As a Matthew 25 presbytery, one of our commitments is to “dismantle structural racism.” The word “structural” is redundant – all racism is structural – but it is there to distinguish racism from individual acts of prejudice or discrimination.
As Robin DiAngelo writes in White Fragility: Why It’s so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism,
“[R]acism… occurs when a racial group’s prejudice is backed by legal authority and institutional control. This authority and control transforms individual prejudices into a far-reaching system that no longer depends on the good intentions of individual actors; it becomes the default of the society and is reproduced automatically. Racism is a system.”
We are in the midst of three anniversary observances that illustrate the legacy of racism in our society. May 25 marked the first anniversary of the death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. Floyd’s death was not unique, except that it was caught on film. The sheer cruelty of his murder ignited a nationwide protest about the systemic problem of police killings of African American men.
May 31 marked the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, when mobs of white residents, some of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and destroyed 35 square blocks of the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa – at the time the wealthiest Black community in the United States. It resulted in between 175 and 300 deaths, nearly all of them African Americans. There were no convictions for any of the charges related to the violence. The “structural” legacy of the massacre lies in its historical diminishment. For years it was called a “race riot” – conjuring in white minds the image of a Black uprising. There have been decades of silence about the event; the riot was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories.
June 19 marks the 156th observance of “Juneteenth” – also known as Emancipation Day. It marks the announcement on June 19, 1865, of the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in Texas. Although the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed by Abraham Lincoln nearly three years before, and Robert E. Lee had surrendered over two months earlier, it was not until June 19 that the end of slavery in Texas was declared. Other forms of structural racism followed, the most recent of which are voter-suppression laws designed to systemically reduce African American and Latinx voter turnout. Juneteenth reminds us that even after laws are changed racism can still be institutionally supported and maintained.
When it comes to dismantling structural racism, however, the critical word is “dismantling.” My friend and colleague Ryan Landino, Executive Presbyter of Great Rivers Presbytery in central Illinois, recently challenged the church by asking,
“How much of white-led anti-racism effort isn’t actually doing the WORK, but is rather PAGEANTRY?
“Pageantry is a show. It’s spotlighting our own steps to come across as most possibly acceptable, capable, and virtuous. It’s calling for success without analyzing the metrics of that success, or who is actually succeeding in that success. The expected response to a pageant is to clap, affirm, praise, and admire. The product of a pageant is that, and really that alone….
“My problem is that I have a life-long education from the Academy of Virtuous Pageantry for White People…. I’ve learned the right words, the right programs, and the right signals that put on a good show…. I don’t want to be seen as anything other than acceptable, capable, virtuous. In those desires I have been well trained.
“But this is part of the work of dismantling. It includes dismantling THAT. What if instead of defending ourselves and our pageant, we listen, we learn, we own on the spot where we messed up, we adjust, we rewrite new steps, we realize that we don’t have all the pieces? Because doing that in real time sounds, to me, like the very work of anti-racism we are called to do.
“If we can’t do that, then our anti-racism isn’t dismantling anything: all we are really doing is asking others to shut up and appreciate the show.”
My question to our Presbytery is, what do we need to do to help dismantle racism, especially the racism that most of us have benefitted from, that we have never fully repented of, and that we still maintain by our pageants and our silence? I have no answers, just ears at this time.
Faithfully,
Dan Saperstein, Executive Presbyter
