Race as a Social Construct

There is nothing biologically real about race. Nevertheless, it is very real in a social sense, with consequences for our daily lives, both good and bad. Guest contributor, Sarah Quezada at Mission Year explores what it means to navigate a world in which racial lines are biologically blurred.

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One of my favorite concepts in Sociology (c’mon… you’re honestly telling me you don’t have a favorite Sociological concept??? I don’t buy it…) is the idea of race as a construct. I had to head back to my trusty 101 textbook to help explain.

First of all, I love the distinction spelled out between the words race and ethnicity:

“Whereas people use the term race to refer to supposed biological characteristics that distinguish one people from another… ethnicity and ethnic refer to people who identify with one another on the basis of common ancestry and cultural heritage. Their sense of belonging may center on nation of origin, distinctive foods, dress, language, music, religion, or family names and relationships” (from Essentials of Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach 6 edition by James M. Henslin, p213).

Now they share an awesome example. The writer speaks of a young girl who has one “white” and one “black” parent in the States and may be labeled as simply “black.” In more recent years, it’s also likely she would be “biracial.” If she were to visit Salvador in Brazil, however, they “have at least seven terms for what we call white and black” (p215). This child would be classified in one of “whiter” categories.

So basically, on her flight, the girl’s racial classification effectively changed. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to our understanding of race because we think race as connected to biology. But in reality, it’s not. Racial categories are used to label biological characteristics, and those groups can change depending on what culture is doing the classifying.

Here’s another great example from Hotel Rwanda, which is a powerful, yet difficult, movie on the Rwandan genocide:

Once, when I was teaching this chapter in my Sociology 101 class, I had the most perfect moment occur. A student raised his hand. He had a tanned complexion and sandy brown-blonde hair, but basically looked the same as many of the guys in this predominately white classroom. “Well,” he told the class. “My dad is Egyptian, so I guess technically I’m African American.”

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It quickly poked a hole in a label we use so frequently for “race,” but it doesn’t really “work” in all situations. Because race is really trying to distinguish skin colors, and that’s just difficult to do.

That’s why I get such a kick out of discussions about my white Latino husband. He doesn’t fit into the description people actually mean when they use refer to someone as “white.” But his skin tone is white nonetheless, and in Guatemala, he is considered white. But his being Latino also confuses people because his skin tone doesn’t match what people expect from folks of that cultural heritage.

Society just keeps shifting the labels of race and ethnicity to try to accommodate all the peoples and cultures of the world.


People can be treated differently based on the race they are perceived as belonging to, regardless of their identity with that race. 

• How might the student in the example above be treated in the United States? 
• Will his experiences be the same as others that identify as "African-American"? 
• If race isn’t biologically real, where does disparity between races come from? 
• How do you see the fluidity of race play out in your context?

Sarah lives in Atlanta with her Guatemalan husband Billy, and their children Gabriella & Isaac. She blogs about cross-cultural marriage and family life, immigration, and multicultural identity at A Life with Subtitles. She is also Director of Operations at Mission Year, a Christian volunteer program. 

Friday Fruit (07/26/13)

Dorothy Counts, 1957

On Fridays, BTSF offers links to other discussions about race & Christianity. It's an opportunity for you
to read about racial justice & Christianity from other perspectives, and for me to give props to the shoulders on which I stand...

Weekly Round Up:

• A Justice for Trayvon Toolkit for White Allies

• Ram Sridharan: To some of my Asian friends who have been silent during the Trayvon Martin verdict

• The Zimmerman Acquittal: America’s Racist God

• Christian Atheism: The Only Response Worth its Salt to the Zimmerman Verdict
• Thanks to Carolyn and John for the rec!

• An Opportunity to Change: Intervarsity student reacts to campus racism
• Thanks again to Carolyn and John!

• American school RE-segregation

• This is White Privilege: The TV Glorification of White Crime

These are some of BTSF's links of interest this week. What are yours?

Feel free to contribute your own links in the comments section, or submit items you feel should be included during the week. Self-promotion is encouraged.

Bearing Good Fruit

In past articles, we've explored how white Christians bear 'strange fruit' in their approach to race and racism. We've come face-to-face with some of the profound racial failings of the American Church, both modern and historic. Now, let's learn some ways that white Christians can bear good fruit in their witness to a racialized world.

If Christ’s death means restitution for our brokenness, what does that mean for the Church's racial sins? How can white Christians live into redemption for a legacy of injustice and silence? What would it look like for white Christians to ‘go and sin no more’?

Scripture
First, we can learn from scripture that tells us God is not colorblind, and that a diversity of cultures is essential to the Body of Christ. We can learn from the mistakes of the early church, and then begin to identify the effects of race in our own lives.

Education
We can continue the journey by educating ourselves about the modern racialized world in which we live, and our participation in its perpetuation. We can read books that we might have previously ignored, consume media we thought wasn't for us, learn histories that we weren't taught in school. There is must to catch up on in order to be responsible contributors to the cause.

Relationships
Empowered by a new richness of knowledge, we can also form meaningful relationships with people with a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. We can model our friendships after those Jesus chose, surrounding ourselves with a variety of perspectives, and intentionally seeking out the marginalized. Racial justice cannot occur in the academic abstract.

Submission
We can submit to the leadership of people of color: at church, in our workplaces, in our extracurriculars, in the movement. When we do so, we set aside our own agenda and follow the lead of those who best understand the changes that need to take place. White folks will then learn we are not here to save the world, but are rather participants in a greater plan. When we set aside our own need to be at the center, we take the first small step in dismantling the status-quo.

Listen
Then, we will become better equipped to be strong, supportive co-laborers for our sisters and brothers experiencing oppression and marginalization. We can pass the mic, lift to the podium, so that other voices are heard and amplified. We can listen and learn from those who hunger and thirst after righteousness."

Act
And when the time is right, we too can lift our voices to strengthen the call for justice.  We show up in solidarity when we are called upon so that the collective voices of Christ on earth ring loud against both individual incidents of racism and the ongoing system of racial disparity. When national racial tragedies occur, there should be no question as to where the collective church stands.

Thus, the world will begin to see what redemption in Christ means. They will see that white Christians recognize that life on earth isn't as God intended, and that we validate the pain and frustration of our sisters and brothers, rather than trying to silence it. They will see a picture of Christ's grace, and reconciliation lived out in our walk. The world will see that our Christian faith means we value justice and yearn for a restored world.

The world will see Jesus when we bear good fruit. 

What steps have you taken to bear good racial fruit? Find more suggestions here. 

Friday Fruit (07/19/13)

This week, we have a lot of links looking at the broader issues of race and legal justice. A lot here looks at facts and data, but I would also encourage you to listen to personal accounts and stories to truly begin to understand the events of this week. Christena's 'Reconciliation Replay' is a good place to start.

Weekly Round Up:

• Stand Your Ground Increases Racial Bias in "Justifiable Homicide" Trials

• Failing to Understand when People of Color Distrust the Police

• The Failure of Racial Profiling

• Racial Bias in Presidential Pardons

• Asian Americans: Let’s Stop Thinking That We’re Switzerland

• Framing Children's Deviance

• Reconciliation Replay – the Listening Well edition
• Yeah, I'm cheating by posting a roundup of a roundup...but it's worth it

• Precocious 'colorblind' kids react to biracial Cheerios commercial
• I got a bunch of requests to post this one because it's 'feel good' in a week where we could definitely use it. But, to be honest, I was underwhelmed: blatant racism easy to point--even a child can do it. It takes more nuanced thinking to tackle (and own) the way modern racism has evolved.

These are some of BTSF's links of interest this week. What are yours?

Feel free to contribute your own links in the comments section, or submit items you feel should be included during the week. Self-promotion is encouraged.

The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Part 3: #Justice4Trayvon)

This is the final post of a three-part series examining James Cone's 'The Cross and the Lynching Tree.' Originally drafted before the Zimmerman verdict was announced, I now re-read it convicted anew.

The silence of the body of Christ in the face of Jim Crow violence is striking. How did they not see the injustice? What is it that white Christians are also blind to today?

The demonization that black men underwent during the era of lynching actively morphed the stereotypes against them from docile ‘Sambos,’ into violent hyper-sexualized predators. This stereotype was actively encouraged in order to justify Jim Crow violence in the name of protecting women and ‘family values.’ This legacy forms the basis for many modern prejudices about black men today.

This 'dangerous black male' stereotype is at the root of our preoccupation with the potential violence of a black victim, rather than the actions of his killer. It is why the victim might be tested for drugs, but not the aggressor. It's why the media wrings its hands about over the sensationalized potential for reactionary rioting, rather than on the reality of innocent loss of life. It is also why public opinion over racialized murder trials are almost always split by race.

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As in the Jim Crow era, juries continue to convict and sentence black folk very differently than white folk for the same crime (See the other Florida 'Stand Your Ground' case). We continue to treat racialized trials as though race doesn't matter or that white folk are unbiased arbiters in such cases. The legacy of pathologizing people of color, while excusing the violence of whites, is now more strongly institutionalized. But it’s also more subtle, with no individual blatant acts of bigotry to raise alarms. This is how modern Jim Crow survives.

How else is the gospel of Jesus’ cross revealed today? "The lynching of black America is taking place in the criminal justice system where nearly one-third of black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight are in prisons.” (163) The persistent 'dangerous black male' stereotype results in a 13x greater prison rate for black men over white men with the same charge.

This legacy is also why 90% of the people stopped and questioned by police in New York City are Black or Latino. Of the Jim Crow era, Joel Williamson notes that “their blackness alone was enough to line them up against walls, to menace them with guns, to search them roughly, beat them, and rob them of every vestige of dignity.” (6) The same could easily be said for stop and frisk policies today.

Jim Crow lynching was a regular reality within your, or certainly your parents’, lifetime. This is not a distant past with perpetrators dead and gone. We exist in a society that has come of age, and been molded by, racialized violence. This proximate legacy effects all of the interpersonal dynamics in our law enforcement, our sentencing laws, our judicial system. Indeed, white folk “still reap privileges from the society that lynching created” (137)

Cone observes that “if the lynching tree is America’s cross and if the cross is the heart of the Christian gospel, perhaps… [it] has something to teach America about Jesus’ cross.” (64) Jesus told us that whatever we have done to the ‘least of these,’ we have done to Him, and thus “every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus.” (158) Indeed, “when we see the crucifixion as a first-century lynching, we are confronted by the reenactment of Christ’s suffering in the blood-soaked history of African Americans. “ (161)

The cross and the lynching tree are inextricably linked in American Christianity. The reality is that “few African Americans are more than a few degrees removed from a similar narrative and the experience that it creates” (Ray). “The cross needs the lynching there to remind Americans of the reality of suffering—to keep the cross from becoming a symbol of abstract, sentimental piety. …yet the lynching tree also needs the cross, without which it becomes simply an abomination. It is the cross that points in the direction of hope…beyond the reach of the oppressor.” (161)

Niebuhr’s lack of empathy in his time reveals a cognitive dissonance not unlike our modern perspective. On the one hand we believe in the sanctity of each life in Christ. We believe in justice and equality. But we live in a country that maintains huge economic, political, and health disparities on the basis of race.

It is often the silence in the face of oppression that is most appalling. In many ways, it is the Peter's denial that is more inexcusable than the physical brutality of Roman guards.  I do not presume that I would have the insight or fortitude to go against the masses then. But let’s challenge ourselves to do better now.

We may want to otherize Jim Crow racists. But if we ask ‘where were the white Christian voices then?’ we must also ask, ‘in what ways do we remain silent now?'

Friday Fruit (07/12/13)

2010 protest in Los Angeles,
Juan Camilo Bernal / Shutterstock.com

On Fridays, BTSF offers links to other discussions about race & Christianity. It's an opportunity for you
to read about racial justice & Christianity from other perspectives, and for me to give props to the shoulders on which I stand...

Weekly Round Up:

• Why Multiculturalism Is a Must for the Church

• 5 Reasons Christians Need to Stop Using the Term 'Illegal Immigrant'

• Multicultural church, Multiethnic church, or...something else?

• An unfortunate teachable moment on Race and Public Witness

• What do I do with all this privilege?!

• The Court’s Bizarre 1 Percent Rule

• Reading Rainbow Host LeVar Burton’s New Lesson: How Not to Get Shot by the Cops

• A Fuller Picture of U.S. History

These are some of BTSF's links of interest this week. What are yours?

Feel free to contribute your own links in the comments section, or submit items you feel should be included during the week. Self-promotion is encouraged.

The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Part 2: Niebuhr's blindness)

This is the second post of a three-part series examining James Cone's 'The Cross and the Lynching Tree.'

The complacency and silence of white Christianity during the Jim Crow era is uncomfortable to face. Even more so, the active participation and leadership of ‘good Christians’ in lynch mob violence. We shudder to see the Christian cross burned as a violent symbol of terror. It’s embarrassing to note the geographical overlap of lynching prevalence with the American ‘bible belt.’

It is easy, and certainly tempting, to distance ourselves from our ugly Jim Crow past. Shall we say it wasn't us in that mob? Shall we insist that had we been there, surely we would have spoken up? Surely we would have objected? “Surely not I, Lord,” "Even if everyone else abandons you, I will not." But like Peter, and the rest of the disciples, white American Christianity could not stand the test.

James Cone uses Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the most prominent American theologians of the 20th century, to demonstrate the moral failings of white Christianity in the face of lynching. Niebuhr was a liberal minded theologian with a strong awareness of the sociopolitical problems of his day. He was accustomed to viewing political issues through a biblical lens, and was sympathetic toward calls for racial justice.

Of any white Christian in that time, Cone argues, Niebuhr should have been in a position to see the connections between the cross and the lynching tree. Surely, he should have vehemently spoken out as a strong ally in Christ for black people facing violence and discrimination. But there is no such stand. In his writings, Niebuhr constantly stops short of urging meaningful change, preferring instead to keep the peace and to maintain a pace of change most comfortable for white Christians of the day.

Stephen G. Ray Jr. notes that Niebuhr is “exemplary of the tendency in 20th-century liberalism to treat the violation of black bodies by lynching as a national tragedy, but not as an ecclesial failure” Instead of observing a broad Christian moral failing, Niebuhr advocates for gradual transition, and even fails to support the integration of his own church.

In contrast, many black artists and theologians drew the parallel. James Baldwin observed that “the bulk of the white…Christian majority in this country has exhibited a really staggering level of irresponsibility and immoral washing of the hands.” (55) Some went even further to say “Not only through tacit approval and acquiescence has the Christian Church indirectly given its approval to lynch law…, but the evangelical Christian denominations have done much towards creation of the particular fanaticism which finds its outlet in lynching.” (112)

Cone uses the work of Niebuhr to illustrate the moral blindness of Christians in the Jim Crow United States. Though there were individuals and small coalitions of white Christians that spoke out, a unified Christian front was shamefully lacking.

Cone asks “what happened to the indifference among white liberal religious leaders that fostered silence in the face of the lynching industry?...What happened to the denial of whites who claimed they did not know?” (164) Has that indifference simply disappeared today? Has it resolved itself into a coalition of Christian allies confronting modern issues of racial injustice? No, the silence remains.

Continue to part three, as we explore what this legacy means for American Christianity today…

Friday Fruit (07/05/13)

Peter Cha and Rebecca Johnston
at the Summer Reconciliation Institute

On Fridays, BTSF offers links to other discussions about race & Christianity. It's an opportunity for you
to read about racial justice & Christianity from other perspectives, and for me to give props to the shoulders on which I stand...

Weekly Round Up:

• Summer Institute Reinvigorates Reconciliation Leaders

• Crossing Boundaries: New Day United Methodist Church

• A Homeless Man and His BlackBerry
• H/T @ThePeacePastor

• Paper Cut Persecution
• Also H/T @ThePeacePastor!

• Wong Fu For Life

• Interdependence Day

• Zimmerman Case Update: Rachel Jeantel is Not on Trial

These are some of BTSF's links of interest this week. What are yours?

Feel free to contribute your own links in the comments section, or submit items you feel should be included during the week. Self-promotion is encouraged.

The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Part 1)

They put Him to death by nailing Him on a tree. 

(Acts 10:39)

As we grapple with the meaning of Christ’s death on the cross, there may be no more vivid image for American Christians than the lynching tree upon which thousands of black women and men were murdered.

In his book ‘The Cross and the Lynching Tree,' theologian James Cone notes that “though both are symbols of death, one represents message of hope and salvation, while the other signifies the negation of that message…What is at stake is the credibility and promise of the Christian gospel.” (xiii)

In our daily lives, “the cross has been transformed into a harmless, non-offensive ornament that Christians wear around their necks,” (xiv) but “if the God of Jesus’ cross is found among the least, the crucified people of the world, then God is also found among those lynched in American history.” (23)

White Christians’ participation and silence in the midst of racialized violence, both modern and historic, is a telling indication of our allegiances and priorities. W. Fitzhugh Brundage notes that “perhaps nothing about the history of mob violence in the United States is more surprising than how quickly an understanding of the full horror of lynching has receded from the nation’s [white] collective historical memory” but that “to forget this atrocity leaves us with a fraudulent perspective of this society and of the meaning of the Christian gospel for this nation” (xiv)

Perhaps we are not self-aware enough to see the parallels between our actions and those of the crowds of Jerusalem: “as Jesus was an innocent victim of mob hysteria and Roman imperial violence, many African Americans were innocent victims of white mobs” (31) with the complicit backing of legal and executive authority. Poet Countee Cullen highlights it: “Lynch him! Lynch him!’ O savage cry,/ Why should you echo, ‘Crucify!’" (99) 

Beyond the punishment of the offender, crucifixion was a public warning to dissidents and troublemakers. Both lynching and crucifixion yielded a “a cruel, agonizing, contemptible death” that served as “public spectacles, shameful events, instruments for punishment reserved for the most despised people in society.” (161) We are reminded that “Jesus’ agonizing final cry of abandonment from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ was similar to the lynch victim Sam Hose’s awful scream as he drew his last breath, ‘Oh my God! Oh, Jesus.” (161)

James Baldwin observed that “the bulk of the white…Christian majority in this country has exhibited a really staggering level of irresponsibility and immoral washing of the hands.” (55) Cone notes “white theologians, then and since, have typically ignored the problem of race, or written and spoken about it without urgency, not regarding it as critical for theology or ethics” (52)

Some went even further to say “Not only through tacit approval and acquiescence has the Christian Church indirectly given its approval to lynch law…, but the evangelical Christian denominations have done much towards creation of the particular fanaticism which finds its outlet in lynching.” (112)

The result was a weakened gospel, and a broken witness of Christ’s love for the world: “Like most blacks of her time [Ida B.] Wells dismissed white Christianity as hypocrisy.” (131) In her view, “our American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hellfire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians.”

Even those disagreeing with her indictments, can see the deep stain of mistrust and alienation that resulted from white Christianity’s absence from racial allyship. “White conservative Christianity’s blatant endorsement of lynching as a part of its religion, and white liberal Christians silence about lynching placed both of them outside Christian identity.” Thus, “The lynching tree frees the cross from the false pieties of well-meaning Christians” (161) The message that was sent was that some lives, some souls, were less worthy, less precious, less deserving of God's attention. In the eyes of their black sisters and brothers, white Christianity was fraudulent.

Given this track record, is there any wonder that Sunday mornings remain segregated? Is a response of caution and distrust of white proclamations of unity all that surprising?

Continue to part two, exploring the moral blindness of Jim Crow Christianity …