Talking about Race

Much has been made in the news and the debates about some inflammatory remarks made by the former pastor of Trinity UCC church where Barak Obama is a member. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a widely popular preacher who has preached many sermons at Trinity UCC (The Nation’s largest UCC congregation) and in other churches and conferences across this country. Hundreds of them have been videotaped. I personally have a video of his keynote presentation at a conference I attended. Kathleen has heard him speak on several occasions. Out of his hundreds of sermons some few have contained language that white folks have considered over the top, as when at Howard University, to an almost entirely African American gathering a few days after 9/11 he said that instead of singing God Bless America he would say, “God Damn America.”

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We ask “How in the world could anyone not love America?” “Why in the world would anyone want to harm and humiliate the United States on a major scale?” “Aren’t we the greatest and most free nation in the whole history of human civilization?”

All Americans do not agree that the United States is the greatest nation on earth, the most moral, the most prosperous, and certainly not the nations which is most just and fair and careful of the rights of its citizens. We have been poisoned by our history of chattel slavery, and by pervasive racism that persists over 150 years after the end of slavery. Many African Americans are more than bitter, often angry because of the limitations and insults that they have lived with all of their lives. Fifty years after Brown versus Board of Education we still have segregated schools. School systems like Hartford which serve the minority community do not provide education equal to what is offered in suburban schools. The horrifically low graduation rate for Hartford’s youth would not be tolerated in any suburban school. On April 17 I went to an event at the legislature highlighting the health disparities in our state. I was shocked at some of the facts presented. In our state per 1000 live births of white babies five die before the age of one, over 14 out of 1000 Blacks babies die in the first year of life. Ten percent of white adults are uninsured in the state, 21.4 % of Black adults are uninsured. For Pediatric Asthma the hospitalization rate for whites is 90, it is 263 for Blacks. The same kind of disparities exists for poverty, education, housing etc. Blacks are behind in every measure of social and economic health as a result of persistent and pervasive racism.

But white folks do not get it; even those of us who have had African American friends for many years still do not get it, because we do not personally experience these disparities. Our African American friends seldom share their experiences and their rage with those of us who are white. We can dismiss the few stories we hear about our friends being detained for driving while black as the result of a few bad cops. In Memphis I picked up a book entitled Gracism, The Art of Inclusion by David Anderson, an African American Pastor. He said he was detained three times on his first day on his job as associate pastor at a predominantly white church in a ritzy Chicago neighborhood. Those of us who live in white skin don’t get it! We do not hear about more than a fraction of the discrimination and insults that our African American, Latino and Muslim friends experience daily.

Our society will not change if we continue to remain silent and pretend that racism is not a problem in this country and that we are not racists. Other people may be racists, but we want to think we are not, and we are. Racism and the myth of Black inferiority have poisoned all of us, what ever color our skin is. Barack Obama broke the conspiracy of silence that has gripped America; now it is time that the rest of us join in the conversation about race and racism.