When a White "Sorry" Is Not Enough
by Dean Borgman
Pentecost Sunday, and I just can’t get the sight of that white knee on a black neck out of my mind…. Just weeks after 25-year-old Black man Ahmaud Arbery was shot to death while jogging… Black police officer Breonna Taylor shot to death by white police in her own apartment… reminding us of a long list… including Eric Garner in 2014--also strangled by a wrongful police chokehold.
We’ve watched the slow and reluctant response of the police departments and police unions and town officials… and unresponsiveness up the line of our justice system to the Executive office itself. We’re forced to wonder about official response to a black knee on a white neck…. I’m left dazed and frustrated.
My personal white apologies to close African American friends fall flat—I can sense it. They have seen it all… over and over… and experienced their own indignities. They have heard voices of seeming remorse with no systemic change… too often before. They know this painful cycle of oppression and are quite sure that hollow amends will continue. What can be done… until I… all of us… are able to see ourselves as part of the problem… before any solution can come?
Before we ponder solutions and suggest some new strategy, we must hear, more clearly than ever before, the depths of our problem. Few of us Whites have taken enough time to listen… to really hear… what Black people have experienced along all the way since 1619… and how it really feels going into the fifth century since then. How does such a trail of racial travesties affect Blacks and Whites? Adequate response will take more painful time and effort than most of us have ever taken.
The Westminster Presbyterian Church of Minneapolis invited Princeton professor Eddie Gloude to speak on “Racism and the Soul of America,” (13Sep16) This look into White America’s soul from a Black perspective is painful… while perhaps prophetic as to the events of this past week in that same city. This video speech is slow getting started but soon gets to the heart of systemic racism in America. Have we taken the time to listen to it… have we heard its diagnosis?
But how is it that so many White Christians, have through the centuries, failed to support the oppressed? Jesus announced his Gospel and personal Mission statement by saying:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor… to let the oppressed go free.” (Luke 4:18)
In my life experience, growing up in a strong church, majoring in Bible and Theology, teaching in a White Seminary… this announcement of Jesus did not seem prominent… nor protests against systemic racism a priority… from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s time up until now.
A second Black voice comes to us from the pastor of Washington D.C.’ Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, The Rev. William H. Lamar IV, preaching on: “It’s not just the coronavirus, it’s bad theology killing us:”
Here is what he had to say:
"There comes a time when being nice is the worst kind of violence. This is especially true for the many Christians who erroneously conflate being nice with following Jesus. No more euphemisms. No more pretending. No more craving the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day “Kumbaya.”
"I believe it is time for those who claim to follow Jesus to declare, without equivocation, that white evangelicalism is a morally bankrupt, bone-crushing theological system devoid of any semblance of the deity incarnate in Christ."
"Multiple factors are responsible for the alarming death rates that black, brown, Native American and poor white communities are experiencing from the novel coronavirus. Mendacious, misanthropic political leadership. A so-called health care system driven by profit and not human flourishing. An economic reality where even the below-a-living-wage money earned by poor and working-class people is siphoned off to the wealthy via tax cuts and tax policies that force wage earners to pay a larger share than dividend earners."
"American white evangelicalism is the offspring of the religion of settler colonialists, and the raison d’etre of settler colonialism is to remove an existing population and replace it with another. Settler colonialism is always violent, and it always has a theological system to support it.
"COVID-19—and its impact on black and brown communities—is the American empire in viral form. It lodges itself among the poor and feasts upon them. They cannot socially distance in tight, squalid quarters. They cannot wash their hands in lead-ridden water in Flint. We are having digital funerals for people who live in a city where Congress refuses to extend the health benefits… they themselves enjoy."
"This bad theology of who belongs and who does not, of who is worthy and who is not, has the blood of my parishioners on its hands. How would the novel coronavirus be affecting my community if the God-talk of white evangelicals, whose theology controls our political landscape, sounded more like Jesus?"
A third Black voice this Pentecost Sunday 2020 offers hope through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. It reaches into the richness of the Black experience for spiritual hope and more effective efforts for the common good. The voice is that of our national Episcopal Presiding Bishop Michael Curry:
As a white man, I can’t say this so eloquently or as effectively. May the collective worldly- centeredness and individual-egocentricity of our systems be overcome with loving justice. May we, of all ethnicities and political parties, be able to hear this plea for our common good: the hope of God’s kingdom come and God’s will be done… for global health, for our national healing, and for the common good for all…. Through the love of Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.
Dean Borgman is a retired (but still teaching) professor of Youth and Family Ministries and Social Ethics at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is an assisting Episcopal priest at Christ Church, Hamilton-Wenham and works as a part-time consultant for the Emmanuel Gospel Center in Boston. His experience in youth work is both suburban and urban, church and parachurch, national and international. He was involved in Young Life for several years, including YL’s early urban work on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Young Life’s Urban Training Institute in NYC. He has taught for several years in Africa besides leading classes and workshops in several countries. His books include Hear My Story: Understanding the Cries of Troubled Youth, 2003, and Foundations for Youth Ministry: Theological Engagement with Teen Life and Culture, 2013. Dean received a Youth Ministry Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Youth Ministry Educators in 2006 and from Youth Specialties in 2013. Dean and his wife Gail live in Rockport, MA and have four grown children with twelve grandchildren.
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EGC is issuing a series of 1st person reflections in response to the killing of Mr. George Floyd, in the hope that each unique voice might be heard, that we might each speak to the part of the Body that we are nearest to, and that together as a team we might disrupt the sin-cancer of white supremacy and our beloved church’s addiction to simple answers.
