Against Racism and Oppression: July 2006 Archives

Elizabeth writes in her Little Blog of Résistance, that way of being in the world which Dorothee Soelle witnessed in a life lived as a religious activist whose Christianity meant being a peacemaker in face of war, being a witness of humanity in the face of exploitation and coercion, being a witness of courage in the face of the banality of the corporate culture. She defined resistance as the refusal to become "habituated to death, something that is one of the spiritual foundations of the culture of the First World.""

The culture of the First World that she refers to in "The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance" is identified in her other writings as the corporate culture that seeks to turn every person, every part of God's creation and every product of humanity into an object for exchange, something to be bought and sold. It is the dominant culture of "power over" that perpetuates the ancient systems of patriarchy, racism, and classism with a new violence, the violence that sees persons as the walking dead, as objects to be manipulated.

This week as we experience the murder of children and hear the crime excused by the leaders of the "free world" we see the face of the culture of death. When I read and re-read Soelle, I know that Christianity lives in hearts of faithful witnesses in spite of betrayal by so many leaders of the Church who have embraced death so that they could bask in light of the Powers and Principalities of this Era. But as the Rabbi observed, they have had their reward.

Dorothee Soelle died last spring. Here she is remembered.

Christian Century, May 17, 2003

Dorothee Soelle, a German Protestant theologian who died on April 27 at the age of 73, was a controversial figure in her own church but attracted a large following by combining Christian mysticism and radical political commitment.

The author of 30 books, Soelle never held a full professorship at a German university. Some attributed that to her support of left-wing political causes, such as opposition to the Vietnam War. But from 1975 to 1987 she spent six months each year as professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

"She was and remains the political conscience of Protestantism," said Maria Jepsen, the Lutheran bishop of Hamburg, where Soelle lived, reported the German Protestant news agency. A popular speaker in Europe, Soelle displayed radicalism and themes in her early works that prefigured later developments in feminist theology.

"She was genuinely and deeply rooted in the spiritual tradition of the Christian church and intensely engaged in the struggle for justice," said Konrad Raiser, general secretary of the World Council of Churches. Soelle developed a massive following during the post-World War II student revolt in West Germany. With Fulbert Steffensky, a Benedictine monk she later married, she founded in 1968 the Politisches Nachtgebet in Cologne--late-evening prayers linking spirituality and politics in churches that became full to overflowing.

John Dean has exposed the rotten core of the new conservatism. They aren't conservatives in sense of preserving the rights and liberties of individuals. They aren't conservatives in the sense of believing that that government is best that governs least. No! they are authoritarians, who will use any means to achieve their ends. They are conservatives in the sense that elitist and controlling sense that was personified by that antithesis of religious liberalism John Calvin.

Here is what John Dean says about the new conservatives:

Today's Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative fundamentals. There is nothing conservative about preemptive wars or disregarding international law by condoning torture. Abandoning fiscal responsibility is now standard operating procedure. Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell Kirk's classic conservative canons, nor in James Burham's guides to conservative governing.

John W. Dean, op-ed, Boston Globe 7.14.06, thanks to Philocrites.

Calvin had a major influence on authoritarian thought on the new nation of America. The Americans were not about to listen to apologists for royalty and inherited wealth. There dissenting tradition and the abundance of land to be stolen from the natives made European classism based on inheritance unattractive. Calvin argued for elitism and oligarchic power as a consequence of merit, God given merit to be precise.

Calvin had about the same relation to the Protestant reformation as Napoleon Bonaparte did to the French Revolution. He was too young to be a leader in the beginning stages of the movement, but he played the role of giving order and suppressing radical elements at a critical stage after the movement had spread. His conception of how religious elites should relate to the rest of the population was his lasting influence on Protestant thought and on our country beginning in the colonial period,

Calvin assumed that God is all knowing, and all powerful. His God both knew and determined who was going to be saved and who was going to hell. Calvin looked at his fellow humans and decided that most would be damned and only a few would be saved.
He argued that we could not know who was damned and saved based on their actions, after all they might be faithless and unregenerate sinners who were trying to earn heaven by "good works." Being kind, gentle, a peace maker and a courageous champion for justice counted for little for this apologist for power (his biographies indicate that he had none of these qualities himself.) So God saved people by unmerited grace, not by any redeeming attitude, ethical act, or spiritual quality that could be discerned.

What could be discerned was God's justice. Calvin argued that those whom God had chosen for redemption would be more upright, and law abiding and those whom God had damned would degenerate into drunkenness, debauchery, poverty and stupidity. So while we could not know for sure who was damned and who was saved, we could make a good guess. Some would be blessed by their upright and law abiding conduct and become rich and powerful, and while the damned would be illiterate, impoverished, laboring people who were unruly with a strong tendency toward crime and mayhem.

Godly government was by the godly, who ruled over the ungodly. The godly knew what was best, and the ungodly was incapable of knowing what was good for them. So in our colonial period we witness a Puritan elite that held slaves, murdered Indians, and engaged in land speculation with forged documents to enrich themselves, but they were blessed by God and they were pillars of our First Parish Churches. The ungodly on the other hand joined dissenting churches and withdrew their allegiance from the elite. In time the North Americans made a revolution and disestablished the elite's church, but the ideas of Calvin had struck deep roots in our consciousness, and when ever white Americans need to control some chaos we see the notion of an elite of Godly merit resurrected.

The word Puritan has come to mean a lot of things, it originally described an attempt to purify religious community of corruption, to reestablish the New Testament church. But it has come to mean the use of the state power to enforce control over peoples ethical, moral and life style choices based on narrow moralism. Puritanism had both a liberating and a controlling side, and is fracture into religious liberalism versus a Calvinist authoritarianism has marked U.S. history since the American Revolution.

As we take note of hypocrisy and corruption of the new authoritarian "conservative" elite, it is tempting to conclude that they don't take Christian moralism seriously, and that their alliance with the Christian right is mainly for political advantage. Tempting but that analysis underestimates the theological rationalizations of the elite, and assumes that they know see their own conduct as unethical and destructive. The elite justify their behavior by the ends that they are pursuing, and any violence, any lie, any allegiance of convenience and any sleaze is okay if it serves God, Free Enterprise and their own God given merit.

I note a consistency with the new authoritarian "conservative" elite and the way Calvinists have justified their actions for over four hundred years. Calvinism was and is a theology that justifies authoritarianism, and the elites that have felt justified by its doctrines enslaved Africa, licensed pirates to prey on the Catholic Spanish, murdered Indians for land, waged wars of aggression based on Holy War rationales, set up colonial empires, and exploited immigrant labor including children in their mills. More recently they have misinterpreted the Bible to justify homophobia, sexism, and the destruction of the social welfare system while giving theological warrant to vicious foreign policies.

They act like thieves and bullies. . .and insist that they are meritorious and have the God given right to rule over an unruly world. Not much different from John Calvin himself.

It is good to remind ourselves that the Christian right believes that the Second Coming of Christ will be ushered in by a war in that region of the world in which the Eastern Mediterranean meets Western Asia, which we often call the Middle East.

The present state of Israel was planted in this region by European religious colonists based on an ideology, namely that Jews needed a state of their own because non Jews were hopelessly Anti Jewish, and that God had given this land to their religious ancestors.  This movement called Zionism had originated in a Europe in the nineteenth century during a period in which national states were tapping into the anti-human ideologies of nationalism and racism in order to enlist their peoples for imperial adventures.  Almost two millennia of Christian anti Jewish teaching fed into the new racism.  As the nationalism and racism of the Europeans was being intensified, Jews began to migrate to the Americas in large numbers.  The Zionist movement recruited smaller numbers to go to Palestine and plant small colonies among the mostly Arab indigenous population.  The area was ruled by foreign empires, the Turks before World War One, and the British after that war.

The genocidal violence experienced by European Jewry before and during World War Two led by Germany's Nazis but supported by far too many Europeans and Americans led to the consolidation of Zionism among the Jewish people's of the world and to their support for an violent insurgency to create a Zionist State on the Eastern Mediterranean.  The British labeled the irregulars who led the insurgency terrorists.

What I know most deeply about Unitarian Universalism I learned in Sunday School, and what I learned includes a vision of a human community.  Since I was a child I have understood that nationalism and racism are ideologies that are anathema to the core values of religious liberalism.  We are called to witness to that human beings can live in peace and understanding, transcending ideologies that pit one people against another.

The problem with Zionism as a response to the racism and nationalism of the European Christians was that it nurtured a racist and nationalist world view among the Jews.  The state of Israel conceives itself as an exclusive Jewish State with a theological mandate to occupy and clear the land for Jews.  The Palestinians (whose ancestors were the people of the Bible, who became both Moslems and Christians, who trace their families back to the ancient people of this land who were once the Canaanites, Hebrews, and Samaritans) were replaced by force by Europeans.  The state of Israel is a European type state, driven by modernist technologies and guided by a world view that envisions all traditional economies to be primitive because subsistence and living close to nature can't be converted into cash.  This is not the way of life or the world view of the ancient Hebrews.  The Biblical mandate is a convenient hook to claim land, but it is not taken seriously as a spiritual guide.

The opposition movement that arose among the Palestinians also turned to racism and violence.  Zionism is a response to European racism and nationalism.  In turn, Zionists advocate an ideology that mobilizes people based on fundamentalist religion and narrow racial nationalism.  The Islamic opposition mobilize the fight against the Zionists on the basis of fundamentalism and racial nationalism.  In our country the Christian right chose to support Israel,  in order to usher in the end of the world.  The secular liberals chose to support Israel out of guilt for the holocaust.  The secular conservatives chose to support Israel because the Israelis are part of the multinational corporate community.  I pray that religious liberals might refrain from joining with these supporters of nationalism and violence, instead we should witness to our own values.  I pray that we can contribute to breaking the spiral  of reactive ideologies based on racism, nationalism and violence.

Terrorism is a word that means using force and violence against civilians in order to weaken their allegiance to the political power.  A terrorist is a terrorist whether or not s/he wears is a member of a cult, a opposition political party or a state.  The United States and Israel may wish to describe their opponents as terrorists, but by using force and violence against civilians to intimadate and coerce they forfeit the moral high ground.

The only way to overcome terrorism is create an international consensus to stop the use of force and violence against civilians.  In order to overcome anti Jewish racism we must also overcome anti Arab racism and vice versa.  There will be no winners in a struggle of one Racist Nationalism against another Racist Nationalism.  No short term foreign policy objectives can justify leaving our religious liberalism in our inner most closet while we go into the world and play politics.  As religious liberals it is time to come out and announce that the Apocalypse has come, and the Peace that we seek is among us and within us, but we must give it voice.  The Messiah will not be running for election in 2008, we can't hope that some Democrat or Republican will lead us to a just peace in the "Middle East" without our voices being raised.  We have soul work to do.  Let us overcome the notion that we can find peace through violence, or establish justice through gaining power over others.

Beverly Tatum has offered a contrasting view of racial identity development between "Blacks" and "Whites."  She does not offer such models for Native Americans, Japanese Americans, Americans of Palestinean descent,  the many ways  of being Latino/Latina/Hispanic. for the many, many experiences of racial development that I can not enumerate without running our of space on my hard drive, nor does she tell us about the subtle differences between "Whites" raised in anti racist contexts, and "Whites" raised in contexts which either assume the dominant culture (most suburbanites) or active bigot homes.  In otherwords like most generalizations, this is overlooks everyones particular experience.  Nevertheless I publish it for your information. One more tool in understanding the dynamics of race in the United states.  Racial identity does not necessarily imply racism, or racial oppression.  Racism assumes that power is used either by individuals or by how individuals habitually relate to one another (institutions) to privilege one group and oppress another.

In Tatum's idea of racial development,both "Blacks" and "Whites"  learn to overcome the behavior patterns that result in perpetuating racism.  They learn to overcome, but they don't do it the same way.

http://www1.umn.edu/ohr/teachlearn/tatum.html

Categorization drawn from Beverly Daniel Tatum's two articles:

"Talking about Race, Learning about Racism:  The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the College Classroom."

Harvard Educational Review  62.1 (Spring 1992): 1-24.
"Teaching White Students about Racism:  The Search for White Allies and the Restoration of Hope."  Teachers College Record 95.4 (Summer 1994):  462-475.

Black Racial Identity Development

Pre-encounter:  de-emphasis on racial group membership that likely includes an internalization of stereotypes about the group
Encounter:  faced with event or events through which individuals are targets of racial slurs or social rejection by individuals and/or groups an the basis of race.
Immersion/Emersion:  (re)building of positive racial identity by seeking out history, culture and peer support within racial background; white-focused anger rises and dissipates.
Internalization:  individuals establish meaningful cross racial relationships via friendships & coalitions/
Internalization/Commitment:  translate personal sense of racial identity into a sense of commitment that sparks the discovery of a universe of ideas, cultures and experiences

White Racial Identity Development

Contact:  Limited awareness of cultural and institutional racism; personal responses to race include curiosity and fear based on images from others and on absence of real images.
Disintegration:  increased interaction and information may lead to an understanding of white privilege and advantage of being invisible as a race; guilt and anger and denial accompany discomfort at this point of understanding.
Reintegration:  may redirect the dissonance of disintegration so that people of color are blamed as source of that discomfort and will then avoid continued reflection OR may seek more information in order to understand how race/racism are constructed in society.
Pseudo-Independent:  to move ahead, may disavow whiteness and/or feel alienation from white peers as this person works to replace racially related myths with accurate information.
Immersion/Emersion:  continued building of anti-racism practices and understandings via social activism within groups, classes, family, public arenas  as well as learning history of such movements; work ranges from involvement within white anti-racism groups to multiracial coalition building across.
Autonomy:  a new sense of self as a person open to new information and ways of thinking about how culture and history and economics might work; alliances crossing race are forged daily.

Writing in the Atlantic Monthly in March 2002 Charles Mann asks how did the people on the Mayflower survive the first winter, he gives this answer:

"In his history of Plymouth Colony, Bradford provided the answer: by robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower first hove to at Cape Cod. An armed company staggered out. Eventually it found a recently deserted Indian settlement. The newcomers-hungry, cold, sick-dug up graves and ransacked houses, looking for underground stashes of corn. "And sure it was God's good providence that we found this corn," Bradford wrote, "for else we know not how we should have done." (He felt uneasy about the thievery, though.) When the colonists came to Plymouth, a month later, they set up shop in another deserted Indian village. All through the coastal forest the Indians had "died on heapes, as they lay in their houses," the English trader Thomas Morton noted. "And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle" that to Morton the Massachusetts woods seemed to be "a new found Golgotha"-the hill of executions in Roman Jerusalem.

To the Pilgrims' astonishment, one of the corpses they exhumed on Cape Cod had blond hair. A French ship had been wrecked there several years earlier. The Patuxet Indians imprisoned a few survivors. One of them supposedly learned enough of the local language to inform his captors that God would destroy them for their misdeeds. The Patuxet scoffed at the threat. But the Europeans carried a disease, and they bequeathed it to their jailers. The epidemic (probably of viral hepatitis, according to a study by Arthur E. Spiess, an archaeologist at the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, and Bruce D. Spiess, the director of clinical research at the Medical College of Virginia) took years to exhaust itself and may have killed 90 percent of the people in coastal New England. It made a huge difference to American history. "The good hand of God favored our beginnings," Bradford mused, by "sweeping away great multitudes of the natives ... that he might make room for us."

By the time my ancestor set sail on the Mayflower, Europeans had been visiting New England for more than a hundred years. English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese mariners regularly plied the coastline, trading what they could, occasionally kidnapping the inhabitants for slaves. New England, the Europeans saw, was thickly settled and well defended. In 1605 and 1606 Samuel de Champlain visited Cape Cod, hoping to establish a French base. He abandoned the idea. Too many people already lived there. A year later Sir Ferdinando Gorges-British despite his name-tried to establish an English community in southern Maine. It had more founders than Plymouth and seems to have been better organized. Confronted by numerous well-armed local Indians, the settlers abandoned the project within months. The Indians at Plymouth would surely have been an equal obstacle to my ancestor and his ramshackle expedition had disease not intervened."

There are other sources that raise some questions about Mann's account. While the Pawtucket were decimated by disease, a good part of the Plymouth Colony was planted in Wampanoag and Narraganset land.  These communities had populations larger than the English settlement for at least the first two decades.  The active support of those native populations was necessary for the Plymouth Colony survival.

Was in viral hepatitis?  Perhaps, but other accounts blame small pox, which had come to these shores with the Spanish was spreading up the East Coast. What is important is how much Bradford and others in that generation shared with Pat Robinson in their self righteous assumption that God was on their side and was bringing death to natives to clear the land.  This quote indicates how early "white narcissism," began to form within the dominant culture  (the incapacity to empathize with others who are outside of one's narrow socially constructed "culture" of reference.)  The founders of the Massachusetts Colony also rejoiced to God for the ravages that disease had inflicted on the native populations.

Debitage has some interesting thoughts about the "self" that is the product of social construction (and in a society based on domination and oppressive systems that self would reflect those social constructions) and the idea of a "real self."  Those who seek transformation (overcoming of their own and others false selves embedded in oppressive systems) should ponder her thinking about Paul's notion of "taking on Christ." 

Some times our anti oppressive work is characterized as just politics, but it is at heart theological, and the wisdom of Paul (new creation, communities of love, taking on Christ) point to a way of thinking about being a responsible and responsive self that combined with the wisdom of Jesus (the realm of God is within us, and between us if we would only realize it) that I think have much to teach us.

On June 30, I posted details about Thomas Jefferson who authored the long standing U.S.policy toward Native people known as "Move or Die."  I included this quote: "If we are to wage a campaign against these Indians the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River. The same world would scarcely do for them and us."

I was asked which Indians was Jefferson referring to when he made that quote.

My instinct is to say "all Indians" and leave it like that,  the Europeans ravished this continent by dividing and conquering.  But the truth is it was all Indians that were left, some had already been exterminated. 

The Shawnee were the major nation resisting Virginia's murderous invasion in 1780 just as the Cherokee were resisting North Carolina's and Georgia's invaders.  But it would have been "first they came for the Shawnee, and then they came for the rest."  By 1780 Virginia had already wiped out several nations.  Jefferson was a national leader,  the author of the Declaration of Independence, the former ambassador to France, when he spoke as Governor of Virginia he was not referring to a local  state problem.  The Illinois River was a long way from Williamsburg.

I have been able to compile a short list of known victims of this policy which was continued until the indigenous people were no longer in possession of any ancestral land, continued even after Wounded Knee, continued even after the people had been humiliated and reduced to dependency.  Jefferson's policy affected these Indians.

Abenakis,  Accochannock,  Alabama Coushatta,  Abanki, Alaska Natives, Apache,*  Arapaho,  Arikara,  Assiniboine Sioux,  Blackfeet,* Caddo,  Carrier, Catawba, Cayuga ,  Cheyenne,  Chickasaw,  Chicora,  Chilcotin, Chippewa,  Chippewa Cree,  Chitimacha,
Chocataw,  Cherokee*,  Chumash,  Coharie, Comanche,* Costanoan,  Cowlitz, Cree,  Creek,  Crow, Dakota, Delaware,  Dene,  Edisto, Essellen, Goshute , Gros Ventree, Gwitch'In , Haida, Haliwa-Sponi, Hidatsa, Ho Chunk , Hohokam, Hopi,Houma, Hupa, Huron,  Illinois, Innu, Inuit, Inupiaq, Iowa, Iroquois, Kalispel, Kaw, Kiowa,  Klallam, Klamath, Kootenai, Lakota, Lumbee, Maidu, Makah, Mandan, Mattaponi, Meherrin, Menominee, Metis, Miami, Mingo, Miwok, Mohawk, Mohegan, Monacan, Montaucketts, Munsee Delaware, Nansemond, Navaho *, Nez Perce, Nisga'a, Nootka,  Ohlone, Ojibwe, Omaha, Oneida, Onondaga, Osage, Ottawa,  Paiute, Pamunkey,  Pawnee, Peoria, Pequot, Pima,  Potawatomi, Powhatan, Pueblo, Quapaw,  Quinault,  Ramapough, Sac and Fox , Salish, Saponi, Secwepemc, Seminole,
Seneca,  Shawnee, Shinnecock, Shoshone, Shuswap, Siletz, Sioux, Spokane, Steilacoom, Suquamish, Susquehanna  Tlingit, Tonkawa, Tsilhqot'In, Tuscarora,  Umatilla,  Umpqua,  Ute,* Wabanaki, Waccamaw-Sioun, Wampanoag, Warm Springs Indians, Washoe, Wea,
Wendat, Wichita, Wiyot, Wyandot.

I am sure there are some I couldn't find.  Some of the peoples on the above list have been reduced to populations smaller than one of our average sized congregations, they were hundreds of thousands in 1491.

Was the removal policy an alternative to Genocide?  In other words if the Indians choose to move, rather than die, isn't it true that there was only the threat of genocide, not the reality of genocide?

If individuals are moved from a land where they ancestors lived, if their children are forcefully removed and sent to English Christian schools, if the land they are resettled on is incapable of sustaining them agriculturally and they are put on the dole they have been destroyed as a people.  When armed men keep them in their "reserve," they are in concentration camps.    Genocide is when a people's culture and way of life has been destroyed.  The native people were destroyed as an indigenous people and turned into the underclass known as Indians.  The survivors are victims of genocide just as much as those who ended up in a mass grave.

Ask the Armenians.  Ask the Jews.  One doesn't have to get every last individual for a genocide to have taken place.  Genocide is the destruction of a particular community of people, survivors of transported Indians were able to recreate some community, but Oklahoma isn't the Great Smocky Mountains.

Native people are resurgent,  more and more individuals are learning their language and working with others to overcome shame and become autonomous and self determining.  But native people live with the awareness of holocaust.  To heal this nation the children of the conquerors must share that awareness.