Olive Branch Interfaith Peace Partnership

Life is too short to be white…and straight. This essay, by Donna Schaper, is especially for white and straight and Christian people. It shows one root of racism, which is scapegoating.

In the world of the goat – shorthand for scapegoating – the beat goes on. The beatings go on. There really isn’t much difference between anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism and sexism: they all count on their being a goat, someone on whom to blame what is disliked or feared in the self. There is, of course, lots of difference when the goating comes on you, as an individual, discrete person – and when it combines laterally with goating of black and brown, Jew and gay, etc. Lumping hurts; it is another way of disallowing individuality. Still, the underlying cause of goating – bad theology, particularly bad atonement theology – is the same for all those lumped as other than NORMAL. Atonement theology: that God goated Jesus in order to save us from our sins. This precedent for scapegoating, and therefore racism and its siblings, is the heart of the matter. If we can touch the heart, we can change the world. First I will try to convince you of the size of the problem in our hearts when they goat.

The possibilities for goating are endless. With Jews the “Goat” is greed, women it is softness, gays it is sex, blacks it is laziness. The goat is what needs to be sacrificed, murdered, destroyed, and made holy by violence. We lay the goat we have slain on a holy altar, barbecue it, and act like we have done something for God. We have not – but at least our own suffering goes away for a while and is replaced by the intensity of violent energy. The goat projections are the drumbeat of the less than ideal history we have known. It could be different – especially if we could all embrace all of ourselves and not throw off what we “normals” don’t like on to the famous “Other.”

A review of goating history (state side) travels through witches and Jews, then Italians and Irish immigrants. Before that slaves were otherized, goatized, to justify white supremacy and use of them. God gets called in on the oddest missions! Lately in a new twist of the ancient twistedness, immigrants are no longer called just immigrants, a privilege the Irish and Italians enjoyed while they were demonized. “Illegal” appears to be the word of necessity to attach to immigrants. Gays are likewise scapegoated as all that is wrong with America. There is a serious paranoid pattern in Christian cultures – and the need to blame somebody for something is ever present. Its source is the sacrifice, the burnt offering and the substitution of Jesus as Christ goat. The big word for this is atonement, the price paid for our sins. To change any of the isms we have to change the way we substitute Jesus and cross for salvation. We have to atone for the atonement theory. But first we must define some terms. If the violence and the goating is clear enough as the heart of our suffering and the suffering we cause for others, what is ITS source? Its source is what I call “whiteness”, what I could call “Westernness” or just bad atonement theology, lined up to shoot the others who threaten to reveal our own suffering.

We can define Western whiteness as the bland, nearly unconscious, color devoid externalization of fault. James Cone puts it well when he says, “White Folk want everything but the burden.” What we do to gays and blacks is to blame them for what we refuse to imagine is wrong in ourselves. (I know that homophobia is not restricted to whites. It is an equal opportunity employer. Nevertheless it comes from the white theology for the other.) Externalization and “goating” is deep within our psyche: it is almost as though we take the color and puzzlements of life and move them, physically, in somebody else’s house, taking all the color and joy out of our own. Blacks are lazy, we are not. We just sit on our couch with our clicker, imagining that we are hard at work. Gays are dirty, we are not. We just masturbate in our car in traffic and imagine no one sees us. We wouldn’t have “fun” sex at home. Of course these are exaggerations: some whites are sexy and some are puzzled by their own laziness. Mythically and culturally, however, we externalize at a great rate.

Consider Senator Larry Craig for a minute. Talk about denial getting us in trouble with the truth. I don’t ordinarily feel compassion for Republicans but this man is breaking my heart. Nina Burleigh in The Huffington Post carried an incredible story about Gay Republicans, most of whom didn’t add Senator Craig’s cell phone mishap to their resume of hiddenness but resembled his self-deceit. (Not everyone heard but indeed he called someone he thought was a press pal and told him how to manipulate his story. It turned out he had “misdialed.” With the Craigs of the world, the excuses run wild.) “Prick any conservative, “ Burleigh says, “and the Kink oozes out. The rockier the rib, the more likely you’ll find pink lingerie under the trousers or a bull whip and machete in the beside table.” We may find Senator Craig’s self deceit either pathetic or humorous or tragic – or all three. The message of the Haggards and the Foleys and now the Craig’s, however, begs us to repent deceit. Why hide in bathrooms? Burleigh’s argument is that conservatives are so afraid of their own sexual interests that they want the government to save them from themselves – thus the punishmentalist legislation.

Why not be the people whom we are, out loud? In the eyes of God, we don’t need to be perfect. Nor do we need to hide our shame at not being perfect. We need “big fat grace” to get over that and come to Jesus, just as we are. The key to ungoating goating is grace: it is to accept the fact that some whites are lazy, some Jews greedy, some fundamentalists over-sexed (what a concept!), and the like. When we know we are not perfect, we “goat” less. Humility in the heart stops much suffering.

Let me expand the argument about externalization, projection, goating and the faith. We live by grace and not works righteousness. For a completely different example, which will show us just how dependent we are on denial, consider the environmental crisis. We are people who have not noticed that the environment is in a lot of trouble. As Grace Paley put it so well, we just didn’t see how big our thighs were getting. Now we notice. Now we are outed or out ourselves or just peek out the closet door. We see. We were blinded, self blinded, culturally oppressed by others – who we thought wouldn’t understand our concern or punish us for having it – but any which way you cut it, we were in denial. But now HALLELUJAH, we see. We don’t need to be embarrassed for not having seen for so long. We can “confess” our blindness. We can ask each other for help. We might even (in an odd twist of Burleigh’s argument about getting the state to stop us) ask the state for help.

When I say we need the government to “punish”/ “Liberate” us from ourselves by, let’s say, raising gas prices, do I mean that we are not capable of self-discipline or self-disclosure? Are we in some kind of denial about just how weak and peer conscious we are? Yup. We appear to need help. We appear to be in trouble. We appear to need help. Some of us are in so much trouble that we send out a self-promoting message to the wrong cell phone number in a loud cry for help. Won’t somebody help us get to the truth about who we are and what’s going on? Senator Craig’s mishap reminds me ever so much of a twelve year old who is doing drugs and hides them in his mother’s laundry basket.

What is hard for “white” folk is that we don’t know how to suffer. We think we’re not supposed to suffer so we play games with the human condition. Others are to suffer, not us.

Punishmentalist theology – the kind that is light on grace and heavy on law -- tries to blame others for what is wrong. Grace filled theology – the kind that is light on law and heavy on grace -- accepts both blame and shame and knows that both white folk and black folk, immigrants, legal and not, gay and straight, the whole kit and caboodle, have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Translated, we have missed the mark of our true humanity. We need help. We don’t need to hide from the fact that we all need help.

We don’t need to hide from our “sins” and indeed we may need others to help us out of our trouble. That is not a crime so much as a blessing. When we see the vigor with which violence against Blacks and Gays has occurred, we have to go to its bottom in our own self-loathing. From there we can reapproach the cross and the atonement. But there are deeper levels, still, to the way our internal difficulties externalize into racism and homophobia and more.

THE PLOT THICKENS

Being “Alien” is bad enough. Being blamed for being alien is worse. Being blamed for your poverty is also pretty rotten. “It’s your fault!” We scream this at others because we don’t want to bear the “fault” of our own suffering. We don’t know how to suffer. Having a demonic alien seems to pacify something in people. Gays get a little different language beyond demonic alien: they are not normal, implying that normal is good. But the demonizing, externalizing, scapegoating pattern is the same. You can almost hear its hatred winding up, like a pitcher about to throw a fast ball. When the phrase “You people” comes out, watch out. When the phrase, “Them” comes out, duck. When the phrase “Not like ordinary people” shows up, put on your bullet proof vest or at least your helmet. The OTHERIZING is the pattern that links the civil rights movement, the gay movement and many others. Those people, you people, the people not known as people but the ones known as them are the problem. We ”normal” people no longer have a problem: we gave it to you to carry.

Some folk want everything but the burden.

By normal I mean me. White, Straight, uncomfortable with people who are not. The poverty of the normal white straight person is extraordinary. We are spiritually homeless. We are in need of shelter – and we look for shelter in all the wrong places. We look for shelter in acting as though we are better than everyone else. We look for our goodness by making other people look bad. The gay rights movement and the civil rights movement are alike in being on the receiving end of the demonizing. “They” make “us” uncomfortable. That is the main thing that joins the movements: the externalization on the one called the other who then becomes the goat in the system. We look good in cheap ways. We look good in ways we don’t pay for. We get a virtue bargain by making others less than we think we are. We then add institutional power – health insurance, segregated schools – to our cultural and mythical superiority and live dull lives. The lies are too deep to allow life to be exciting. Excitement is the tension between the is and the ought. Excitement knows whom you really are and that you are ok anyway. “I’m not ok, you’re not ok, and that’s ok, “ is Bill Coffin’s best line. That is excitement. That is a level playing field. That is colorful living; it has tension, exposed, rather than hidden.

Life is just way too short to be white. One way or another the lies will catch up with us. And why do we tell lies? To protect ourselves from the truth. We think we are protecting “others” but that is a lie on top of a lie.

Unfortunately there is a great expense in this way of being. It only looks like a bargain. In fact, it is extraordinarily expensive. “If you are not who I think you are, then I am not who I think I am”, said James Baldwin. The deceits and fictions wear away at our soul. White people become “white”, vacated of color, empty vessesls of false virtue, supported not just by the psychological games of white privilege but the systemic intrusions of same in schools, on jobs, and in real estate patterns. The white man’s burden becomes something OTHERS carry. Straight people become narrow and not just straight. I may be straight but I am not narrow” is a telling slogan: it names the problem of what happens to those who are anti gay. We/ they become narrow.

I would like to think that I am but a recovering racist and a recovering sexist and a recovering heterosexist but the truth is a little less. I am more a racist, a sexist and a heterosexist than not. If one more white person assures me “I am not racist…but…” or one more straight person tells me, “I am not prejudiced but…”, I will scream. Why all the buts? What in the world are we trying to defend? Our whiteness and our straightness, that’s what, and the health insurance, (phony) moral superiority and housing that go with it.

We also live in communities that share our values. We are very likely to be corrected as long as we stay “white.” I can tell my system (a liberal congregation with a great history in the Avant Garde in Greenwich Village) that life is too short to be white till I am blue (colored) in my face but they are not that interested.

A well-educated black woman took an internship at my church. One of my ultra liberal congregants said to her, “It must be hard on you being at a church where every one is so well educated.” That happened two months ago.

The same woman was asked to sing gospel songs. No one knew that she knew opera. She was other and in her cage and someone had thrown away the key. It is of course an interpretive cage. She has the key and her interpreter is actually the one locked up.

She preaches a sermon, which says nothing about the congregation being racist. A member of long standing gets up and says the congregation is not racist, that many people have paid their dues in the movement. Life for him is NOT too short to be white. He had a lot to defend and hold on to.

A Malaysian man tells his parents he is gay. They say, “Just don’t tell your sister.” Why not? Because she couldn’t handle it, which is to say they couldn’t handle it because the lie we tell is the one that hides us from ourselves.

The New York Times shows the demonization pattern against Jews, even in 2007. When asked to rename the Christmas concert at a New Hyde Park School, the winter concert, parents exploded. “They execute the baby Jesus in the arena of political correctness.”. (Paul Vitello, story August 15, 2007, “A skirmish in the secularism wars”) Apparently being politically incorrect is better than being correct, in this anti-Semitic code.

Bigotry is an equal opportunity employer. It is not just for people of color or gays but also Jews and immigrants. It also internalizes with the great dance of the devil, the “twist”, and we find Jews demonizing immigrants and blacks demonizing gays. Anybody who is not part of the power sorority or fraternity is fair game to be scapegoated. How else would people in power hold on to our power, save by putting others down? As much as we would like to think that the Gay and Civil Rights and Anti-Semitism movements have put themselves out of business by their successful achievement of goals, unfortunately, the truth is different.. There is plenty left to do – and its has to do with noticing how the scapegoating pattern works and also just how unnecessary it is.

A black, gay woman walks down a street in a liberal town in Western Massachusetts. She is “dredding” again, as she put it, and her hair is in the early stages of the re-dred. A white woman, sexual status unknown, whom she does not know, says to her, “What happened? Did you see a ghost?” The permission the white woman has to say this is white privilege at its most ignorant: it knows not what it is doing and because of the privilege, doesn’t think it needs to know what it doesn’t know.

Consider Congressman Craig, more deeply. He taps his foot in a Minneapolis bathroom in order to solicit some gay sex. This married Republican who has voted against gay rights every chance he gets has to go to a toilet stall to get a little satisfaction. He is demonized by fellow Republicans and forced to resign. The poor man. I pity him when I am not furious at him. What will happen in the great American creed of “honesty” and “Transparency” is that he will be vilified, lose “everything”, all because he couldn’t find a safe way out of his toilet stall closet. Talk about hate twisting life into knots. The racist homophobic plot thickens and twists into trouble of a nearly insurmountable kind.

THE ALTERNATIVE

There is another way. It starts with reconceptualizing Jesus as other than a goat. He becomes a grace not a goat. It moves to a powerful knock you out idea that scriptures(of all varieties) are right when they say, “The stranger is the ROUTE to God.” The route. You can’t get to God except through the strange and the stranger, the strange about yourself and the stranger you are trying to avoid. It moves to another picture of human goodness and power. We are not good because of ourselves, we are good by grace.

Power is exciting when it is not damning. The atonement theology keeps us with a disempowered Jesus, who “lost” the war with the devil, took on all our sins and recommends that we do the same to others.

Since we still need power, we find it in phony, graceless, domineering ways. We flip into the ever so white and Western concept of domination. The concept of power as domination and the dominating other is what the 2/3 world, mostly people we call “of color”, are so sick of. Domination is what the goating folk are after. Being on top is EVERYTHING TO THEM. But it is not everything to either Jesus or God. The alternative to being one among many -- as opposed to penthoused with the guard at the door -- is not powerlessness, as otherwise progressive theologian Tony Campolo implies in a disappointingly affirming concept of atonement (“God as the Suffering Servant”, Tikkun May/June 2007). It is not a choice between no power and power. The alternative to power of a different kind – the power to inspire, support and empower, rather than to conquer, kill and destroy. Imagine white, heterosexual folk using THOSE kinds of power! What a different world it would be! God’s power does not come through “sacrificial love expressed in his death by dying on the cross.”

The goating starts here in this misinterpretation of scriptures. We turn our beloved Savior into King Goat. We focus on Jesus’ murder rather than on his life and the dance of distortion begins.

In some extreme views, focus on Jesus’ murder as God ordained sacrifice entails the weird idea that the Roman death system was actually part of God’s plan. What kind of God requires blood lust or a human sacrifice to satisfy his own rage at his children? What kind of God wants me on top and others of God’s children beneath me? Jesus knew that the domination system might kill him, and it did. The fact that even death couldn’t conquer life, however, was a mind bogglingly powerful revelation for Jesus’ followers, past and present. Life after death, as interesting as it is, does not prelude or take precedence over life before death.

What is the opposite of atonement theology? That Jesus is the mark and measure of conquering love ad mutuality and partnership. That nobody needs to be a goat or to have a goat. Sacrifice is Sacer Ficio, the holy doing of loving power. The monks who died in the process of protest in Burma did not die in vain. They did not suffer in vain. But that is because life and death are on a continuum, not because they were barbecued. The measure of life is love, mutuality and partnership. When those things happen, so does immortality. In the West we will tend to see their deaths as evidence that their movement did not work. Our pragmatism will fall in line with our failed atonements. Others will see their life as their love and be transformed by those facts.

Genuine Christianity knows there is another way to see Jesus than as the goat that was fried by the powerless. The very self-donation or kenotic emptying of the self of the self is the pattern Jesus of the scriptures did – and it is the solution. Jesus did not die for our sins. He died because domination power caught him in the act of challenging it at its deepest level.

The lies we tell about the other are the keys that trap us. “The other, “ said Rumi, “is yourself, in the mirror.”

Listen to James Cone show this in Jesus-like love of white folk. “You must accept white people and accept them with love. They are in effect still trapped in a history, which they do not understand. We cannot be free until they are.”

Becoming free is loving our enemies, as Cone does. It is understanding that Jesus is not King Goat, nor crucified King, but instead a partner with us in love of who we are, as we are, flawed, and still held by an astonishing grace.