Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(37)



I decided that I’d challenge the black church’s sexism. It was another show of our moral hypocrisy, another way of looking down the ladder at the face and fate of the nigger beneath us. The sad irony of our sexism is that it targets the women who make up the vast majority of our congregations. Of course I wasn’t foolish. I knew that I’d have to teach for at least a year to get the church ready to ordain three women as deacons for the first time in its history.

In weekly Bible study, I hammered away at the parallels between sexism and racism. If God respected all people the same, then we had no right to deny women equal standing in our sanctuaries. All seemed well until a group of local ministers got wind of what I was doing and deemed it destructive to black Christianity.

“You gonna let this yellow nigga come down here and destroy the black church?” their leader asked members of my congregation.

“Y’all got to do something.” So they did.

When I got to the church one Sunday morning, my key didn’t work. Must be fixing the door finally, I thought. The key to my office didn’t work either. Finally, I thought, they are getting around to refurbishing my sparse quarters.

I preached my sermon and couldn’t help but notice faces I hadn’t seen before. I thought my preaching was winning new converts. Apparently God wasn’t one of them.

After church, a deacon rose to announce trouble.

“Pastor, there’s a real problem in this church.”

“Deacon, let’s deal with that trouble.”

“The problem is you.”

Oh damn, I’m the trouble. Well praise the Lord and pass the offering plate because this wasn’t looking too pretty for me.

The church erupted in applause, and then, in short order, took a vote to cast me out. It really hurt that most of the women in the church sided with their men against me and their own best interests. But I eventually understood; they had to live with those men long after I left.

*

I thought I had heard the Lord clearly when I got kicked out of school. I thought I’d become a church pastor and preach the prophetic word of God. I thought I’d lead the people into the vineyards of progressive theology and together we’d be a mighty witness for the black church, challenging all of the ills of society. I thought first we’d uproot the ills in our own ranks.

But mine was the only uprooting. I was sent packing with a month’s severance pay. Once again I was left with no means to support a wife and a preschooler.

I had little choice but to return to Carson-Newman and the bastion of whiteness from which I had been expelled to complete my education. I knew my return meant that I had to attend chapel regularly, but after my experience at Thankful Baptist, it seemed a harmless requirement. I had obviously heard God wrong.

It wasn’t just gender that proved to be a barrier, a real source of suffering for black folk, not only in my church but across the nation. The shade of skin was a problem too. The minister who led the charge against me was, like me, a yellow Negro, and by citing my color in his theological brief against me, he shined a light on the deep wound of colorism in black America. The “light, bright and damn near white” black person is often put into conflict with the darker and richer chocolate members of our community. I had seen up close how color-struck black folk are.

My father was a hulking man known for his brawn and his blue-black skin. As I grew into adolescence and my understanding of the white gaze deepened, I saw how you looked at him. I couldn’t help but notice how so many folk saw my father not as a man, but as a specimen, a hominid whose dark skin and outsized muscles conjured all the ruinous images of black folk fresh out of the jungle. Savages. Savages who woke at dawn to go to work to fuel the engines of your civilization. Savages without whom you could not turn the gears of the very world you demanded black bodies make for you.

After he was laid off from the factory, my father worked as a janitor and all-around utility man at a local pharmacy. I saw how the white owner of the store eyed him. The man valued my father’s epic strength. But at the same time he infantilized my father. I even heard him once say to my father that he acted like a boy. I half expected my father to lay him in his tracks and prayed he wouldn’t do so. Yet I was angry that he hadn’t done so to preserve his sense of dignity and manhood. This same black man who was so tough on us kids didn’t say a word. It gave me a hint of the psychic costs of black manhood, of thrusting and parrying with the cold facts of white dominance that hushed one’s rage and yet encouraged it to flow against one’s own family. I suspect that my father’s suppressed rage found an outlet when he encouraged his sons to box each other, with gloves on but no headgear, to the point where we bloodied each other’s noses in our ghetto basement. This was a poor black man’s therapy.

At age seven, on our family trip south, I imagined what the word nigger might make my father do. At age fifteen, I saw in the pharmacy what it did to him. The word didn’t just exist in the air, to be brushed away like a gnat because he knew better. It resided in him. It resided in all of us. We black folk also viewed his dark skin with cruel disregard. He was the nigger, not just to you, but to us, too, because we have learned to see through your eyes. I saw what seeing himself through your eyes did to him. It ate at him. It circled his mind and frisked him like an abusive cop. I saw that he had chosen my golden-skinned mother—he called her “Ivory”—at least in part as an escape from the prison of his own darkness. In black life light skin is valued because it is closer to your white skin, and those with it are deemed to be closer to your so-called civilizing influence. That very notion reeks of barbarism, reeks of a crude, primeval equivalence between epidermis and humanity, reeks, therefore, of white supremacy.

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