Skin-Deep Savages

I’m tired of writing about racism, but it just keeps coming up! I wish it would just go away. But it won’t, so I keep writing about it. During this Christmas season, we are supposed to be thinking about good news of peace on Earth. But so long as we are still racist savages on the inside, we will never have peace on Earth. In fact, our technological interconnectedness can amplify, rather than dampen, our evil tendencies.

Author Derrick Jensen, in the preface to his book The Culture of Make Believe, describes one of the most disturbing incidents in the history of white/black relations in America. (It is very similar to many incidents in the history of white/Native relations.)

“In 1918, the husband of Mary Turner, a black woman from Valdosta, Georgia, was killed by a mob of white men, not for any offense he had committed, but rather because another black man had killed a white farmer. I do not know precisely how Turner’s husband died. I do not even know his name. I know only that in retaliation for the killing of the white farmer, many white citizens of Valdosta lynched eleven black men—who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong color skin—before they shot and killed the man they were after.

“In the wake of her husband’s murder, Mary, who was eight months pregnant, vowed to avenge those who killed her husband. An Associated Press article later commented on her ‘unwise remarks, as well as her attitude.’ If you dig beneath the delicate language, it is easy to see what was coming. A mob of several hundred white men and women determined they would ‘teach her a lesson,’ or, perhaps more precisely, they would teach a lesson to those others who might be tempted to act as she did. They tied her ankles together and hung her upside down from a tree. Then they doused her clothes with gasoline and burned them off of her. They used a hog-splitting knife to open her belly. Her infant fell to the ground, and cried briefly, until someone crushed the head with his heel. The mob then shot her, not once or twice, but hundreds of times.”

Surely, we think, we would not do something like that today. But underneath our thin skins, we still carry the emotions that, under the right conditions, could ignite into similar or greater levels of violence. Most of us have grown up learning not to think, feel, or act in this manner which is perhaps the worst imaginable offense to God, should God happen to exist. But the people of Valdosta, not quite a hundred years ago, were not very different from us. Human nature has not changed. This kind of behavior could happen again if sparked by the right circumstances.

In case you still think it is impossible, let me report what a colleague told me about a student in her class. He wrote his English composition term paper about how black people are inferior and should return to slavery. Did this person reach this conclusion by getting to know black people and, perhaps regretfully, concluding that they were not just slightly but so extremely inferior that they deserved subhuman status? No. He spewed out beliefs that had been implanted in a religious fashion and that he held with religious zeal. He refused to think for himself. We know this because his paper was plagiarized from a white supremacist website.