforce this arrangement.
This inextricable relationship between race and class needed to be carefully disguised in a culture whose mythology has been an individualism that promises a “level playing field” for each and all—a meritocracy in which all have an equal opportunity to succeed. The rules for inclusion in the privileges of white America first and foremost include learning not to see and never to name the entitlements that alter significantly the kinds of doors that open in business, bank loans, schools, healthcare, housing, public policy, etc. The myth of equal opportunity for all protects European Americans from accountability for the inequities of racism. This is the dirty “big secret” in our society.
Informed Theological Voice and Action
We Christians have a very important role to play in exposing and deconstructing this lie that obscures the interlocking systems of advantage that reproduce and sustain racism in this country. For a long time theologians have observed the way sin functions as a lie. Racism is not just a political or socio-economic issue. It is Sin. Since Presbyterians purport to know a lot about sin, we may be well qualified to speak truthfully and plainly about this sin so long obscured by silence, denial, and the mystification of the abuse of power that accompanies privilege.
Racism mirrors what we know about original sin. This lie of privilege and stigma permeates the culture into which children are born in the U.S. Before we have words, we learn the rules that accompany privilege or marginalization. European Americans don’t get up one morning and decide to be racists, we are carefully taught just as children of other racial and cultural heritages learn to cope with an identity that includes stigma. By the time children move from this first stage of deception we have learned the rationalizations and stereotypes that accompany the rules. Wendy Farley, a theologian at Emory University calls this next stage of the lie, callousness (1990). Calluses protect tender places, and these rationalizations help blunt the natural empathy privileged children would otherwise feel. Gradually, those rationalizations and stereotypes come to monopolize our imaginations about race. And, since Euro-Americans have learned not to connect our own experience with this sin, we consider racism as a socio-economic and historical problem that needs to change but for which we have no personal accountability. We, too, are caught up in it.
But of course sin as lie intends to obscure ways we have set aside the opportunities to use our freedom differently. As children, we are not accountable for the lies we were taught. As adults we are accountable when we refuse to acknowledge the truth spoken so plainly and forcefully by persons from other racial and cultural heritages as well as a number of Euro-Americans.
The women in this room will overhear the other side of this lie of racism through the frame of our experience in exorcising the lie of sexism and the stigma that many of us internalized and rationalized and felt claimed by until we were helped to begin to re-imagine who we are as those whom God also loves. We know in our bones the pain and hard work of externalizing this stigma in a culture and church that still are ambivalent about our equality. I hope the Euro-Americans in the room can use this experience with sexism as an empathic bridge to help us begin to imagine the burden of externalizing the stigma of racism.
We Euro-Americans have not attended well to the consequences of this lie for our souls. We are created for life in relationships. In his book, The Color of Faith, Fumitaka Matsuoka (1998) suggests that the sin of racism lies in the negation of relation. The lie requires that we turn those created as neighbors into strangers, the feared and stereotyped “other.” Wendell Berry (1989) has written that racism not only creates a wound in those it oppresses but a mirror image of the wound in the flesh and bones of those who oppress. It is perilous for Euro-Americans to imagine that our own souls are unaffected by the lie we perpetrate against others however unwittingly. To use an image from Simone Weil (1977), our hearts are turned to stone when we treat human beings as if they were not also created in God’s image, equally loved by God, and intended as our neighbors. When we negate our relation to those God also loves, it is our own lifeblood that drains out of us. It is our own humanity that is depleted.
Healing and Transformation
What will need to happen for this denomination and for us who are members of it to re-imagine racism constructively? What will sustain us either in the work of deconstructing a racial identity based on the lie of privilege or in the work of resisting the stigma of racial oppression and the bitterness of betrayal after betrayal by European Americans who refuse to relinquish the privileges that reproduce your oppression? One step surely lies in very intentional work to educate particularly European American Presbyterians and to engender conversations across lines of color and culture in which the humanity of each is regarded and respected. There is encouraging evidence of such educational commitments. I want to applaud members of the Presbyterian Women who are working closely with our Racial Ethnic Ministries staff to become trained as leaders in diversity training. Women have always been at the forefront of justice issues in this denomination and once again they are already at work. I have attended some of the training sessions, and I have much hope for their long-term effectiveness in freeing minds and hearts to imagine new possibilities and providing experiences that yield new opportunities for relationships. The curriculum provided by VOS, “A Guide to Resist,” to help groups in the work of discerning and deconstructing unwitting patterns of racism will also be important for our future and holds much promise. Theological Educators in seminaries of the PCUSA have recently begun a process we hope will guide us in nurturing effective teaching and learning in racially and culturally diverse classrooms.
I want to close with the story of Lois Stalvey, a Euro-American woman who was a stay-at-home mom in the 60s when she had a series of small encounters that helped her and her husband begin to re-imagine racism as an interlocking system of advantage as well as disadvantage based on race. In her book, The Education of a WASP, Stalvey (1989) describes how she came to understand the lie of a level playing field as the veil of racism lifted, and she saw her own life implicated by the privileges and racial isolation she previously had not recognized as such. Stalvey and her husband modeled something I hope other of us Euro-Americans will do as well. They joined their education about racism with action in resisting its injustices. They developed and nurtured friendships with persons whose racial identity and culture differed from their own. When their behavior caused a demotion and transfer for Mr. Stalvey, they sought out housing that allowed them to live in a neighborhood of varied races and cultures and for their children to be in a school where they were a minority race.
I commend her story to you because Stalvey’s book makes clear something I said at the outset, resisting racism isn’t rocket science. It is a disciplined practice of restoring relation and truth- telling. The Education of a WASP helped me and my Euro-American students imagine that the journey was possible, and it could be enlivening and freeing. It helped my students whose racial heritage and culture is not Euro-American to hold onto hope that some Euro-Americans can change and be neighbors in the journey toward love and justice.
I close with this story because I am a cradle Presbyterian and an educator. I know our temptation to study and talk forever. Obviously, I think education matters. It is my ministry. But in this case, I urge us to join education and conversation in contexts that cross lines of racial and cultural difference. I urge us, European Americans to seek those opportunities to resist exclusion and restore relation. I urge you whose heritage and culture differs from the dominant one in this denomination, to dare to speak the truth when we European Americans falter in the effort toward racial justice. To paraphrase Gandhi, let all of us be the change we seek.
References
Adams, M., Bell, L.A., & Griffin, P. (Eds.) (1997). Teaching for diversity and social justice. New York: Routledge.
Berry, W. (1989) The hidden wound. New York: North Point Press.
Farley, W. (1990). Tragic vision and divine compassion. Louisville: Westminster John Knox.
Gandhi, M.
Matsuoka, F. (1998). The color of faith. Cleveland: United Church Press.
McGoldrick, M., Giordano, J., & Pearce, J. K. (Eds.) (1996). Ethnicity and family therapy. (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford.
Stalvey, L. (1989). The education of a wasp. (2nd ed.). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin.
Takaki, R. (1993). A different mirror: a history of multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co.
Weil, S. (1977). The iliad, poem of might. In. G. Panichas (ed.). The simone weil reader. (pp. 153-183). New York: McKay.
Wellman, D. (1993). Portraits of white racism. (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge.
Copyright 2003 Nancy Ramsay. If you would like to reprint this article or parts of it please contact Nancy Ramsay at nramsay@lpts.edu for permission.
