White Supremacy is based on the big LIE that stands at the heart of America and American history:  White people matter more than any other people and white, straight men are the most important.   

 It was not always so.  From the beginning of humanity, people have thought their own clan or tribe was better than others.  And at least since the ancient Greeks, people have recognized different races, although not often based on skin color.  The word slave itself comes from Slav, the people of Russia down through the Balkans who supplied most of the slaves captaured by the Greeks and Romans.

            These two ideas were fused in the seventeenth century with the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  It was a rationalization to quiet the consciences of those involved in both transporting and selling black human beings and those who bought them.  

            We’ve been dealing with the big LIE since Europeans landed on our shores.  It quickly led to distinguishing between white indentured servants and black bondsmen and then to lifetime slavery for blacks and their children.  It was enshrined in our constitution – a black adult was only 60% of a white person, and militias were recognized, at least in part, to prevent slave uprisings.  The civil war put an end to legal slavery, but Jim Crow brought it back in other forms.  

The big LIE is about much more than just race.  It’s largely about power – who is the assumed standard against whom everyone else is measured, who gets hired and considered for top positions in management, who’s voice is heard and given credence in meetings, who gets the benefit of the doubt from police and retail personnel, who sets the rules.

            The current split between liberals and conservatives is not just about who matters most, but that is a large part of it.  I think that’s particularly true for Trump supporters.  They see their situation as a zero-sum game.  If Blacks and other people of color or GLBTQ’s or even women are treated fairly and given equal opportunities, then it must mean that their status is diminished.  It is so psychologically important to them to feel superior that they will sacrifice their economic and physical well-being for it.  

Nixon made good on Johnson’s prediction that signing the civil rights laws would cost the Democrats the South for a generation (now going on three).  The years between Reagan’s governorship, and the 1980 election allowed most Americans to forget Reagan’s negative reaction to the black freedom movement. That forgetfulness allowed Reagan to appear as a genteel actor who declared “morning in America.” And yet for the majority of black people, he was the face of a choice made by white America to turn its back on the movement of the 1960’s.  Reagan embodied the LIE.

            Black America knew exactly what Reagan and the Republicans were doing, and so did white America.  Baldwin said: “Reagan represented the justification of white America’s history, their sense of innocence.”  To Baldwin, it showed the depth of our own madness. Reagan’s appearance on the national stage signaled the door slamming shut on the window of possibility opened by the civil rights movement twenty-five years earlier.  

            The second stop on Reagan’s opening campaign trip was the Neshoba County Fair, only a few miles from where Goodwin, Schwerner, and Chaney were buried.  In his speech, he promised he would support “states’ rights”; i.e., let the states ignore the Civil Rights laws.  What happened in Neshoba County was not a political misstep, but a tactical decision by Reagan and his operatives to exploit racism for political purposes.  It reveals how that decision, along with a host of other choices, gave modern conservatism its dark, racist undertones.  This is the soil in which Trumpism grows.

            As Reagan had in his 1980 campaign, Trump represented a full-throated reassertion of a particular vision of the country as decidedly white and forever committed to the principles of white supremacy.  Trump’s supporters considered any different political vision a heresy.   The 2016 election was a referendum on the direction of the country and on who we took ourselves to be.  It was an election about the substance of the American Idea as the possession of white people.  

Trump can’t be cordoned off into a corner with evil, racist demagogues.  Moderates make him wholly bad in order to protect our vision of Americans as basically good and that racism is an aberration.  But he is in fact a clear reflection of who half of the population actually is.  Considering Trump the exception shifts our attention from what is happening right in front of us and protects our self-understanding from what he actually represents. Trump represents a reassertion of the belief that America is, and will always be, a white nation.  To willfully blind ourselves to this is to continue the LIE.  

There was discussion in the congregational meeting last week about including the term “white privilege” in the new covenant.  Alice and I first became actively involved in anti-racism work in the fall of 1970 with a Presbyterian congregation in Cleveland.  It’s chosen task was to produce programs on structural racism to present to white suburban churches, so we were introduced to the idea of white privilege half a century ago.  Let me offer some examples.  Virtually every Black adult in this country who has been stopped for a traffic violation has wondered, “Is this the day I die?”  If your thought was, “Can I talk my way out of a ticket,” then you are privileged.  If when you were around twelve, your parents didn’t sit you down and talk to you about how to act when encountering the police, so you don’t get killed or beaten, then you are privileged.  If you, like I, think I’ve worked for years as an ally but now I’m old and tired.  I just want to spend my last years in peace. Then you are privileged because our friends of color don’t have that luxury.  

            So, if the big LIE is so embedded in our culture, what can we do about it?  The idea that slavery is a moral question goes back centuries.  The Abolitionists based their argument on the immorality of holding fellow human beings in bondage.  I just finished Meacham’s biography of Lincoln.  Lincoln consistently framed the issue of slavery as a moral question.  King, Baldwin, and Glaude believed that we must try again to get America to view white supremacy as a moral question as the only way to move beyond the big LIE.   

Morality is used so commonly everyone thinks they know what it means, but it can be slippery.  I understand morality to be about how we treat each other.  For me, good moral actions are those that help everyone, or at least most people to thrive, to be able to live up to their potential.  Its simplest formulation is the golden rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  

            Morality also comes into play in actions not directly involving other people.  For example, actions that harm the environment are immoral because a degraded environment makes it harder for people to thrive.  

            King became the senior pastor of Dexter Ave. Baptist Church in Montgomery in 1954, the year before the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott.  He was selected to be the leader of the boycott because the two more established and well-known black ministers in town each had their followers, and it was thought that could be divisive.  He was 39 when he was shot down in Memphis in 1968.  In those 13 years of active civil rights leadership, he changed America.  

            What is our role in getting more people to recognize that white supremacy is a moral question?  How do we muster the courage to keep fighting in the face of abject moral failure?  To not abdicate our responsibility to fight for our children and for democracy itself?  Let’s look at what King and Baldwin had to say.  

            King’s message was to call upon the moral core of white Americans to recognize the justice of the civil rights movement.  He was an admirer of Gandhi.  He thought that non-volent protest would work here as it had in India in reaching the conscience of the British people about the unfairness and suffering that colonialism caused the Indian people.    

It worked here for a while.  The murder and mutilation of Emit Till the year before and the hatred directed at the students in Little Rock had confronted Americans with the ugly truth of the results of the LIE.  Seeing the real-life effects of the big LIE on real bodies shocked and horrified most people.  The continued violent responses to the protests, the killing of the four little girls in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Bull Conners’ use of the firehoses and dogs on women and children, and the police attack on the marchers on the Edmund Pettis Bridge made possible the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

            The legislation was ground-breaking and would have long term consequences.  But in the short-run, moral appeals did little to transform the circumstances of black people’s everyday lives, since most white Americans did not seem to view the issue of race in moral terms.  In fact, they seemed to give less than a damn about the sinfulness of racism.  This lack of progress was what drove Malcom X to call for active resistance and led to the rise of the Black Panthers.  

After the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, King had begun to realize the deep-seated poverty that resulted from decades of segregation and exclusion had to be addressed directly.  It, too, was a result of the failure to address the big LIE as a moral failure.  He turned his attention to the economy and the vast disparities in wealth in the country and to the disproportionate burden the Viet Nam War placed on Black people.  He started organizing the Poor People’s March on Washington to bring the problem directly to the seat of power.  Remember he was in Memphis to give a speech in support of the Garbage Workers strike on April 14, 1968.  I’m not suggesting there was a conspiracy, but it’s a big coincidence that he was killed the next day.  

            The legislation was ground-breaking and would have long term consequences.  But in the short-run, moral appeals did little to transform the circumstances of black people’s everyday lives, since most white Americans did not seem to view the issue of race in moral terms.  In fact, they seemed to give less than a damn about the sinfulness of racism.  This lack of progress was what drove Malcom X to call for active resistance and led to the rise of the Black Panthers.  

After the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, King had begun to realize the deep-seated poverty that resulted from decades of segregation and exclusion had to be addressed directly.  It, too, was a result of the failure to address the big LIE as a moral failure.  He turned his attention to the economy and the vast disparities in wealth in the country and to the disproportionate burden the Viet Nam War placed on Black people.  He started organizing the Poor People’s March on Washington to bring the problem directly to the seat of power.  Remember he was in Memphis to give a speech in support of the Garbage Workers strike on April 14, 1968.  I’m not suggesting there was a conspiracy, but it’s a big coincidence that he was killed the next day.  

            King and Baldwin spent their careers trying to show us that America’s race problem is, at its root, a fundamentally moral question with implications for who we take ourselves to be.  Sure, policy mattered.  Power mattered.  But in the end what kind of human beings we aspired to be mattered more.    

            Baldwin never rejected the idea that we are much more than the categories in which people try to pigeon-hole us.  We, too, must never forget as he wrote in 1963, “Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.” 

Glaude writes, “Hope is invented every day.  And, God be my witness, we desperately need hope today.  If we are not able to summon it, we may find ourselves where Jimmy found himself – at the end of the after times, with the vicious cycle about to begin once more.”  In the end, Baldwin wanted us to see that whiteness as an identity was a moral choice, an attitude toward the world based on our dark unconscious.  

            In a speech in Anaheim the month before he was assassinated, King addressed this issue.  He didn’t mince words.  “America is a decidedly racist country.  The problem can only be solved when there is a kind of coalition of conscience.  Now I am not sure if we have that many consciences left.  Too many have gone to sleep.  But there are some left.  And we gotta be that creative minority, ready to do battle for the sacred issues of life.  Ready to do battle for the principles of justice, goodwill, and brotherhood.”  

             I suggest that is still the question before our country, “Do we still have enough people with consciences to confront and eradicate the idea that white people are worth more than other people?“  If we fail to rid ourselves, once and for all, of this pernicious belief we’re doomed to repeat the cycles of our ugly history again and again.  As Samuel Beckett wrote, “Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”  To do that we must go back to where we started, or as far back as we can – examine all of it, travel our road again and tell the truth about it.  Know whence we came.  

            We must find and rest in a community of love. That community doesn’t have to take any particular shape or form; it simply must be genuine.  For me, this beloved community is where I find encouragement and, when I need it, rest. In our time, with so much hatred and venom in our politics and our culture, we must actively cultivate communities of love that allow us to imagine different ways of being together.  We also must engage in a critical inventory of who we take ourselves to be and to make a decision to choose life.  

King, paraphrasing Theodore Parker, said, “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  I think he was right, but we know from physics that things move in a straight line unless some force acts on it.  Men and women committed to justice and equity through the centuries have been the force that altered the moral arc toward justice.  Now it’s our turn.  We are the ones who are now responsible for making sure that the arc continues to bend toward justice. 

Andy C. Reese