UM Conference Denounces American Legacy of White Supremacy

The legacy of white supremacy maintains a stronghold in the psychology of Americans, according to speakers at a United Methodist gathering at Lake Junaluska in December.

Eric Law, director of the Kaleidoscope Institute that helped host the Multicultural Conference, posited the sessions as a non-confrontational way to discover the “unconscious” paradigm of racism that he says still permeates society and the church. Attendees, most of whom were lay leaders or ministers within the UMC, were organized in “small group” format to encourage personal discussion about their experiences with racism and discrimination.

Law acknowledged that racism is a scary topic to discuss for most since it invites people to expose the way they think.

“This is very scary,” said Law, “especially when people have not had a chance to look inside their ‘iceberg’ [their subconscious thought patterns].” Throughout the conference, the Kaleidoscope Institute speakers analogized the human psyche to an iceberg, where the mass of an individual’s cultural assumptions are hidden beneath the surface.

“When we’re talking about ‘white privilege’ or ‘power’, we’re asking people to look inward, to look at their pattern of thinking,” said Law. He likened this exposure to a fish being pulled out of water, the water representing the subconscious worldview that powers racism. “How do you change something that you don’t know you have?”

Duke University professor Tim Tyson, speaking on the second day of the conference, also borrowed Law’s analogy of the fish.

“The legacy of white supremacy is the kind of thing that lingers in our minds, though we are not always conscious of it,” said Tyson. “This is why I always say white supremacy is the water and we are the fish – and we can no more discuss this than fish can contemplate the wetness of water.” Tyson was careful to distinguish the thought pattern – which he considers to be seamlessly and poisonously ingrained in American culture – from the “political project” of white supremacy, which blatantly advocates for white dominance in society.

Tyson also argued that many of the apparently progressive narratives we encounter, even ones as venerable as To Kill a Mockingbird, are insidiously informed by a culture that highlights “the virtue, or lack thereof, of white people.” And in these narratives, he says, minorities act as “angelic icons who verify the virtue of the good white folks, and underline the evil of the bad white folks.”

But the vocabulary needed to pinpoint this thought pattern is growing, Tyson said. “Oddly enough, [this struggle] unites us in a certain way. Because white supremacy, the legacy of white supremacy, lives in the heads of black folks, and it lives in the heads of white folks.” This observation deeply informed Dr. Martin Luther King’s ministry, he argued: “He [Dr. King] understood this was not just about breaking the power of white people, but it was about creating a sense of ‘somebody-ness.’” This, he concluded, is the challenge Americans still face today.

The conference also addressed race relations from a biblical perspective. In his discussions on the topic of “The Bible and Racism”, United Methodist Bishop Gregory Palmer illustrated how the perspectives of biblical actors, even Jesus and the Apostle Paul, were informed by the biases of their cultures.

In particular Palmer noted Paul’s choice of language in Ephesians 2:11 when addressing the Gentiles in “wrenching terms” as outsiders. “One could take the more positive tack that he was rooting the movement in Judaism,” Palmer said. “And on the other hand, perhaps in a little bit of excess, [Paul is] saying, ‘Remember you’ve kind-of been invited in.’”

Palmer also found evidence in Jesus’ interaction with the Canaanite woman (Matthew 15:21-28, and Mark 7:24-30) of the prejudices of his day. The story is troubling for many because of the apparently coarse response the woman receives from Jesus when she petitioned him to heal her daughter.

Palmer, in his sermon, rejected interpretations that supposedly “fix” Jesus’ behavior by explaining away his choice of language (Jesus implicitly calls the Canaanite woman a “dog”), thereby absolving him of his cultural biases. “We like a comforting Jesus, a Jesus that’ll make us feel better about him and about ourselves,” said Palmer. “And so when he gets outside of the box either by design or something else that was at work on that particular occasion, it just messes with us. And we don’t like a messy Jesus.”

Although he never fully articulated his own interpretation of Jesus words, Palmer focused the story on the woman’s faith, relating it to the type of faith needed to approach the Lord for healing in our society. “Can we have enough faith and courage like this woman, rebuffed though she was, to persist over time and to lay ourselves prostrate before the feet of the master?” he asked.

“It’s a helpful reminder that even in these sacred texts, in this canon, in our holy book, there are these tensions that arise about how we speak about ourselves in the whole and how we reference our particularities,” continued Palmer. He concluded that, whatever the apparent biases Jesus and Paul unintentionally betrayed, the ultimate message through scripture is that of the redemption of the body of Christ from its racial, economic, and cultural divisions.

All speakers highlighted the importance to strive for a church devoid of barriers between people groups based on ethnicity. Palmer said that he is hopeful for such a reality, but that its time has not yet come – it will take more exploration into the “differences, particularities, nuances and cultural habitus of the Christian faith.”