Racism and Misplaced Supremacy

I didn’t look up the video intentionally. It popped up on my newsfeed one day as I was scrolling through – the last moments of a black man gasping the words, “I can’t breath“, appearing on the same media thread somewhere between, “Don’t Let Quarantine Rob You of Your Summer Body” and “We got to facetime my cute, little nieces again last night.”

Recipes, workout plans, memes, fashion, theology, friend posts, distant acquaintance, quarantine-joke, *scroll*…man dying.

The Struggle of Inadequacy

I love writing. I have to write. But there are some topics I feel utterly inadequate to write about. Not because I don’t know the truth, or don’t know right or wrong, or am apathetic. But because I feel lost when looking at a world with so much pain and brokenness, and I am ashamed of my own inadequacy.

So I’ll post on social media for the local pregnancy center, visit Churches to speak on abortion, talk to women in abusive situations across the world on how they can keep their pregnancies. I’ll speak on the eugenicist mindset of abortion centers around America. I’ll write about grief, about suicide, about stigmas surrounding pain, and our own, human, fragile, uneasiness when we are close to problems we are unable to solve.

I’ll sit next to my South Korean friend in the coffee shop, and lean my head against her shoulder to confront the glares of the white people who stare across at her every time she coughs. I’ll weep over the Netflix, court-drama, When They See Us, watch the viral video of the black man dying in the stream of media feed, feel my stomach turn in knots, click the phone shut and throw it away.

I have never been a victim of racism, never lived in a place where racism is culturally prevalent, and writing on the topic forces me to broach a mind-set I struggle to even understand. The concept of racism would seem ludicrously archaic if it was not so disturbingly, malignantly real.

The Struggle of Foundation

So here’s the deal. I am not arguing you can prove or disprove racial intent in crimes involving different ethnicities. I am also not arguing you can prove or disprove racist intent in the crime that led to the death of George Floyd. But we do live in a world where racism is real, where people are culturally criminalized based on how close their ancestors lived to the equator, and where racial discrimination doesn’t always end with a judge and jury.

Because we live in a world and a culture where racism is real, we have to talk about it. Full stop. To be silent is to speak.

But second, we have to understand where racism comes from because that is part of finding the solution.

If antipathy between whites and blacks is “natural,” based on our evolutionary progress from the first human genome, then to combat racism is a losing battle. Any progression toward subjective cultural equality would be a degression from objective human authenticity – it would either unnaturally level the anthropological playing field or unnaturally exalt the lower half.

And if racism is based merely on historic precedent – the desire for control and colonization, the need for laborers, the Western conquest for wealth, property, and slaves – then this explains origin but not persistence. Racism should be outdated, along with tenant farming, the feudal system, and leeching the wounded. It shouldn’t be part of 2020 economics, court cases, passive neighborhood segregation, and calls to 911.

If racism stems from either of the above two things – which are the two most argued – then our case is hopeless. Either we’re advancing toward progressive suicide, or we’re running on a hamster wheel that is existentially obsolete.

Attempting to argue from one of these two bases is one of the reasons for the inflation of the word racism, slapped onto political tweets, Instagram stories, the news’ media, and ranting Facebook posts – until we run a real danger of losing true and lasting meaning to the word at all. It also breeds fear, an overwhelming what is to be done until nothing is done. It fuels a sense of inadequacy that is just as responsible for silence as apathy or hate.

So we stand in desperate need of an option 3 – an actual foundation on which we can stand and say: Racism is wrong. 

The Struggle of Sin

Here goes: Racism is a result of sin. Particularly of two sins. Pastor and Author, Douglas Wilson sums them up in his post, What Is Racism?.

The sins are: Malice and vainglory.

Malice is sinful hatred. Examples of racism would be malice toward someone because his skin is darker, or lighter, because his father is French, because she wears a hijab.

Vainglory is pride, which is one of the roots of all sins. Racism thus stems not only from malice toward people because they have a different cultural identity, locus, or ethnicity, but from vainglory in thinking oneself superior to them because of your own.

This option is harder to grapple with. Why? Because even if I can say I’m not a racist, I would never look at someone differently based on their ethnicity, I do, however, know what it’s like to harbor malice toward my neighbor. I know what it’s like to be full of pride. I know what it’s like to think myself superior, to think myself worthy, to judge, look down upon, ostracize others, based on things no less arbitrary than race.

Sin is the great equalizer. We may be right in identifying hatred. But the reasons for it? Not so much. To plant the root of racism in scientific theories or historical precedent allows us to distance ourselves, to remain on the outside where it’s safe, where we’re not racist, where we can insert the r-word into our 140-character twitter rages and call ourselves social justice warriors.

But to call it malice and vainglory, to root it in anger and pride, means we are much closer to the villain than we thought. And lest you think that downplays the horror of racism – it doesn’t. Calling it evolutionary excrement, left-overs from time, historical run-off…that downplays racism.

But calling it sin – rooting it not only as hating my neighbor but hating God and hating his image – that recognizes the horrible, gut-wrenching, atrocious, Christ-defaming, man-exalting, weight that racism is.

It recognizes the inherent brokenness of this world. It recognizes the intrinsic sin and blasphemy and outcry rooted deep in the heart of every oppressor and every victim. It stands on the foundation of: “Let us make man in our image.” It looks at malice, and pride, and racist malice, and racist pride, and says: “This is wrong.” 

The Struggle Vanquished

This means the solution to racism is not reformation but resurrection.

It means Christians are not allowed to be silent. It means we are not allowed to withhold judgment on atrocities. It also means we are not allowed to excuse ourselves from judgment. It means we are not allowed to stop striving toward the advancement of Christ’s kingdom in this world of sin, and it also means we are not allowed to view ourselves as this world’s savior. It means we are not allowed to become apathetic to crimes of police officers, and it means we are not allowed to fuel hatred toward police officers that are actually doing their job. It means we are not allowed to shame our neighbors for being made with dark skin or to shame our neighbors for being made with light skin.

It means the Gospel is the answer to racism.

We argue about supremacy, recognize its fatal consequences, push people into seeing a privilege or dis-privilege into which they were born.

But supremacy isn’t the problem. It’s the misplacing of supremacy that is the problem.

God is the Ultimate Supremacist. Self-declared.

And his answer to misplaced supremacy – to pride and vainglory, to malice and racism and malignancy and abortion and the abuser and the abused – was to enter the story. And he enters as a baby, born of a virgin, born to a despised race, born to an abused people, born to a sinful world. He enters crying and helpless, and on the other side of the greatest injustice of history, he ascends, triumphant and glorified – the precursor and the promise that we will follow.

The ultimate battle was never between White and Black, or Jew, or Asian, or Muslim, or Native American, or Hispanic. The battle has always been much more drastic, requiring not social justice, but justice. Period.

It was Christ versus sin and all its consequences, including racism. And those born in Christ are born –  called from every tongue, tribe, and nation – not into an ethnic battle, but into an Ultimate Battle that has ethnic consequences.

The world is broken. The world has gone bad. The world is full of evil. Keep fighting.

“But do not fear,” Christ says. “I have overcome the world.”

Soli Deo Gloria,