Smart People Saying Smart Things: Post Trayvon Martin is America's God a White Racist? And If So, How Would You Even Know?

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We talk about so many things here on We Are Respectable Negroes. The diversity and range of what we discuss is, for me, one of the joys of the site. 

For example, I have been following the discussion about faith in the aftermath of George Zimmerman's acquittal for murdering Trayvon Martin with no small amount of interest. 

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Sunday is the most racially segregated day of the week. Is there anything that can be done to change that fact?

There are three elements in how religion intersects with the colorline that are of particular importance.

Faith involves a belief in such things that cannot be proven by ordinary means.

Theodicy involves trying to reconcile an all loving, good, and omniscient God with the problem of evil. Where was God during the Holocaust? Where was God on the slave ship and at the plantation? Where is God when children are held captive as sex slaves? Would a "good" God allows such wickedness to occur?

Racism is a political, philosophical, religious, economic, and scientific system of thought and belief that privileges one group of people, marked by their "color" and "phenotype" as naturally and preordained to be "less than" relative to another group of people and types of bodies, marked in a similarly arbitrary way--but normalized by Power--as being naturally dominant and empowered.

Racism is a true lie and fiction made real. Racism is a response to existing social and political questions. Racism is evolving and changing; it is one of humankind's greatest inventions.

When these three variables are put together societies can be made. When they are challenged and undone whole societies are forced to rethink their assumptions and organizational logic, and regimes of racial (and other types of power) can potentially be unmade.

Trayvon Martin is a test case for how those essential concepts can be either reinscribed or undone.

I am not religiously minded; I am however fascinated by how religiously minded people work through what George Zimmerman's murder of Trayon Martin reveals about white racism, white supremacy, the colorline, and faith in post civil rights Age of Obama America.

Writing over at Religious Dispatches, Anthea Butler and Willie Hennings are first-tier thinkers.

How they work through this puzzle is an object lesson in critical thinking within one's own theoretical, epistemological, historical, and philosophical priors and training.

Anthea Butler deftly and provocatively argued that:

God ain’t good all of the time. In fact, sometimes, God is not for us. As a black woman in a nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a white man, and am not capable of taking care of my reproductive rights, or my voting rights, I know that this American god ain’t my god. As a matter of fact, I think he’s a white racist god with a problem. More importantly, he is carrying a gun and stalking young black men. 

When George Zimmerman told Sean Hannity that it was God’s will that he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, he was diving right into what most good conservative Christians in America think right now. Whatever makes them protected, safe, and secure, is worth it at the expense of the black and brown people they fear. 

Their god is the god that wants to erase race, make everyone act “properly” and respect, as the president said, “a nation of laws”; laws that they made to crush those they consider inferior.When the laws were never made for people who were considered, constitutionally, to be three-fifths of a person, I have to ask: Is this just? Is it right? Is God the old white male racist looking down from white heaven, ready to bless me if I just believe the white men like Rick Perry who say the Zimmerman case has nothing to do with race? 

You already know the answer: No.

As a complement Willie James Jennings observes how:

Dr. Butler also points out the contradictions of American Christianity embedded in this legacy. At this very moment, the Christianity of America in all its varied and magnificent forms is yet to reckon with the incredible power of whiteness. Whiteness is not biological fact or a bedrock reality of culture. It’s a way of looking at others (especially people of color) and oneself that grew powerful in America as arriving immigrants sought to shed perceived cultural impediments to their full assimilation into a white American identity. 

American Christians must take on the difficult work of understanding how whiteness has been woven like a cancer into their Christianity. It is the power of that whiteness to shape our social worlds—defining good and bad, beautiful and ugly, true and false—that is at heart the reason this wound will not heal. It is the reason why some people deny our grotesque racial history even as it stares them in the face with the case of George Zimmerman.   

Denial is one option in the face of pain, but there is another: Struggle. Enter the struggle against our racial history and against the concept of whiteness that covers American Christianity like the Kudzu that blankets our landscape smothering any species in its path. The senseless death of Trayvon Martin and the senseless menagerie of judicial logics when it comes to justice and fairness for people of color are constant reminders of the struggle of faith. 

What keeps me from giving up even as I see yet more spilled blood and spoiled lives is the simple fact that I am not struggling alone. Indeed my faith comes from a God who, found in human flesh, struggled in the face of suffering, and torture, and death, and who drew my questions and frustrations into the divine life before I would know them as mine. God is known by God’s actions. 

I love wonderful writing by smart people. We need more of such intervention in America's public discourse.

Both essays can be read here. Please read them in their entirety.

For those of you who are churchgoers or otherwise part of a religious community, how did you all talk about the Trayvon Martin tragedy? Was it even discussed? Were you able to situate and locate the Zimmerman trial, and its outcome, within your given faith tradition, and use that saga to make sense of a world in which God and evil exist side by side?