\u201cThe Caucasian differs from all other races: he is humane; he is civilized and progressive\u2026. The Caucasian has often been master of other races\u2014never their slave.\u201d \u2013\u00a0Unitarian preacher and romantic transcendentalist thinker Theodore Parker<\/b><\/div>\n![\"White](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/687\/2016\/12\/White-Myth-1024x512.png\")
Last month, I took two of my kids to one of my favorite museums. It\u2019s the\u00a0National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis Tennessee, built on the Lorraine Motel the very place where Dr. King was assassinated.<\/p>\n
We got to board a\u00a0bus just like the one that\u00a0Rosa Parks sat\u00a0on, we saw actual slaveship manifests, and re-visited some of histories most inspiring and damning moments.<\/p>\n
At one point early on, my kids started asking questions like \u201cHow could anyone ever think this is okay?\u201d And I think I said something to them like \u201cThe Devil gets people to do some evil things and if you do them enough, eventually you will stop realizing that\u00a0they are evil.\u201d<\/p>\n
I really do believe that racism in America is a Principality and Power, and like my friend Sean Palmer says, \u201cIf we don\u2019t recognize this we won\u2019t understand how people can swear their not racist (and mean it).\u201d<\/p>\n
But like demons in Jesus day, they must be named. So here\u2019s the name I want to tell you for this one.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the story I want to tell my kids when they get a little older:<\/p>\n
Naming the Demon<\/h2>\n
What you\u2019re seeing around you is\u00a0not your fault. You didn\u2019t start this story, it existed long before you ever arrived on this earth.<\/p>\n
In 98 A.D. the Roman historian Tacitus wrote what has been called \u201cone of the most dangerous books ever to be written.\u201d And maybe it is, after all, it was a book that helped lay the ground work and inspire the Nazi myth of their racial superiority and thus the justification for the ruthless elimination of \u201clower breeds of humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n
The book is called Germania, and in it, Tacitus is making some observations about the Germanic tribe of people who fought off Rome\u2019s empire, and how impressed he was with them. He\u2019s impressed that they\u2019ve\u00a0never intermarried,\u00a0describes them as people unlike anywhere on earth: Red hair, blue eyes, and a strong build.<\/p>\n
Tacitus praises their moral character, and how they don\u2019t \u201claugh at vice\u201d and that they have \u201cgood moral habits\u201d He loves their system of governance, a way of self-governance\u00a0that he describes in detail,\u00a0one that values participation by everyone. He praises and describes a form of governance that captured the imagination of people like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the like.<\/p>\n
And he connects this form of government, these people of noble character, with a particular kind of skin color and ethnic background.<\/p>\n
And the Anglo-Saxon Myth was born.<\/p>\n
I first read about this in Kelly Brown Douglas \u2018s excellent book\u00a0Stand Your Ground:Black Bodies and the Justice of God.\u00a0<\/em>And I found it fascinating that I had never heard this story before. It never dawned on me to ask, \u201cWhere did the first white slave owners get the idea that they could justifiably treat\u00a0another human being as beneath them?\u201d<\/p>\nToday, the myth of White superiority is still going strong\u2026 it\u2019s even making a resurgence in the mainstream politics and media. But for most of my Caucasian brothers and sisters reading this it sounds strange to say. We live, after all, in 2016. We would never say that one race of people is superior to another, but here\u2019s the thing, we live in a world that was built by people who did, and created the world accordingly.<\/p>\n
The Great White Hope<\/h2>\n
I can\u2019t emphasize this enough. The United States\u00a0was built on this strange and toxic idea that people of Anglo-Saxon descent were more moral, smarter, better people. From the Constitutional declaration that African-American slaves were only 3\/4th of a human being, to no less than the people who drew up the founding documents (including many Presidents) explicitly describing their belief about God\u2019s calling for their ethnic group the.<\/p>\n
The founder of American democracy, Thomas Jefferson, saw democracy as an virtue\u00a0given to him by his race\u2026and he got this idea from a book 1600 years old at the time.<\/p>\n
Jefferson wrote to his granddaughter Anne, \u00a0\u201cTacitus I consider as the first writer in the world without exception,\u201d<\/p>\n
So yeah, he was kind of a fan.<\/p>\n
Douglas points out that Jefferson\u00a0believed, like many others, that these new Americans had been chosen by God to \u201cimplement an Anglo-Saxon system of governing. He considered Americans to be the New Israelites.\u201d<\/p>\n
Douglas notes that\u00a0this has implications for things much broader\u00a0than slavery.<\/p>\n
It will lead President Theodore Roosevelt \u00a0to later be concerned about an influx of immigrants who aren\u2019t people of color, but aren\u2019t of\u00a0Anglo-Saxon descent (Roosevelt refers to them as \u201cnew stock\u201d and was very concerned about the birth rate of people from \u201cold stock\u201d). It will lead to the Jim Crow laws of Segregation. It will lead to Dylan Roof walking into a church in Charleston and murdering people in cold blood and to people of color\u00a0having\u00a0to point out that black lives matter.<\/p>\n
It is the\u00a0myth that is\u00a0responsible for the idea of American exceptionalism and manifest destiny (which I\u2019ll talk about next week). For a closer look at all the implications of this story weaving it\u2019s way into the fabric of the western world, check out this by my\u00a0pastor friend Sean Palmer.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\nIt is the story that is behind so many other stories that we today. It\u2019s behind many of our\u00a0headlines and the news feeds, it\u2019s a story that crawled it\u2019s way out of German forest\u00a0through the pen of a 1st century historian with some bizarre\u00a0ideas about how race is connected to morality and character, and how one race in all the world is better than the others.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s a lie.<\/p>\n
But at least now you know it\u2019s name.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThe Caucasian differs from all other races: he is humane; he is civilized and progressive\u2026. The Caucasian has often been master of other races\u2014never their slave.\u201d \u2013\u00a0Unitarian preacher and romantic transcendentalist thinker Theodore Parker Last month, I took two of my kids to one of my favorite museums. It\u2019s the\u00a0National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2768,"featured_media":884,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[18,62,40,4],"class_list":["post-877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christianity","tag-demonic","tag-racism","tag-social-justice"],"yoast_head":"\n
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