It is almost painful to listen to the verbal gyrations of Nikki Haley, who claims Christianity, trying to deny that America always has been, and continues to be, a racist country.
Americans need to grow up past their childish fragility. Admitting national racism doesn’t “harm our children” or seek to “make them feel bad.”
To admit national racism is as good a thing as it is to admit “to err is human.” Just as the latter alerts us to be careful, the former would enable us to be confessional, corrective and compensatory, even if never cured.
Michael Friday
Watching Haley and certain “experts” on talk shows making inane comments to defend America as not racist is more disgusting than laughable.
Here’s one such comment: “If America is racist, why do Asians, Africans, Chinese, Indians, Central and South Americans, Filipino and many others keep coming to America?” This is nonsense.
Most people who come to America do so for economic reasons; some are willing to brave both the racism and the gun-ism they already know prevails here rather than remain in the war-torn and drug-infested violence in the countries they flee. On the other hand, most people who decide, intentionally, not to come to America, will list racism high among the preventers.
Haley and others need to tell us why, if America has never been racist, America’s severely depleted indigenous peoples are on reservations, concentrated on the central and midwestern parts of America. They need to tell us how so-called African Americans came to be in America — if America never has been racist.
“They need to tell us how so-called African Americans came to be in America — if America never has been racist.”
They must say, before next month — if America is not racist — why every Black History Month, Americans discover more and more heroes, inventors and contributors to American wealth, strength, history and culture who have been deliberately obscured or erased just like Haley and others try to erase slavery as part of American history.
If America is not racist, they must tell us why people of African descent, although only 14% of the American population, comprise 37% of America’s incarcerated population and why only 4% of white males, who are a fully one-third of America’s population, ever find themselves in America’s prisons.
If America never has been racist, how do we explain the preponderance of fully white and fully African American congregations instead of more blended ones, all over America at Martin Luther King’s proverbial 11 a.m. hour on Sundays? Does Haley know why there is an American denomination called “Southern” Baptists, of which her prominent colleagues, like Speaker Mike Johnson, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, James Lankford, Ted Cruz (gasp!), and even Matt Gaetz (double gasp!!), and a full threescore other House and Senate Republicans, are members? Would she fathom and honestly assess why these persons’ policies, postures and, sometimes, personal attitudes toward colored minorities (and the “Tea Party” and “Freedom Caucus” response to the election of a Black president) are and were what the records all show they were and are? Has she any idea about the “great exchange” that practically — in racial matters — made the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln become the Democratic Party of Robert Byrd (and vice-versa), when Democrat Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, knowing he “just lost the South for a generation”? (It’s worse; it’s been lost for two.)
Does Haley know how many Black people were lynched in America at the hands, quite frequently, of white Southern Methodist, Southern Baptist and other deacons, Sunday school superintendents and other church leaders? Is she — just like Tim Scott, her fellow South Carolinian — blind to the highly ubiquitous dynamics of race that gets Black people killed so easily and so frequently when they encounter white (and also non-white) police, which credible social scholars name as neo-lynching? Hasn’t she heard about “Black Wall Street?”
If America never has been racist, why did George Liele choose to flee the American South for Jamaica in the winter of 1782? Why did full companies of slaves opt to become soldiers fighting for the British in the American War, on the promise of their freedom if the British won? Why did they choose to flee America for Trinidad and elsewhere in the Caribbean in 1816 after the Brits lost, if America was not racist?
The founding and beginnings of Baptists in Jamaica (by Liele) and Trinidad (by those companies of former slaves and soldiers) are testimony not only to the fact of America’s racism, but also the breadth of the reach of America’s racism. For, make no mistake, it is American racism and religious supremacy (not to mention woeful biblical mal-and-misinterpreted idiocy) that render most so-called evangelical Americans blindly taking sides with Israel’s political posture toward Palestine, regardless of what Israel’s political class does to Palestine.
“Until America confesses her original sin of racism, the political system … will continue to produce obfuscating prevaricators on the matter, like Nikki Haley.”
Look, until America confesses her original sin of racism, the political system — whose political and ethnic ancestry created this racism in the first place — will continue to produce obfuscating prevaricators on the matter, like Nikki Haley.
I know the SBC managed an apology for slavery almost 30 years ago; but I am yet to hear a full-throated confession of the sin of racism and see repentance — that 180-degree turn —away from the sin of racism.
The Greek word epistrepho defines repentance as action, not mere words; and it appears to me there remains room for the SBC to bear real witness to credible repentance of this racism, with the repudiation of all the vestiges of racism — including Trumpism — starting with people like Al Mohler, Robert Jeffress and Franklin Graham, even if SBC politicians lack the Christian credibility to do it with their immense power.
Simply put, it is Christians, more than politicians, who are holding America back from confession and repentance and endangering our people, country and world.
The politicians who lie about America and race will continue to fool “nice” religious simpletons but also find incestuous enabling from some so-called evangelical leaders who ought to know something about confession and repentance, but who prefer the lie, the privilege and avoidance of the cost of the Cross — that Christian icon that symbolizes taking the higher and harder road toward healing.
But so long as American Christians continue to coddle racists and liars, America continues her fast flight downward to implosion or extinction. As one who has visited the massive historic ruins all over Athens, Corinth, Delphi and elsewhere in used-to-be-great Greece, and used-to-be-greater Rome, and who has, along with everybody else, watched used-to-be-great London Bridge finish falling down under Boris Johnson, I’ve seen a thing or two about extinction.
Michael Friday serves as executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of Greater Indianapolis. He is the author of And Lead Us Not Into Dysfunction: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, of Church institutions and Their Leaders. He has served Baptists in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and the United States.
