Racism is Sin by Valerie Bridgeman

A few days after the arrest of two black men in a Philadelphia Starbucks café on April 12, I posted on my social media platforms, “I’m tired.”

Racism is a sin. It is structural, embedded, and in the air and water of this nation. But it’s not just a “thing.” It’s sin. And it is upheld by racists, real people who believe the underlying tenets of racism.

When I first decided to reflect on racism and how I believe anti-racist work is the work of the church as a gospel mandate, I had planned to pull out all these stories and statistics to make the point. I thought about how I have come to understand the reaction to Jesus’s reading the Isaiah scroll in Luke 4:18-30. The people are infuriated when he says that foreigners—the widow of Zarephath in Sidon (from where Jezebel hailed) and Naaman, the Syrian—provided and were provided for by God even though they were not of the “chosen” people. New Testament scholar Obery Hendricks helped me understand the xenophobic and racist nature of their response. I wanted to unpack that text in light of ongoing relentless Black dying in public spaces by state-condoned or state-sanctioned means. They wanted to kill him, after all.

But then I remembered how very traumatized I am, and how traumatizing it is to repeat Black Deaths for me; what it takes to recount the names of the many men, women, trans*, gender-nonconforming people of color who have died publicly, often on camera for the world to see. It’s pornography. It’s like posting the postcards from the late 1800s and early 1900s that white people sent after a brutal hanging after church, complete with smiling white men and white boys and the occasional white woman and white girl, as if they are at a “picture show.” I’ve never seen a look of horror on any of their faces—but then, those faces wouldn’t have made the postcard, I suppose. At the mention of lynching is the place where white people would start yelling, “not all white people.” And actually, also, some black people, as evidenced by the inbox message from a purportedly black woman who told me that I was “just as ignorant and racist” as the dispatcher who reported on the Starbucks guys. I wish I were making some of this up.

But it is all white people. I don’t mean that there are and were no white abolitionists and no white people who are horrified by Black deaths. I don’t mean that there are no righteous and justice-seeking white people. I mean that all white people in this nation benefit from NOT being a person of color. And that, too, is a part of the structural sin. It’s been call the “original sin” of this country: what its white founders did to indigenous people and to enslaved black people, especially.¹ The system counts on “ordinary white people,” as I read recently in an article about who these people were who lynched Black bodies. I have been thinking about the fact that a Presbyterian minister in Richmond, VA, Robert L. Dabney, helped craft the theological rationale of slavery for the southern church.² He helped to sanctify the sin. I’ve also contemplated that a Methodist minister, William Joseph Simmons, helped “revive” the Ku Klux Klan.³ I’ve been thinking about the fact that a new museum on lynching has opened in Alabama.⁴ All of these facts make me wonder: how will we live into the gospel teaching: “I have come that you might have live in its abundance” (John 10:10). This week, Professor Christopher Carter, in a lecture at The Ohio State University, led us through an exercise on how and who we believe is an “ideal human.” It was a powerful conversation, which I can’t recount all here, but one of my main take-aways was this: if a person cannot see the Imago Dei in all humans, if a person thinks some humans are “superior” to other humans, then it may be nearly impossible for said person to see people of color as deserving to flourish.

And, flourishing is the point of the gospel. Racism disrupts flourishing and therefore, racism is a sin. But I know diagnoses are useless without some offer of “remedy,” and that’s where my “tired” comes in. In 2018, I believe we have enough materials out to “teach” on anti-racism. It’s sin, and the church doesn’t just offer “forgiveness” for sin, it also offers us the good news that God can and does change us. That change requires our willingness to accept first that racism, systemically and personally, is a sin, and call it that. Then it requires that, with the help of the Holy Spirit, everyone who sees that sin in them and around them “resist it, so the ‘devil’ will flee.” I’m tired, but I think naming the demon, not as a “problem” or “flaw,”⁵ but as “sin” is a first and good step. And I think the first steps must start in the egregious house of white privilege, white supremacy, and white fragility. In other words, as my friend Melanie Morrison notes, as a gospel mandate,⁶ white people must do their own work and stop leaning on Black people to “teach them.” Because, we’re tired.

As I lean into the coming days and to the work my soul must have,⁷ I know that I, too, must resist racism in all its iterations, as an act of faith. But I confess that I do this work while I’m tired, and need the replenishing presence and nourishment of the Spirit, so that I may flourish in the work.

1 http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2016/01/29/january-29-2016-americas-original-sin/28859/.

2 “Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898),” https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Dabney_Robert_Lewis_18201898#start_entry.

3 DeNeen L. Brown, “The preacher who used Christianity to revive the Ku Klux Klan,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/08/the-preacher-who-used-christianity-torevive-the-ku-klux-klan/?utm_term=.0d61b5fc598d.

4 The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. https://museumandmemorial.eji.org.

5 I am not denigrating groups that allow white people to gather and unpack their racism, such as reported in this article, “Hi, I’m Bonnie, and I’m a Racist,” written by Will Greenberg. Whatever resources will move the needle are welcomed into dismantling racism. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/racists-anonymous-churchnational-discussion-race/.

6 http://www.alliesforchange.org/doow-july

7 I first heard this phrase from Dr. Katie G. Cannon, the first black woman ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA) in the late 1980s. I do not know if it is original to her, but it stuck with me.

Valerie Bridgeman is Interim Dean of Methodist Theological School in Ohio (MTSO), where she serves as Associate Professor of Homiletics and Hebrew Bible. She also is president and CEO of the non-profit organization, WomanPreach! Inc., which trains preachers in prophetic preaching especially attending to Womanist and Feminist concerns.