Why is it always African Americans that keep makeing race an issue?
Annual Conference is the annual “business meeting” of the area United Methodist Churches. I have been to six of these meetings and they all have sucked. It is dry. Business focused (report giving) and a wink and nod toward anything spiritual. Robert rules the day at these things in the past, and Robert is not really open to the blowing of the Spirit.
This years Annual Conference, which concluded yesterday, was different.
I don’t know if it was because it was in a church. A different bishop. A different agenda. Or a combination. I do not know. All I know is I actually felt the blowing of the Spirit on the back of my neck. I will say, it gave me chills.
It was not all peaches and cream, it was still a business meeting at its core, but the Spirit was present in a way I had not been aware of in the previous years. I thank God for that.
I heard something after the Commissioning and Ordination worship that stuck with me. If you were not there the preacher was an African American who comes from a long tradition of speaking about things that Anglo churches do not. At the end of the of the worship, I heard someone express, “It always is the African Americans who keep making race an issue.”
In reflecting on this, I would say, “It is only the survivors and family members who keep bringing up the Holocaust as an issue.”
Just as it is important for us to never forget the Holocaust, we should never forget the reality that everyone (myself included) is racist. (Harvard has little implicit association tests you can take to see your implicit bias)
Race need to be brought up as often as it can be, regardless of how uncomfortable it is, so that we may never forget and grow into less racist lifestyles.
Racism: biological or environmental?
I know there is great debate on the nature vs. nurture aspects to racism. I have always been confronted with people telling me that racism is taught to us by others. To raise the question that perhaps we are all racist at birth was a laughable comment (and it pissed people off in seminary). However, in light of the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters and this article in TIME, I would like to resubmit that perhaps racism is both biological and environmental.
Implicit Tests
Tests to determine one’s natural bias toward one thing (such as white people) over another (black people).
Freakonomics
From September 15th 2008 Freakonomics tear-a-way calendar:
“In a paper called “The Economics of ‘Acting White,’” the young black Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. argues that some black students “have tremendous disincentives to invest in particular behaviors (i.e., education, ballet, etc.) due to the fact that they may be deemed a person who is trying to act like a white person (a.k.a. ‘selling out’)
From September 16th 2008 Freakonomics tear-a-way calendar:
“Black and white television viewers live in separate worlds. While Seinfeld was one of the most popular sitcoms ever among whites, it was never ranked among the top fifty shows watched by blacks. Monday Night Football is one of the few shows to bridge the black-white divide.”
What I do not understand is that if a white person tries to ‘act black’ it is seen as a positive thing among their peers. Why is this? Or is this only true in my experience?
Secondly, if whites and blacks do not even really talk the same language (evidenced by the Seinfeld example) then what makes us think that there is not a race issue in America? We cannot communicate with one another! It is my hope that Obama will be able to be more like Monday Night Football and less like Seinfeld.
