Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(8)

Early in his career King believed in the essential goodness of white America. He trusted most whites to put away their bigotry in the face of black suffering. In the last three years of his life he grew far more skeptical of the ability or willingness of white folk to change. He concluded, sadly, that most whites are unconscious racists. In sermon after sermon before black congregations, King lashed out at American racism. I know his words may surprise many of you. You may be tempted to dismiss them as the rants of a man gone off course, of a soul made black by bitterness. But they are the words of the greatest American prophet. This is civic Holy Writ; this is political scripture. They are the sentiments of the man whose carefully selected words grace his national memorial and fill the innocuous speeches of countless dignitaries. King’s soul was indeed black, but it was made beautifully black by the culture that produced him, a culture of proud, loving, loyal, complicated blackness, a blackness that is often hidden from mainstream view even to this day.

Let us now read from the Book of King.

“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race,” King said. “Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society.” We are “perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population.”

In 1968 King said the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were penned by men who owned slaves, thus, a “nation that got started like that . . . has a lot of repenting to do.” Before his own Atlanta congregation in 1968 King declared that for black folk the Declaration of Independence “has never had any real meaning in terms of implementation in our lives.”

King said that black folk couldn’t trust America and compared us to the Japanese who had been interned in concentration camps in World War II. “And you know what, a nation that put as many Japanese in a concentration camp as they did in the forties . . . will put black people in a concentration camp. And I’m not interested in being in any concentration camp. I been on the reservation too long now.” Here King reverted to black vernacular to forge his link with the black folk whose comfort he sought as he got blasted in white America for criticizing the Vietnam War and for fighting to get rid of inequality. King concluded that black suffering has generated a “terrible ambivalence in the soul of white America.”

In 1966 King said in Mississippi that our nation “has a choice. Either you give the Negro his God-given rights and his freedom or you face the fact of continual social disruption and chaos. America, which will you choose?” In 1967 King also declared that the “fact is that there has never been any single, solid, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans . . . to genuine equality for Negroes.” And just two weeks before his death, he announced, with a broken heart, “Yes it is true . . . America is a racist country.”

That is why King is important to this generation, to this time, to this nation, to our people. He spoke the truth that we have yet to fully acknowledge.





V.

Sermon

[T]he destiny of the Negroes is in some measure interwoven with that of the Europeans. These two races are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are alike unable to separate entirely or to combine. The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.

—Alexis de Tocqueville





           Repenting of Whiteness





1.

Inventing Whiteness


Beloved, let me start by telling you an ugly secret: there is no such thing as white people. And yet so many of them, so many of you, exist. Please hear me out. I know you’re flesh and blood. I know that you use language and forks and knives. I’m not talking about your bodies or your garages or your grocery stores. I’m talking about the politics of whiteness. I’m talking about an identity that exists apart from the skin you’re born in. I’m talking about a meaning of race that supersedes the features you inherit when you come out of the womb. You don’t get whiteness from your genes. It is a social inheritance that is passed on to you as a member of a particular group.

And it’s killing us, and, quiet as it’s kept, it’s killing you too.

Race has no meaning outside of the cultures we live in and the worlds we fashion out of its force and energy. Whiteness is an advantage and privilege because you have made it so, not because the universe demands it.

So I want to tell you right off the bat that whiteness is made up, and that white history disguised as American history is a fantasy, as much a fantasy as white superiority and white purity. Those are all myths. They’re intellectual rubbish, cultural garbage. The quicker you accept that, the better off you’ll be, and so will the rest of us.

Yes, yes, I know many of you are proud to be Irish, or Italian, or Polish, or Jewish. And those ethnic groups are as real as any other groups with identifiable cultures, languages, and histories. But when your ancestors got to America, they endured a profound makeover. All of your polkas, or pubs, or pizzas, and more got tossed into a crucible of race where European ethnicities got pulverized into whiteness. That whiteness is slapdash, pieced together from the European identities at hand. But there is a pattern to it all. It helped the steady climb of European cultures to dominance over the long haul of history.