I was fortunate enough to meet Bishop Lyght of the WV Conference, UMC, some years ago as I worked as a Community Organizer, and recently found his blog. On one post, written on the 17th of this month, before the Shirley Sherrod fiasco in which we proved that Americans are quick on the draw to make conclusions (it just wasn’t Foxnews, by the way) about race and racism, he makes a rather deep statement. Have discussed Kelsey’s book, he notes,
Kelsey shares several insights that emerge from this definition.
1. “Racism is a form of naturalism.” “Nature has condemned inferior races and blessed the superior race.”
2. “Racism is a plan of political action.” “The reduction of life by the means of deprivation has usually been a substitute for the elimination of races.” This leads to segregation, a political action.
3. “Racism is a philosophy of history.” “Racism teaches that the whole cultural superstructure rests on the genetic substructure.”
Then, to summarize,
For Kelsey, therefore, “racism is a faith.” Racism is a “form of idolatry.”
What is the Meaning of Racism? «.
I have to agree with the overall statement, that Racism is a form of idolatry, in which one group is set, for whatever reason, above another based on nothing more than appearances.
I look at the scene with Shirley Sherrod, noting that she is the wife of a Civil Rights pioneer and very much one herself, and cannot shake the feeling that we have just entered into a very bad path. We have participated in a robbery of her and her husband’s work, in which what they contributed to society will now be summed up with a very bad wikipedia page. The President and his administration bowed to the likes of Glenn Beck and FoxNews without substantiating their facts. Everyone jumped so fast to recognize ‘reverse racism’, reacting with force, when people still argue over whether or not a white person calling a black person the ‘n’ word is racist, if slavery isn’t really blown out of proportion, and if separate but equal isn’t the way to go.
I am not so much mad at Andrew Breitbart and Foxnews as I am at myself really.
