Becoming Like Creoles

Living and Leading at the Intersections of Injustice, Culture, and Religion

Curtiss Paul DeYoung

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781506455563
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506455570
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The French Caribbean authors of In Praise of Creoleness (Eloge de la Créolité) exclaim, "Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves to be Creoles." Creoleness, therefore, becomes a metaphor for humanity in all its diversity. Unique among the many images useful for discussing diversity, Creoleness is formed within a history of injustice, oppression, and empire. Creolization offers a way of envisioning a future through the interplay between cultural diversity, injustice and oppression, and intersectionality. People of faith must embrace such metaphors and practices to be relevant and effective for ministry in the 21st century. Using biblical exposition in conversation with present day Creole metaphors and cultural research, Becoming Like Creoles seeks to awaken and prepare followers of Jesus to live and minister in a world where injustice is real and cultural diversity is rapidly increasing. This book will equip ministry readers to embrace a Creole process, becoming culturally competent and social justice focused, whether they are emerging from a history of injustice or they are heirs of privilege.

5

A Well in Samaria: Creolization of Whites and
Privileged Persons

Curtiss Paul DeYoung

The Gospel of John states that Jesus “had to go through Samaria” (4:4). Samaria was that rare place in the Roman-occupied Palestinian territories where a colonized and oppressed Jew experienced some sense of privilege. More than seven hundred years prior to Jesus’s entering Samaria, when the Assyrian Empire forcibly removed ancient Israelites into captivity, poor and working-class Hebrews had been left behind in the region. Upon their return to Palestine, many formerly exiled Jews claimed that the Hebrews living in Samaria had intermarried with their colonizers and altered the Judaism they claimed to practice. Samaritans were perceived as people of mixed ancestry with confused religious beliefs. They were despised and marginalized in Israelite society. Samaritans had a much different account of their own origins. They said Samaritans were descendants of the Patriarch Joseph and his African wife, whose offspring were the half tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh.^[1] While most historians have since sided with the Samaritan version of history, bigotry against Samaritans was extreme at the time of Jesus. One rabbi even said, “He that eats the bread of the Samaritans is like one that eats the flesh of swine.” They were believed to lack ritual purity. This notion was further advanced by the belief that the menstrual cycle of Samaritan women started when they were born. Therefore, they were considered inherently and always impure.^[2]

Samaritan revolutionaries reacted against these years of bigotry by placing human bones in the sanctuary of the Jerusalem temple during Passover early in the first century, prior to Jesus’s entrance into Samaria.^[3] Prejudice and tensions were high. Yet the Gospel writer declared that Jesus “had to go through Samaria.” The King James Version of the Bible intensifies the resolve of Jesus in this verse, stating that Jesus “must needs” go through Samaria. Most Jews travelled around Samaria when commuting between Judea and Galilee. They avoided all contact with Samaria and the people who resided there. Although Jesus had the option of avoiding Samaritans, he chose to enter their land and, as we shall see, fully enter their cultural reality. Jesus stopped at Jacob’s Well to rest in the heat of the day while on his journey through Samaria. A woman came to draw water as Jesus was sitting by the well. Jesus asked her for a drink, and a conversation ensued. The woman expressed shock that Jesus spoke to her and had asked for refreshment, as he was a Jew and she was a Samaritan woman. The author of the Gospel of John noted parenthetically, “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans” (4:9). Their conversation soon moved on to religion (4:5–26).

A deeper look into their resulting dialogue reveals that Jesus had studied the culture and religion of the Samaritans. He knew that the Samaritan faith tradition anticipated a Messiah, called the Taheb, who would reveal truth.^[4] When in the course of conversation Jesus asked the woman about her husband and she stated that she was not married, he revealed to her that she had previously been married five times and was living with a man who was not her husband (4:16–18). Jesus did not state this fact to shame her. By revealing the truth about her domestic situation, Jesus demonstrated to her that he was the Revealer (the Taheb), the Messiah. The Samaritan woman confirmed this when she stated to the people in her village, “Come see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” (4:29). The woman invited members of her community to join her in conversation with Jesus (4:30). Then the community welcomed Jesus to stay with them for a few days (4:40).

As a Jew in the first century, Jesus was a person of privilege in any relationship with a Samaritan. If Jesus had been looking for a Samaritan cross-cultural experience, he might have invited a Samaritan cultural expert to visit him in Galilee in the comfort of his own cultural environment. Rather, he headed right into the heart of Samaritan territory. Therefore, his experience of Samaritan culture occurred in the context of Samaritan rules and ways of life. As noted, Jesus had prepared for this encounter by studying the culture and religion prior to entering the context. And when he entered Samaria, he listened to Samaritan perspectives.

Jesus’s conversation with a woman in Samaria serves as a starting point for a closer look at what is needed for whites, males, and other people of privilege to become like Creoles. A question first must be asked: Is it even possible for people of privilege to become like Creoles? The leaders of the first-century church believed that privileged Romans and Greeks could be transformed. So they invited Romans and Greeks into house churches composed of and under the leadership of oppressed Jews. Again I ask, Can people of privilege become like Creoles? Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant in Éloge de la Créolité / In Praise of Creoleness point to the possibility for a Béké (white) to become a Creole. They write, “In literature, the now unanimous recognition of the poet Saint-John Perse by our people as one of the most prestigious sons of Guadeloupe—in spite of his belonging to the Béké [white] ethnoclass—is indeed an advance of Creoleness in Caribbean consciousness. It is delighting.”^[5]

Yet we must still pursue the question, Can white people become like Creoles? Why? Because the significant gap in cultural understanding and lived experience between whites and persons of color in the United States is one of the greatest challenges in the formation of truly reconciled, Creole-like faith communities. Persons of color often live and work in a world dominated by white cultural ways and know much about whites. Few whites have a lived experience, a deep knowledge, and a disciplined posture of listening that might result in their developing a nuanced understanding of other cultural perspectives and the experience of racism and oppression. In this chapter, the question is explored, Can whites and other people of privilege become like Creoles?

The Challenge for the Privileged

This chapter opened with the example of Jesus entering Samaria as a person of privilege. Jesus was well positioned to understand Samaritan oppression. He lived the experience of oppression as a colonized Jewish subject of the Roman Empire. So, his perspective as an oppressed person allowed him to more easily enter the Samaritan reality, even though he held a privileged position while in Samaria. This is also true for persons experiencing various oppressions today (such as sexism, ageism, ableism, heterosexism, etc.). But most whites in the United States have very limited, if any, direct experience of being racially oppressed or listening to and learning from those who have experienced racism. This lack of direct experience of racism or prejudice creates a significant challenge for developing critical cultural competence and an analysis of socially constructed power. Later in his life, Martin Luther King Jr. came to the conclusion, “I guess I should have realized that few members of a race that has oppressed another race can understand or appreciate the deep groans and passionate yearnings of those that have been oppressed and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent, and determined action.”^[6]

In chapter 3, cultural competency was discussed using the six stages in the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS). Many whites in the United States are on the lower end of the scale. Researchers Mitchell R. Hammer, Milton J. Bennett, and Richard Wiseman note, “Individuals who have received largely monocultural socialization normally have access only to their own cultural worldview, so they are unable to construe (and thus are unable to experience) the difference between their own perception and that of people who are culturally different.”^[7] The first three stages in the DMIS are denial of cultural difference, defense against cultural difference, and minimization of cult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Becoming Like Creoles
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Prelude
• Day of Pentecost: Creolization in Colonization
• Middle Collegiate Church: Creolization in the East Village
• Church at Antioch: Creolization of Leadership
• Faith Community in the Twenty-First Century: Creolization of Women for Leadership
• A Well in Samaria: Creolization of Whites and Privileged Persons
• Harlem and Howard: Creolization of Curtiss Paul DeYoung
• Cave of Machpelah: Creolization at Religious Intersections
• Postlude
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Contributor Biographies