A Lament for the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

Sunday, March 21, was the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, observed annually on the day the police in Sharpeville, South Africa, opened fire and killed 69 people at a peaceful demonstration against apartheid "pass laws" in 1960. I participated in an online worship service with colleagues from the Eastern Ontario Outaouais Regional Council of The United Church of Canada.

One of my contributions to this worship service was composing a Lament. The Anglican and Evangelical Lutheran churches in Canada and the United States issued a statement together for this day, with a prayer which begins “God of holy ground, move us to lament and repent.” And so we are moved to lament during the day and the season of Lent. This lament is mine, as a white person, and is written from my perspective.

The book of Lamentations says, “See, O Lord, how distressed I am; my stomach churns, my heart is wrung within me.”
That is how I feel today, O Lord, as I reflect on this day to eliminate racial discrimination.
I lament.

I lament all the times I have thought of the accusation of racism as being worse than racism itself, when I have bristled at phrases like “white privilege,” when I have thought or even said the time-worn excuses, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body” and “some of my friends are Black, or Indigenous, or Asian.”

I lament when I thought or said, “I don’t see colour,” thinking that absolved me of racism when I was really diminishing the identity of BIPOC people. I lament when my mind turned first to the motives and history of a BIPOC person caught up or killed in an altercation with police– and I lament that I even think of these as “altercations” when there aren’t two sides.

But reflecting on today, what I really lament is what I have missed, with my unconscious and conscious prejudices and attitudes and socializations.
I missed so much by regarding a white Canada as “normal.”
I missed so much by building up and contributing to myths that rely on white people, white institutions, and by feeling threatened if stories are told of a Canada with BIPOC people.

When our churches are predominantly white, I have considered them to be, well, churches, and if they are largely BIPOC people, I have put them into a category of “ethnic ministries.”
I have missed so much by viewing whiteness as so much a part of the natural order that I barely notice it.

The United Church made an apology to Indigenous peoples in 1986 and I lament that its wording still rings true today: We confused Western ways and culture with the depth and breadth and length and height of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Western ways. White ways.

How much have I missed, Lord, how much have we missed, by not hearing BIPOC voices, how much have we missed being closed to BIPOC spirituality and ways of worship and interpretations of the good news of Jesus, how much have we missed displaying the omnipresent portrait of white Jesus and not representing him as other than white.

How much have I, we, missed by seeing BIPOC people and spirituality and culture and conditions as alien, or only in terms of white culture and spirituality and conditions?
How much have I, we, missed by only reading and listening to and watching stories of BIPOC people if they are minor characters in a narrative with a white saviour who rescues people who can’t help themselves?

How have I, we, missed by thinking of Christianity as European when its first followers were brown, when one of the first “Christian” nations was Ethiopia? How have I, we, missed with mental pictures of non-white peoples as latecomers to Christian faith when there have been Christians in India for 20 centuries, in China for 14 centuries – when the first Protestant missionaries arrived in China at the same time as much of Canada?
I lament that I, and we, are poorer for this, that conscious and unconscious prejudice has blurred the image of God in me and us, I and we are not what God meant me and us to be.

I lament too, God, that I have been taught to see racism as only individual acts,done by bad people. “Uncle so and so is racist but I’m not,” I can then say. I lament that this protects the whole system behind these actions as I and we think of racism as a personal choice, not a web of systems and principalities and powers that ensnares us and yet we benefit from it. I lament that when I only see the systemic racism, I am letting the systems to be racist for me, protecting myself as a white person from my own personal prejudices, assumptions, biases and benefits from a racist society and structures.

I lament, God. May my lament produce in me personal transformation and become action, as an individual, as a community, as a church, that lament can inspire me and us to make the name of this day real, concrete, life-changing, life-giving. But, God, don’t let us stop lamenting, as if we have reached the end of the journey.

Foundation and Empire

Here's a passage of science fiction that captures what a bit of colonialism was like for Indigenous peoples back on Earth. I'm not sure there is a way to make the descendants of colonists (I am one, with my ancestors arriving in New England on the Mayflower in 1620 and in New France in 1640) understand how bizarre and disconcerting the imposition of a foreign power's sovereignty and alien laws and practices was for the unwilling people who were living happily on the land, unless it is transported into the future through science fiction as a way to tell us about our past and present.

This is from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series of novels - not Foundation and Empire, as my blog post's title would suggest, but Second Foundation, published in 1953. This passage is set on Rossem, a chilly but inhabited planet on the periphery of the Galaxy, visited only by trading ships.

And then one day not unlike other days a ship arrived again. The old men of each village nodded wisely and lifted their old eyelids to whisper that thus it had been in their father's time - but it wasn't, quite... The men within called themselves soldiers of Tazenda.

The peasants were confused. They had not heard of Tazenda, but they greeted the soldiers nonetheless in the traditional fashion of hospitality. The newcomers inquired closely as to the nature of the planet, the number of its inhabitants, the number of its cities - a word mistaken by the peasants to mean "villages" to the confusion of all concerned - its type of economy and so on.

Other ships came and proclamations were issued all over the world that Tazenda was now the ruling world, that tax-collecting stations would be established girding the equator - the inhabited region - that percentages of grain and furs according to certain numerical formulae would be collected annually.

The Rossemites had blinked solemnly, uncertain of the word "taxes."

I don't know if this was Asimov's intent, but how dissimilar is the Rossemites' experience from that of the original peoples of the Americas, Africa, or the Pacific when Tazenda/European powers asserted sovereignty based on a decree made by a far-away ruler?

Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation, © 1953 by Isaac Asimov (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983, 12th ed. 1987), p. 43.