Brethren, I’m back on this blog, after a pause in August.  I take my anger from observable hypocrisy and my scripture from Paul:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” — Galatians 3:28

Here is what I have recently observed.  As I have said here before, I am recently divorced, and I have been looking for a righteous, Christian man whom I might eventually date.  I have not accepted dates or even had conversations wth non-believers.

Twice, it has happened that a caucasian Christian man has engaged me in conversation. Over the coure of time, while he is doing that peacock dance that seems to be the better part of most men’s courtship ritual, puffing himself up to prove to me he is better than other men, he mentions people of color.  He uses — horror of horror — the “N” word, not in a hip-hop twenty-first century way (which would be bad enough, coming from a crunchy white man), but in a nineteenth century Jim Crow way.

The two times that this has happened, I have gasped, called the man on his bad attitude, told him to lose my number if that is his attitude toward other people of any race, and then he denies he meant anything by it, and he tells me, “I have plenty of black friends.”

Hmmm…

Twice, too, these men have then told me utterly improbable stories about brave, young, wonderful, much-admired, bff-type best male friends who were black.  One told me he dated a woman of  color who was a wonderful woman whom he cared about — this I doubt even more.

No one white ever uses the N word and has “black friends.”  There may be people of color who have to tolerate these lying hypocrites, but there are surely no confidences, no shared important memories, no affection whatsoever.  I pity those who have encountered these people and received less than their fair share of compassion and respect.

I have attended mixed-race churches ever  since I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, more often than not where I was, as a white woman, in the minority.  I have volunteered for church projects, and I have borne my soul  to women and men of  color, and those brothers and sisters have enriched my life by allowing me to really get to know them.

Even with all that, I would say that I only have made a few lasting frienships with people of color, not for a lack of love and mutual respect, but because racism is alive and well in America today, and African-Americans are right to exhibit some level of distrust, even within the church, with white folks, who are apprently, even as we — in Jesus’ name, elect Barack Obama president — still not conquering their absurd and idiotic ideas about  people of other races.

The good news — We are quite probably electing a black president, so this view is by no means universal, and most of the people  who don’t want to vote for him have other objections to him than that of his race.

Also good news — the men who heard me gasp and spew invectives knew that their views were absurd and idiotic, and they were embarassed by them when they were called on what they had said, and so they lied to cover their racist tracks.  Even if their views did not change — I suspect in both cases, they just wanted to get into my white panties, not embrace the black population (and for the record, my panties remained unconquered)  — however, at some level, they understood that their views were entirely unjustifiable by any intelligent argument.

The bad news, very, very bad news — before those words slipped out of their mouths, they assumed, surely from recent experience, that they were generally acceptable to the majority of white, Christian women whom they might want to date. This shocks me more than I can say.  I am horrified that there is at the very least a complacency among any Christians about racism, who seem to think that it is nothing that needs to be overcome.

I especially don’t understand how any Christians are left without understanding that Jesus is coming soon for an unblemished church, that racism is one of America’s greater blemishes, that it was designed and perpetuated by a group of social darwinians who understood that if they could get immigrant workers to hate African-American workers and vice-versa, they could dominate both groups because they were divided.  An unracist America would conquer poverty and crime, would ensure the welfare of every single child born in the USA, would demand a living wage for all workers, would demand excellent education for all students, wherever they lived, and would, in short, conquer the elite’s stranglehold over the many.  If this sounds communist to any of you, I exhort you to read your New  Testament carefully — it is in fact the way God sees the role of the church.  We are to take care of, as Jesus told us in the  sheeps and goats parable, “the least of these,” in other words, the most vulnerable people in our society, hence the poor, hence the excluded, hence the illegal immigrant, hence the crack baby, hence whoever has been given the short end of the stick, and that often  includes people whose skin color is different than our  own.

We should all gasp when we hear the N word from white Christian friends, especially those whose friendship is not imaginary.  We should storm out.  What fear do we have of calling our bretheren on this?  It is as great a sin as any, and it speaks so very little of the intelligence of the conversation that would bear it.

Any man who thinks he recommends himself by announcing that he is better than another ethnic group ought to have his name written on the walls of the stalls of  ladies’ rooms in churches with this warning –
“Has imaginary friends.  Has imaginary appeal.  Is a great, white hope in his own mind.”

I pray, in the name of Jesus, a man with wooly hair and Middle-Eastern skin darker than my onw, who died on the cross and rose from the dead for me, that we will at long last conquer this horrible affliction within the church.  In His name, I bind the spirit of ignorance and pride from our body.  I loose  the spirit of unity and understanding.  Let the church say AMEN.