Tag Archives: National Museum of African-American Culture

Are We or Will We Ever Be Free at Last?

Time has vindicated Dr. King. Ultimately it is not Black versus White. It is justice versus injustice, haves versus have-nots. As long as Dr. King talked only about African-Americans he was relatively safe, but when he began to pull poor Whites and poor Blacks together he became a threat to the power and wealth elite. If he had been allowed to live, he might have even been able to articulate the frustrations of today’s shrinking middle class. Thus Brother Martin could have been a prophet of a sizable slice of America. This would have been a formidable challenge, but it was never allowed to materialize.

One of Jesus’s points in the Sermon on the Mount was to seek the kingdom of God first and allow all other worries and legitimate concerns to follow it. Such a kingdom-focus doesn’t sit well with us. We would rather have seeking the kingdom as a consumer spending habit or path to political goals. We would rather settle on being in the best church, denomination, or path (Me against the World) in contrast to others of the same type, even if our path is the one constantly thumping how everyone should just get along. A Christianized humanism may be more comfortable to us than the gospel of Christ’s kingdom.

That’s where this book, Free at Last? The Gospel in the African American Experience, stands. It’s too biblical, too focused on Christ’s kingdom to light the torches of those looking to build a kingdom of their own.

In 1983, Dr. Carl Ellis wrote a book for an African American audience on the state of the church, the history of various Black movements, and how we can move forward. He revised and republished it in 1996 and it was republished as a special edition classic in 2020, which is the edition I read.

Ellis spends most of the book on overviews of different movements and cultural arguments Black leaders have made, both within and without the church, to recognize and defend the honor of African Americans. It offers a high-level framework for understanding decades of history. He gives the most attention to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who disagreed on how to raise the dignity of Black families in a country that wants to either melt away their distinctions or marginalize them.

No one escape Ellis’s criticism because mistakes and bad actors have cropped up on all sides. Some Black leaders have painted Christianity as a White man’s religion, but Ellis separates civil religion and White-centered humanism from the biblical faith and traces these sinful influences through to today. White humanism he defines as a belief that White people and standards are the ultimate references for truth and values, White people being generally unaffected by sin. Many African Americans have adapted this view into a Black humanism, which again, for the churched and unchurched, is not Christianity.

Anything can become an idol, even, perhaps especially, good things. “Afrocentrism is truly magnificent, but it is not magnificent as an absolute. As an absolute, it will infect us with the kind of bigotry we’ve struggled against in others for centuries.”

Ellis notes a point in history when the solution to gaining dignity in American life was the melting pot, everyone blending into the surrounding culture, but the dominant culture rejected African Americans subtly and overtly. If they were to blend in, they would have to be subservient to Whites. That actually didn’t sit well with anyone but the abusers. America isn’t a country that can tolerate a permanent servant class for long. We tell ourselves we are the land of the free and the brave, created equal by the Almighty. Americans of any color won’t be content to stand in the alleyways and watch others parade by.

There are many ideas holding us back. In one chapter, Ellis describes “four prisons of paganism” found in many corners of the world:

  1. Suicidal religion, which attempts to deny reality or numb ourselves to it through various means (sometimes with a “militant shallowness”);
  2. God-bribing religion, which is any manner of attempting to curry favor with the Almighty;
  3. Peekaboo religion, which hides God behind other people or things so our allegiance and obedience can be focused on the other thing and not the Almighty;
  4. Theicidal religion, which includes all attempts to reject God’s existence.

Ellis states Peekaboo religion is a dangerous trend in the Black church for its tendency to revere the pastor (and his wife) more than they should. I’d say many independent White churches do the same thing, but the percentage would be smaller.

To rise above these errors, Ellis calls for creative preaching and church practices. He calls it being a jazz theologian, one who improvises on melodies in performing the truth for contemporary congregations and find new ways to reach our increasingly secular neighbors. His call might have more resonance if he pointed to a new application of truth and history that is working, but he may have wanted to avoid that specifically because he isn’t trying to start a new thing for others to copy. He wants us to know the Lord and His Word and look for ways the people in our area will hear them.

It’s not in the book, but I know Ellis is the head of The Makazi Institute in Virginia, a type of L’Abri fellowship for cultural understanding and engagement. That would be his take as a jazz theologian, not something just anyone could do.

One value of Free at Last? is a 60-page glossary covering many topics referred to in the book as well as many contextual topics not mentioned. I wrote a post about content from this section before.

Photo by Samuel Martins on Unsplash

The triumphant return of George Wallace

I’m pretty sure people are tired of me pointing at current events and saying – in my querulous old man’s voice – “That’s something we saw when I was young, just all dressed up in different clothes!”

But darn it, it keeps happening.

I offer in evidence the following graphic. I’m sure you’ve already seen it. It was released (at taxpayer expense) by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History. It purports to explain important ways in which “whiteness” continues to inflict cultural violence on the black people in our midst.

“Whiteness,” according to this graphic, includes things like self-reliance. The nuclear family. “Objective, rational, linear thinking.” The primacy of the Western tradition. “Work before play.” Christianity as the norm. Respect for authority and property. “Delayed gratification.” European aesthetics. Christian holidays. English common law. Decision-making and majority rule.

When young people look at this list, I suppose they see an incisive analysis of cultural imperialism.

What I see is a throwback. I see Gov. George Wallace of Alabama (1963) shouting “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!”

You see, I’m old enough to remember the last years of Jim Crow. I can remember when you could turn on the TV and see (a few) people still seriously defending the principles of segregation.

I knew an older kid in school who went south to attend a segregated college. When she came back and we challenged her on it, she replied, “You people up here don’t understand. These folks aren’t the same as us.”

Which is precisely what the Smithsonian’s “Whiteness” graphic asserts. That these folks aren’t the same as us.

If you listened to the arguments for segregation they made in those days, you’d hear the apologists saying something like this: “We don’t hate the d*rkies. Some of ‘em are fine people. But you gotta understand. They’re different from white folks. They’ve got no sense of responsibility. They can’t get to work on time. They can’t manage money. They can’t think logically. They’re like children. That’s why we’ve got to give them their own separate neighborhoods and institutions. Because if they had to compete with the white man on even terms, they’d just die off.”

Which is precisely what the Smithsonian is saying. That black people and white people are essentially different. That there is no common ground of humanity. The only difference now is that the moral judgments on racial traits have switched polarization.

The end result of believing that color is the single most important fact about any individual has to be segregation.

If I wanted to be snide, I’d congratulate a certain political party on doing the longest strategic end run in history, achieving their old goal of racial segregation from the 1960s. George Wallace would be proud.

But I don’t really believe it’s strategic. I think it’s just the Gods of the Copybook Headings coming back, forcing those who don’t know any history to repeat it. Yet again.