Another Racist Like Me

{This was first published on April 25 in Necessary Therapy}

 

    

“If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of that wound into himself… I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it.  And I want to be cured…”   (from The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry).

          Racism is alive and well and living in America (among other places).  This is just as much true today as it was in 1970, when Wendell Berry penned the words above.  It may (or may not) take more sophisticated or subtler forms, but it is just as pernicious and debilitating as when the first Europeans invaded the shores of North American and when the first Africans stepped off the ship and entered “the land of the free.”

         In his book, The Hidden Wound, Berry confronts the disease of racism he inherited from his ancestors.  For him, this was “augmented and deepened by my life.”  In typical Berry fashion, he moves from ethical reflection to personal story to classic literary references and around again.  Along the way, he touches on what has been said in the pulpits and repeated in the pews.  Rather than drawing on the power of Scripture to set free,

        “the language of religion became abstract, intensely (desperately?) pious, rhetorical, inflated with phony mysticism and joyless passion… Far from curing the wound of racism, the white man’s Christianity has been its soothing bandage — a bandage masquerading as Sunday clothes, for the wearing of which one expects a certain moral credit.“

         Has the Church gotten any better?  I hope.  I like to think so.  On our best days and in the right places, I believe we have (not by our own doing, but by the grace of God).  But the truth is that within the Church, we still perpetuate (if not promote) the same kind of hatred against others (”illegal immigrants” perhaps being the “niggers” of today).  

        And this is not just the sin of right-wing political or theological hawks preying on the “lesser fortunates.”  To all my enlightened liberal friends on the side of “liberation” - hear this.  It’s just as condescending (if not more so) to think you can save somebody from oppression as it is to work to keep them down.

     Berry points this out in his conclusion of The Hidden Wound  -

          “It is not, I think, a question of when and how the white people will ‘free’ the black and the red people.  It is a condescension to believe that we have the power to do that.  Until we have recognized in them the full strength and grace of their distinctive humanity we will be able to set no one free, for we will not be free ourselves.“

         The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, will set us free.  This truth is not of our own making.  It is nothing short of a gift from God.  It is, in fact, the Gift from God in the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the great Wounded Healer.