By David Gushee
This is my first column in two months. My absence stems from many weeks on the road. I am still processing these experiences.
With my daughter Marie, I spent two weeks in Cape Town, South Africa, helping to teach in an innovative M.A. program of Carson Newman College, while also serving in black and “coloured” townships. Very shortly thereafter I boarded a plane for Tel Aviv and a nearly two-week course out of Fuller Seminary on peacemaking and citizen diplomacy in the Middle East.
In coming weeks I plan to write more about these experiences, but I begin with how the United States looks from the vantage point of South Africa and Israel with regard to two issues: money and race.
In South Africa, American generosity is deeply appreciated. American Christians are heavily involved in supporting benevolence programs in some of the poorest areas of the nation. This is true both at the governmental level and in terms of the compassion teams sent by numerous churches and parachurch organizations.
We ran into earnest American Christians all over Cape Town. And President Bush’s funding of the emergency AIDS relief program in Africa is remembered with warm appreciation. President Obama and the U.S. government need to continue supporting effective AIDS prevention and relief programs there.
In Israel, American generosity is also deeply appreciated, though that generosity has been largely one-sided. Our group did see projects in a few Palestinian areas that had been funded by the U.S. government. But the main forms of American generosity there include almost $4 billion a year in U.S. military aid to Israel, and the millions of dollars that flow in from American Jews and Christians to help support their respective political-religious visions in that troubled land.
Not to get too political, but I found myself deeply troubled by much of what this money is buying.
America’s progress on race relations is visible by contrast with both South Africa and Israel. The strange confluence of visiting both countries in the same summer gave opportunity to see the very stark differences between societies in which race/ethnicity remain absolutely central to everyday life and racial lines remain quite distinct over against what is happening in large quadrants of our own society.
Though South Africa, especially due to the incredibly wise leadership of Nelson Mandela, made a remarkably peaceful political transition to majority rule, racial/ethnic distinctions between particular groups remain very clear.
In Cape Town, for example, there are whites, blacks and coloureds. Everyone knows who is who. They speak different languages/dialects, they largely live in different neighborhoods and they socialize mainly with their own groups.
We saw a handful of exceptions, but these were indeed exceptional. Meanwhile, economic power seems largely concentrated among white South Africans. The level of poverty in the black and coloured areas we visited was some of the worst I have seen in the world.
As for Israel, the same racialization of society is visible, though the situation is incredibly complex.
Politically, the State of Israel consists of Israeli Jews and Israeli non-Jews, usually still called Israeli Arabs. The latter are citizens of Israel but they complain and can document the ways in which theirs is a distinct and second-class kind of citizenship.
Palestinians in the occupied territories share Arab identity with Israeli Arabs and other Arab peoples and yet they have a strong, frustrated national identity as well. The only Jews to be found in the occupied territories are the unwelcome soldiers and settlers.
In Israel, Jews and Arabs are educated in different schools, most often live in separate communities and very rarely date or intermarry. We visited a community where Jews and Arabs are living in intentional residential integration, but this was noteworthy precisely because it is so rare. Even there no one seems to believe in a dissolving of the clear cultural/ethnic boundaries between the two peoples.
I found myself feeling happily astonished that my white-majority country elected Barack Obama president. I saw with new eyes how surprisingly valuable our integrated schools, interpenetrating cultures and, yes, our interracial friendships and marriages have become in making us one national community consisting of an endless variety of mixed and blended racial and ethnic groups.
The Fuller student group included an American of Iranian background and another whose parents come from India. They baffled Israeli security and aroused suspicion. But we knew they were just as American as anyone in our group of Irish or French stock.
Much is wrong in our country these days, including residues of racism, but overall this contrast on the role of race makes me very, very grateful to be an American.