We have sometimes been faithful proxies of white supremacy. If you’d take the time to know us, you’d see that we’ve imported some of the harmful beliefs you’ve laid on our psyches. Or we’ve generated our own varieties of troubling blackness. In fact, your racist dogma was so appealing that even when you stopped barking it, we demanded more in our own cultural quarters.
The ventriloquist effect of whiteness has worked brilliantly; black mouths moving, white ideas flowing. What your vast incuriosity about black life keeps you from knowing, and this is heartbreaking to admit, is that we black folk often see ourselves the same way you see us. Sometimes we view our own culture, our traits and habits, through the distorted lens of white condescension or hatred. Often we make other vulnerable black folk in our midst the nigger you’ve made us all out to be.
This came home to me after I battled bias at Carson-Newman. The racial dynamics of the college were troubling. Black students couldn’t have been more than 6 percent of the student body. We weren’t warmly welcomed either, except if we played ball. When I asked why there weren’t more black speakers at the mandatory Tuesday chapel, it came down to crude mathematics: our small percentages mandated only one black speaker a year. Most of the other black students accepted that as par for the course; I was a few years older so it rankled me a bit more. I didn’t enlist their help. I formed a one-man quiet protest and refused to attend chapel. In return for my resistance—chapel was mandatory—I was unceremoniously booted from the school after my junior year.
Then I had to figure out what to do to support my family. I had worked all through college, cleaning and degreasing heavy machinery at a local factory. Later I pastored a couple of different churches. After getting my walking papers from Carson-Newman, I got “called” to a bigger black church in East Tennessee.
I went there thinking that I had found my life’s purpose. After being expelled from college, I was eager to apply my knowledge of the Bible and my beliefs about social justice in the black church setting. The only thing I really discovered is that God has a mighty sense of humor. The church I took charge of is named Thankful Baptist Church. They proved anything but grateful for me.
I decided that I’d challenge the black church’s sexism. It was another show of our moral hypocrisy, another way of looking down the ladder at the face and fate of the nigger beneath us. The sad irony of our sexism is that it targets the women who make up the vast majority of our congregations. Of course I wasn’t foolish. I knew that I’d have to teach for at least a year to get the church ready to ordain three women as deacons for the first time in its history.
In weekly Bible study, I hammered away at the parallels between sexism and racism. If God respected all people the same, then we had no right to deny women equal standing in our sanctuaries. All seemed well until a group of local ministers got wind of what I was doing and deemed it destructive to black Christianity.
“You gonna let this yellow nigga come down here and destroy the black church?” their leader asked members of my congregation.
“Y’all got to do something.” So they did.
When I got to the church one Sunday morning, my key didn’t work. Must be fixing the door finally, I thought. The key to my office didn’t work either. Finally, I thought, they are getting around to refurbishing my sparse quarters.
I preached my sermon and couldn’t help but notice faces I hadn’t seen before. I thought my preaching was winning new converts. Apparently God wasn’t one of them.
After church, a deacon rose to announce trouble.
“Pastor, there’s a real problem in this church.”
“Deacon, let’s deal with that trouble.”
“The problem is you.”
Oh damn, I’m the trouble. Well praise the Lord and pass the offering plate because this wasn’t looking too pretty for me.
The church erupted in applause, and then, in short order, took a vote to cast me out. It really hurt that most of the women in the church sided with their men against me and their own best interests. But I eventually understood; they had to live with those men long after I left.
*
I thought I had heard the Lord clearly when I got kicked out of school. I thought I’d become a church pastor and preach the prophetic word of God. I thought I’d lead the people into the vineyards of progressive theology and together we’d be a mighty witness for the black church, challenging all of the ills of society. I thought first we’d uproot the ills in our own ranks.
But mine was the only uprooting. I was sent packing with a month’s severance pay. Once again I was left with no means to support a wife and a preschooler.
I had little choice but to return to Carson-Newman and the bastion of whiteness from which I had been expelled to complete my education. I knew my return meant that I had to attend chapel regularly, but after my experience at Thankful Baptist, it seemed a harmless requirement. I had obviously heard God wrong.
It wasn’t just gender that proved to be a barrier, a real source of suffering for black folk, not only in my church but across the nation. The shade of skin was a problem too. The minister who led the charge against me was, like me, a yellow Negro, and by citing my color in his theological brief against me, he shined a light on the deep wound of colorism in black America. The “light, bright and damn near white” black person is often put into conflict with the darker and richer chocolate members of our community. I had seen up close how color-struck black folk are.
My father was a hulking man known for his brawn and his blue-black skin. As I grew into adolescence and my understanding of the white gaze deepened, I saw how you looked at him. I couldn’t help but notice how so many folk saw my father not as a man, but as a specimen, a hominid whose dark skin and outsized muscles conjured all the ruinous images of black folk fresh out of the jungle. Savages. Savages who woke at dawn to go to work to fuel the engines of your civilization. Savages without whom you could not turn the gears of the very world you demanded black bodies make for you.