issues with racial reconciliation in CT
an even more dense yet just as provocative piece called Catching up with a Dream appears also.I know many of my white friends and colleagues, both past and present, have grown irritated by the black community's incessant blabbering about race and racism and racial reconciliation. They don't understand what's left for them to do. "We have African Americans and other people of color on our staff. We listen to Tony Evans's broadcast every day. We even send our youth group into the city to do urban ministry. Can't we get on with it already? Haven't we done enough?"
I can empathize. I know that black people are tired of the blabbering as well. I would love to move on. Somehow, though, on our way to racial resolution, we've gotten stuck in the rut of familiar patterns. These patterns lead us to believe we've accomplished something simply by, for example, hiring a person of color or speaking to a person of another race at church or hugging someone we don't know at a conference 300 miles away from home. These types of gestures are good and necessary. But we should not let symbolism displace the purpose of the acts themselves.
Rivers is less generous: "Much of the current race-relations discourse, like what happens at Promise Keepers, substitutes fundamentalist hugfests for the kind of deep, substantive dialogue that has a genuine impact on institutional decisions and public policy. Too much of the reconciliation rhetoric of white evangelicals focuses on interpersonal piety without any radically biblical conception of racial justice."
Oberlin College religion professor Albert G. Miller believes the church has a watered-down understanding of King's vision. "I think we are stuck in our image of King at the 1963 March on Washington," he says. "The 'I Have a Dream' King was a kinder, gentler King. There was a more complicated man that evolved after that point who was very frustrated with what he saw with the limited progress of blacks. In his latter days, King was not just protesting for blacks to eat at the lunch counter, but for blacks to have employment at the lunch counter and to own it."
Cheryl Sanders, professor of Christian Ethics at Howard University and senior pastor of Washington's Third Street Church of God, concurs. "The problem with the Dream language is that it draws attention away from the reality of what King was speaking about throughout his life. There's a danger of only seeing him as a dreamer, and if we only see him as a dreamer, we too easily let ourselves off the hook from dealing with the realities that he was dealing with."
Toward the end of his life, King returned to his Baptist theological roots, "stripping himself … of Protestant liberalism's pieties," writes Willy Jennings in BOOKS & CULTURE (March/April 1998), emphasizing the words of Jesus and the coming judgment.
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