Over the past weeks and months, I've heard a tiresome response from certain brothers and sisters, used when I highlight the American sin of racism, and how that sin is destroying fellow children of God, those made in God's image in Christ: "More Black Americans kill one another than White Americans who kill Black. So, surely violence isn't racist".
So, repeat after me: Racism is institutionalized White-on-Black violence, even if that violence is internalized by Blacks.
In 1619, the first twenty Africans were brought over as labor for the new colonies. Within one generation the white majority had defined black people as permanent slaves and non-human property. This created a social order in which black people were only valuable for their ability to support a white dominated society that was economically prospering off of the stolen land of Native Americans and the stolen labor of African Americans. Consequently, a system of White-on-Black violence was born.
That White-on-Black violence has defined America for 400 years! This is America's sin.
Think about what that means.
1. Millions died on slave ships, even before setting foot on American soil.
2. Slavery institutionalized itself in American history, as official policy, for 245 years.
3. From 1865-1945, well over 100,000 were re-enslaved through our judicial "convict-leasing system". Yes, this was a real thing.
4. Racial terrorism existed in America, from 1865-1965.
5. Jesus, who was both the Son of God and a poor Galilean Jew living in solidarity with those under Roman occupation and those vulnerable to crucifixion, has been transformed into a powerful White man. This image is a form of idolatrous systemic White violence against Black people and all people of color. (See Blum & Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America to understand the significance of this.)
Despite such White-on-Black violence and much more, Black people have always resisted. For example, dissident voices like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass rejected "the Christianity of this land" in its complicit endorsement of white domination over black bodies, proclaiming that it had nothing to do with the true peaceable Christ. Protests like these continued until the 1970s, always triggering systemic white backlash.
Not surprisingly, the Powers that Be backlashed. Since 1960, law enforcement has regularly viewed "Black" as more suspect, and flooded our prison system with a new form of slavery: Since the 1970s, the prison population has boomed from about 300,000 inmates to beyond 2 million people caged like animals, a disportionately large number of them black men. Black bodies continue to be controlled by this system of White-on-Black violence.
Consequently, Black Americans are rightly fed up. A full 33% of Black males will be involved in this injustice system at some point in their lives, primarily for nonviolent drug charges, despite studies revealing that black youth and white youth use drugs at comparable rates. Research also tells us that black males are 21 times more likely to be killed during an encounter with the police than their white counterparts.
Just as critically, we're defunding schools at an alarming rate, even as we're funding more and more prisons.
So don't tell me White-on-Black violence no longer exists. It does! We've institutionalized it -- again -- just in a new form, one that's so insidious we never realize it.
Now, repeat after me: Black-on-Black violence is an extension of this institutionalized violence!
It's called internalized racism (a term from WEB DuBois' Souls of Black Folk). Because Black Americans find themselves accepting this racist institutionalism and adopting the very negative stereotypes about African Americans concerning their abilities and intrinsic worth.
Here's what I mean.
As a result of growing up in an anti-black society in which violence inflicted on African Americans has been historically judged less harshly than violence against Whites, regardless of the perpetrator -- black people begin to believe that their own life and the lives of other black people are worth very little. Due to internalized racism, they become more willing to engage in violence against other black men, women, and children -- the so-called "Black-on-Black violence" that lots of Christians point to, in order to say none of this racism talk is real.
We know that a lack of self-respect and/or negative views toward their own race (e.g., internalized racism) result in black male teens' greater propensity to engage in violence. In essence, this "Black-on-Black violence" is simply an extension of systemic White-on-Black violence.
Whenever I hear White Christians use this "black-on-black violence" as an argument against the contemporary evils of American racism, I also hear them diminishing the long-standing system of white domination contributes to fatherlessness in the black community, police brutality of black people, negative societal perceptions of black people, the systemic disempowerment of black people, the internalized racism of black people.
And ultimately, it makes their argument that Michael Brown deserved to die a feasible argument to their minds.
And, in so doing, they make a defense for the White-on-Black violence that has been institutionalized in America for 400 years! A violence, I hasten to admit, that stands opposed to everything we Christians believe about Jesus, his Good News, and the Kingdom of God that he brings.
Blaming one Black young man for the sowing of such collective sin is a great disservice to oppressed people of the world, to whom Jesus consistently showed mercy.
And it's unChristian. No matter how you slice it. Because it's racist to its very core.