Rhetoric Race and Religion
“How long, O Lord?!?! How long!
How long … (will we) have sorrow in my heart all the day?
How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?”
These are the words of David found in Psalm 13. David continually repeats “How Long” and expresses deep down turmoil, anxiety and unrest. In response to the killing of Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd,Tywanza Sanders, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lee Lance, Daniel L. Simmons, Depayne Middleton-Doctor and Susie Jackson (bios), by Dylan Roof at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, I am asking White America with the same fervency, how long will you continue to dehumanize Blacks in America? Sylvia Johnson shared that Roof told those he killed “”You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” While Roof’s goal was to judge Blacks, his comments were actually a testament of the actions of Whites.
It all started on this land in 1619 when “a dutch man of warre” sold colonists “twenty Negars.” During slavery, White Supremacy was birthed and the systematic devaluation of Black life commenced. Since then, Whites have been raping, shooting, whipping, beating, lynching and torturing Blacks. It is this very system of oppression that persists today. It privileges Whites and defines Blacks as worthless.
It. Is. All. Connected. Many Black people were still wrestling with the numerous non-indictments of police officers that slaughtered Black lives. On the same day of the terrorist act by Roof, Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman indicated that the White male ABC agents who bloodied and bullied UVA Student, Martese Johnson, will not be charged. The killing of these nine Black men and women in Charleston falls within the historical trajectory of John Hays, Sam Baker, Cleveland Larkin, Lusk Holly and other Blacks killed in the Slocum Massacre in 1910, and the millions of nameless Africans killed on the slave ships from Africa to the “New World” between the seventeenth and nineteenth century.
The massacres of Black racialized bodies at the hand of White Americans throughout American history are connected to the sexualized violence that police officer Eric Casebolt committed on a Black teenage female, June 5, 2015. The manhandling of a Black female body follows the same historical line of Claudette Colvin, Recy Taylor, Harriot Jacobs and countless other Black women. On March 2, 1955, Colvin, as a teenager, was treated inhumanely by two White police officers, Thomas Ward and Paul Headley by being forcibly removed off the bus. On September 3, 1944, Taylor was gang raped by six White men including Herber Lovett. Lovett and the other assailants were not charged for the rape. While Jacobs was a slave, she was fortunate to escape rape like many other Black women, but she was sexually harassed by her White slave master James Norcom. She says this about the experience “O, what days and nights of fear and sorrow that man caused me” (pg. 29).
The racialized and sexualized violence against Black bodies is also connected to the imprisoning of Black bodies. Primarily, the problem is not that Blacks commit more crimes; in fact there has been a decrease in the overall number of crimes committed in this country. The problem is that Black behavior is being criminalized. Stacey Patton elucidates how Black joy is criminalized in “Even Black Joy is a Crime.” She details the criminalization of Henry Walker’s celebration of his sister Lakaydra Walker graduating from Senatobia High School.Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton ushered in what Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow,” in which Blacks are disproportionately incarcerated. She asserts that mass incarceration is not confined to being in prison rather the whole network of laws that essentially erases Black’s citizenship once they are caught in the system. The NAACP reports that Blacks are incarcerated at “nearly six times the rate of Whites.” One in three Black males may end up in prison according to the Sentencing Project. Black women are incarcerated at close to three times the rate of White women. The most telling story of the unjust criminal justice system is that of Kalief Browder “who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime.” Jennifer Gonnerman shared his story in the New Yorker. He eventually committed suicide on June 6, 2015, but it was the criminal justice system that killed him. Douglas Blackmon argues that slavery continued with the convict leasing system in which Blacks were imprisoned for racialized behavior. Alabama arrest records indicate that Green Cottenham was arrested for vagrancy. The root cause for slavery in the “New World” was capitalism and the need for a labor force (Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams and Edward Baptist’s The Half has Never Been Told). The contemporary private prisons in which so many Black racialized bodies are bound are identified as “for-profit prisons.”Directly linked to racialized and sexualized violence is cheap labor. As one bystander proclaimed at a slave auction in Montgomery, Alabama on July 13, 1861, “Niggers is cheap.”
Alongside the development of the mass incarceration system was the school to prison pipeline. Reagan, Clinton and then President George Bush ushered in “zero-tolerance” policies that disproportionally effects Black and Brown racialized bodies. The Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP reports that “African-American students overall are now nearly three times as likely to be suspended, and Latino students are nearly one-and-a-half times as likely to be suspended, as their white peers.” As a result, Blacks are not being educated but disciplined and feed into prisons. The lack of education in capitalist America is enough to hold any one back, inside a racialized and dehumanizing system, it is completely debilitating.
Walter Johnson’s statement encapsulates the ideology behind this White Supremacist system: “the condition of gazing, claiming, supervising, delighting, penetrating, climaxing, and maiming at will – the human condition of owning” (pg. 171). This is exactly how Whites have treated Blacks for a long time. There is no way for me to address all of the components to this system in this one article, but I will highlight the fact that the racialized disparaging views of Blackness are ingrained into the very material objects of this country. On the day after the terrorist act by Roof, the Confederate flag remained at full height at South Carolina capitol while the U.S. and state flags were lowered to half-staff. The elevation of the Confederate flag is a visual representation of White Supremacy ruling over Jeffersonian ideas of freedom and democracy which were also inherently contradictory because they required the enslavement of Black bodies. While Southerners are claiming the Confederate flag represents “Southern pride and heritage,” it is a constant reminder of White’s oppression over Blacks during slavery. Woven into the very fabric that makes up the flag are the ideas of Blacks being lazy, hyper-sexualized, beastly, and the closest to apes. In fact, this is what William Thompson said: “As a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematic of our cause.”
In an interview of Mark Sanford by Chris Hayes, U.S. Representative for South Carolina’s 1st congressional district, about the Confederate Flag, he says: “It’s easy from afar, the Bible says to worry about the log in your own eye before you worry about the splinter in somebody else’s.” The first group of White Americans I am calling out is White Christians! You all have been on the frontlines fighting to maintain White supremacy and privilege. Jacobs’ slave master, just like many other slave masters were Christians. It was White Christians who made Black slaves like Andrew Jackson run barefoot down the road tied around their neck to a horse (Johnson, 175). White Christians were either involved with or present when a mob of White people in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1918 “stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death” Mary Turner. They then: “opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death” (Cone, 120). The Ku Klux Klan, which has been the “face” of White Supremacy, is a part of White Christian America. Reagan, who played a monumental role in the present school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration system, was a White Christian. It was White Christians who led the pro-Darren Wilson marches and held up signs saying “Support OUR POLICE! PRAY FOR PEACE” and “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Many who attack me on my Facebook page and on comment sections are White Christians who say the same damn thing: “stop playing the victim,” “just listen to the cops and Blacks will not be killed,” “stop race baiting,” “stop killing each other,” “Black on Black crime,” and “abortion is the biggest issue for the Blacks.”
In no way am I arguing that all White Christians are perpetuating White supremacy because historically and presently, I personally know some who have fought against the oppressive system. What I am saying is that overwhelmingly, White Christian America has held down, incarcerated, lynched, bombed and marked Blacks in America. In my next post, I will pose three challenges to White America.
Travis Harris is a R3 contributor
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