“Yet it is on the whole a kindly society, for wars and depressions have victimized both whites and blacks.  Their shared experiences have bred familiarity; and from familiarity has come understanding and compassion.”

“For whites and Negroes alike, Reconstruction was a dismal time.  Hardship and lack of cash, which were the common lot of black and white, drew all classes together.  Sufferings which were shared gave to ex-masters and ex-slaves an understanding which later generations largely preserved.

The record is not all bad.  The epitaph of post-Reconstruction generations in Southside should be written with compassion:

They made the best of what they had.”

– Below the James Lies Dixie, a book I found in my local library.

One of the sneaky things about systemic issues is that it makes us think that just the South™ was bad, and not the individuals involved.  And that if we were just a little more understanding, a little more compassionate, we’d see that nobody meant any harm, and if no one meant any harm, then no harm was actually done.

“Thus, on the whole, northern evangelicals did not differ from southern evangelicals in their racial views, except that they tended to oppose slavery.  This was easily done, in that slavery did not exist in the North.  They were thus not particularly visionary or radical on the matter.” – Divided by Faith

It can be comforting to look to the past, to wonder at their sins, and marvel at their engineering or their good intentions.  It’s comforting because it’s in the past and therefore we aren’t responsible for the bad, and yet we can affirm the good.  But that conveniently ignores that humans are all the same, and the same racist actions and attitudes of Columbus, the Pilgrims, the slave owners and even the abolitionists flow through white veins today.

“The early white abolitionists opposed slavery but not racialization.” -Divided by Faith

There is a danger in assuming past sins were fueled by ‘blatant hate and racism’.  It only seems blatant when we look backwards.

For example, there were 3,446 lynchings from 1882-1968.  40 a year.  Not even 1 a week, which is much less than the 1 every 28 hours shootings today of black people by cops and cop-like authorities.  And yet which of these would we describe as blatant racism?

“Early evangelical abolitionists were conciliatory in tone, not wanting to raise too much ruckus for fear of hurting the main mission of the church and upsetting the social order….Indeed, so conciliatory were their tones, so mild their requests, that many white southerners felt comfortable in the abolitionist movement.” – Divided by Faith

We have to get over this idea of being conciliatory.  Of having the proper tone.  Of not wanting to make people uncomfortable.  What if tearing down the empire, calling out the bad intentions of our ancestors and disrupting the friendly comfort of our local church is the whole point?  The social order is what is broken.  The social order is what Jesus came to upend.  And the social order is bigger than any one of us.

It is not really a matter of ‘what were they thinking’ or ‘nuance’ or finding the right local church.

It’s about what does it mean to be an oppressor, to be part of the system that oppresses, to benefit and profit from it, and how are our churches and other institutions sustaining the status quo?

Why were they so comfortable with oppression?  Why are we so comfortable with it?  What do we get from it?  How does challenging the status quo threaten our livelihood?  What might we have to give up to change the system?

In Divided by Faith, the authors talk about Ann Swidler’s idea of a cultural tool kit, and they expand this to describe an evangelical’s cultural toolkit, which consists of  ‘accountable freewill individualism,’ ‘relationalism’, and ‘antistructuralism’.  Because of this, “The concept of individual sin lies behind many white evangelicals’ accounts of the race problem.   From this original sin, we fail to love our neighbors….Absent from their accounts is the idea that poor relationships might be shaped by social structures, such as laws, the ways institutions operate, or forms of segregation…..White evangelicals not only interpret race issues by using accountable freewill individualism and relationalism, but they often find structural explanations irrelevant or even wrongheaded.”

“For white evangelicals, the ‘race problem’ is not racial inequality, and it is not systematic, institutional injustice….Because society is viewed as merely the aggregation of individuals, social change is achieved by personal change and renewal…”

Using their tools, “The solution to the race problem in the United States – and the solution to most any social problem anywhere in the world – is through the personal influence strategy, which derives from the cultural tools of accountable freewill individualism and relationalism.”

This analysis makes everything make so much sense.  I can see now why Austin considers this book a must-read for white people.  The issue here is not one of individualization.  It does not really matter if your mom was pro-Jim Crow or not.  It does not really matter if there was a good emperor or not.

The systems are what are crushing people.  The racism and oppression and violence that are so good at creating and sustaining fear are also so good at keeping both oppressor and oppressed trapped.  And when we insist that it is an individual problem, we are maintaining the structures that oppress.

When we look at our history, at empire, at what church and kingdom mean, we need to ask how might fears, greed, even hate, play into support of the system.  What was at risk, how could they have subverted the system, and how does all of that apply to me here and now?  How am I working to uphold or dismantle systemic oppression?  We do ourselves no favors in minimizing the sins and shortcomings of the past.  We need to be honest about their complicity in violence, their love of power.  And we need to see the same in ourselves.

It is not empathy with the oppressors we need to learn.  It is the understanding of what oppression is and complicity with systems and examining the ways white supremacy, white hetero-patriarchy feeds the worst part of human tendencies to keep us complicit today.

If we want to talk about racial sins and LGBT issues at the same time, look no further than Ebola to see how the fear-mongering is both the same as it was with AIDS and continues the racist language of Africa being dark and dangerous.  If we want to talk about the nuance of empire, look no further than Ferguson.

If we are trying to be empathetic to the oppressors then it makes sense that we’d need to be understanding of empire, and of course our institutions of church will need to line up to that understanding.  But I’m pretty sure that’s not what Jesus came for.