The story of America and the world is the story of Christian supremacist, white supremacist brutality.
He came dancing across the water
With his galleons and guns
Looking for the new world
And that palace in the sun
If we had to put our finger upon the year which marked the beginning of modern race relations we should select 1493-94. This is the time when total disregard for the human rights and physical power of the non-Christian peoples of the world, the colored peoples, was officially assumed by the first two great colonizing European nations. Pope Alexander bull of demarcation issued under Spanish pressure on May 3, 1493, and its revision by the Treaty of Tordesillas (June 7, 1494), arrived at through diplomatic negotiations between Spain and Portugal, put all the heathen peoples and their resources-that is to say, especially the colored peoples of the world-at the disposal of Spain and Portugal.
This, then, is the beginning of modern race relations. It was not an abstract, natural, immemorial feeling of mutual antipathy between groups, but rather a practical exploitative relationship with its socio-attitudinal facilitation-at that time only nascent race prejudice. (Loc. 8548)
He came dancing across the water
Cortez, Cortez
What a killer
[S]ocial intolerance, which attitude may be defined as an unwillingness on the part of a dominant group to tolerate the beliefs or practices of a subordinate group because it considers these beliefs and practices to be either inimical to group solidarity or a threat to the continuity of the status quo. Race prejudice, on the other hand, is a social attitude propagated among the public by an exploiting class for the purpose of stigmatizing some group as inferior so that the exploitation of either the group itself or its resources or both may be justified. (Loc. 10083)
The Christian and Critical Race Theory
Maybe we shouldn’t listen to what the denomination that was founded to support slavery thinks about Critical Race Theory.
Randall J. Greene (he/him) on X
The Republican Party habitually inverts American history and the moral universe while quelling speech about actual American history. I grew up in Texas public education. We learned the Southern Strategy, the Confederate Catechism, the Lost Cause, and the Traditional Segregationist Discourse. We were taught a pile of racist, revisionist nonsense. I still recall a 7th grade history teacher yelling at us for saying the Civil War was about slavery, drilling “states’ rights” into us instead. The brutality of Columbus and the conquistadors was whitewashed in all the ways outlined in “Lies My Teacher Told Me“. Texas schools teach such white supremacist mythology to this day.
A third important development was ideological or even theological: amassing wealth and dominating other people came to be positively valued as the key means of winning esteem on earth and salvation in the hereafter. As Columbus put it, “Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise.
A fourth factor affecting Europe’s readiness to embrace a “new” continent was the particular nature of European Christianity. Europeans believed in a transportable, proselytizing religion that rationalized conquest. (Followers of Islam share this characteristic.) Typically, after “discovering” an island and encountering a tribe of American Indians new to them, the Spaniards would read aloud (in Spanish) what came to be called “the Requirement.” Here is one version:
I implore you to recognize the Church as a lady and in the name of the Pope take the King as lord of this land and obey his mandates. If you do not do it, I tell you that with the help of God I will enter powerfully against you all. I will make war everywhere and every way that I can. I will subject you to the yoke and obedience to the Church and to his majesty. I will take your women and children and make them slaves. . . . The deaths and injuries that you will receive from here on will be your own fault and not that of his majesty nor of the gentlemen that accompany me.
The Requirement has been widely reprinted. This translation is from “500 Years of Indigenous and Popular Resistance Campaign” (np: Guatemala Committee for Peasant Unity, 1990).
Having thus satisfied their consciences by offering the Native Americans a chance to convert to Christianity, the Spaniards then felt free to do whatever they wanted with the people they had just “discovered.”
Why don’t textbooks mention arms as a facilitator of exploration and domination? Why do they omit most of the foregoing factors? If crude factors such as military power or religiously sanctioned greed are perceived as reflecting badly on us, who exactly is “us”? Who are the textbooks written for (and by)? Plainly, descendants of the Europeans.
How do we unpack and confront centuries of racist domination amidst an onslaught of perpetual whitewashing where the traditional segregationist discourse is mainstream? Critical Race Theory, a bogeyman and straw man for white evangelicals and the GOP, is rooted in traditional civil rights discourse. Both are necessary parts of our education as we unlearn the white supremacist mythology currently taught.
“The Front Porch” has a great series on CRT framed for white Christians.
- The Christian and Critical Race Theory, Part 1: A Survey of the “Traditional Civil Rights Discourse” : The Front Porch “Traditional Civil Rights discourse predates and dispels allegations of cultural Marxism.”
- The Christian and Critical Race Theory, Part 2: The Segregationist Discourse and Civil Rights Retrenchment : The Front Porch “To tell the story of the rise of critical race theory historically, we have to consider the segregationist and anti-Civil Rights context that spawned it.”
- The Christian and Critical Race Theory, Part 3: A Bridge: Dr. Derrick Bell : The Front Porch “Bell’s work signaled a return to the more “radical” elements of W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver C. Cox, Stokely Carmichael, and even Dr. King.”
- The Christian and Critical Race Theory, Part 4: Alan Freeman and the Contribution of CLS : The Front Porch “Laws reflect dominant social morality and power distribution. That’s why our laws are more likely to legitimize racism and racist systems than remedy them.”
- The Christian and Critical Race Theory, Part 5: A Misalignment of Frames: Integrationism – The Front Porch “In this post, we will focus primarily on the ideology of the Civil Rights Establishment.”
- The Christian and Critical Race Theory, Part 6: A Misalignment of Frames: The “New Right”
- The Christian and Critical Race Theory, Part 7: A Race Intervention into Critical Legal Studies – The Front Porch
Again, how did the traditional segregationist discourse, trimmed of a few unacceptable phrases, become the dominant discourse in American society by the 1980’s?
…the ascendence of the “Reagan Revolution” in American politics as the near full re-emergence of the segregationist discourse—states’ rights, federalism, radically free enterprise, freedom of association, increased privatization, the mythic view of American meritocracy, and opposition to public assistance, all couched in the polemics of anti-communism and civil religion, but repackaged in race-neutral language.
Reagan’s “new conservative” movement hearkened directly back to the campaign of Barry Goldwater, taking Nixon’s conservatism to the next level. Not only did Reagan champion the law and order movement beyond any that had gone before, but he perfected the rhetoric of Southern segregationists like George Wallace. (I’d argue that, with only a handful of deletions, Wallace’s entire Inaugural Address could have been delivered by Ronald Reagan, and quite probably was delivered multiple times in aggregate over the course of his political career.) Every theme discussed above—states’ rights, federalism, radically free enterprise, freedom of association, increased privatization, the mythic view of American meritocracy, and opposition to public assistance, all couched in the polemics of anti-communism and civil religion—were the bases of his fabulously successful 1980 and 1984 campaigns. And, for the most part, these themes were successfully cast in the “race neutral” language of “equal protection under the law” and “color-blindness,” solidifying a new post-civil rights era compromise, viz., the commitment to an idealized formal equality absent the goal of substantive equality.
Previously
- You have soaked our children in shame and given permission to your children to hate.
- Toxic Christians: We See You
- Biblical Inerrancy and The Cult of Ignorance
- Spiritual Warfare and the Politics of Paranoia and Providentialism
- The Long Southern Strategy and the Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity
- White Resentment: The Grand Bargain of White Supremacy
- The Segregationist Discourse
- Texas Republicans: Upholding White Supremacist Mythology with the Power of Law
- “Those Burning Crosses Are Symbols of Evangelicalism”
- Trinity of Toxic Nonsense: White Supremacy, Misogyny, and Purity Culture
- I Cannot, and Will Not, Believe in That God: Libraries as Candles in the Dark
- Empty the Pews of Toxic Christianity
- Purity Culture, the False Gender Binary, and Abuse at Heritage Christian School
- The Breathtaking Bigotry of Unreconstructed America
- Post-truth, Open Society, and the Business of Behaviorism
Leave a Reply