Happy Juneteenth, y’all!
I am embarrassed to note that I was in my 30s before I had even heard of this holiday, when a Black coworker mentioned it and explained what it celebrates: freedom from slavery. Juneteenth commemorates a group of freed slaves in Texas who didn’t even find out about the Emancipation Proclamation until a full YEAR after the Civil War in America had ended, nearly three years past Lincoln’s signing of the Proclamation.
Yeah, that tracks.
Worse, upon reflection, I realized that this Black colleague was my first ever Black coworker. I was 15 years into my working career by the point we had that conversation.
The older I get and the more I learn about the world, the more appalled I am at the isolation and oppression of Whiteness, a great force field residing over my cultural experiences, shielding me from alternate viewpoints unless I seek them out.
I was raised on top of a mountain in very-White Appalachia. The mountain folk definitely considered us outsiders and regarded my family with intense suspicion. The family names all around us were very English, the kind of “English” who ran for the hills to find peace away from law enforcement. (My mom could point out which neighbors had committed insurance fraud by burning down a “family home.”)
I went to a Christian school founded in 1974 by a fundamentalist church, so I am sure it was a segregation academy, a Christian school founded in response to the federal desegregation of public schools to allow “White flight” from the “godless” public school system. (“Taking prayer out of schools” turned out to be handy cover, but really – lots of racism.) The Wikipedia article I linked as well as this piece by Slate center the definition of these racist schools in the South, but I can absolutely affirm based on lived experience that lots of little Northeastern and Midwest independent churches popped up Christian schools under the guise of “giving children a Bible-based education.” There was hardly a non-White person in my K-12 educational experience; we had a few doctors’ and professors’ kids whose families were immigrants from the Middle East or India, but I had zero Black friends growing up.
Having been raised in Christian Fundamentalism, when it came time for college I went to the flagship school of Fundamentalism, Bob Jones University, in South Carolina. BJU is famous for many bad reasons, and delving into their story at any depth makes it appear even worse (the Slate article above dips in a toe). Just this spring, the popular president of the institution resigned because the Board refused to allow them to handle Title IX investigations properly. This is years after the GRACE Report about sexual abuse of BJU students who were ignored, punished, or targeted by University personnel in the name of “biblical counseling.” All of this is on top of the baked-in racism of the institution which is why I’m writing this post in the first place (as writing helps me process ideas).
I wish the adults around kid-me had not been sucked into the lie that remains one of the most popular right-wing talking points: individual “freedom” is more important than virtue, and that the involvement of the federal government in the work of equality and justice is somehow an affront and an overstep of individual rights.
The people around me celebrated the fact that Bob Jones lost its IRS tax exemption in the early 1970s because of its refusal to admit any Black students. This was a point of pride within the ideology, that rejecting federal law was righteous because such defiance allows Christians to follow a higher law (one that apparently hates Black people, loves Whiteness, and prioritizes outward cultural forms of “morality” such as “prayer in schools” and banning women from wearing pants over actual good deeds….but I’ll leave that rant in the box).
I would like to think that many of the adults around me, who were good to me in genuine ways, were deceived or misinformed or lied to. But that’s a flimsy excuse, and I’ve stopped making it for myself and others. I could have known better years before I actually did. (It’s fair to note that you don’t know what you don’t know until you’re confronted with it. My confrontations didn’t even begin until I landed at Covenant College to do a master’s in education, and things only accelerated once I began reading works eschewed by American evangelicals, such as Paolo Freire or Karl Barth.)
I hear nothing new in the 2023 GOP playbook; the culture wars are going strong. They’re just doing an extra-good job right now of soaking people’s brains in toxic hatred (thanks, Fox News!) and sucking in people who ought to know better but are afraid of some kind of cultural erasure.
Well, to digress for just a moment, that fear of cultural erasure by White folks is extremely relevant to why Juneteenth wasn’t even on my radar until I was in my 30s. It’s the driving force behind why some asshole Texan called into C-SPAN on Juneteenth to complain that Black people hadn’t thanked Whites for ending slavery. It’s why yelling “Critical Race Theory” in a room of conservatives leads to panic, and how people manipulate this White Panic to drive mindless voting patterns which do nothing for the average person but provide plenty of tax breaks for the rich and corporations. Oldest trick in the books, still profoundly effective. White power.
Though BJU finally relented in the 1980s to admit non-White, non-international people of color (that tax thing hit them in the wallet, which is about the only hit they comprehend), the school banned “interracial dating” until the year 2000. I went to college with friends who had to present themselves to the Dean of Students for him to assess whether they were “too dark” to date white people. I shit you not. (You can find some posts on Reddit with first-hand accounts, if you’re morbidly curious.)
Biracial students at Bob Jones had to declare which race they would date, White or Black or Asian. I have no idea how they handled folks from India; I actually can’t think of anyone I knew at college who was Indian. I do know that my Indian best friend from high school (whose family was connected to the even more ludicrous Hyles-Anderson flavor of fundamentalism — seriously, that church and college were insane in their level of abuse) and I had conversations about her being scientifically Caucasian, so she should be free to date White people.
I was at BJU in 2000 when then-president Bob Jones III announced on live TV, in an interview with Larry King, that he was dropping the ban on interracial dating Why the change? The 2000 Presidential Republican primary had tarnished BJU’s reputation. Several high-profile candidates had refused to come speak to the student body over the school’s racist policies; George W Bush did speak to us at convocation, then criticized the school in the following days once its racism came to light. Press coverage was pretty intense. BJU had been a power-stop on the Southern campaign trail for years, a sign of the unholy alliance between right-wing Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism with the Republican party. (I’m going to point you back to the Slate article I posted above; it touches on this relationship briefly.) Jones dropped the ban (I guess he held all power, as president?) and the news scrutiny more or less went away, but some of the influence of Bob Jones University in the national sphere was lost forever.
(I don’t have the time or background to delve, but I wonder if this is when Liberty (under Falwell) began to pick up much more influence with the GOP. BJU and Liberty are longtime rivals; Liberty maintains the shitty theology but they learned way faster that the easiest path to power is to accommodate literally any compromise that furthers your goal. Appears to have worked, as Liberty has one of the largest online education programs in America, pulling in like ¾ of a billion dollars of federal aid money each year.)
I look back over my early life experiences and wonder “what the hell.” It’s like stepping into the sunshine after being in a dark cave and needing time to be able to see clearly.
My journey into greater light continues to this day, but I like to take Juneteenth to honor those who helped me see.
First, I appreciate and value my Black colleagues who have done more work than they should have needed to do to help me understand even the most basic things about how Black folks experience racism every day (every hour?). I feel like I’ve gotten a much better handle on what racism actually looks like in practice thanks to them being patient and being willing to explain, but now I try to pick up that load with other White folks so they don’t have to.
This being Pride month, I also want to salute the many LGBTQ+ people in my life who have done similar work to help me understand complex issues including allyship, trans rights, and the lived experience of non-cis or queer or non-hetero people. I wrote a similar post in 2021 about how much I had to unlearn before I could step out of the shadow of bigotry and homophobia couched in religious language.
I also commend professors at Covenant and UGA (through Coart’s PhD work) who pointed us to crucial thinkers who challenged the way we had been taught to see the world. I have lived much of my life in academia or education, so learning-by-reading works for me.
I had a ton to learn about the impact of colonialism on American thought in general and Christianity in particular. To be clear, Covenant started that journey for us, but being the flagship PCA school, they couldn’t go very far. It was an important start, however, and I will always be thankful to them for introducing us to the Dutch Reformed stream of thinking, undoing a lot of the damage from our years in Baptist Fundamentalism. (I’m not saying Reformed thinking is free of harm; it is full of its own pitfalls and blind spots. But if you forced me to pick a theological side, I’m going to lean Reformed.)
It breaks my heart that Covenant has closed their M.Ed. program, likely driven out of business by the cheap online master’s degrees for teachers. My M.Ed. is the best graduate experience I’ve ever had. It was literally life-changing, and any good that I was able to do for my students at NCS likely stems from the influence of those professors and that program. I am devastated to see it end.
It wasn’t until Coart was taking courses in Critical Theory at UGA that we finally encountered writers who profoundly changed how we saw the world: Freire as the foundation of critical pedagogy and education for freedom of the individual; Fanon to understand how horrific colonialism is or how much imperialism influences American thought and policy; the writings of the Frankfurt School establishing Critical Theory as a way to critique power structures often hidden or ignored. (I wrote a tool to help novice researchers implement Critical Theory questions into their work.)
Since then, I can add Karl Barth (at a seminary) for upending how I understand inspiration, and the experience of leaving evangelicalism as seminal events in my own thinking. I see so much more clearly now than I did even 10 years ago.
My 30s were a crucial period of growth and change for me, a sea change (obligatory callout to Shakespeare for that phrase). I wish I had gotten to these ideas sooner, but perhaps I would not have been ready for them without walking the earlier path. I don’t know.
I wrote much of this on June 19 but I’ve decided to hold this essay for a day and publish it on the 20th. It’s very likely this post will come across to a wise reader as centering Whiteness on a day that should be dedicated to Black heritage — they aren’t wrong. But I feel like there may be others out there on this path, and perhaps it is helpful for them to know they aren’t alone.
Growth and change are essential human qualities. When we stop growing, we die.
I can hope that people who have been brainwashed by power-hungry manipulators of American politics might decide to step out of a single narrow-minded view that centers Whiteness as central to our culture and to Christianity. America would be far stronger if it were just and equitable. Racism costs us deeply as a society.
Likewise, American Christianity — dominated by the Evangelical stream — teeters on oblivion. That sentence may seem bizarre given the sheer dominance of “Christians” screeching these days to ban gay books from libraries, harm trans people, force abstinence-only sex education, endanger women’s lives by banning abortion, dangerously label the study of actual American history as CRT, praise Trump as if he were not a horrible human being, and generally just showing off their whole asses to the world as ignorant, hateful people “in the name of Jesus.”
I’m not sure that Christians locked in that bubble, surrounded by a miasma which stifles independent thinking and inhibits outside opinions from “non-believers” from reaching them, are aware of just how many people — particularly young people — have abandoned the church entirely over their hate. (Example: The Southern Baptist Convention makes a lot of noise, but their membership is only around 13 million, and down nearly half a million since 2022. Some of that decline is due to “record-keeping,” but I was genuinely surprised to learn just how small the SBC is in America.)
I believe the Church universal will be as strong as it ever was, but no particular emergence of it should feel safe from the consequences of warping the Gospel for the sake of power, whether to gain political influence or to protect abusers or to conflate patriarchy with “what the Bible says” or to center Whiteness as a Christian virtue.
just:words 
Got a comment?