Day 903 - The Sins of Our Fathers (and Mothers)

This post is my response to the issue of lynching and racism I mentioned on Day 861. It is a subject talked about too much but with little action to heal the wounds of the past. 

Sometime around the end of April an evangelist friend of mine active in Christian “social justice” on his Facebook page posted a link to a recently released report, “America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror," written and published by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, AL. I do not know if you, or my friend, obtained and read a copy of the full report on lynching in the US and specifically the South in the last 165 years or so. I have.

I can’t remember the exact comment my friend made with the post, and I can’t get back to the link because I figured out he blocked access to his ministry page for all but “friends.” I do recall clearly the tenor of his comments that provoked me to write this post.

The comment and motive for my friend seemed a broad brush effort to paint people of the South and perhaps all Caucasians with collective guilt for a miserable and loathsome time in this country’s history. (It is a history somewhat akin to the anti-Semitic bigotry that led to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and racial Apartheid in South Africa.)

He made clear his stance that we carry a burden of collective guilt since he believes there is a collective sin. It reminds me of the Puritan ethic of Nathaniel Hawthorne who believed the sins of our ancestors shape completely our destiny. As I argue two paragraphs hence, to aggregate sin to a collective whole reduces the role of personal responsibility. In fact, Reinhold Niebuhr argued that all collective action operates at a lower ethical standard than is expected of individuals.

My reaction is to wonder if a person who is born blind or without a limb is a sinner or simply one who inherited a genetic history that the person cannot change (at least not yet) but only live with?

But this post is not about my evangelist friend, it is a reflection on what to do about racism.

There are several points made in my present post. First, Christians, especially evangelists to the disaffected, ought to eschew “guilt bombs.” The irony in my evangelist friend is that he ministers to folks who have left the church for being shamed. They (and perhaps themselves) have had far too much guilt and damnation tossed at them and not enough showers of saving grace that we preach in our Reformed faith and share with our fellows.

Second, there is no biblical warrant for collective sin especially as it would impose itself on subsequent generations, except perhaps one. If there is any collective guilt, it is the universal sin that we all possess, we have fallen short of the glory of the Lord and as Paul said, no matter how hard we try to do the right thing, we do the wrong thing. We are responsible for, and suffer the consequences of our own actions. The actions of a mob invariably trace to the action or inaction of a single person.

The third point is that while there is no such thing as collective guilt there is a slightly different concept. It was broached by a participant in a Bible study I lead at Second Presbyterian Church. We do have the capacity to suffer from reflective sin. Reflection on historical sin becomes our personal sin when reflection does not move us to remedy the sin.  

This idea of reflective sin encapsulates the motivation we experience when we contemplate or discover a historical and persistent wrong promulgated on a person or persons by our fellow human travelers that causes us to ameliorate it.

The fourth point is that all sin is equal, it is an intentional separation from God. Racism is a sin like all other sins. It is persistent in every generation.

Sin, be it racism or envy, is part of what Paul calls the World of Flesh - that all encompassing reality within which we are all immersed that seeks to shape our values, alienate us from God and resists the full emergence of the Kingdom of God. The latter emergence is a reality inaugurated upon the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus.

My fifth and final point acknowledges to talk about race in this post (or about any controversial human relationship in public) in this polarized time using words that do not comfort to a prejudged, politically correct language and perspective invites reflexive negative judgment. The key emotion is compassion, heart-wrenching compassion. But if we all refuse to talk except from our own “special cultural or theological script” that protects our individual emotional sensitivities, we will only participate in pointless futility. That is a great sin itself.

Racism marks everyone it touches. I am a child of the South and the United States of America. Though I was born in Akron, Ohio, my parents and ancestors are of Irish, Welsh, Cherokee and German extraction who lived in the deep South (and Texas) and shared its cultural values. I spent all but the first nine months of my childhood in a small, sleepy town of Rome in Northwest Georgia with quite the connection to the residual animosity towards the hypocritical aggressors in the War Between the States, legal (de jure) racism and lynching, and desegregation. My family traces its lineage back to the Revolutionary War, for what it is worth. My time, for better or worse, is the “in between time” when the world dramatically but did not fully change in the face of an emerging new reality. This is one reason I can identify with the Apostle Paul (see below).

My childhood was marked by memories of colored and white water fountains and rest rooms at all the local stores, and of separate and unequal educational systems. I rode the bus home from school and vividly recall the separation of the races with the “colored” in the back of the bus (and all the times we were harassed by the bus driver for sitting back there), and separate motion picture theaters.

The memory of my own grandfather, who I dearly loved, remains in my mind. Once he came into one motion picture theater in town searching for my father, to tell him he needed to get himself, my mother, brother and I out of that theater because there was going to be trouble since some n----- had bought tickets and entered.

The debates in our small Southern Baptist church about the steps that the deacons would take to close the building if some group tried to integrate our service on a Sunday still linger in my mind. They were discussions held in a building with a picture of Jesus on the wall surrounded by children with the quote below, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” I guess that irony was lost on them also.

I attended primary and secondary school before and after the Brown v. Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court. My brother and I attended a private middle and high school at great financial sacrifice by my parents in part because of the poor quality of public secondary education and in part out of fear of us sitting in integrated classrooms.

The headmaster of my private school publically excoriated me as a thirteen year old in a morning assembly for mindlessly sitting down at a soda fountain in town while two young African-American teenagers tried to be served. It was an act claimed to besmirch the school’s reputation.

Racism in one form or another was ever present in my own extended family, people who I loved and still love dearly. We were all full participants in our segregated society and I had a ringside seat to observe it first hand from the “safe” side. Almost every one of my family from those times are now deceased. The one who is not has remarked how wrong they were back then. It has not changed his politics, nor mine (that are diametrically opposed to his in most respects). But I love him dearly.

 I recall attending Georgia Tech in Atlanta on Hemphill Avenue. Adjacent to the campus stood the Pickrick Restaurant of Lester Maddox who began selling ax handles there in 1964 to deal with “integrationists” and incite fellow segregationists. He subsequently became governor of Georgia, embarrassing many of its citizens.

I am a graduate of Georgia Tech and member of its service society that helped integrate Georgia Tech. At the time of my graduation with my Ph.D., Georgia Tech had the largest enrollment of African-American engineering students in the country. At the time of my matriculation it had about 40 women students, when I left the student population was about 25% female.

I said my time, for better or worse, is the “in between time” when the world dramatically but did not fully change. 

       This is what I mean:

On May 21, 2015,  I read that President Obama had started a Twitter account. Within minutes it was filled with posts that called him a “monkey,” and other unprinted racial slurs. Someone posted an image with his neck in a noose, and another posted an alteration of the famous 2008 Obama campaign poster to show him with an apparent broken neck as if he had been lynched. The campaign slogan “Hope” was changed to “Rope.”

In my research to prepare this post I discovered that the third and presumably final lynching in Rome GA occurred at the familiar corner of Fifth Avenue and Broad Street, one block from the courthouse, in front of the Forrest Hotel. The hotel is named for the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, an illiterate rube but brilliant tactician, to honor his action around Rome fighting the Northern armies.  
       That third lynching occurred on April 1, 1902. Walter Allen, an African-American, was forcibly removed from jail and lynched from a light pole in front of the hotel for an alleged choking attack on young girl, 15 year old Miss Blossom Adamson, “one of Rome’s finest.”

Mr. Allen was lynched before a crowd of about 4,000, many of whom then fired fully a thousand bullets into his body. In 1860, the total population of Rome was about 4,000, of which 1,919 were black slaves. In 1902, 4,000 was probably an exorbitant percent of its population that must have included sightseers from adjacent towns.

My family moved to Rome from a nearby community some years later.  My father was born in that nearby town fifteen years after this lynching. However, it is surely likely that many of the ancestors of my peers, if not my own relatives, had family in that crowd.

The Forrest Hotel is now a popular hotel for the growing tourism trade in Rome, a city that was denoted “the most livable small city” by some trade magazine in 1997. I doubt anyone recalls the lynching now, or wants to talk about it.

What should we do about my evangelist friend’s effort to paint guilt on all Caucasians for historical racism and the horrid lynching of the era I have just described in a polite way? What should we do about this very detailed report, "Lynching in America: Confronting the legacy of Racial Terror?”

The Equal Justice Initiative offers some suggestions. For example, could we accomplish something like the truth and reconciliation movement on South Africa?

Notice the difference, in South Africa it was the actual participants who engaged in the reconciliation. Here, most of the participants are deceased. 
       We can’t do what the Allies did on German towns where concentration camps were located. The Allied soldiers forced the German citizens to tour and clean out the camps and deal with the tortured corpses.

Should we push to have place markers at the notable locations of these lynchings, such as out front of the Forrest Hotel in Rome, GA? That actually might be an effective idea. But again, is our aim to shame or change?

Some, as I have experienced, seem to think we should sit around and feel guilty and shamed but offer no concrete suggestions for the future. 

One thing I have learned is when you start beating someone with a club, be it literally or verbally, it has a common result. The other to resists, becomes openly hostile and deaf to your criticism. In fact, one has to wonder if hostility and deafness born out of an idea of moral superiority tinges the critic as well.
       If we have any possibility at all to change a person, the only one we may change is our own person. Laws do not change minds. If so, the Civil rights Act would have ended racism and the social programs of the War on Poverty would have eliminated poverty. The only one with power to change is you.

Rather than be so presumptuous to tell you what to do, I offer some reflections and suggestions to consider as your actions. I will not try to make you feel bad and personally responsible for those lynching, because, as with the Nazi death camps, who cannot be grieved by observing pictures and hearing accounts of the dark side of our human condition?

I have seen the world change and it causes me to truly identify with Paul’s idea that we live in a world with feet in two diverging boats, the old world of Flesh and the Kingdom of God. It’s time to decide whether we want to take one foot out of one boat or the other, or fall into the water and drown.

When we change our self (the word I have in mind is repent, or turn around) then we have taken the only step we can - to be a model of Christianity to copy for those who have yet to do so. We do this when we love our fellow human traveler as God does. (I have to apologize to my evangelist friend because his comments were inspired by an outrage over injustice.)

Perhaps we must become color blind. That is, when the color of one’s skin no longer matters to us, we have dispensed the most powerful healing balm for racism there is, grace.

This is the one certain thing: as long as this old world has a breath in it, racism will be one of the tools it uses to work against us. The response to President Obama’s Twitter account is prima fascia evidence of that. We do not have to embrace it.

Part of the problem today is that in many respects racism has transformed into an economic and generational issue. Once poverty (or any change, including racism itself) spans a second generation reversal becomes increasingly difficult for both “the ins” and “the outs.” Some how we must create an environment in which HOPE is a valid alternative in minds that do not even know what Hope means. Hope is the core of our Faith. Our own two hands can nurture Hope.

What if we dispensed to others without restraint that grace we are blessed to possess?  Challenge racism when you see it but do it in a way that has a chance to have a positive effect. We may damn someone for the guilt of racism, but when we do so, we then live in fear that someone will point out our own horrible hidden guilt - and suffer the woe that we have closed a mind.

Perhaps the only way to change the world is to let the Lord lead the way so we each change our self and start living as a citizen in the present Kingdom of God. I urge you to be certain that you are giving of your own two hands and your gifts to the Kingdom’s glory. God is good.

All the time.

Amen.