Racism and God-Talk
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Racism and God-Talk

A Latino/a Perspective

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez

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Racism and God-Talk

A Latino/a Perspective

Ruben Rosario Rodriguez

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About This Book

The apostle Paul wrote that "All of you are one in Christ Jesus." Given Paul’s vision of God’s kingdom defined by the breakdown of all distinctions and relationships of dominationā€”no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or femaleā€”how do we make sense of ethnic particularity within the church’s theological formulations?

Racism and God-Talk explores the biblical and religious dimensions of North American racism while highlighting examples of resistance within the Christian religious tradition. Social historians have seldom analyzed the problematic of race from a primarily theological perspective. This volume undertakes a critical examination of explicitly theological and confessional perspectives for understanding and transforming North American racism.

Rosario Rodriguez offers insights from Latino/a theology for broader scholarly and social discussions concerning racism, borders, and immigration. The first to analyze race and racism from a Latino/a theological perspective, the volume makes use of a broadened conceptualization of "mestizaje," or mutual cultural exchange, to challenge the church to recognize the effects of racial and ethnic particularity in all theological construction.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2008
ISBN
9780814776285

PART I

The Fundamental Contradiction

1

Beyond Black and White

Understanding Race in North America
Two apparently inconsistent axioms shape this investigationā€™s conception of race: (1) there is only one human race, and (2) racial particularity remains a necessary aspect of political discourse. In North American public discourse race and racism are widely used terms open to a variety of interpretations and vulnerable to imprecision between technical and popular usage. Nevertheless, within academic discourse there is, despite the vagaries of language, some consensus as to their technical use: (1) the most common yet outdated usage of ā€œraceā€ refers to the existence of biologically distinct human subspecies (i.e., Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid), a view now rejected by the disciplines of biology and anthropology; (2) in contrast to this first use, ā€œraceā€ is often used as a synonym for the entire human species, emphasizing the genetic unity of humankind in spite of somatic differences; (3) a third meaning of ā€œraceā€ is closer to the term ethnicity insofar as it is used as a synonym for a nation or ethnic group (Jewish, Irish, etc.); and (4) social scientists use race to identify a group of people who share a collective identity on the basis of physical markers (skin color, hair texture, facial features, etc.) and/or analogous social locations in their respective societies, even when belonging to distinct national or ethnic groups (black, Asian, white, Hispanic, etc.).1 By this schema, the concept of race does not refer to any singular identifying trait but encompasses such diverse factors as national origin, skin color, cultural traditions, and familial bloodlines. Accordingly, the term racism describes a broad range of negative or hostile attitudes by one social group toward another on the basis of these same factors.
By defining ethnocentrism as the almost universal human tendency to prefer members of oneā€™s own social group, and racial prejudice as the irrational hatred toward members of another group (often on the basis of physical differences such as skin color), this investigation reserves the term racism for a very particular set of attitudes and behaviors. Racism is distinguished by the systemic imposition of ethnocentrism or racial prejudice by one social group upon social structures and cultural practices that not only foster racial discrimination but also produce long-term racial disadvantage for another social group. By this definition, whenever one social group exercises political power over against another group with the intention of advancing its own political advantage and cultural domination while limiting the political, economic, and cultural opportunities of the other, we have an instance of racism. Historically, the oppressed group is often an ethnic minority within a larger population, but as evidenced by South Africa under apartheid, a minority population can dominate and oppress a majority population. A spectrum of social realities can be considered ā€œracistā€ beyond the more obvious authoritarian racist regimes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (e.g., slavery and Jim Crow laws in the United States, the genocidal ideology of Nazi Germany, and South African apartheid), given that a society not overtly structured to benefit one group over another can nonetheless perpetuate cultural attitudes and behaviors that lead to the racial disadvantage of others. At stake in this definition of racism is the oppressed social groupā€™s access to political power and ability to positively transform its own socioeconomic reality, a crucial distinction when addressing theorists who claim that racism is a modern phenomenon linking European colonial expansion, the rise of capitalism, and the dominance of scientific rationalism to the creation of totalitarian racist states without accounting for the premodern, culturally embedded roots of modern racism.
By emphasizing the social power dynamics that constitute racism, I do not minimize the role of moral agency in perpetuating racism, but seek to highlight individual acts of irrational racial prejudice within a particular cultural and historical matrix. This definition allows for the possibility that the victims of racism can themselves institute racist structures and practices, countering those theorists who argue that, for example, in a white-dominated society only whites can be racist. The justification for the latter is based upon the assumption that since racism is structural and institutional, since we live in a society defined by white cultural privilege, and since blacks do not have an equal share of institutional power, only whites can be racist (most of this literature speaks only in black-white polarities).2 This approach rightly emphasizes the institutional dimension of racism but posits a rather narrow view of power. For example, the tendency within minority populations of color to create hierarchies in which lighter skin is valued and darker skin stigmatized (ā€œcolorismā€) might have arisen as a consequence of white European racism, but the fact that these tendencies have been internalized and perpetuated by the very victims of racism demonstrates that the oppressed are also capable of instituting practices of domination. Furthermore, this definition does not adequately account for racism in nonwhite societies. Take the tragic history of conquest and oppression of Koreans by the Japanese, grounded on the long-held belief that Koreans are inherently different from and inferior to the Japanese. To label this an ā€œethnicā€ conflict over cultural differences as opposed to a ā€œracistā€ conflict on the assumption that both populations belong to the same ā€œraceā€ (i.e., they are both ā€œAsianā€) is to impose Western theoretical concepts on the situation. Finally, there is something imperialistic and paternalistic about any view of humanity that treats the victims of oppression as less than human by denying them the capacity to act as sinfully as their oppressors. We must resist the temptation to romanticize the victims of oppression as saintly on the basis of their social location, since to define racism as solely institutional at the cost of individual moral agency or group self-determination is in itself an act of domination.
While the racial attitudes of the biblical world reveal an awareness of color difference that does not necessarily lead to the enslavement or oppression of other people, there is a long history of postbiblical interpretation within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that rationalizes and justifies the subjugation of sub-Saharan Africans. In modern Euro-American racial discourse the so-called curse of Ham (Gen. 9:18ā€“27) stands out as the chief example of racist misuses of the Bible, one with clear precursors in Talmudic, Patristic, and early Muslim exegesis. A brief survey of the history of interpretation of such racialized texts is warranted in order to better understand the racist contradiction embodied in antebellum Christianity in the United States. While Christian belief and practice have contributed to the legitimization of racial stratification, scientific racism has also exerted a deep and long-lasting influence on popular North American beliefs about race. Therefore, this chapter traces the history and eventual rejection of scientific racism within academic discourse, highlighting the recent resurgence of biological theories of race in the North American academic context. While race is no longer considered a valid descriptive category in the natural sciences, it has been embraced by marginalized and oppressed groups as a necessary descriptive category for political discourse in order to resist white cultural and political dominance. Historically, racial descriptive categories were forced upon minority groups by the dominant culture (ā€œracializationā€), yet these groups have appropriated and transformed such labels in their search for cultural identity and political liberation. To unilaterally abandon the language of race now that science has recognized the error of its ways is to ignore and minimize a long and painful history of oppression. Consequently, I contend that the Christian churchā€™s response to racism ought to embrace liberating aspects of the ā€œrace consciousnessā€ movement in its theological reflection.

The Biblical Background

When did color prejudice enter the biblical exegetical tradition? Two landmark studies, Frank Snowdenā€™s Blacks in Antiquity (1970) and Lloyd Thompsonā€™s Romans and Blacks (1989), evaluate the culture of Western classical antiquity and conclude the ancients were not racist in the modern sense of the term. Nevertheless, both studies acknowledge the presence of negative color prejudice and identify a cross-cultural tendency toward ethnocentrism. Still, the consensus among classical and biblical scholars is that most references to skin color and ethnicity in classical texts are examples of literary color symbolism not motivated by racial prejudice. This investigation contends there is evidence of an accumulative consequence upon Western culture resulting from the continual use of negative color symbolism, which, while not originating in color prejudice, gave rise to racial prejudice and racism. Given that Christianity originated as a persecuted sect within the Roman Empire and became the official state religion, serious questions also need to be asked concerning the ā€œrhetoric of empireā€ in the formation and spread of Christianity.3 If, indeed, the spread of Christianity in the West follows the general history of empire, theology faces the arduous task of unraveling how the rhetoric of empire transformed the New Testament message and, more important (for the current investigation), how Christianity accepted and spread Greco-Roman ā€œethno-political rhetoricsā€ that contributed to the rise of modern racism.4
The Theological Roots of Modern Racism
Both Snowden and Thompson presume a definition of racismā€”as the creation and perpetuation of totalitarian structures by a dominant group to subjugate another group perceived as inferiorā€”that leads them to conclude classical antiquity was not racist. However, this definition of racism does not adequately account for the more subtle forces that shape cultural attitudes in order to create racial/ethnic stratification without the overt use of political domination. In general, references to skin color in non-Christian and early Christian Greco-Roman literature disclose a rhetorical use of color symbolism in which black is negative/evil and white is positive/good, but such metaphors are not considered instances of color prejudice insofar as this anthropological phenomenon appears cross-culturally (even in some black African cultures).5 Nevertheless, Thompson acknowledges antiblack sentimentā€”attributing it to an almost universal response to the unfamiliar other (ā€œethnocentrismā€)ā€”while Snowden documents the Greco-Roman aesthetic bias against both very dark and very light skin color that certainly contributed to classical attitudes about sub-Saharan Africans.6
In the wake of Snowdenā€™s research, the accepted consensus among classicists and biblical scholars states that color prejudice (as we know it today) did not exist in antiquity. I am troubled by the sweeping generalization that racism is a modern phenomenon because it fails to recognize those important aspects of classical aesthetic and moral norms equating beauty and goodness with whiteness that contributed to the formation of modern racist worldviews.7 It is worth noting that several of Snowdenā€™s peers (Thompson included) have critiqued his emphasis on positive portrayals of blacks in classical literature to the exclusion of more negative and grotesque representations.8 Regardless, Hellenistic culture left its indelible mark on Judeo-Christian theological traditions. Biblical and post-biblical perceptions of blacks by Jews, Christians, and Muslims illuminate the cross-cultural permeability of confessional traditions with their surrounding culture and provide a baseline comparison for deciphering the various ā€œrhetoricsā€ of empire that have interacted with the biblical tradition. Images of black Africans in the Hebrew Bible correspond to Snowdenā€™s evaluation of ancient Greco-Roman attitudes. In other words, there is no historical evidence of negative color prejudice in the Bible. Based on the limited textual evidence, the ancient Israelite perception of black-skinned Africans (specifically references to ā€œKushitesā€ in the Hebrew Bible, ā€œEthiopiansā€ in the LXX) can be cataloged under three distinct categories: (1) a proverb about skin color that does not reveal any negative sentiment toward black skin but merely refers to skin color as a metaphor for that which is unchangeable (Jer. 13:23), (2) statements about specific Kushites (Num. 12:1; Jer. 38:7ā€“13; Jer. 36:14; Zeph. 1:1; Ps. 7:1), none of which reveal an attitude of color prejudice or other negative sentiment based on ethnicity, and (3) a passage in Isaiah (18:1ā€“2, 7) that describes the land of Kush and its people in positive terms.9 Ironically, the Hebrew text most often associated with biblical justifications of racism, Genesis 9:18ā€“27, contains no reference to ethnicity or skin color, pointing to a postbiblical origin for the interpretive tradition that viewed the curse of Ham etiologically as the rationalization for the enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans.
Analysis of postbiblical Jewish and Jewish-Hellenistic sources also reveals a lack of negative evaluations of black Africans. Rabbinic and targumic literature preserves the biblical image of Kush as the ā€œland at the farthest southern reach of the earthā€ becoming the basis ā€œfor various expressions denoting geographic extremes, just as in classical writings.ā€10Thus, within the Judaism of late antiquity, the idea that Ethiopia was literally the end of the earth ā€œgave rise to two contradictory images of the people who lived there: they are pious, unsullied by civilization; and they are barbaric, unenlightened by civilization.ā€11 In other words, while postbiblical Jewish literature does reveal some negative attitudes toward Kushites, they are not based on skin color but reflect a general Mediterranean attitude toward all barbarian cultures, or merely echo the negative color symbolism present within all ancient literature (Greco-Roman and Near Eastern).
Not surprisingly, early Christian literatureā€”both New Testament and Patristic writingsā€”reflects the same cultural norms of aesthetic beauty and perpetuate the same ethnocentric tendency toward oneā€™s own social grouping as the rest of ancient Mediterranean culture. The most influential early Christian interpreter of ā€œblacknessā€ in the Bible was Origen. He interpreted Song of Songs 1:5 (ā€œI am black but beautifulā€) allegorically, employing the common metaphor of darkness as sin. Origenā€™s identification of the maiden speaking in verse 5 as an Ethiopian, and his use of this and other biblical Ethiopians as symbols for those still in sin and outside Godā€™s covenant (i.e., unbaptized Gentiles), became widely accepted, thus establishing the pattern for all future Christian exegesis.12 The church fathers from Origen to the sixth century ā€œsaw the biblical Ethiopian as a metaphor to signify any person who, not having received a Christian baptism, is black in spirit and without light.ā€13 While not a completely negative valuationā€”insofar as ā€œunbaptizedā€ implies there is still hope of salvation in Christā€”the fact remains that Origen and other church fathers equated ā€œEthiopiaā€ and black skin with a spiritually unregenerate state, even extending the metaphor to the point that salvation becomes linked with whiteness.14 The church fathers allegorized biblical references to Ethiopians (in the LXX and New Testament) as symbols for sin, going so far as to depict devils as black Ethiopians; nevertheless, historians still view them as inheritors of the classical literary tradition that employed black-white color symbolism to represent good and evil instead of as proto-racists.
So when did color prejudice enter the biblical exegetical tradition? Postbiblical Jewish exegesis had a strong influence on Christian and Islamic exegetical traditions, yet...

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