Shifting Racial Hierarchies towards Intercultural MinistrySTANLEY JOHN, PH.D.

Acts 10 Peter’s Conversion

First, Acts 10:28 “God has shown me that I must not call anything unclean.”: The Gospel challenges his ethnic pride.

Second, Acts 10:34 “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism”: The Gospel challenges his ethnic priority for salvation.

Third, Acts 10:47; Acts 15:8 “Surely no one can stand in the way of their being baptized with water. They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have.”: The Gospel challenges and reorients his categories for salvation.

“God who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He made no distinction between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith.” Acts 15:9-10

1. We construct society based on Social DISTINCTIONS

Society is constructed around difference and inequality In the U.S., in 2006, the poorest 20% of the population earned 3.4% of 'the total

income, whereas the richest 5% earned 22.3%. New York Times, Sept. 10, 2019

WASHINGTON — “The expanding gap between rich and poor is not only widening the gulf in incomes and wealth in America. It is helping the rich lead longer lives, while cutting short the lives of those who are struggling, according to a study released this week by the Government Accountability Office.”

Washington Post: Over the past 40 or so years, the American economy has been funneling wealth

and income, reverse Robin Hood-style, from the pockets of the bottom 99 percent to the coffers of the top 1 percent. The total transfer, to the richest from everyone else, amounts to 10 percent of national income and 15 percent of national wealth.

1. A. American Social Hierarchies• Income:

• In American society people are stratified by income and personal possessions into social classes.

• Ethnic Groups: • They are classified by cultural or family background into ethnic groups

or by skin color into racial categories.

• Gender and Age: • They are also classified by gender and age, as well as by

standards such as education.

There is a basic contradiction in Western values: We extol equality, but massive inequalities persist and, in fact, grow nationally and internationally.

2. We employ these distinctions to manage and exercise control over others.

• Social classes: a system of social stratification based on income or possession of wealth and resources.

• Individual social mobility is possible in a class system.

• Castes: a system of social stratification based on assignment at birth to the ranked social or occupational groups of parents.

2. A. Caste System

All of Creation was one person: Purusha Head- Brahmins

Shoulders- Kshatriyas

Legs-Vaishayas

Feet- Sudras Dust: Casteless

2.B New Racism

• New racism is racism based on culture instead of biological characteristics.

• Modern forms of racism are a 17th and 18th century phenomenon created to justify economic expansion, slavery, and the killing and subjugation of millions of people.

3. We believe narratives about others to support our view of the inferiority of the other.

Tite Tienou, The invention of the “primitive” Erroneous ideas and explanatory theories The idea of the primitive in anthropology’s past Superiority/inferiority complex “Legends which have no firm historical basis are

often of the highest historical value as reflecting the moral sentiment of their time…. The facts of history have been largely governed by its fictions (William Lecky, 1908:20)

3. A. Concept of Race Samuel Morton (1799-1851, ranking of the races based on cranial capacity Stephen Gould (1981) in the Mismeasureof Man debunked this theory and claimed that Morton manipulated his findings Jason Lewis (U. Penn, 2011) concluded that Morton did not manipulate, neither did he believe in the intellectual superiority. He was only interested in variation

Ideology of Race needs Rationale: Thomas Jefferson in1781: "I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether

originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind" (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14, Laws).

Less than a hundred years later this "suspicion" was a scientific "fact," and codified through, among other things, the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision in 1857, which declared that slaves were "chattel" (i.e., moveable property), and remained so even if they moved to free territories, and could not become citizens of the United States. (Ybarrola, Steve. 2009)

3.B. Development of the concept of Race

Development of race as Ideology: A racialized society, which is a society wherein race matters profoundly

for differences in life experiences, life opportunities, and social relationships” Emerson and Smith, Divided By Faith (7)

“Cultural anthropologists have established that ingrained attitudes, general and scientific prejudices, and economic competition have often had far more to do with…racial definitions than have the real physical attributes or geographic origins of people. ‘Race’ in these investigations…is conceived of as a cultural construction, not a biological fact. It is in reality a kind of ideology, a way of thinking about, speaking about, and organizing relations among and within human groups” (Raymond Scupin, 2002:12, emphasis added).

Carl Linnaeus, Swedish botanist 1758 classified humans into four categories—white, red, yellow,

and black—and attached behavioral characteristics with each “race.”

Lieberman: “It was a taxonomy of superiority-inferiority that reflected the politically correct views of his time. It was a way of thinking that would prevail, with few exceptions, for the next three hundred years” (2003: 38).

It supported the belief “that Caucasians are biologically superior and that most people of color, especially blacks, have an inferior culture determined by their ‘race’” (Lieberman 2003: 36)

Race not biological but a cultural construct Compare race in Brazil and U.S.

4. Our view is shaped by how we think of the other. Our thinking Is formed by exposure and education and experience.

Social Imaginaries- Charles Taylor “By social imaginary, I mean something broader and deeper than the

intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (23).

Convicted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wffHBQKq74

Social Imaginaries as Ideologies: “schematic images of the social order” that are “most distinctly, maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience” (Geertz 1973: 218, 220).

In the U.S. Ideology of Anglo-Conformity: Through this lens “becoming American” meant

adopting the cultural beliefs and social practices inherited from the British colonists. Assimilationist.

Ideology of Melting pot: Assimilating into something distinctly American

Ideology of cultural pluralism or multiculturalism: socially and culturally heterogeneous society

Rankine, The Racial Imaginary (2015) “These systemic problems have infiltrated the mind so that when

someone asks the white policeman who shoots someone, ‘Why did you shoot him in the back?’ his answer is ‘I don’t know.’ Many of them say, ‘I don’t know,’ and it’s because they’re being propelled forward by some imaginary conception of being under attack when they’re not under attack,” Rankine said recently. “I think sometimes we’re dealing with racists who go out to murder and I think sometimes we’re dealing with people who have in their consciousness a built-up idea of who they are and who the ‘other’ is, and are inside a fight that doesn’t exist except in their imagination, and because their imagination is armed, the person on the other side ends up dead.” These racist constructions in the imagination throw people of color into a “false fight for their humanity,” she said, paraphrasing the poet Fred Moten. “We’re spending a lot of energy just trying to stay human.””

- Lauretta Charlton, New Yorker, speaking on the work of Claudia Rankine, author of The Racial Imaginary, 2015.

5. These then allow us permission to treat the others as less than because we have come to believe that they ought not to be treated in the same measure and it affirms the normalcy and rightness about those in power.

“The starker the contrast between us and them, the easier it is to recruit soldiers whose mission it is to bring them into conformity with us.” -Tienou

When negative cultural stereotypes take on theological affirmation, then you have a religious justification for viewing others as lower. (Case: Rwanda)

Chinese detergent commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Few8kJ0zfnY

Color is better: Italian commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94MMfgIKabw

5. We engage in habits and experiences that reaffirm the narrative of others that we have

Race- and how our understanding of the other shapes our caricature of the other and we use other cultures in ways that are mocking.

CASE STUDY: SOP.

“Whatever their intentions, the photo is problematic for at least three main reasons. First, as a comparison, consider why blackface is so offensive. Starting in the early 19th century, white actors would apply black makeup to their faces and exaggerate their lips in a caricature of African American looks. Then they performed racist tropes on stage for laughs. Blackface denigrates people of African descent. It says that skin color can make someone intellectually and culturally inferior, so it’s not a problem to imitate their appearance for the sake of amusement. In a similar way, putting on clothes typically associated with racial and ethnic minorities communicates that a person’s culture has value only as entertainment. That’s why you can’t dismiss this photo as “just a joke.” It harks back to a history of dehumanization.” Jemar Tisby, Washington Post. https://twitter.com/JonathanMerritt/status/856976043407589376/photo/1

6. We need to move past this type of thinking to really open up to understand the world and experience of the other.

Miroslav Volf Exclusion and Embrace Exclusion: The way in which one treats the others to

protect his/her own monochrome world is what he calls exclusion.

He writes, “Sin is not so much a defilement but a certain form of purity: the exclusion of the other from one’s heart and one’s world.” (241).

Why embrace the other?

The heart of embrace theory is that “God’s reception of hostile humanity into divine communion is a model for how human beings should relate to the other.”

Volf defines "Embrace" as distancing ourselves from our own cultures to create space for the other”

“What kinds of selves we need to be in order to live in harmony with others?” “identity,” “otherness”, and ‘reconciliation”

Embrace: “the will to give ourselves to others and ‘welcome’ them.”

The way to embrace in a world filled with hate is to respond in forgiveness. Volf claims, “forgiveness is an outrage…for without forgiveness and repentance embrace is a masquerade” (247)

Conceptualizing

1. We construct society based on social hierarchy

2. We employ these to manage and exercise control and authority over others. (Example caste)

3. We believe narratives about others to support our view of the inferiority of the other (created from feet) (invention of the primitive)

4. Our view is shaped by how we think of the other. Our thinking Is formed by exposure and education and experience.

5. These then allow us permission to treat the others as less than because we fundamentally believe that they ought not to be treated in the same measure and it affirms the normalcy and rightness about those in power. Hence white privilege. (Slavery) (commercial, rightness is defined by changing the blackness in the Chinese or essentializing blackness in the Italian advert)

5. We engage in habits and experiences that reaffirm the narrative of others that we have (fox news)

6. We need to move past this type of thinking to really open up to understand the world and experience of the other. (Openness) (embrace exclusion)