Читать книгу Preaching Black Lives (Matter) - Gayle Fisher-Stewart - Страница 16
ОглавлениеA SERMON TO MYSELF AND MY WHITE COLLEAGUES
MARK 5:34
He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
Sometimes the Spirit leads us to apparent contradictions. That being the case, I’d like to talk about listening; specifically, listening for Black lives. For a White preacher like myself, the challenge of this book, Preaching Black Lives (Matter) is an inherently thorny one. My people are the producers and beneficiaries of White Supremacist structures that demean both Black lives and the importance of those lives. This is not solely a historical matter. Consciously or otherwise, we participate in and reaffirm these structures every day. Therefore, we have a special moral responsibility to bring them down.
But all too often when we raise our voices to denounce White supremacy (if we raise them at all), we do so in ways that re-inscribe patterns of White supremacy. All too often, the very act of raising our voices draws attention away from Black witnesses, who are more capable than we to testify about the importance of their own lives. Speaking from a position of power, like a pulpit, only amplifies this effect of re-centering Whiteness. So we work at cross purposes, undercutting the very people for whom we aspire to advocate.
If we are silent, we tacitly support the forces of White supremacy, and the unjust profit they deliver to us. If we speak, we repeat patterns of White supremacy that perpetually privilege White voices. We are in a devil’s bind. What is to be done?
There is no easy answer, but we might begin by taking a cue from one of our own, a White man, indeed a very White man, who was nonetheless a foster child of the Black church,1 one murdered for his witness on behalf of those whom Whiteness demeaned:
It is God’s love for us that He not only gives us His Word but also lends us His ear. So it is His work that we do for our brother when we learn to listen to him. Christians, especially ministers, so often think they must always contribute something when they are in the company of others, that this is the one service they have to render. They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking.2
If we do not listen, we will not understand what is required, for Black lives alone can tell what justice they require. If we do not listen, we will never know our own blind spots. If we do not listen, and indeed, allow ourselves to be transformed by the voices we hear, there is no hope for us.
We who are called White must preach for Black lives. The sin that threatens them is ours, and our Savior will not excuse us if we fail to raise our voices. But if we are to preach for Black lives, we must first learn to listen for Black lives. Reading the witnesses of this book might be a good place to start. But for us, listening, rather than merely hearing, is no easy feat.
In her book White Fragility, the secular educator Robin DiAngelo describes and critiques the defensive responses we (that is White people) deploy when encountering, and especially when challenged on, the issues of race and racism.3 She makes the point that while these defenses are often unconscious and reflexive, they are not innocent, but rather, weaponized. They work to derail honest conversations on racism, and thereby obliterate even the possibility of confronting and dismantling the structure of White supremacy.
DiAngelo is an atheist, but if we were to translate her ideas into a theological framework, we might say that White fragility represents sin’s effort to remain unexamined. In the face of such dissembling fragility, DiAngelo’s prescription is simple: “toughen up.” Her central argument is:
Stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them. We do have them, and people of color already know we have them; our efforts to prove otherwise are not convincing. An honest accounting of these patterns is no small task given the power of white fragility and white solidarity, but it is necessary.4
And it is necessary. White fragility shouts like hell to drown out Black voices. We must learn to muzzle it, if we ever hope to listen for Black lives.
When Christians encounter a new moral claim, it’s almost reflexive to ask ourselves: “What would Jesus say about this?” Often, this question leaves us sorting through complicated and conflicting testimony. But there are those blessed, startling moments when Christ’s witness is so clear as to silence all debate.
As we consider DiAngelo’s claims regarding White fragility, the story of Jesus’s encounter with the Syrophoenecian woman offers just such a testimony.
[Jesus] set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But she answered him, “[Lord], even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone. (Mark 7:24–30)
For many Christians, myself included, this is one of the most cringeworthy passages of the Bible. There are multitudes of verses of scripture that we weaponized to support discrimination, disenfranchisement, even genocide. But this may be the only time we hear such words come explicitly from the mouth of Christ. Hearing what sounds like racism from a man we proclaim as Messiah should give us pause.
Before proceeding, let me offer two disclaimers. First, historically, it’s not quite accurate to label Jesus’s rebuke as “racist.” Both racism and race are recent inventions, scarcely more than five hundred years old. As Du Bois famously noted:
The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing—a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed. The ancient world would have laughed at such a distinction.5
Racism—that is, the project of sorting humanity into a small number of groups based on an arbitrarily chosen set of physical attributes, with the purpose of establishing and enforcing a universal hierarchy among them—is a decidedly new idea. But ethnocism—that is, the project of arguing for and enforcing various hierarchies of human ancestry—is certainly ancient. And it can fairly be described as a kind of antecedent to racism.
This distinction is more than simply academic. One of racism’s fundamental lies is that race is both eternal and natural. In fact, it is neither. When we uncritically and anachronistically read racism and race back into scripture, we contribute to the lie of race’s inevitability and immortality. And if we attribute divine characteristics to human constructions, we are rightly called idolaters.
That said, while Jesus’s comment to the Syrophoenician woman is not racist, it is decidedly enthnocist. Mark is content to imply this fact (though it takes very little inference to catch his meaning). Matthew’s account of the story is more explicit. Before rebuking her, Jesus declares “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 15:26). Jesus asserts a clear hierarchy: Israelites are privileged over Gentiles; and on this basis, the woman’s daughter should be left to suffer. Though the statement is not racist, per se, its effects are similar.
His words also fit the popular short-hand definition of racism: prejudice + power. Jesus is prejudiced against the Syrophoenecian woman; and he holds in his hand the power to free her daughter, or not, as he chooses. So if Jesus’s rebuke is not technically racist, in the historical sense, we can still reasonably understand it as a fore-type of racism. Having delivered this disclaimer, for the sake of convenience, and to communicate the urgency of this passage, I hope you will forgive me if I call Jesus’s behavior “racist” going forward.
The second disclaimer is this: given that my stated purpose is to consider the story of the Syrophoenecian woman in light of DiAngelo’s “White fragility,” and given that I’ve identified Jesus’s rebuke as a fore-type of racism, a reader might infer that I am attributing something like Whiteness to Jesus.
To be clear, Jesus is neither historically nor theologically White. Ethnically, he did not belong to any of the diverse groups that have been assimilated into Whiteness. Sociologically, he was a working-class Israelite living under Roman occupation, from a town of ill-repute: he did not have the social capital of Whiteness. Theologically, Jesus’s clear orientation is toward the margins, thus Whiteness cannot be his subject. As James Cone famously noted: “He is Black, because he was a Jew.”6 Whiteness has no part in him.
That said, we must also acknowledge that at various points in his ministry, Jesus wields significantly greater social power than those who surround him: as an able-bodied man, as an Israelite within Israelite lands, as a respected and educated teacher, as a renowned healer, and as an adult. Though he is not White, the way he conducts himself in these moments can be instructive for those of us who participate constantly in the social power of Whiteness.
Disclaimers aside, what can DiAngelo teach us about Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman? And how will it help us listen for Black lives? DiAngelo identifies a number of defenses that White people deploy when confronting the issue of racism. Among them is White solidarity, which is the unspoken agreement among Whites to protect White advantage and not cause another White person to feel racial discomfort by confronting them when they say or do something racist.7
At the first sign of racial trouble, we circle the wagons to defend other White people from charges of racist conduct, or even from confrontations with simple facts regarding the racist institutions of our society. As regards Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, it seems that we transfer this same impulse onto Christ.
If you make a search of sermons and biblical commentaries on the story of the Syrophoenician woman, you will notice very quickly how White scholars and pastors seem intent on circling their wagons around Jesus. Though he is not White, perhaps we recognize in his power and in his prejudice the same racist dynamics that surround us. Or, perhaps, we imagine him to be White. Either way, we feel compelled to defend him from the charge of racism before it is even stated. What does this look like in practice?
DiAngelo notes that one of the most prevalent defensive responses of White fragility is to prioritize intent over results.8 We assert that so long as our conscious intentions were not racist, then we are absolved from the racist effects of our actions.
This seems to be the preferred defense of biblical commentators. One way or another, they will declare that Jesus does not intend the racism that we hear. In my review of these commentaries, I find three versions of this argument.
The first notes that in the Greek, when Jesus uses the word “dog,” he is using the diminutive form (κυνάριον), in contrast to the standard (κύων) that Jesus uses to describe the dogs who lick at the poor man Lazarus’s sores (Luke 16:21). Thus, according to this argument, when he calls the Syrophoenician woman a dog, he is describing her not with contempt, but rather affection.9
The absurdity of this argument comes clear if we simply read his words again, replacing “dogs” with the diminutive, and more affectionate, “puppies”: It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the [puppies.]
This is, of course, no less offensive, only more patronizing. And regardless, this reasoning still leaves the woman’s daughter to suffer and die.
The second line of argument emphasizes Jesus’s declaration, “Let the children be fed first.” From here, the commentators assert that Jesus’s intention is not to deny the Syrophoenicians needs; but rather, to defer them. Essentially, these commentators argue, he is simply telling the woman to wait her turn.10
There are two problems with this line of argument. The first is that the statement “Let the children be fed first,” appears only in Mark’s version of the story, not Matthew’s. For Matthew, at least, this detail is irrelevant. More fundamentally, this line of interpretation is uncomfortably reminiscent of the court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. It would be akin to telling those who had to go to the back of bus that they were not being denied, only deferred. After all, in the end, the bus is still going to the same destination. And once again, his reasoning leaves the woman’s daughter to suffer.
The final version of this argument is a favorite of White interpreters with liberationist aspirations. I regret to say, I have preached it myself on one occasion. This argument states that by denying the woman in a racist fashion, Jesus provides her the opportunity to speak for, and claim, her own justice. Thus, he empowers her.11
This argument requires such contorted mental gymnastics that it is remarkable it does not cause aneurysms. Imagine a potential employer who tells an applicant, “We’re not hiring you because you’re Black.” When the applicant protests, the employer says, “You’re hired. I just wanted to give you the chance to speak up for yourself.” One can only hope that a civil rights lawsuit would follow.
Another defensive mechanism DiAngelo identifies is focusing on the messenger, rather than the message.12 That is, we invalidate criticism based on the method of its delivery rather than its content, colloquially: tone-policing. A particular favorite is the assertion that criticism must be delivered privately, or it is invalid.13 DiAngelo notes the absurdity of this rule, in that the racist behavior being critiqued is frequently public. Thus, the public space is preserved for racism, and antiracism is regulated to private spaces (where it is generally ignored anyway).
In reading the story of the Syrophoenician woman, I was surprised to notice how I engaged in that kind of tone-policing within my own mind. Through decades of reading this exchange, I had always imagined it as a private encounter. The witness of Mark’s account is unclear, though his statement “yet [Jesus] could not escape notice” at least suggests there might have been others present. Matthew, on the other hand, is very clear about the fact that the Syrophoenician woman had an audience.
By imagining the scene as a private one, I effectively moved the woman’s criticism to a venue I deemed more appropriate, and thus, allowed Jesus to save face (at least in my sight), which is to be expected: the defenses of White fragility operate even in the absence of external criticism, sabotaging the healthy parts of our own minds, so we cannot see for ourselves the structures of White supremacy that shape our lives.
Here, in all these various interpretations of the passage, we see the defensive reactions of DiAngelo’s White Fragility deployed to protect Jesus against the charge of racism. This is not particularly surprising. As DiAngelo notes, White fragility is endemic in our society.
What is surprising is to watch how Jesus reacts. Let us consider the scene again, from the beginning. Jesus delivers a racist rebuke: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” (Matt. 15:26). The woman responds with a bit of rhetorical brilliance—a pointed quip, a comic reversal of his words: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table” (Matt. 15:27). Perhaps she speaks meekly, using the language of his own racism in an effort to ingratiate herself to him, thus subverting the rules of an oppressive system for her own need. Or perhaps she tosses his words back to him in a witty and sarcastic rebuke. We can’t really know. Regardless, the fundamental content of her retort is: Jesus is wrong. Specifically, his prejudice has led him to a false and unjust conclusion.
And now we encounter a startling and graceful surprise. In contrast to his later day interpreters, Jesus offers no defense; no explanation, no gas-lighting, no appeal to intent, no evasion or disengagement, no tone policing. He does not recenter himself. Instead, he simply states: “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter” (Mark 7:29).
A short phrase, but there is so much in that statement.
“For saying that . . .” that is, he amplifies her voice. He acknowledges, for anyone who is listening, that the woman’s critique was valid and her witness has proved it. This healing he will perform is not a matter of mercy, but one of justice. She was right and he was wrong. By contrast, White fragility moves to recenter our own voices. And if we do happen to engage in antiracist action, we frame it as a kind of largess of character, rather than simply a matter of paying what is owed.
“. . . [Y ]ou may go . . .” that is, he asks nothing further of her: neither thanks, nor recognition, nor absolution, nor even reconciliation. Whereas, White fragility demands that should we do right, we must be thanked, and acknowledged, and forgiven, and told we are friends again and that all is well.
“The demon has left your daughter.” Finally, he amends his behavior, and delivers her justice. (Mark’s account is kind enough to confirm for us that the girl was, in fact, healed.) He makes amends and focuses on what must be done. White fragility, by contrast, will focus on intention, sentiment, and statement, rather than change, action, and restitution.
At one point in her work, DiAngelo recounts posing a question to people of color:
“What would it be like if you could simply give [White people] feedback, have us graciously receive it, reflect, and work to change the behavior?”14 “It would be revolutionary,”15 a man of color replied with a sigh. Mark 7:29 shows us what that revolution could look like in practice.
We might ask ourselves—and I do—why the Evangelists would include this very unflattering story of the Messiah whom they loved, and his racism. We might wonder why they reported this singular and unique story of Jesus losing an argument. That is a good question.
In one anecdote, DiAngelo recalls a moment when her own thoughtless racist behavior is brought to her attention. She approaches the woman she wounded to work for repair. She listens, she acknowledges, she commits to change, she makes restitution, as far as was possible, and says “thank you.” And then she recalls , “I ask Angela if there is anything else that needs to be said or heard so that we may move forward. She replies that yes, there is. ‘The next time you do something like this, would you like feedback publicly or privately?’ she asks. I answer that given my role as an educator, I would appreciate receiving the feedback publicly, as it is important for White people to see that I am also engaged in a lifelong process of learning and growth.”16
Like DiAngelo, Jesus is an educator: “Teacher” is the title to which he most frequently answers. As an educator, the inclusion of this story is important, because in it he shows us how to receive criticism, even rebuke, when we have engaged in racist behavior. When reading this story from Mark, Jacob Slichter noted admiringly, “He had the courage to do his learning publicly.”17 Unfortunately, such courage is rare; but if we hope to learn how to listen for Black lives, we must claim it.
When we contrast, on the one hand, how simply, directly, and readily Jesus receives criticism for his racist behavior, and, on the other, the convoluted contortions interpreters use to explain his racism away; when we consider our own reluctance to acknowledge and name his behavior as a kind of racism, and how this reluctance blinds us to the actual Good News of the story (that is, that the woman receives justice, that Jesus repents and changes, and that it is possible for us to do the same), then we must consider this conclusion: White fragility not only keeps us from talking meaningfully about racism; it also keeps us from hearing the gospel. We court a double danger when we allow White fragility to deafen us; when we let it stop us from listening for Black lives.
For Black people, this danger is measured in harassment, lost jobs, broken bones, and worse. For us, the danger comes in the possibility of spiritual death. As Bonhoeffer notes:
He who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life, and in the end there is nothing left but spiritual chatter and clerical condescension arrayed in pious words.18
Thus, it can be rightly said, if we are to preach for Black lives, indeed, if are to preach at all, we must first learn to listen for Black lives. And this involves following Christ’s example, putting aside our defensiveness, and receiving the witness of Black voices, whatever tone they take, as the manifest grace of God in our lives.
1. By his own acknowledgment, Bonhoeffer’s radical understanding of discipleship was profoundly shaped by his time as a member of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, and the teaching of its then pastor, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell. Sr. Dr. Reggie Williams documents and explores this connection in his book Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014).
2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: A Discussion of Christian Fellowship (San Francisco: HarperSan-Francisco, 1978), 97.
3. Robin J. DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018).
4. DiAngelo, White Fragility, 129.
5. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Darkwater: Voices Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1920), 29–52.
6. James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 123.
7. DiAngelo, White Fragility, 57.
8. DiAngelo, White Fragility, 69.
9. John Macarthur, Macarthur Study Bible New King James Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998), 1475.
10. John Gill, “Commentary on Mark 7:4.” The New John Gill Exposition of the Entire Bible, 1999, accessed September 07, 2018, https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/geb/mark-7.html.
11. Holly J. Carey, “Jesus and the Syrophoenician Woman: A Case Study in Inclusiveness,” Leaven 19, no. 1 (2011): article 8.
12. DiAngelo, White Fragility, 121.
13. DiAngelo, White Fragility, 123.
14. DiAngelo, White Fragility, 112.
15. DiAngelo, White Fragility, 112.
16. DiAngelo, White Fragility, 139–40.
17. Jacob Slichter, personal communication, April 18, 2019.
18. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 97–98.
