A Sermon on American Racism

On Sunday, August 17, 2014, I preached this sermon in response to recent killings of unarmed Black men by police officers.

Really? I Don’t Think So

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Co-Pastor

August 17, 2014

Scripture: Matthew 15:21-28

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

New York City police strangled Eric Garner to death. Los Angeles police shot and killed Ezell Ford as he lay on the ground. Ferguson, Missouri, police shot and killed Michael Brown. All three of these victims were unarmed Black men. They are just recent examples of police violence against Black men that got some publicity. Various Internet sites report that a Black man is killed by police or vigilantes every 28 minutes in this country. Remember Trayvon Martin? He’s just another one we heard about. Police violence against Black men doesn’t always result in death. Recently in Seattle a Westlake Mall security guard maced a Black man while ignoring white law breakers. Remember Rodney King? I used to work at Catholic Community Services in the Central District of Seattle, where the population is mostly Black. One day I was looking out a window from which I could see our parking lot. There was a Seattle police car there, and a Seattle police officer was talking to a Black man he apparently had pulled over. There was no struggle. The Black man wasn’t threatening the police officer. Nonetheless, a second police car showed up. Then a third. A co-worker who also saw what was going on said “It’s the Central District.” These are but a very few examples from America’s shameful and sinful culture of racism.

Most of us are white, and I need to ask those of us who are: Do we get it that Black Americans are afraid of the police and have good reason to be? Pastor Jane tells a story from a seminary class in which the teacher asked how the students would react to the police knocking on their door. The white students said they’ be curious and want to cooperate and help. The Black students said they’d be suspicious. Those Black students weren’t being irrational. They weren’t being paranoid. They were reacting out of their experience and the experience of Black people generally, just as the white students were reacting out of their experience and the experience of white people generally. Of course no generalization is true of every member of any group of people, and certainly not all police officers are a threat to Black people, but it is still true that on the whole Black Americans experience the police differently than white Americans do. They experience them in significant part as a threat. That’s because the police represent society at large, and our society at large is racist. It was in its origins. It still is.

Our society is racist, but just how does racism work? That’s a crucial question for us Americans today. Here’s a good answer to that question from an African-American pastor. The Rev. Tony Lee, identified in an article on The Huffington Post’s religion page as an African-American pastor of an AME church in Maryland, says that the problem of young Black men dying at the hands of the police  is an example “of daily antagonisms felt by black people on the street.” He said “This is part of a wider school-to-prison pipeline and the ghettoization and de-humanization of black bodies.” There’s the crux of the problem in one word—dehumanization. American racism does nothing less than deny the full and equal humanity of Black people. That’s how racism works.

It doesn’t just work that way in our country. We see it at work in our passage from Matthew this morning. In that reading Jesus has an encounter with a woman identified as Canaanite. That means she’s not Jewish. It means she’s from a different people than Jesus is. In this story Jesus calls the Canaanite woman a dog. Hard to believe perhaps, but Jesus calls another human being a dog. The way Matthew tells this story, for Jesus, at first at least, the Canaanite woman who asks him for help isn’t even human. When he calls her a dog he makes her less than human. He gets over it by the end of the story, but in the story he denies the full humanity of the woman with whom he’s speaking.

That’s how racism works. For a racist a member of the other race isn’t fully human. That’s how human cruelty usually works, especially when it’s practiced on a huge scale. For the Nazis the Jews were less than fully human. How else could they slaughter so many millions of them? For American racists Black people aren’t fully human. How else can we lynch so many of them? How else can we deny them equal opportunity in employment, housing, health care, and especially legal justice? If a leader wants people to brutalize another people that leader has to start by dehumanizing the people he wants brutalized. Back in the 1960s we called Vietnamese people “gooks.” I did it myself. We were killing Vietnamese people in huge numbers, so we dehumanized them. Dehumanizing them made it easier for us to kill them. It made it possible for those of us who weren’t personally directly involved in killing them to live with the way our country was killing them. Racism dehumanizes. That’s its primary sin. It makes human beings less than human. It calls people dogs.

Jesus got over it in our little story, thank God, but how he did raises an important issue for us. In the story the Canaanite woman basically outwits Jesus. When he calls her a dog she says yes, but even the dogs get the crumbs that fall from the table. Jesus is impressed, calls her a woman not a dog, and gives her the help she has requested. In the story the dehumanized one brings about a change of consciousness in the one doing the dehumanizing. I’m really glad Jesus gets over his dehumanizing of this woman in our little story, but we need to be really careful about how that happens. You see, the racism of white Americans isn’t a problem for Black Americans to solve. It is a problem for us white Americans to solve, as our colleague the Rev. Dr. Marsha Williams, a Black pastor in our Conference, recently reminded us. Jesus’ failure to recognize the full humanity of the Canaanite woman was really his problem to solve, not hers. So let’s take this story as a warning, not as a model.

Speaking now as a white person and to those of you who are white, if our racism is our problem to solve, how do we do it? I have no magic answers to that question. We’ve all grown up in a radically racist culture. Yes, racism isn’t as bad—or at least isn’t as overt—as it used to be, but our culture is still radically racist. You don’t get over a history of centuries of virulent racism in a few decades, maybe not even in a few centuries. So getting over American racism is not a simple task, and there are no simple means of doing it. This morning I want to suggest just one basic but indispensible step.

You white folk among us, how many of you, how many of us, understand that we have white privilege every moment of our lives? We’ve all got it whether we’re aware of it or not. If you’re not doing anything wrong, like speeding say, do you get nervous every time you see a police officer? No? That’s white privilege. When you apply for a job do you think that you have to be much more qualified than the applicants of another race if you stand a chance of getting hired? No? That’s white privilege. Have you been turned down for rental housing on some obviously made up excuse? No? That’s white privilege. If you’ve ever been involved in any kind of court case civil or criminal, have you thought the court was going to rule against you just because of the color of your skin? No? That’s white privilege. We white people have it, every last one of us.

It is so easy for us white Americans to convince ourselves that racism is a problem of the past not of our present. Heck, we’ve even got a Black President, right? So how can our society be racist? Well, whether we like Obama as a President or not I trust we’re all glad that his race didn’t stop him from getting elected, but one election doesn’t wipe out racism. Lots of people still voted against Obama quite without regard for his politics just because he’s Black. Moreover, it’s so easy for us to point to Obama as proof that we aren’t racist, then go on with our usual racism with nothing really changed. It is white America’s denial of its racism that is the biggest obstacle to overcoming it.

We’re not going to solve American racism here this morning. Far from it. We can however stop lying to ourselves. We live in a racist culture. It’s not our fault that we do, but we do. Overcoming racism has to start with us becoming more aware of that foundational fact of American life. We white people have to start admitting our white privilege. And we have to stop dehumanizing people of color. I’m sure we would all say yes, of course, Black, Red, Yellow, and Brown people are all human beings. We’d all say it, but do we really get what it means? Do we really get what true equality means? When you see a Black person on the street who you don’t know can you really say to that person Namaste, the God in me greets the God in you? Maybe we’d all answer yes; but when I hear that yes part of me wants to say Really? I don’t think so. I think we’ve all got racism in our bones because we all grew up in a racist culture. The only way we’ll ever get over it is to start by admitting it. So let’s admit it, shall we? Maybe if enough of us do fewer unarmed Black men will die at the hands of the police. Amen.