Is anything ever accidental?

"You are a racist."

"No, I am not.  My best friend from high school is black."

For most of a two year period one of my college roommates and I carried an ongoing argument over whether I was a racist.  I defended myself against the charge by claiming that my best friend from high school was black.  I now know that I used one of lamest excuses for not being a racist.  One evening, before that realization, my roommate changed the terms of the debate when he asked me a rather innocent question.  It wasn't until years later that I understood the full implications of the question.  He asked, "would you marry a black woman?"  Without thinking, I said "no."  That night, somewhat unbeknownst to me, I began the process where I came to understand what he meant by calling me a "racist."  I had been programmed to think in racial terms. 

Years later it occurred me that when folks walk away from the "racist" tag they do so because they think it only means hateful things.  If they are not members of a hate group, then how can they be racists.  That is the problem with our discussion of race in the U.S.  We want to understand a complex social construction in simple terms.  For most of us, the process of racialization occurs almost from birth.  When our parents make choices about where they worship, our preschools, or non-school activities.  Interestingly, it can occur before our births when they make choices about where we live, if they can afford that choice.  We are taught to make choices from within racial categories.  In the abstract the categories are all wrong, but in our practical, everyday lives, we hold tight to them.  The choices we make to get from point A to point B in our hometowns suggest how we think and act in racial terms.   In Macon, Georgia, the choice of sending a child to public school versus private school after fifth grade shows the process.  We racialize our music.  My current example is Darius Rucker, but there are other examples.  But the process of racialization is even more subtle than that.  In reaction to a question posted on Facebook about Brad Paisley's "Accidental Racist" song, a young woman said she was proud to be "Black."  Since the young woman claimed her racial identity, she is in effect making a "racist" claim that a racial category helped define her understanding of herself.  No one would suggest she should have done anything else, but this is what makes the Paisley song interesting.  What happens to a white man if he does so?  Given the initial reaction to the song, it is clear that he must be the worse kind of racist: one who doesn't understand his sin.  It might have helped if Paisley had had a little more historical perspective before launching the song.  Paisley, his character in the song, and the young woman in the comment section of a Facebook post claim their identity in racial terms.  It would be nice to live in a world where people are judged by the content of their character, but we have not constructed that world. 

Oddly, the song attempts to understand something that is often lacking in discussions about race relations: an attempt at understanding the "other."  Paisley's character is caught in a judgmental stare.  Rather than trying to "walk in another's skin," the initial move in the song is to defend the character's regional identity.  Here South means "white."  In this simple move, the song's problem becomes clear.  Paisley grabbed a loaded symbol and tried to explain it away in all of his post-release interviews.  The focus has remained there.  Sadly, it also gives the stupid "heritage, not hate" line continued credibility among those believers.  The character in the song, however, moves forward in his thinking, is forced to think about his racism, and his understanding of that racism.  It is in that move that the character asks "Dixieland" to understand why he is asking difficult questions.  But the angry reaction to the song and Paisley's own words miss the attempt to understand another human being's experience because the focus stayed on the coded image.  And the lyrics that push the issue hardest for white southerners are covered by the rap lyrics to let bygones be bygones.  Can't we all just get along, which is always the weakest way to address racial discussions.  The song could have done more, but it did not.  There is nothing accidental about any of this.

Given his discography, Paisley is likely one of the few people who can ask these questions to white southerners listening to country music, even if his critics think they are in a better position to advance racial understanding.  Sorry, folks, but Paisley's audience is never going to hear you because they have been racialized to ignore you.  A better question might be, how can we claim racial identity without letting it define us in simple terms?  I am far more interested in having students who understand their cultural history but who are not limited by that history.  It takes a tough skin to move through that process, including having a good friend point out your racial tendencies.  But to assume that country music artists are the only ones who see the world with racial blinders on might be as bad as the song itself.

April 4

U2's lead man, Bono, thought he had heard somewhere that  the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr. occurred in the morning.  In the group's song Pride(In the Name of Love) he wrote, "Early morning April 4/ shot rings out in the Memphis sky."  The group gathered at the Lorraine Motel the evening of April 4 were getting ready for dinner, or supper as most folks called it then.  Bono has had to either announce the lyrics are wrong or change them in performances, but the next set of lyrics tells the true story: "Free at last they asked for your life/ they could not take your pride."  In many ways, I am shaped more by that song and its reflection on King, Gandhi, and Jesus (the fourth taken in the name of love has escaped me) than King's actual life or his death.

Tucked between the death of two grandfathers, the first dying in early February and the second dying in mid-May, King's death apparently barely registered on my family's life.  My father says that he remembers the news blurb but does not recall the family saying anything about the news of King's death.  My parents were likely adjusting to life with a ten month old and dealing with the loss of a parent.  Funny how the grand stories of history pale in comparison of daily life of average people.

But King's life and death loom larger on me than either of my grandfathers, both good men but lost to me in time and distance.  The young minister from Atlanta has complicated my thinking about heroes ever since U2's song brought me to him and energized my sense of justice as something beyond lists of right and wrong.  I often have to get students to think about the man beyond the "Dream."  The man who failed in Albany, Georgia, and Chicago, Illinois, was willing to let his mind expand to include the war in southeast Asia under the umbrella of civil rights, often in the face of criticism from his fellow civil rights activists brethren.  In seminary, I was drawn to his thinking by my own sense of racial injustices I had experienced through the lives of two friends.  But at the same moment Boston University's investigation into his dissertation revealed significant cases of plagiarism, and his marital infidelities were no longer allowed to stay in whispered conversations.  The saint was human.  By the time I reached a doctoral program, I must confess I was tired of Dr. King.  Call it hero fatigue.

Before I let him go, however, I wrote one more essay on the change in his thinking that occurred around the time of the "Dream" speech.  Earlier that summer he had given a speech where he linked the war in southeast Asia to the fight for equal rights in the U.S.  His sense of justice included criticizing his nation for using its political and military influence in a place that required neither.  He was willing to wage a prophetic campaign against the nation's might.  When I began teaching at Mercer, we required students to read "Letter from Birmingham" and "Dream."  While teaching the second text, I realized for the first time how much the opening of that speech is a threat, a prophet's call.  I still think we misread the "dream" section because we want to feel better about ourselves, but the speech contains the power of the change that was occurring in King's thinking.  His death in Memphis was the culmination of that shift in thinking.  While racial issues played a role in the Memphis conflict, particularly since the strike occurred as a result of two black workers' deaths, he was there because the sanitation workers were asking for better wages and working conditions.  These were the very things his Poor People's Campaign highlighted.  He saw the movement beyond the right to vote to a place where the kingdom of God bends toward the least of these.  Forty-five years ago, I was learning to stand up and walk around in a world slouching toward Bethlehem.  I have spent the better part of my forty-five years trying to figure out how we can live in that vision, failing as often as he did in ways far different than he.  But his greatest gift is his ability to see the kingdom through his fallenness; hope remains.