400 years of slavery and me
Picture this - Kevin Costner comes galloping over the ridge on a valiant amber steed and crashes down into a shallow river, rifle raised as spray from his horse parts like the Red Sea and he guns down dozens of U.S. soldiers who are attacking a tribe of peaceful Sioux Indians. It is the climax of the movie Dances with Wolves, and with John Williams’ epic brass score backing him up, Costner looks like a rugged, semi-woke modern man transplanted into the great holocaust of America’s history. A white man, after spending time with Native Americans learns to see their humanity for the first time, becomes disgusted with the country’s horrific expansion, and joins in one last effort to fight off the inevitable collapse of the land’s first occupants.
He is who we should have been, could we do it all over again. There is only one problem, even for a work of fiction. It is terribly, tremendously untrue.
When white people get around to telling stories about our racist American past, we tend to imagine a great deal. In movies and books and TV shows there may be a whole host of racists dominating the scenes, but we always ensure there is at least one white character who righteously disagrees and intervenes to help those poor non-white folks live a better life. They drive the black musician around the Jim Crow South in the Green Book or let the genius women saving the space program use a closer bathroom in Hidden Figures or write a book about the stories of the housekeepers exposing the white families who abuse them in the Help. But most importantly, they give us a chance to imagine what we would have done had we grown up in such a time. Surely we would not have been like those terrible bigots. We would be the good one, the token non-racist, the white savior. Or so we imagine.
As the New York Times’ incredible 1619 Project lays out, 2019 marks four hundred years since the very first slaves were kidnapped from Africa and brought to the land that would one day become the United States. Before the country even began we built the economy on the back of slaves, sustaining our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness by stealing it away from those who didn’t look like us. This anniversary, ugly as it is, made me wonder - what would I have done if I lived in the two hundred and forty-six years that passed between the first slaves being brought to these shores in 1619 and when the practice was finally outlawed?
If I had lived in, say Virginia in 1815, would I ignore the easy development and progress of my white neighbors and commit myself to earning only the fruits of labor and sweat from my own brow? As my Church leaders turned a blind eye and even owned slaves themselves to support their religious orders and institutions, would I work for change and call for conversion of heart? When violence and murder were used to terrorize the forced labor camps all around me, would I appeal to universal human dignity and equality among people in an attempt to appease the wrath of the slavedriver?
Even I, it must be admitted, am no stranger to imagination. It is easy to pretend I would have been some righteous and valorous secret agent on the Underground Railroad, spiriting away the enslaved under the misty cover of night.
And yet pretending to wear a superhero’s cape or hold aloft Moses’ staff has never been an especially fruitful spiritual exercise. And more to the point, there are a lot of privileges I get in life, but reimagining a past where I wouldn’t have been a slave owner is not one of them. Given the opportunity, given permission, who am I to say I would be better than so many who came before me?
Of course this is not to say I would have been a rich and vicious plantation owner, fanning myself on the veranda of the big house and delighting in the whipping of a slave. One need not be wealthy to be cruel, or Southern to be racist.
Mostly, you simply need to be surrounded by others who find racism permissible. How is a conscience formed at a young age, even with eternal truths readily available, if not by the influence of those around you? And such is the world I would have found myself in - racist parents, racist neighbors, racist government, racist church, racist me.
The truth is, I know I would have been a blatant racist in the 1800’s because I was such a timid racist growing up in the early oughts. And if I am honest, I am an unwitting racist now. Today. I have marched in Black Lives Matter protests and retweeted countless instances of injustice and prejudice. Quick, someone please pat me on the back. But when I feel slighted by a black person, there is still that nagging thought that creeps in almost instantly that it is because of race not personality or circumstance. Our nation’s foundational prejudices whisper on my shoulder and I see patterns where none exist, forcing myself to reel back, to be fair, give the benefit of the doubt I would give a white person treating me the same way.
When a white person says something mildly racist, the kind of wink, wink statement that can be easily defused with a “Relax, I’m only joking!” I usually stay quiet. I go along to get along. I keep the peace.
But of course I don’t really. It is not peaceful for black folks when I bite my tongue. It is a status quo that brings pain and alienation and even terrorism in their daily lives. My silence today is proof of the silence I would inhibit in a more legally ruthless age. The brutality of slavery is no reason to excuse myself. If it was as acceptable then as police killings and mass incarceration and presidential tweets are today, then I am convinced I would be the same man. Earnest, but weak and eager to seek the approval of the folks around me, even if it costs those whose approval means nothing to the world.
Not long ago a white coworker told me to say, we have instead of we got. “You sound like you’re from Atlanta,” she said dismissively. I knew exactly what she meant to say - I sounded uneducated, black. I let it slide, contenting myself to keep saying we got despite her but unwilling to cause a confrontation with someone I still had to keep working.
In high school a friend on the baseball team claimed to a small group of us at a fast food restaurant that he didn’t have any problems with black people, not really, but there are “Ni***rs and then there are Ni***rs.” He emphasized the second version like there was some obvious distinction we were supposed to understand. Our little all white group knew enough to push back and say, no there wasn’t, but he quickly rejected our protests and said we had not grown up in the neighborhood he had, where we would have learned such things. More than the shock of a friend using the N-word though, what sticks out to me today is how eager we were to move on. We made our obligatory objection and then changed the subject to bring equilibrium back to our group. No one brought it up again. No one considered getting rides in a group that did not involve him or trying to change his mind. No one contemplated how he might act the next time he meets a black person he considered inherently worse than the rest.
I don’t like this simple fact - that my complicity in racism today reflects on what my actions would be in a country with slavery. I despise it. But I also can’t change it, unless I’m willing to change who I am today. Only when complicity and cowardice and mild tolerance of the intolerant become anathema to me, will I be able to look back at the white men and women of the slavery and Jim Crow eras as somehow different than me.
At age seventeen I heard a speaker at a Catholic conference say that the spiritual life is a bit like the cross itself, with a vertical beam and a horizontal beam. The horizontal part of the cross reaches out side to side like the call to love your neighbor and all those invocations of the beatitudes. Most people these days, the speaker told us, think being a Christian is all about that horizontal beam - soup kitchens and doing unto others. But there was also the equally important and drastically ignored piece of the cross that stretched heavenward, he continued, that was your prayer life, your interior connection and devotion Jesus. The beams were inseparable for the life of a Christian, the speaker reminded us, but it was that vertical piece that connected you with God and thus gave you any strength to love your neighbor.
No one left the conference that day wondering which piece he thought was more important. In a Church losing its way with social justice warriors replacing spiritual fathers and prayer labyrinths replacing the Holy Rosary, the world needed to remember it was the vertical beam that held up the horizontal.
And I suppose much of that is true. Seeking God’s face is how we learn to find God in our neighbor. But the reverse is rather true as well. How can you say that you desire heaven if you want no part in building the kingdom here on earth? Origen puts it this way - “It is clear that he who prays for the coming of God’s kingdom prays rightly to have it within himself, that it may grow and bear fruit and become perfect.” For our eternal home is far more than simply where God resides, it is that place where there is neither male nor female, Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. If you don’t want to live in such a place now, why would you choose to “go there” when you die? Those vertical and horizontal beams are indeed lashed together so tight they become inseparable.
This was the fatal flaw I see, insofar as it can be whittled down to a singular point, in the rationale of so many popes and cardinals and founding fathers and half-hearted slaveowners who all encouraged and took part in hundreds of years of the transatlantic slave trade. They cast their eyes to heaven and imagined they desired a better afterlife while they tolerated the injustices of the life they had been given. It is the weak point in how I handle racism today. I consider it a shame. I pray for better. I pretend I would have been the hero a hundred and fifty years ago while I ignore confrontations today with relatives and coworkers and old friends that would actually make a difference. Who do I think I am kidding? Certainly not God.
That we live in a world where I do not own slaves is a fact worthy of getting on my knees and thanking God above for the black Americans who came before me and fought for justice and equality - the ideals our white forefathers pretended only applied to them. The great abolitionists not only freed themselves, but helped free me from the terrible fate that would otherwise await me, not just in this life, but in the next. They are the Moses in this story. In our story. My soul walks a little closer to God thanks to their sacrifices, their courage, their moral clarity where I so often have gone without. Their great work has brought all white Americans closer to that point where the beams of the cross meet.
Now it is our job to stop pretending, and start believing it.