Racism

Review: The Anti-Greed Gospel

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Cover image of "The Anti-Greed Gospel" by Malcolm Foley

The Anti-Greed Gospel, Malcolm Foley. Brazos Press (ISBN: 9781587436307) 2025.

Summary: Argues that greed is the root of racism and calls the church to economic solidarity, anti-violence, and truth-telling.

We often think that hate and ignorance are at the root of racism. And certainly we can come up with examples of hate and ignorance. But Malcolm Foley argues in The Anti-Greed Gospel that the love of money is the root of the evil of racism. He shows how racism both arose and persisted after the abolition of slavery for economic reasons. The effort to subject one people by another was first and foremost about economic advantage.

Foley introduces his argument through showing that economic reasons (coveting) led to breaking other commands of God including bearing false witness, theft, and murder. He shows how unfettered capitalism and racism are intertwined in the economic growth of our nation through slavery. Then in post-reconstruction America, he traces the rise of lynching as a tool of economic subjugation. He argues that the tendrils of greed that eventuate in lynching undermined the witness of Christians like Francis Grimke and Atticus Haygood. The former eventually embraced violent resistance; the latter a kind of cynical paternalism. By contrast, he offers the example of Ida B. Wells, whose truth-telling exposed the roots of racialized greed and whose resistance sought justice through legal means.

The example of Wells provides the transition to the second part of Foley’s argument. He explores what the church can do. First, he argues for economic solidarity between Christians across racial lines such that we strive toward the Acts ideal of “no needy among us.” Then he contends for love rather than violence as we seek remedies for greed. For example, love resists practices like property appraisals that keep people in poverty. Love also opposes wars, which often rely upon minorities disproportionately to fight the battles while draining resources from domestic programs. Thirdly, he argues for prophetic truth-telling amid the culture of racial lies. Finally, he stresses the importance of creativity as we cast vision for a kingdom that is not of this world.

First for one criticism. Indisputably, in the American context, greed found expression through a form of racist capitalism. But I would argue that greed is an evil that finds expression in every economic system. In every economic system we can see classes or racial groups who are exploited for the economic gain of others. What this demonstrates is that Foley’s thesis that racism is rooted in greed has cross-cultural validity. I wonder if the association of “racialized capitalism” throughout the book weakens the focus on the root cause of greed.

That said, Foley’s thesis helps explain the persistence of racism. It also clarifies both the danger to the church of the “tendrils” of greed upon its life and the way it addresses racism. It is more than just relationships across racial lines. Whether society follows or not, finding ways to express economic solidarity, practice loving resistance, and engage in prophetic truth telling are more substantive alternatives than saying “let’s be friends.” It also seems to me that the challenge of creativity is to transcend our polarities and political binaries while not losing contact with earthly realities. We need to cast alternative visions people understand and find compelling.

Malcolm Foley is a young leader who is a scholar-pastor, and well-positioned to implement the recommendations he makes in this book. I look forward to hearing more from him!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Plundered

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Cover image of 'Plundered" by David W. Swanson

Plundered: The Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice, David W. Swanson. InterVarsity Press (ISBN: 9781514007747) 2024.

Summary: The tangled roots of racial and environmental injustice. Traces exploitation and oppression of people and land to a common root of greed.

The basic premise of this book is that systemic racism and environmental destruction stem from a common root. Specifically, greed, and its outworking in theft, in the eyes of David T., Swanson, are the sources of what he sees as two intertwined ills. Often, those subject to racial injustice also suffer from depredations on the environment. The point of this book is not to argue what are disputed ideas in some quarters nor to propose policies for society as a whole. Instead, Swanson asks how churches might engage in caretaking of both people who have suffered injustice and the land they inhabit, often in urban settings.

Swanson comes uniquely qualified to address these questions. After training as an outdoor educator, Swanson experienced a call to establish a church on the South Side of Chicago, New Community Covenant Church, where he has lived with his family and worked the past fourteen years. The book reflects his own efforts to love and care for the people and place of the South Side of Chicago, specifically the Bronzeville neighborhood.

Before addressing his key insight, Swanson begins with the gift of creation, weaving biblical narrative and insights of Indigenous Christians into his sabbath day walks by Lake Michigan near the Center of Science and Industry, through the woodlands, canals, and lagoons of what was the site of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. From here, he considers our vocation, which he describes as priestly caretakers. As priests, we both bless the Creator and the creation. As caretakers, we seek the flourishing of all God’s creation, recognizing that our flourishing depends upon it.

Then, Swanson explores what we have actually done. We have so refashioned creation, resulting in mass extinctions and changing weather patterns. Scientists contend we have entered a new era in Earth’s existence, the Anthropocene. We have pursued extractive and exploitative policies not only with the creation but with ethnic minorities, the Black and Brown peoples of our country. As a result, these people often suffer the worst effects of our environmental depredations in what is called environmental racism. As Christians, we have often been complicit. Real healing can only begin with repentance, leading to repair, reconciliation, and renewal.

Part of how this happens, Swanson contends, is through our detachment from our place. We often do not know where our water, food, energy, clothing, and other necessities come from. And so we often can be oblivious to the exploitative and extractive practices implicit in our existence. But there is hope and the last two chapters in part one begin exploring what priestly caretaking under Christ’s redemptive work might look like in our communities, from gardens, to welcome of newcomers, to fighting for the quality of local schools.

All this comes in the first part, under the heading “tangled roots.” The second part is headed ” becoming naturalized.” Instead of detachment, Swanson considers what it means to become indigenous to a place. Swanson urges three practices to nurture our relationship with our place and its people. Instead of detachment, we nurture belonging, listening to and learning about our community. Instead of unceasing exploitation, we sabbath, resting both ourselves and the rest of creation and practicing generosity. Finally, in place of greed, we nurture virtue–prudence, justice, courage, temperance, faith, hope, and love.

Priestly caretaking is not idealistic utopianism. Rather it is a form of “long obedience in the same direction. Swanson writes:

“Caretaking in the ruins of industrialized extraction and exploitation is a generational commitment. Who can say how long it will take for a racialized people centered on Jesus and pursuing repair together to find that creation has re-exerted its formational power over them? How long will it take for a people who’ve been severed from the earth to learn to walk humbly and gently among their creaturely neighbors? There is no program for this, no curriculum or metrics. There is only the good and slow work of learning together how to exist as a blessing and a gift.”

What I appreciate about this book is that it doesn’t try to do too much. It doesn’t propose macro solutions for racism or environmental problems. Swanson does for urban communities what Wendell Berry does for rural farming communities. Both focus on care for people with names and their place. We can’t seek restoration everywhere if we don’t practice it somewhere. Swanson invites us to begin where we are to engage the long, slow work of community caretaking.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: How Ableism Fuels Racism

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How Ableism Fuels Racism, Lamar Hardwick. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2024.

Summary: An argument that ableism is an important lens through which to understand racism, because both create a hierarchy of superior and inferior bodies.

Lamar Hardwick is a pastor who lives at the intersection of racism and ableism as a Black pastor on the autism spectrum. Also, at the time of the writing, he is under treatment for a recurrence of cancer, with the attendant bodily disabilities this brings. As he has reflected on his own experienced, read scripture and researched American history, he is convinced that ableism not only fuels discriminatory treatment of the disabled but also racial discrimination. The connection is the idealizing of certain bodies as fit and superior. In the American experience, this has particularly centered on White bodies, especially male bodies.

Hardwick focuses on Judges 17: 1-6, in which a young man, Micah, steals a large sum of money in gold from his mother, then under threat of curse confesses his sin. Instead of punishment, his mother takes the gold and has it made into an idol for the household. When a Levite comes through, Micah persuades him to become his priest. From this incident, Hardwick discerns three stages of ableism: images, idols, and institutions. Instead of facing sin, we honor what we should grieve, make it an object of central concern, an idol, and then create institutions to support our idolatry.

Hardwick traces how this was done in the early settlement of the U.S., subjugating women and indigenous people, and importing slaves, considering them inferior human beings. Slavery was even defended as a blessing for the inferior slave! He traces ways churches supported this form of ableism, and have continued to do so, pleading for and receiving exemption from the ADA legislation of 1990.

He cites a statement of John Piper’s that equated disability with ugliness and how our idolatry of superior bodies upholds certain White and ableist ideals of beauty. I was reminded of a conversation at a social gathering where someone remarked on the attractiveness of Michelle Obama only to be confronted by a yuck face from one of the other (White) women.

He offers a particularly personal discussion of ableism, racism, and healthcare in terms of access, differences in listening to reported symptoms, and quality of care. He also discusses how ableism fuels racism in the church, and the important role Black churches have been in offering a refuge from ableist and racist treatment and in many ways have led the way in disability inclusion.

One of the most thought-provoking chapters focused on the disabled God. The resurrected Jesus still bears the wounds of the crucifixion, and in this, God is glorified. This contrasts with ableist versions of Jesus, blonde, blue-eyed, ripped and aggressive.

Hardwick also considers the world of work and ableist ideas of productivity, what he calls “grind culture.” The question arises of the worth of bodies that cannot meet the demand of the grind, and the different ways bodies of color and disabled bodies participate in the work of creation. He proposes elevating place-making above profit-making as one way to address this.

I thought the major point the author was making to be compelling–that ableism furnishes the energy for racism in the distinction between superior and inferior bodies. At the same time, I wonder if the connection, if not conflation, of the two may mean overlooking the voices of persons with disabilities. Yet Hardwick offers important insights into the idolization and institutionalization of ableism. Most striking, and a field where I think further work is possible is the idea of the disabled God, the God who does not think the “disabilities” of the cross something to be “fixed.” People need not become White or able to be beautiful before God. The personal insights Hardwick adds from his fight with cancer sharpens his critique of ableism, even as it reminds me that to pray for him that the power of the disabled God would shine through his life.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: King: A Life

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King: A Life, Jonathan Eig. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Summary: A new biography of King that focuses not only on his civil rights leadership but his personal life and struggles.

The sources for the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life continue to open up as both government records and new private sources become available to researchers. Jonathan Eig, in writing this biography had access to these and offers a portrait of King that not only underscores his greatness but the complexity and humanness of the man. We have the man of peace who would talk with a man who assaulted him, forgive him and refuse to press charges. We learn of a man of courage, who knew his life would likely be ended by an assassin’s bullet. We hear the eloquence of a man who lifted us all by his “dream” and challenged our complacency with the Letter from Birmingham jail. Yet there are also the moral inconsistencies of his plagiarism of portions of his dissertation and his appropriation of material his sermons and his affairs with women and his guilt-ridden struggle with his unfaithfulness.

Other biographies introduce us to all of these. Eig takes us deeper. He explores the powerful influence of his father (also a womanizer) and his attempts to define himself apart from Daddy King, particular when this meant going against the powerful peope who were his father’s friends. Another powerful influence on his life was Coretta. Arguably, she was initially more deeply committed to civil rights than Martin but as the call upon his life became clear, she was fully on board as a partner, despite the restrictions she faced as a woman in the male world of the Black church and civil rights leadership. She endured the imprisonments, the threats on the lives of the family, the modest life they maintained. It seems she may be worthy of a biography in her own right.

Other accounts have discussed J. Edgar Hoover’s animus against King and the surveillance by the FBI that revealed many of King’s sexual affairs. Eig goes deeper into this, particularly his long relationship with Dorothy Cotton. Like David Garrow, he discusses memos of recordings at the Willard Hotel, where King was allegedly on hand as a woman was raped by a Baltimore pastor, Logan Kearse. Eig is more reluctant than Garrow to credit these, recognizing the effort of the FBI to smear King. Both note the recordings themselves remain sealed until 2027. Eig discusses at length the anonymous letter with a compilation of recordings sent to King to induce him to commit suicide. Neither King nor the FBI come out looking good here–King persists in affairs even when he knows he’s being surveiled.

Eig explores deeply King’s relationship with other civil rights leaders. I had never before realized the importance of Ralph Abernathy in King’s life. He was both alter ego and counterbalance–the trusted friend and fellow pastor with whom King could confide, laugh with, and it appears, even carouse with. Eig also develops the tensions that arose, particularly in the years after the March on Washington, a high water mark. King acted intuitively, could raise money but did not have the organizational talents sorely needed in movement leadership. Furthermore, as racist forces doubled down and President Johnson became more engulfed by Vietnam (which King opposed), it became harder for King to persuade those who felt violence was the answer, of its futility.

Eig also develops King’s opposition to the Vietnam war and his courageous stand which he knew would alienate Johnson and others. King recognized how the war would thwart the efforts of Johnson’s Great Society, robbing it of money and focus in the national agenda. He also recognized the disparate proportion of Black young men who were dying.

The book explores King’s struggles with depression, particularly as divisions and resistance developed and his attempts to address northern racism struggled. Some, no doubt was simply exhaustion as King drove himself hard to fulfill his sense of call. While never formally treated, he did consult with a psychiatrist. Mostly, it was his friends, including Abernathy who would pull him away long enough to regain equilibrium.

What Eig also gives us is a man of deep religious faith, who believed his calling was from God, whose trust was that God would carry him through, even in the daily face of death. One particularly senses this in Eig’s accounts of Kin’s last visit to Memphis and his prescient message of the night before.

Eig covers both familiar ground in this biography as well as take us deeper into the complicated man King was. King’s namesake Martin Luther once stated that “God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick.” Eig shows us both a courageous leader and a grievous sinner who would be excoriated for his plagiarism and called out by #MeToo and #ChurchToo for his treatment of women. He also shows us how King’s life offered America a mirror in which to see itself and recognize the deep stain of racism. His vision for non-violence, for justice, and for a reconciled beloved community was a gift that the America of his time sadly rejected. The book reminds us of the truth we are inclined to deny and of the gift that we continue to refuse.

Review: Officer Clemmons

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Officer Clemmons, Dr. François S. Clemmons. New York: Catapult, 2020.

Summary: An autobiographical memoir of Dr. François S. Clemmons, from his earliest years in Alabama, his youth in Youngstown, Ohio through his college years when he accepted that he was gay, his relationship with Fred Rogers, and subsequent performing and teaching career.

Recently in connection with my “Growing Up in Working Class Youngstown” series, I wrote about François Clemmons after discovering that he also grew up in Youngstown. I also learned that he had recently published a memoir, and intrigued as I was, I picked up a copy to learn about this man who worked on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood for twenty-five years, breaking down racial barriers through his very presence.

My article viewed Clemmons as an outside observer. The memoir gave me a sense of what it was like to be François Clemmons from those early childhood years, the years of awakening to his homosexuality, the extraordinary relationship he had with Fred Rogers, and his later career. He begins with his troubled childhood with a violent father. His Great Grandmama Laura Mae protected him, forcibly removing him when his father kidnapped him at gunpoint, shooting the father in the shoulder! It was his Great Grandmama who led the effort to gather enough money to send a group of men, his mother Inez, and himself to the industrial north, to begin a new life away from his violent father. He also writes of his Granddaddy Saul, from whom he learned to sing.

Youngstown was not any better family-wise. Inez, his mother, took up with Warren, who she adored, but who became an abusive step-father to Clemmons. Singing, especially in the city’s churches became an escape and he rapidly gained status, learning to read music, eventually becoming choir director at his church. Even then, he was beginning to realize that he had feelings for his own sex, “tamping” these down, discouraged by both friends and his church’s, and especially his mother’s, beliefs. He also discovers the racism that would put him on a vocational rather than a college track and excluded him from music venues, except for special Blacks-only nights. His ticket out of Youngstown came in the form of a social worker who paid for music lessons from a well-trained choral director and encouraged his application to Oberlin College. He describes the day a high school principal who was part of the Oberlin Alumni Association called him to his office to share the news that he was going to ask the alumni to provide a scholarship to attend Oberlin, which had a very fine conservatory. That support was crucial because, by then, he was living with friends to escape his step-father’s violent temper.

The next part of the memoir recounts Clemmons musical training under the tutelage of Ellen Repp and his acceptance of his homosexuality. Ironically, an effort of his mother and stepfather to “fix” him by taking him to a prostitute led to his taking refuge with the Beechwoods, whose son was gay and who fully accepted both him and François. They would be his home in Youngstown until his graduation. He became involved in civil rights advocacy, meeting Dr. King and learning about Bayard Rustin, a key organizer who was also a gay man. When he met Nick, he experienced deep fulfillment in a relationship with another man.

The final part of the memoir covers the years in Pittsburgh and the development of his singing career in New York. Much focuses on his extraordinary relationship with Fred Rogers, who he first met during his MFA studies at Carnegie Mellon, while singing in the choir at the church Fred and Joanne attended. From the first lunch he had with Fred, he discovered someone who loved him unconditionally. He describes on particular episode of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood where Rogers ended as he always did, saying, “You make every day a special day by being you, and I like you just the way you are.” Clemmons felt like Fred was looking at him, and asked him, after the show, “Fred, were you talking to me.” Rogers replied, “Yes I was. I have been talking to you for years. You finally heard me today.” While Rogers personally accepted Clemmons homosexuality, he would not permit Clemmons to be publicly out and remain on the show. That just would not have been possible in the 1960’s. Clemmons describes the tension he struggled with between his homosexuality and his recognition of the work he was able to do on the show to change perceptions of Blacks. He admired Rogers support of civil rights, typified by a time when they were on tour in Cincinnati and a music director refused to let Clemmons rehearse. Rogers asked the man to apologize or they would not work with him.

Rogers supported his singing career, including standing with him, supporting him financially, and mentoring him through further racist treatment with the Metropolitan Opera. Eventually Clemmons retired from the show, going on to research and perform the great spirituals in the Black American music tradition, first with the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble, and later, at Middlebury College, where he now makes his home. One of the heartwarming episodes he describes is the opportunity to invite Rogers to Middlebury to receive an honorary degree.

The memoir concludes with a man who seems to be at peace, having finally found the way to forgiving his two fathers, accepting his own sexuality, championing the distinctive music of his people, and reveling in the love of this most unusual figure in television history, Fred Rogers. The memoir helps us to see how hardwon this peace was, given the racism, the opposition from family and society to his sexuality, and the challenges of making it as a Black in the classical and operatic world. It’s a story of both persevering in a gifted calling, and the difference that a few people who did the right thing–a great grandmother, a social worker, a choral director, a principal, a music professor, and finally, Fred Rogers. In the end, through teaching and through this memoir, Clemmons has turned around to give to others the best of what was entrusted to him.

Review: Strength for the Fight

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Strength for the Fight (Library of Religious Biography), Gary Scott Smith. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2022.

Summary: A biography on this pioneer Hall of Famer who desegregated Major League Baseball, devoted his post-playing years to civil rights activism, all sustained by his active faith.

As a lifelong baseball fan, this is not the first Jackie Robinson biography I’ve read. The one I read when I was a young fan focused on his exploits on the field, his courage and restraint in breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball, and how his play contributed to several pennants and a World Series victory. As this book makes clear, Robinson not only needed to be both courageous and self-controlled to face racist treatment, he needed to be good–and he was. He was fast and daring on the base paths, a great fielder, and could deliver hits and bunts in clutch situations. He was a great all-round ballplayer deserving of Hall of Fame status simply on those merits.

This book added to the portrait of Robinson in several ways. Most importantly, it reveals him as a man of deep faith, who like Augustine had a godly mother and his own Ambrose in the form of a Methodist pastor, Karl Downs, who rescued him from gang life in Pasadena. Later, as he faces intense pressure and vitriol, he testifies, “Many nights I get down on my knees and pray for the strength not to fight back.” This and the support of his wife Rachel made all the difference for a proud man whose natural instinct was to fight back. Yet Smith also shows how Rachel went beyond standing by Robinson to pursue her own career as a nurse-therapist and professor.

Gary Scott Smith also fleshes out the vital role Branch Rickey played in Robinson’s life. Smith goes into the Methodist faith the two men shared, a critical factor in Rickey deciding to sign Robinson. Rickey was both a deeply religious man in Smith’s account and a sharp (and parsimonious) baseball entrepreneur. It was Rickey’s counsel he followed in not fighting back against spiking, knockdown pitches, and crude racial insults. When Rickey died in 1965 he said of Rickey: “He talked with me and treated me like a son.” The treatment of Rickey is so interesting that I would love to see Smith follow up this book with a full length biography on Rickey, perhaps as part of this Library of Religious Biography series.

What also distinguishes this book is the account it gives of Robinson’s post-baseball career as a tireless activist for civil rights through newspaper columns that did not hesitate to criticize presidents of either party, through public addresses including messages in hundreds of churches, marching on the front lines in places like Selma. At the same time, Robinson was not a “movement activist.” While honored by the NAACP with its Spingarn award, he did not hesitate to differ with others like Paul Robeson over communism or Dr. King over Vietnam. Some accused him of being an “Uncle Tom” for his relationship with Nelson Rockefeller, motivated by both political and business considerations, and his support in 1960 for Richard Nixon.

Vietnam would contribute to tragedy in Robinson’s life. His son Jackie, Jr. returned with addiction problems but the book makes clear the strains on the father-son relationship between the two. Sadly, just as Jackie, Jr. started to get his life on track as well as his relationship with his father, he died in an auto accident, just a year before Jackson himself passed.

That leads to my one question about this book, that the author doesn’t discuss how such a fine athlete as Robinson died at age 53, just sixteen years after retirement, suffering from diabetes, heart disease, and nearly blind. Others have discussed the disparate impacts of racism on health and the effects of his repressed anger and racial traumas on his health. Pictures of Robinson show him with hair turning white in his last playing years. Robinson bore on his body in many ways, externally and internally, the trauma of racism, and perhaps this might have been further developed in this work.

Smith portrays Robinson’s faith as “muscular,” and apart from those bedside prayers concerned more about moral and social uplift of his people, expressed in his tireless work. Even in his last years, with failing health, he was grateful for God’s blessings. Yet, he was infrequent in church attendance, and Smith notes the evidence of extra-marital affairs. After his first two years, he was more aggressive in defending himself on the field, having fulfilled his agreement with Rickey. Yet there is a thread running through the course of his life, shown by Smith of a faith that sustained and strengthened Robinson. What resulted was some of the most significant civil rights leadership in the twentieth century delivered in the form of a stellar athlete (no one since has stolen home more than the 19 times he did this) and a courageous champion. His faith, courage, and perseverance are worth emulation.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Black Hands, White House

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Black Hands, White House, Renee K. Harrison. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2021.

Summary: A history of how enslaved peoples played a major role in the building of this country and the need to remember that work in our monuments and by other means.

A number of histories have detailed the slave experience in America. What is unique about this history is that it seeks to give an account of the contribution enslaved Blacks made to the building of this country and its economy. Not only that, it seeks to tell the story of people, often by name who made that contribution while enslaved. The author believes they need to be remembered for their important role. They are a part of America’s history and are worthy to be included.

The author begins with an overview of the economic impact enslaved Blacks made in the country especially through the production of tobacco, cotton, rice, and sugar. She also lists six pages of companies and institutions that benefited from American slavery, or directly from slave labor. These include the government — slaves built many of Washington’s buildings and infrastructure. Insurance companies insured slaves for their owners, various banks accepted slaves as collateral or owned slaves, newspapers advertised slave sales, universities were funded by slave owners and some used slave labor in their construction, railroads rented slave labor, mines employed slaves–even churches and seminaries owned slaves and used slave labor.

Succeeding chapters chronicle the role slaves played in specific building projects. Mount Vernon’s buildings and tobacco and wheat crops depended on slaves. The author lists the names and values of slaves inherited by or subsequently hired by Washington and their trades, spouses, and enslaved children. At least 150 are buried in unmarked graves there.

Benjamin Banneker, a free black son of a slave was a self taught astronomer who was part of the survey team laying out boundaries, his role being to place the boundary markers for the new capital city. Slaves fired and laid many of the bricks and cut and hauled much of the stone for buildings in Washington. Slave markets often existed in the shadow of builds rising as shrines to democracy and freedom.

Both the White House and Capitol building were built with slave labor–and slaves re-built the White House after it was burned in the War of 1812. Of the first eighteen presidents, only two never owned slaves and publicly opposed slavery. Eight brought slaves they owned into the White House, four others owned slaves but did not have them at the White House. Four others, including Lincoln, did not own slaves but had ambiguous positions on slavery.

A similar story may be told of the Capitol. On page 175, the author lists 100 people who were “rented” for the construction of the Capitol building, a partial list. Philip Reid, a slave from Charleston, South Carolina, figured out how to cast Clark Mills Statue of Freedom in sections and install it atop the Capitol dome. His owner received most of the wages, apart from $41.25, for his work.

She goes on to describe slave involvement in the construction of the Supreme Court building, the Treasury building, the Smithsonian castle, Georgetown University, and the Library of Congress. At the core of the Library is the collection of Thomas Jefferson’s library. John Hemings fashioned the pine bookshelves and the portable book boxes in which the books were transported, Burwell Colbert painted the carriage that transported the books and Joseph Fossett fashioned the ironwork on the carriage.

Harrison believes it is past time to recognize in our nation’s monuments, particularly on the National Mall, the history of slavery, the vast machine of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the contribution that peoples forcibly removed from their own countries made in ours. She chronicles the inadequate attempt to do so with the Freedman’s Memorial, funded by former slaves but appropriated by white directors who chose the design, Abraham Lincoln towering over a kneeling slave who had been freed. Frederick Douglass, in a speech at its dedication, acknowledged the bravery associated with Emancipation but also the white self-interest.

The author describes the memorial as a pattern of absolution without accountability that has run from the end of the Civil War to the relatives of the Charleston Nine. A monument alone will not satisfy all the needs for accountability but a National Sanctuary Memorial to Enslaved Black Laborers would mark a beginning–a tribute to their labors that also helped build our country, a remembrance of the people whose names and work are often absent from the pages of our histories. It’s part of a larger conversation of acknowledgement of harm and accountability and appropriate restitution without which our national wounds associated with slavery and racism cannot be healed.

This is a compelling history that moves beyond the indignities done to Black bodies to the dignity of their work, already evident in many of our national landmarks. They nourished the economy of an infant nation. I thought the idea of a National Sanctuary Memorial to Enslaved Black Laborers was quite appropriate. I was surprised to find no way to help with the funding of such an effort or petition for such a monument. The University of Virginia was the only place (one mentioned in her list of institutions) where such a thing has been done. I could find no website to advocate for a national memorial. I hope the author will persist and find others to mobilize a national effort toward this end, one worthy of the many she has written of by name and the many nameless others.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: The Hidden Wound

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The Hidden Wound, Wendell Berry. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2010 (Original edition 1968, with Afterword 1988).

Summary: An extended essay on racism in America, our collective attempts to conceal this wound upon American life, and its connections to our deformed ideas of work.

Wendell Berry wrote words that would be exceptional for most whites today. These were written in 1968 by a white man of the South, making them all the more exceptional:

“If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost has been greater perhaps than we can yet know. If the white man has inflicted the wound of racism upon black men, the cost has been that he would receive the mirror image of the wound into himself. As the master, or as a member of the dominant race, he has felt little compulsion to acknowledge it or speak of it; the more painful it has grown the more deeply he has hidden it within himself. But the wound is there, and it is a profound disorder, as great a damage in his mind as it is in his society.

This wound is in me….I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it….”

Berry begins by acknowledging the story of his family as a slaveholding family, one that sold as well as acquired slaves. He acknowledges a family that went to church with its slaves but inured itself to the teachings about moral obligations that would have unraveled slavery.

He then turns to a childhood memory of Nick, a Black man who worked for his grandfather. He spoke of the racist structures that assigned Nick a place of being a worker and tenant and the dignity with which Nick accepted these but also the dignity of Nick’s work–his careful study of saddle horses, of the requirements of the land. Nick took Berry under his wing and taught him about the work of the farm. But the wound was there, evident in Nick not being able to accept the invitation to Berry’s birthday party, and Berry deciding that the only decent thing to do was to sit with Nick outside.

Berry recognizes in both what he learned from Nick in all his dignity and the underlying social divisions between them a picture of the deformities of our American society that defined success as distancing oneself from the physical labor of the farm and that used knowledge and status to make money off of the labors of others. So we have diminished ourselves, even as we had to diminish the personhood of Blacks to enslave them, something we have done since 1619. In doing so, we have alienated ourselves from good work and from the land upon which our lives depend. We have considered that work to be “n***** work” (Berry’s terminology, objectionable today but reflecting the demeaning character of its historical usage). By this we have not only demeaned persons but also lost our connection to the pleasures of good physical work and the land where this work is done.

Berry’s argument isn’t for legislation or structural change (and I believe this may be a weakness in ignoring the goods that can be done by addressing unjust structures). He argues that we need one another to heal the wounds racism has inflicted. Just as Nick taught Berry the wisdom of the farm and good work while Berry bridged the divide by sitting with Nick rather than staying with the white folks during his birthday, Berry argues that the task is not so much for whites to “free” Blacks but rather to “recognize the full strength and grace of their distinctive humanity” and that “they possess a knowledge for the lack of which we are incomplete and in pain.”

In his Afterword, written twenty years later, Berry addresses the displacement of racism from rural to urban settings and the decline of family farms, including Black farms. What has happened is simply a shift of the deformed ideas of work from the farm to the city with high paid executives and others who do “menial” work. Overcoming racism means no longer perpetuating these destructive ideas of work but paying just wages for all good and necessary work. Berry, drawing on his deep values of community also argues that integration without the restoration of the fabric of community is inadequate.

Perhaps the most significant thing in this extended essay, which I felt stands well on its own without the Afterword, is Berry’s courageous acknowledgement of the wound of racism on our national body. It is a wound caused by whites, but one from which whites suffer as well as Blacks. A strength of this work is that he owns his own complicity and his own learning with no “yes, buts.” It is vintage Berry, utterly consistent with other works of his on the dignity of manual work, of knowledge of the land, of caring for place, and of membership in community. What is striking is that Berry here offers a generous vision of community and membership that includes Black and white and the value in the humanity of each person. While Berry downplays systemic issues and may be faulted for this, his integration of issues of race into the larger themes of his work makes this more than merely a writing of place by a rural agriculturalist. It is an essay that discerns the fabric of society we are weaving, the rents in that fabric, and the crucial threads needed for a durable and useful garment.

Review: Healing Racial Trauma

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Healing Racial Trauma, Sheila Wise Rowe (Foreword by Soong-Chan Rah). Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2020.

Summary: A counseling psychologist describes the experience of racial trauma in story, drawing upon her own and other clinical experiences, and explores the resources for resilience to face continuing racial struggle.

As a White male, I’ve heard the terminology of racial trauma but have not experienced it in my own person. But I work with Black colleagues who have. One looking up to see a policeman’s gun trained on her for the “crime” of watering a neighbor’s flowers while the neighbor was away. Another and his wife stopped in front of their home after a trip to the grocery store, forced to lay on the pavement while their car was searched, for evidence from a robbery even though they offered to produce a receipt from the grocery confirming their whereabouts when the robbery happened. Their crime? “Fitting the description.” Or Asian-American friends who have faced racial slurs urging them to go “home” when this is the country of their birth and citizenship. Often Blacks and people of color can tell a litany of stories running not only through their lives but the lives of their parents and grandparents. When I see the story of a racial injustice, I may be incensed. When a person of color sees the same story, it opens old wounds and is one more in a series of assaults on their sense of dignity.

Sheila Wise Rowe, a counseling psychologist who grew up in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston helps us understand both from her own experience and those of others the deep wounds of racial trauma, wounds beneath the skin, that many Blacks and people of color struggle with. She begins with types of racism and types of racial trauma. The latter was particularly illuminating as she named:

  • Historical racial trauma: The trauma shared by a group that has faced in its past a traumatizing event such as the forced removal of First Nation tribes that continues to affect these people in the forms of alcoholism, addiction, and elevated rates of suicide.
  • Transgenerational racial trauma: The bodily effects of trauma passed from one generation to the next, possibly manifesting in diabetes, heart disease. An axiom of trauma is that “the body remembers” and this idea suggests that trauma is even remembered across generations. It also can mean the passing of trauma in the stories we tell.
  • Personal racial trauma: The personal experience of abuse for one’s race. Rowe in the book describes the verbal and physical attacks she endured when being bused to white schools.
  • Physical trauma: Attacks upon one’s body that are racially motivated. One thinks of what John Lewis and so many endured at the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
  • Vicarious trauma: The wounds opened when one hears reports of violence against others of one’s race. One thinks of the example of mothers and wives who hear reports of a police involved shooting and think of their own husbands and sons.
  • Microaggressions: The small, everyday, thoughtless assaults on dignity. “You’re so articulate.” “Can I touch your hair?”
  • Racial gaslighting: The ways individuals and institutions in power try to recast reality turning an incident of racial injustice into something the victim of injustice must have done wrong and that racism is just something imagined that must be gotten over.

In the chapters that follow Rowe describes the effects of the ongoing experience of racial trauma. She describes the fatigue of racism’s relentlessness, especially pronounced for many Blacks in the summer of 2020 in the cycle of incidents with police, protests, and recriminations. Silence is the swallowing and suppressing of pain, anger, and rage, and the self-destructiveness that occurs when all this is turned inward. Rage is the bitter root that festers until unleashed in destructive acts. Fear is often used to subdue a population, as in lynching. Shame happens when the stories of racial inferiority are internalized and they become the stories that prevent one’s true story from being told. Addiction is a misguided response to relieve the pain of trauma.

Rowe addresses these with stories and charts the beginnings of the way out, starting with lament, that cries out to God, that gathers up the hurt and offers it to God. Lament tells the truth without spiritualizing or sugarcoating. She stresses the Christ-centered nature of the healing work that is needed in walking toward freedom, a work that allows Christ to enter in and walk with. It is both internal and external work. Rowe believes that this can lead to a growth in resilience. Racism isn’t going to disappear overnight. Rather, one must develop the resources in Christ who heals our wounds, who helps us practice self-care as his beloved, and calls us into creative engagement with our unique gifts and voices.

For people of color, this may be (and has been from accounts of colleagues) a book that both names what is often felt without words and offers hope and healing. It is an important book for Whites to read as well. It begins with naming the forms of trauma. Then, Rowe’s descriptions of herself as a little girl being bused invited me to imagine what it was like to be on the bus, the walk the gantlet of hateful crowds to enter her school. The other stories, including Nick, her husband’s, invite the same imagining, not as a substitute for what no one should experience, but as at least a very beginning of understanding viscerally as well as cognitively, something of racial trauma. To learn to just sit with and listen to these experiences may open the door to being an ally in Christ’s healing process.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: White Evangelical Racism

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White Evangelical Racism, Anthea Butler. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, (Forthcoming, March) 2021.

Summary: A short history of the evangelical movement in the United States, showing its ties to racism and white supremacy from the time of slavery down to the present.

This was an uncomfortable book for me to read and review. In our racialized society, I would be identified as white. By conviction, I would identify as evangelical. What troubles me about this account is that it makes a good case that the evangelicalism in America with which I am identified is inextricably bound up with the history of racism, America’s original sin, as Jim Wallis has called it.

Anthea Butler offers in this book a concise historical account of white evangelicalism’s complicity in racism. She traces that history from the support of slavery in white, mostly southern churches. She follows this through post-Civil War Jim Crow laws and the support of white churches for segregation, and the participation of churches in lynchings. While some mainline denominations gave support to the civil rights movement, evangelicals remained on the sideline, calling this a “social gospel.”

Butler is not the first to note that the coalescing of evangelical political engagement in the Seventies and Eighties came as much around the denial of tax exemption for segregated schools like Bob Jones University as it did around opposition to abortion, which was originally not an evangelical cause. She traces the rise of organizations like Focus on the Family, the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition that led to an increasing alliance of evangelicalism with the Republican party, culminating in the support of 81 percent of self-identifying evangelicals with Donald Trump in 2016 despite race-baiting language, anti-immigration stances, and support of white nationalistic aims.

Perhaps no one person has defined American evangelicalism more than Billy Graham and so Butler devotes a chapter to him. While he desegregated his meetings, and hosted black speakers on his platform, and even include a black evangelist on his team, he took care to distance himself from the civil rights movement as it embraced nonviolent civil disobedience. King may have shared his platform once, but no more. Graham also preached against communism, associated by many in the South with the civil rights movement. His record was ambiguous at best and in the end, the focus remained on winning people to Christ rather than unequivocal stands for racial justice.

Parts of me wanted to protest against this sweeping indictment by citing the abolitionist efforts of northern evangelicals, and other socially engaged efforts in the nineteenth century. Butler does mention this as well as other forays like that of the Promise Keepers into racial reconciliation. The sad fact is none of these movements prevailed over the long haul in standing against white supremacism. The first decade and a half of the twenty-first century saw some promising evangelical initiatives around racial reconciliation and immigration reform, only for these to wither over the last five years.

I also wanted to protest that evangelicalism is not inherently white. Black and Latino churches in this country share the same theology. And people globally identify with the same theological convictions that form the core of American evangelical belief. I’ve been in a meeting with representatives of over 150 countries where this was the case, where those of my skin color were a minority. But in the ways American evangelicalism has separated itself from its Black and Latino kindred, the judgment stands. The typical first response of many white evangelicals to a Christian person of color trying to talk about racial injustice is to defend and argue rather than listen to a fellow Christian. We seem remarkably untroubled that divisions by race in our churches mirror our political divisions.

Butler, a former evangelical who still cares about this movement, reaches this sobering conclusion:

“Evangelicalism is at a precipice. It is no longer a movement to which Americans look for a moral center. American evangelicalism lacks social, political, and spiritual effectiveness in the twentyfirst century. It has become a religion lodged within political party. It is a religion that promotes issues important almost exclusively to white conservatives. Evangelicalism embraces racists and says that evangelicals’ interests, and only theirs, are the most important for all American citizens.”

I have no defense against this. I fear evangelicalism in the United States may be like the church in Ephesus described in Revelation 2:1-7. The church was marked by its orthodoxy and yet Jesus has this to say: “Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first. Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place” (Revelation 2:4-5, NIV). I fear we are at imminent risk of losing our lampstand, that is, our witness within the culture. In fact, I find most churches are more concerned about political interests than even their historical distinction of seeing lost people come to Christ. Butler’s message mirrors that of Jesus in Revelation. This book is a call to repentance. The trajectory of history is not inevitable. We can turn away from the precipice. But I fear the time is short.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss. The opinions I have expressed are my own.