Excerpts from Jesus as Brother

p. 53

The ideal of “We the People” cannot thrive where triumphalism is rampant.  American triumphalism has led to the spirit of “Manifest Destiny,” the belief that the United States is the divinely ordained model for all successful future human societies.  The triumphalist spirit has contributed to the demise of past nations and empires that have devoted themselves to it.  In the same way, the supremacy of whiteness has retarded America’s progress toward civic and social stability.  When we look at the Old South, we can see that slavery isolated those states from the mainstream of American progress, leaving any advancements made after the Revolution to the Northern and Midwestern states, where immigration and innovation were forging an industrial and agricultural powerhouse.  After the Second World War, with the GI Bill of Rights and the repeal of the Jim Crow laws, the remnants of the Confederacy have blossomed.  How much of the nation’s progress might have taken place in the Sun Belt, had the dead hand of slavery not throttled it?

p. 135

Americans face two major social problems in the future:  the alienation of our white majority from the nonwhite minorities and the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a shrinking percentage of our people.  Commercial propaganda exaggerates the correlation of wealth and whiteness, as well as color and poverty; to be white and wealthy is morally good, and to be nonwhite and poor is morally bad.  People with comfortable incomes know from firsthand experience how much difference the money and color questions make to those who do not have those things.  It is sheer hypocrisy to downplay the importance of color in attaining positions of wealth and power.

Triumphalist Christianity has stood for too long and too firmly for the position that the poor are simply underserving.  The scandal of hungry, sick and poorly housed children, white and nonwhite, in America, remains our family secret.  We acknowledge this injustice now no more than our Southern ancestors acknowledged the injustice they did to the slaves or the victims of Jim Crow a century and more ago.  Our churches make the salvation of souls a matter of tearful concern, but leave the health of other people’s children to the responsibility of their own parents, no matter what their conditions of life.

p. 139

"Why should we save your dirty white skins?”  The words hit me like a bucket of cold water.  They came from a young, handsome black minister.  His voice was quiet and flat in contrast to his words.  He might have been answering a question about where he went to college.  I had made what I thought was a very perceptive remark, something like “It seems to me that American colored people have a great opportunity to tell new African nations how good democracy has been for you.”  I expected that he would be pleased that I was aware that the Europeans in the early 1950’s had loosened their ties on their African colonies.  His words blew a gaping hole in the screen of plantation mentality that had hidden the black world from me.  The minister’s searing answer has stayed with me as I passed through many stages of growth in my understanding of its meaning.

The attitude behind his unexpected comment has puzzled me.  Did he only mean to chide me for presuming that American democracy had been an unmixed blessing for his people?  Or, did he have an instant premonition that sometime in an unpredictable future of the world’s affairs it would be dangerous to be a white citizen of one of the former colonial powers that have exploited and brutalized dark-skinned people all over the world?  Either of these possible interpretations of his reply is very disturbing.

Part of my shock at my black colleague’s remark was his startling antagonism toward what I am, a white person!  I was used to the language that says “white” means the good, the right, the best.  Any other use of “white” sounded foreign, or worse, like a curse that no decent person would ever utter.  My whole outlook on life was based on the assumption that there are the “real people,” meaning us who are “white,” and there are the “colored people,” who inhabit a different reality from us.  The whole cuture of my native Southland rested on that use of language.  Although at that moment I was sitting in an institution that was far from that southern culture, it was still deeply embedded in my subconscious.  My shock must have been evident from my silence.  I have no memory of any response to him.  Yet I have never forgotten what he said.

p. 165

Envy is defined in the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary as "painful or resentful awareness of an advantage enjoyed by another joined with a desire to possess the same advantage." Envy has become a driving force in American life along with the proliferation of our materialism and commercialism. The ability of American business to produce great quantities of things of all sorts has made us the envy of most of the rest of the world. We now quantify our "standard of living" by use of consumer terms, referring not so much to what we have as to what we all want and will spend time and resources to get. It is an open question whether our mass production of things or our advertising and merchandising of those things is more impressive. Both of these have become major influences within our culture. The terrible consequence of our pervasive culture of consumerism, aside from its distracting us from better pursuits, is the limited ability of some to consume due to hereditary economic disadvantage. One-fourth of our children live in poverty. This does not mean that they lack access to television commercials, but that their world is defined by the images of and the desire of things they only see and cannot have.

The role of envy magnifies when great and conspicuous differences exist between the statuses of members of families, communities, or nations. In many ways, our modern American society excels in the vicious production of pathological envy….

p. 166

This great economic difference fuels the social unrest that currently plagues us and most of the world's people. Whatever degree of economic prosperity or economic decline any society may enjoy or suffer, we now see more perceptible difference than ever before in human history. The expansion of communication media, and their nearly universal saturation of the world, has made more people aware of the great differences between themselves and the "others"….

So much real deprivation exists in the world, through civil wars and ethnic strife, and so much hunger and dislocation caused by population pressures and man-made disasters, that it is almost blasphemous to talk about envy of mere possession of things. But the stark reality is that the perception of deprivation can be as psychologically destrutive as actual privations. Not all of that destructiveness is obvious. Inner wounds are slow to heal when the conspicuous consumption for which we are famous as a nation exaggerates the perception of deprivation.

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