Evangelizing Racism

IIN HIS SEMINAL STUDY "The Myth Of Equality", published this year, Ken Wytsma cites the finding of a Christian research group which reached the following conclusion: "More than any other segment of the population, white evangelical Christians demonstrate a blindness to the struggles of African-Americans", and concludes: "this is a dangerous reality for the modern church". Wytsma, a cleric who attended a conservative seminary, reached the same conclusion in his personal life. he further asserts that the evangelical community tends to view racism as being a thing of the past, a problem which will be remedied only when the rest of society becomes more involved in it, or as a problem that is stirred up by trouble making left wing political agendas, which themselves must be resolutely opposed. According to Wytsma, we all love justice, in theory, racial and otherwise, as long as it imposes no cost to us personally, such as challenging or compromising our personal prejudices. The author tackles the problem of semantics, noting that the term "white supremacy" in enjoying a born again popularity, a term often used by black activists, and usually avoided by the white community. Racism, he point out, is among America's founding values, the first slaves having been brought to Virginia only twelve years after the founding of Jamestown. Racism is not only implicit in our modern day judicial and economic system, but also in our immigration laws, which, for the most part, have favored Europeans from predominantly white countries, and have tended to exclude people from countries with darker skinned populations. Today's controversy concerning Mexican immigration is but a continuation of a long standing American tradition of racial segregation and exclusion. He makes the salient but overlooked fact that there is no genetic, biological, scientific basis for dividing the world's people's into "races" by skin pigmentation. skin color, like height, weight, and depth of a body of water, is a continuum; one merely chooses to draw the lines of separation where it is mot convenient for the person drawing the lines. Races, in fact, do not exist in any real sense, but are mere categories, artificially contrived for the sake of categorical simplicity. At what point, as one descends beneath the ocean surface, do we begin to call the water "deep"? Whenever we choose. The world is a far more complex system that our minds prefer to contend with, so, we simplify by categorizing arbitrarily. Wytsma offers the surprising assertion that racism, rather than being an ancient fact of human history or an inherent aspect of human behavior, perception, and culture, is in fact a rather recent creation, and emerged only when advances in transportation exposed far flung cultures to each other. And, since it is a recent invention, racism is therefore neither inevitable nor unavoidable, but merely a construct of our modern, divided world. That means that there is hope for a future unfettered by bigotry, but only if we allow ourselves to accept the reality of the imaginary nature of race, and the possibility of a future world less encumbered by needless and harmful divisions.