One night William Stringfellow dreamed that he was stabbed with a knife on 125th Street in Harlem, at the hands of a black man who had asked him for a light. Stringfellow then lived in Harlem not far from there. He was a white man who graduated from Harvard Law School and, in 1956, promptly put his training to use in the streets. He was doing his part. Yet it was clear to him in the dream, he later wrote, that “the murder was retribution.” Further: “No white man is innocent.”
The re-emergence during the past year of outrage over racial injustice has prompted many white people to wonder what they might do. What policies might one propose and advocate to combat economic inequality along the lines of skin color? What condolence might one offer to the victims of mass incarceration?
A leader in the Black Lives Matter protests, Alicia Garza, has said, “We need you defecting from white supremacy and changing the narrative of white supremacy by breaking white silence.” But well-meaning speaking-out can have its hazards, too. Another activist’s exasperated blog post, titled “Dear White Protestors,” repeats as a refrain, “This is NOT about you.”
Much of Stringfellow’s output as a lay theologian takes up the challenge of what can usefully be said by white allies about racism in the United States of America. (He died 30 years ago this month; a collection of his writings, Essential Writings, is now available from Orbis Press.) Stringfellow wrote from the echoes of Harlem, the North’s subtler but no less cruel counterpart to the Jim Crow South. Harlem taught him a theology of the demonic principalities—institutions, ideologies, idolatries—that lure us into the dominion of death. Racism, as a principality, is not an aberration of a few cross-burning racists but a condition that manifests itself most pervasively among those who pretend to be innocent of it. Again, “No white man is innocent.”
“If you want to do something,” Stringfellow told an audience of concerned members of the clergy in 1963, “the most practical thing I can tell you is: weep.”
This was both a reprimand and a policy proposal. The challenge before white people was not more ingenuity or eloquence but, as he wrote in My People Is the Enemy, “they must surrender their prerogative of decision.” It is for the people who know injustice best, by having suffered it, to choose the path of liberation and lead the way. It is for white people to follow and to relinquish the privileges of supremacy. “The preface to reconciliation,” he continued, is when white people begin “risking their lives and the future of this society in the hands of the Negroes.”
Though I have no statistics on the matter, the bylines and photographs that tend to appear in this magazine suggest that its readership is far more white than the actual makeup of the Catholic population in the country today. I wonder if to such an audience Stringfellow’s words ring as scandalously today as they did in the early 1960s. They ring at least as true.
Partly in anticipation of the coming papal encyclical on the environment, I have been meeting with a group that seeks to support those on the front lines of the climate crisis, who are disproportionately people of color. We shared a supper recently with a group of organizers in the Black Lives Matter movement. This society heaps on our communities the waste it can’t put anywhere else, they reminded us. Yet in the white-dominated environmental movement, their voices remain on the margins.
White people have managed not only to reap the profits from climate change, and to predominate among its deniers, but also to weaken efforts to stop it by making others feel unwelcome. As the journalist and activist Naomi Klein has written, “White supremacy is the whispered subtext of our entire response to the climate crisis, and it badly needs to be dragged into the light.”
William Stringfellow had a tragic tenor to his white ally-ship, but he also sought to be a Christian in it. (He was an Episcopalian, to be precise.) He affirmed the gospel of life as much as he railed against the kingdom of death. And he believed them to be integrally related.
“My hope,” he wrote, “begins in the truth that America is Babylon.” Only when we recognize our fallenness is there the possibility of redemption. “The good news is relative to the veracity of the bad news.”
It's surprising to me to see the eagerness found in this and other comments here to see sin as a purely individual phenomenon, as something only present in someone else. I think one of the most important things Stringfellow recognized about sin is the way it works collectively, the way it infects us all, and how we share its stain. This is essential for understanding a society in which racism is in many respects illegal, and most people personally object to it, yet racist outcomes are everywhere—such as the disproportionate effects of evils like predatory loans and mass incarceration in black communities. In many cases, the people participating in these practices don't want to be racist, yet we have to untangle the ways in which we nevertheless are.
In light of the gospel, also, recognizing shared sinfulness is not the end, but the beginning. Through it, we can begin to accept the divine grace of love, and its profound demands for our lives and our societies. The innocent have no need for this.
It's absolutely true that "all men are sinners," and Stringfellow's perception of "white men" is a subset of that. But it's not an irrelevant point of emphasis. I think this poster explains the matter poignantly.
I don't think it's as simple as that. For example, white people and black people in the United States use drugs at approximately the same rate, but black people are three times more likely to face arrest for it (see p. 272 of this Human Rights Watch-authored article). In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, the disparity is so painfully evident; I watch as teenagers of color here are regularly bothered by police for activities that, in the white suburban neighborhood where I grew up, were quietly (but quite openly) tolerated. When one is treated like a criminal from a young age, one begins to think of oneself that way. It creates a cycle.
Simply blaming individual police officers is not the answer either, though for many it is a tempting recourse. I'm not sure what the answer is—and I think Stringfellow is calling for a kind of humility here. But I know the answer is not to blame the poorest, most over-incarcerated communities among us and move on with our lives. Reconciliation, I suspect, must begin with an honest accounting of systemic racism that still exists around us, and a commitment to hearing out the voices who are saying that they are being made into victims—or, we could say, into widows, orphans, and lepers.
It seems to me that the prevalent principalies of "liberal" and "conservative" politics are clouding the discussion here. The way he's quoted above, Stringfellow actually seems to be criticising can-do, government-driven "liberal" policies around poverty. In his lifetime he was a strenuous critic of Johnson's Great Society proposals. And of course histories like Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time reveal theways in which many of these policies were passed only through compromises that excluded black Americans from their benefits—the National Labor Relations Act (which excluded black-dominated professions like farming and housekeeping), for instance, and the G.I. Bill (which structural conditions often prevented blacks from benefitting from). This discussion strikes me as yet another case in which the labels "liberal" and "conservative" are hurting more than they help.
I'm not sure if this comment was intended as a criticism, but in many respects it actually says exactly what Stringfellow said; he was a strenuous opponent of Great Society proposals, for instance. What he rejected, however, is the claim of many white people that systemic, demonic racism no longer exists, or that it has nothing to do with them.
Death and taxes are certain enough, but denialist comments at America are more so. The IPCC, like all other relevant scientific bodies, has made very clear statements about the urgency of the climate crisis and its anthropogenic cause. For instance, summary statements from the body's 2014 synthesis for policymakers:
Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen.
Raising genuine questions and challenges is always welcome, but this kind of comment is not that. I call it "denialist," because the author is striving to deny the reality of climate change despite all the evidence to the contrary. Please stop the obfuscation so we can have a constructive conversation grounded in the honesty our faith demands.
Thanks for this, Beth. I think you're right in that Stringfellow often wrote with a sense of shock value; perhaps Berry, writing from the South, had reason to take a gentler approach.
Still, I think it's important to note that this shared sense of sin Stringfellow does not depend upon individuals having "inflicted" racism on each other. He saw it more as a systemic, demonic force. For many white people, I suspect white supremacy is more likely experienced through benefits that they never asked for and rarely notice. As Christ said from the cross, "They know not what they do."
There's definitely a growing swell of interest in Stringfellow today. Bill Wylie-Kellerman, who edited the Orbis volume I mentioned, has done much to ensure this. Myles Werntz tells me that his new book engages with Stringfellow on war. Leading American religious thinkers like Stanley Hauerwas, Jim Wallis, and Walter Wink were profoundly impacted by Stringfellow through writing and friendship. Daniel Berrigan, of course, was a close friend of his and wrote about Stringfellow beautifully. Anthony Dancer's recent study of Stringfellow (which I reviewed for Commonweal) includes a foreword by Rowan Williams citing Stringfellow's influence on him. I also know a network of young scholars and pastors who are profoundly affected by Stringfellow's legacy and whose works, in many cases, are still to come.
Thank you for these responses. I certainly share the dream of a world in which skin color does not determine a person's chances in life, but I also think, with the preferential option for the poor in mind, it is for those who are historically oppressed to say when this has been acheived. The Black Lives Matter movement, together with related outcries about the ongoing and disproportionate impact of mass incarceration and economic crisis on black communities, make clear that skin color does still matter in this country, and whiteness is still a privilege. That sin is still with us. In my experience it is by and large those who benefit from that privilege who are most eager to claim that it doesn't exist.
I think you're very mistaken that concern about climate change is merely a concern of elite academics. Academics are generally more visible than many other professions in debates about scientific and policy matters, so I can see how you could get this impression. But countries around the world that are facing the effects of climate change first hand have been leading this discussion, even if many of those of us in wealthy countries haven't been listening. At United Nations discussion on the subject, perhaps no one has been as outspoken as Philippine climate negotiator (and Catholic) Yeb Sano. And several years ago, the government of the Maldives held a cabinet session underwater to dramatize the impact of climate change on their island. When 350.org (then still a very small group of recent college graduates—I knew them at the time) called for a global day of action on climate change in 2009, there were more than 4,000 events in 170 countries.
For correlations along lines of race, I commend to you the Public Religion Research Institute's recent study, which demonstrates how people of color in the United States are much more aware of and concerned about climate change than their white counterparts. Among Catholics, for instance, 73 percent of Latino/as are "very" or "somewhat" concerned, compared to 41 percent of white Catholics. Just because elite, often white voices are often the ones we choose to listen to on these matters doesn't mean that others don't have something to say.
Your claims about the emissions are also misleading. If we consider the numbers on a per-capita basis—the only terms that make sense if we're concerned about human welfare—the United States' emissions are much, much higher than India or China (17.6 tonnes annually, compared to 1.7 and 6.2, according to the World Bank). China leads the world in investment in green energy, and the consumers in China, India, and Brazil are the world's greenest. The U.S., as the country with the most resources to invest and the most influence in the world, should be leading the way on this matter. Instead, we are demanding that our far poorer competitors do so while also trying to scrape by in the game of global capitalism. This is a dangerous position for us to take, morally.