“Race
in America” August 20, 2017
Roger
Ray, pastor click here to see the video
HuffPost
3-4-17 Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief
strategist and the driving force behind the administration’s
controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, has a favorite
metaphor he uses to describe the largest refugee crisis in human history.
“It’s been
almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and
Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.
“The whole thing
in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 2016. “It’s a global issue today — this kind
of global Camp of the Saints.”
“It’s not a
migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the
Camp of the Saints.”
“When we first
started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. ... I mean, this is
Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”
Bannon has
agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as
executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart — which he called a “platform for the alt-right,” the online movement of white nationalists — he made anti-immigrant and
anti-Muslim news a focus.
But the top
Trump aide’s repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an
obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he
understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s
never found a wider audience. There’s a good reason for that: It’s
breathtakingly racist.
“[This book is]
racist in the literal sense of the term. It uses race as the main
characterization of characters,” said Cécile Alduy, professor of French at
Stanford University and an expert on the contemporary French far right. “It describes the takeover of Europe by
waves of immigrants that wash ashore like the plague.”
The book, she said, “reframes everything as the fight to
death between races.”
My daughter is a relatively
fair skinned Korean, which, unfortunately, gave my subtly racist father a
little reason to bargain for hope.
When she was a baby and we were
watching her sleep, Dad said, “I believe there’s a lot of white blood in her.”
I knew that he was looking for a way to give himself permission to love his
newest grandchild but I had to burst his bubble and let him know that she was
100% Asian and she wasn’t going to change. If he was going to love her, he had
to change.
28 years later, I can tell you,
even though she does not have a cleft chin or blue eyes, 
she is a case study of nurture
over nature: that arrogant, smart-mouthed, condescending little Asian rebel is
indisputably my daughter!
Still, to be fair, my father
was not the worst racist in rural Kentucky. More often than not, he showed at
least come empathy for anyone who was poor but he was a product of his environment
and there were some real demons in those parts of the woods.
Journalists are not suppose to
create news so that they can report on it and in the same way, I guess that it
really isn’t cricket for a preacher to create an incident that can be used as a
sermon illustration, though that is exactly what I have done this week. I can
claim a certain level of innocence in that I didn’t mean to throw a rock at a
hornets’ nest but since I did, you get to hear about it.
In light of all of the protests
and violence sparked by the removal of Confederate memorials in southern
cities, I wrote to one of our listeners in my hometown, Glasgow, KY, to inquire
as to the fate of the memorial to “our Confederate dead”
that had been on our courthouse lawn when I
was growing up there. I was sincerely surprised to learn that it is still
there.
So, I did something I have
never done before. I wrote a letter to the editor of the Glasgow Daily Times. I
reminded them that our little town elected the first black mayor in Kentucky
and the second of any southern state in 1968 and that in spite of the violence
in other cities, we integrated our schools without incident.
I appealed to them to move the
Confederate memorial to the cemetery built by a Confederate earthen fort where,
in fact, my parents are now laid to rest. And, I suggested that they do this as
a municipal decision rather than waiting for the embarrassment of having it
pulled down in a riot.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been
surprised, but other than a couple of Glasgow residents who sent me private
messages of appreciation, a couple of hundred people in that small town rose up
tell me to mind my own business, and to insist that the statue was about
history and not about racism. One lady called me to conduct an exorcism over
the phone.
Several others tried to tell me
how to be a pastor and a few, not to subtly, impugned my intelligence. They did
so with such bad grammar and so many misspellings that it kept Mark Rowland
busy for a couple of days trying to correct them all.
I’m indebted to my friend, Dan
Goodwin, for pointing out that there are no historical statues in public places
in Germany of Adolph Hitler. So, I shared with my hometown critics these
observations:
A monument on government
property is not there for historical purposes. It is there to show honor. Note
that Germany does not have any public statues of Hitler, even though Hitler was
historically important. What he represented was extreme violence against Jews,
gays, the disabled, and Gypsies. So they don't "honor" him though
they certainly remember him. Similarly, we do not have statues of King George
in our public places.
Our war for Independence
is certainly important to our history but we do not honor the head of the state
we were fighting against.
The Confederacy declared
war on the USA, specifically to, as William Thompson, the designer of the
Confederate flag, wrote at the time: As a people we are fighting to maintain
the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored
race.
For those of you who are
concerned about forgetting our history, I have a some good news for you in a
single word: books. There is a library in Glasgow, I used to go there every
week. You will find many examples of books there.
Further, as Confederate
monuments are concerned; most were erected long after the war. The one in
Glasgow went up in 1905, forty years after the end of the Civil War. At that
point, it was clearly a secessionist sympathizing tip of the hat to the KKK
more than it was mourning the deaths of those who died two generations before.
Most of the monuments in the news these days were erected in direct response to
the Civil Rights movement and school desegregation decisions from the SCOTUS.
The whole devotion to the Confederate flag came into existence as a white
backlash against the Civil Rights movement.
Now, let me be clear about this, I would not typically give
a lot of time and energy to symbols but I have to admit that they have grown in
importance in my mind since they appear to function something like the kitchen
light in a roach infested apartment.
When you suggest removing tributes to traitors out of places
of honor, you find out how much sympathy there is for traitors in a community.
These people are not history buffs, they are people who
harbor racist sentiments that even they may not have been aware of until the
statues became a matter of controversy. My dad didn’t articulate racist
feelings about Asians until one became his granddaughter.
Most of us who were gathered in the now demolished Ramada
Convention center that Tuesday night in November of 2008 to celebrate the
election of Barack Obama had tears in our eyes because we really believed that
racism in America was virtually over.
We were wrong…. Obama was the ultimate kitchen light in a
roach infested apartment. Electing our first black president did not herald the
end of racism in our nation but rather it revealed how strong racism still is.
No matter how much of the opposition to Obama was portrayed
as partisan politics, such defensive claims could hardly mask what it really
was. Racism has a peculiar stench that is hard to miss.
Progressives have been ebullient this weekend about the
departure of the Brietbart racist ideologue, Steve Bannon, from the White House
staff.
As you can easily see from our wisdom lesson today, taken
from the Huffington Post, Bannon was no casual college fraternity Nazi. He was
a devoted reader, writer, and promoter of anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant,
anti-black racist propaganda. From one 60 something Harvard educated white guy
to another, let me just say that Steve Bannon represented the lowest rung of the
moral ladder in our nation and you need not hold your breath waiting to see a
statue of him being erected at Harvard or even any sewage treatment plant
anywhere in our nation.
Still, I believe it would be foolish to assume that his
departure amounts to a re-baptism of Donald Trump’s conscience. Long before
Trump ever met Bannon, his father was arrested at a KKK rally.
Trump spent nearly $100,000 on newspaper ads calling for the
execution of the Central Park Five
and reiterated his desire to see these young men of color
executed even after DNA evidence had proven them to be innocent of their
previous rape convictions.
Trump was in trouble years ago for discriminatory housing
practices, and, of course, no one can forget that Trump literally entered politics
with his outrageous claims that Obama was not a legitimate president because he
was born outside of the United States.
Of course, John McCain was born in Panama 30 years earlier
and no one ever doubted his citizenship because, if you are born to an American
citizen, you are a natural born American citizen… everyone knows that, except
if you are a head to toe racist who cannot accept that any black man can
legitimately be the President of the United States.
Steve Bannon was not infecting Donald Trump with racism. He
was writing racist ideology into policy and speeches but it wasn’t like Trump
needed to be converted to the cause. Trump ran on racism and prejudice. His
very first campaign message was a racist screed against Mexicans and Muslims
and he rode that apocalyptic horse into the White House.
It is a horrible and shameful
thing that an unthinking racist, plagued by malignant inferiority complex has
managed to become the President of the United States but as a pastor I have to
point out that even though he lost the majority vote, he did get many millions
of votes, and even after all of this horrifying racist stuff has come out of
the oval office, more than 60% of Republicans still support him.
Now, I realize that there are
many Republican elected officials who are also shocked by his evident racism
but they are trying to overlook that flaw because they hope that they can use
him to get tax cuts for the super wealthy and to take health care away from 20
million poor and middle class Americans… and that is their best claim to a
moral high ground.
But I cannot escape the
probability that just as the election of Barack Obama revealed the hidden
racist strains in America, the election of Donald Trump was a triumph of
resurgent racism in America. Even though those who voted for Trump do not want
to wear that mantle, the apparent, at least unconscious belief, is that a
racist President gives some legitimacy to the racist inclinations buried deep
within those who voted for him.
We see the worst of it from
those who now participate in Nazi rallies but the root of it goes deep into the
hearts of those who would shudder at the suggestion that they voted for him
because he is a racist.
Still, I will say this: Those
who try to defend themselves by insisting that they are not racist even when
they very plainly are have this going for them… they don’t want to be racists.
Their denial betrays their
awareness that their racism is something they are ashamed of and do not want to
own and that is a hopeful thing. Here is my pastoral invitation, rather than
denying your racism, repent of it. Don’t pretend you really believed the absurd
claims that Trump was going to bring back coal jobs and protect you from
terrorism. Acknowledge that his racist rhetoric called out to your id, he
appealed to the fear in your brain stem, and you gave vent to your lower
nature.
If you don’t want to be a
racist, then start trying to seriously root it out of yourself and out of our
nation. President Obama was never famous for his use of Twitter but this week
one of his tweets became the most popular in the history of Twitter when he
quoted Nelson Mandela, who said,
“No one is born hating another
person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion.
People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to
love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”
My friends, if love is our
religion, I gotta tell you that it looks like the fields are ripe for an
evangelism harvest…. We have a whole lot of converting work to do.
