Racist is an ugly label. Those accused of racial discrimination often defend themselves by saying, “I am not a racist!” We’ve heard people ranging from Pres. Donald Trump to celebrity chef Paula Deen make that claim, most recently Amy Cooper, after she called 911 about an “African American man” she encountered in Central Park, who happened to be birdwatching.
The recent killings of Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and George Floyd in Minnesota reflect the reality that African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than are white Americans. Ahmaud Arbery’s killing in Georgia illustrates the danger they face from white vigilantes. These deaths come in the wake of a health pandemic that has killed African Americans at more than double the rate (92.3 deaths per 100,000 population) of white Americans (45.2), due to social inequities related to employment, living conditions, and health care.
It is time to admit that we are all racists, because we are shaped by a society that has at its core the erroneous notion that white people are superior to black people. Racism is deeply embedded in the institutions that socialize us, and white dominance guarantees its continuation. Those in power rarely relinquish the thing that benefits them.
Racism within American Methodism, my own tradition, dates to that church’s earliest years when black Methodists left to form the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Zion in 1821 because they were denied leadership opportunities. After splitting over slavery in 1844, the north and south branches of the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) reunited in 1939 with a segregated structure that would prevent black leadership over whites. That structure persisted until the 1968 merger that formed the current United Methodist Church, which remains largely segregated at the congregational level.
The MEC South resisted reunification for decades, insisting on the segregated social space that marked the American south and was enforced by Jim Crow laws and lynchings. Writing a century ago, MEC South Bishop Warren Candler weakly denounced lynching, then went on to defend it as “generally speaking an outburst of passionate indignation against an unspeakable crime.” He continued, “If a man has a brutal origin and a beastly end, the offense of maiming or killing him is no greater crime than that of cruelty to animals,” reinforcing the idea that African Americans were less than human.
Reading such horrific comments leaves me wondering how leaders of my own religious tradition could reconcile such violence with a Gospel that commands love of God and love of neighbor. The theory of Pierre Bourdieu helps me to understand that they could perpetuate racial domination, even through violence, because they had been taught and had reinforced by every social institution that this was God’s intended order, and they taught the same to their children and grandchildren. 1
Such arguments have justified white dominance since the first ship brought enslaved Africans to provide the labor on which our country’s prosperity is built. More than 150 years after slavery was abolished, the mindset that African Americans are inferior and dangerous persists because it is entrenched in our national narrative, and it benefits white Americans, who control that narrative.2
The Civil Rights movement changed many minds, hearts, and laws, but it takes generations of intentional disruption to undo social conditioning. Part of that disruption has been naming the problem white supremacy or white privilege, putting the focus on those perpetuating the domination, rather than those who are victimized by it. Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” offers a list of ways white people benefit from racism while not having to confront it in their day-to-day lives.
Three years after that essay was published, a video captured the brutal beating of Rodney King, showing the world what black people have long experienced. More than three decades and countless videos later, another list is circulating about white privilege, with hashtags naming specific African Americans killed while engaged in often mundane activities.
We know it happens. We know it is wrong. And yet it continues. I cannot imagine the danger that police officers face everyday, but their social conditioning leads many to have an unfounded fear of people with dark skin. One young black man told me about his cousin being pulled over. When the police officer came to his car door, my friend’s cousin had both hands pressed against the window, driver’s license in one and registration in the other. Instead of being reassured, the officer called for backup.
There is no simple solution to the deeply entrenched racism that has shaped us all, black and white. But a good start would be to hold accountable police officers and civilian vigilantes whose defense in such cases is that they feared for their life, when in fact their black victims have much more cause for fear.
There are systemic reasons why they get away with it, so if we want things to change, we need to change the systems. In addition to reforming law enforcement and the judicial system, churches, schools, and other communities need to hold trainings and conversations that help us recognize the racism embedded in those institutions. In these conversations and in personal relationships, white Americans need to really listen to people of color describe their lived reality in a racist society, and how different it is from ours. We need to be willing to call out those who say and do things that perpetuate racist assumptions.
Otherwise we will continue to socialize future generations to see it as normal that one race of people can demean, subjugate, and even kill another race with little cause and little accountability. We will continue to produce more racists.
- For a fuller discussion of this history and of Bourdieu’s theory, see my book We Shall Not Be Moved: Americans Debate Race, Gender, and Homosexuality, especially Chapter 2.
- It was not surprising that Pres. Trump called on governors to “dominate” those protesting Floyd’s murder. When arbitrary domination is challenged, the dominant group often resorts to language that seeks to reinscribe the relationship.