SOJOURNS AND CONFESSIONS OF A COMPASSIONATE RACIST

Mel Leaman

The swooshing sound swirling above my head captured imaginative scenes of little David slaying the giant. I was somewhere deep in the Serengeti plains, about to release my stone with incredible accuracy upon the head of a wild beast. Supper was about to be slain and those gathered would be enthralled by the skills of this young hunter.

The instrument that sparked my fantasy was my father’s slingshot. It had been uniquely fashioned by tribesmen who depended on instruments like this as well as crudely sharpened machetes and blunted clubs to kill the animal needed for the next meal. Although I didn’t know how to use it, I held the awe of my neighborhood friends who wielded tiny Y-shaped sticks with glorified rubber bands.

My weapon, so the accompanying stories went, could bring down large game with one well sited projectile. A leather pouch was attached to a 10-foot cord that was twirled above the head. The experienced hunter knew the exact moment to release, so the stone shot straight for the designated target. Dad tried on numerous occasions to imitate the finesse and accuracy the natives had so successfully displayed. However, there couldn’t have been an animal big enough for him to hit!

Early in their marriage my parents joined the Mennonite Mission Board. They took a ship to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in 1938 to take the good news of the gospel to those bound by the bad theology of their traditions. Three of my older brothers were born there, whereas I became the benefactor of adventurous tales and intriguing artifacts.

These people were natives to me—a name often used by my parents. My mental images were of men in streamlined thongs racing across open plains while bare-breasted women worked the fields and fed their families.

These men and women should have known better! Chiefs practicing polygamy, medicine men plotting suspicious concoctions, diviners who knew nothing of the divine, and ill-clad dancers honoring the dead—they all should know better!

The Dark Continent needed the light of Jesus. Dad and Mom heard the call to Christianize and culturalize the native. These were a backward people bewildered by the wiles of Satan. Quite innocently, this earnest response of Christian compassion partnered with complicity. The subtle alliance of the two implied that Africans had nothing to lay at our feet, even as we had everything to offer them. White Americans convincing black Africans that the white man’s faith and lifestyle was superior could not help but feed a racist mentality.

It would be easy, in these days when criticism can be in vogue at the expense of fairness, to draw some rather negative conclusions about my parent’s commission. As Chinua Achebe vividly points out in his noteworthy book Things Fall Apart, many times the missionary did not understand either the religion or the culture of Africans. They insisted that to hold unto Christ, the Africans must let go of the cultural rituals, customs, and beliefs that maintained their society. Christian missionaries opened the doors for colonization and quite naturally supported, if not sacralized, Western ways.

My students at Lincoln University, the oldest historically black college in the nation, are sometimes shocked, if not angered, by the words of Rev. John Miller Dickey, who founded our school. Describing his earlier work with African slaves in Georgia, he noted that he "took opportunities of speaking to them at their funerals, which they always attend in the night, and with many African heathen customs."

Dickey stated in a sermon in 1853 that

The colored people of this country seem to have been sent by Divine Providence that they might be Christianized and employed as laborers for the evangelization of Africa. It is true, they are degrade, and many of them in bondage, but why should this discourage us? Are they always to be children, and to have no part in the building up of the kingdom of God? Are they less able than we, when properly instructed, or less willing?

A year later Ashmun Institute was founded, then renamed Lincoln University in 1865. The first three graduates became missionaries to African countries.

Some students resent having their ancestors designated as "heathen" and refute Dickey’s determination that Africans were "degrade." They argue that African Traditional Religion has always had a reverence for the High God and that the practices of soliciting the help of that deity through prayers to other divine ambassadors or ancestors reflected, rather than diminished, that respect.

The dances that offended Western eyes were not proofs of erotic paganism, but a sacred means to catch the eye of the High God or to appease an ancestor who had a closer connection with this God. They contend that the communal aspects of African Traditional Religion, as well as the spirit world, were grossly misunderstood by missionaries.

I should note that there is not unanimity amongst my students in regard to the consequences of Christian missions. Some concentrate on the callous stripping of a foreign culture, while others applaud the fact that Christianity positively addressed the fears of witches, discontented ancestors, and other superstitions.

My wife and I have had the pleasure of boarding either Christian or Muslim students from various African countries for the past three years. While they acknowledge the ignorance of the missionaries and their complicity with the throws of colonization, they also affirm the light of God’s love that freed their ancestors from captivity to "heathen" customs. An African colleague once told me that even though some Africans outwardly express hostility for missionary affronts against their faith and culture, they may be inwardly grateful for the education and enlightened perspectives of faith and lifestyles these missionaries brought with them.

The mission movement was founded on a compassionate Christ, and most missionaries let this love be their guide. While in some respects they could not separate themselves from the culture of their birth, they attempted to maintain a genuine sensitivity to the African way of life.

John E. Leatherman was a friend of my parents. He commented in the February 1938 edition of the Christian Monitor that

learning to know the native is one of the missionary’s biggest jobs, and a lifelong one too . . . We say with emphasis that he who regards the negro as an essentially inferior race and on a lower "rung" of the so-called evolutionary ladder is not cognizant of many facts, and is automatically ruled out as being incapable of gaining a fair understanding of the native.

I am proud of the deep love of God and the desire to spread the gospel that motivated my parent’s sojourn to the mission field. On their return, these same commitments motivated my father to pastor a small Mennonite congregation in York, Pennsylvania. Dad was in the touch-up ministry: he slung a paint brush by day and saved souls by night. He served both professions well.

The voices for civil rights were graduating from whispers to roars, however. News of the movement was somewhat muted at our house because we did not have a television. The word native was now relegated to those on the Dark Continent while "colored" or "negro" became the preferred reference for African-Americans.

My images had to change. Inasmuch as our family and church related to African-Americans, their distinctiveness seemed to center on need, not color. We gave them clothing, money, and rides from the city to our suburban Bible school. Every summer for two weeks a bunch of black-faced boys and girls would clamber excitedly onto the bus to fill the pews of a white man’s church. As I stared out the bus windows, I silently wondered why they lived in buildings that looked like one long house with lots of doors and postage stamp lawns. Where did they play?

My mother periodically mentioned that the children from the projects made crowd control quite difficult. Likewise, in my eyes, those children seemed more rough, rash, and ready to fight than any of my friends did. Frankly, I was a little afraid of them. I attended weekly inner-city child evangelism meetings with mom. She could spin a tale that would capture any audience. Yet many times I watched her lovingly struggle with unruly children as she shared her stories of good news. I remember wondering, "What’s wrong with these kids?"

Our "Fresh Air" (as the urban-rural exchange program was called) girl stayed with us for several weeks one summer. She took her first step on grass in our front yard! Dad and Mom didn’t even tell me what color this newcomer would be. She was rather big and bossy, from my point of view. I was not conscious of her brownness being a barrier to our friendship, but it did take me a while to get accustomed to her brash ingratitude. She struck me as eating too fast, always wanted more, and never saying "thank you."

Upon my inquiry, Mom explained in whispered tones that apparently no one was around or cared enough to teach her any manners. She added that many children like her had to fight to get what they could when they could because there might not be anything on their tables the next day.

I can’t say I bemoaned her leaving, but the impression that to be black meant not having what white folks had stuck with me. The relief I felt upon her return to New York was accompanied by a sigh of pity.

Only in my later years have I realized that pity has clouded my perception of African-American. I have wondered how much it sparked sincere acts of compassion that paradoxically became the fecund soil for seeds of racism. Was pity a significant motivating factor in the early 1970s when I picked up my junior high students from the projects and took them to my house or to the beach?

During my years as a pastor, what was the mix of pity and compassion that drove me to the park to play basketball with the kids from "the other side" of town? Why did I spend five years trying to jump-start a community youth center? Is there some complicity in my present position as a white professor at a black college?

The concept of white privilege—that whiteness includes inherent unearned powers and privileges in North American culture—is a recent addition to the race discussion. In that light, I was blind to the ramifications and sins of privilege. Yet I have always felt a strong desire to help those who had less than I. That urge is thankfully rooted in the benevolence of my parents as well as a personal desire to conform to God’s preference for the poor, the last, and the least.

The problem was that I unconsciously approached such persons as the poor who had nothing to offer the rich; the last who depended on the first; and the least who were mere benefactors of the best. I transgressed the innate dignity of human being, ingenuity, and ability that the Creator endowed upon every creature. I could do things for them, but I did not expect to establish a healthy give-and-take relationship with them.

My empathetic (or was it sympathetic?) acts of kindness shrouded a demeaning internalization of the belief that black people were needy people. Even as they could not be trusted to come up with a worthy religion in Africa, neither could they presently cope with societal responsibilities in this part of America. Basically, black people needed the white man’s help. They provided a means to appease the guilt of the privileged.

This being said, I do not fault the Christian compassion of my parents for the racial prejudices I have held. They were merely living out healthy expressions of their faith within the confines of a sick system—a system of white supremacy that at times could color any act of charity. A system that consciously or subconsciously sacralized white privilege and internalized racism. A system that diminished the opportunities for African-Americans to share a reciprocal relationship with their white neighbors and then held them solely accountable for their lack.

Throughout their lives, my parents responded to genuine need without regard to the color of the outstretched hand. They pursued the righteousness (right relationship) and justice that the prophet Amos demanded. The racism I learned was a reflection of a society living amid broken relatationships.

My parents’ attempts to mend the breaks heightened my sensitivities to the divisions between white and black. I felt the tension of those differences. Dad and Mom were white and privileged, so even their efforts to fulfill the mission God had for them left space for subtle bits of racism to stain my soul. I misinterpreted truth. How much more racist would I be if they had not pursued God’s call?

I genuinely applaud their efforts to reach out. My parents took risks to be rightly related with others. Through their acts of charity, I experienced connections with African-Americans that I could not have found outside of their obedience to God.

Admittedly, the initial contacts were made from the standpoint of the privileged helping those who knew the poverty of soul and pocketbook. The helpers were white, and those needing the help were black. Certain aspects of classism and racism could hardly be avoided. Good deeds planted some bad seeds.

However, God used those experiences to help establish a level of comfort in relating to African-Americans that has led me to a place of greater understanding and wholeness. It is a place of confession and repentance; a place where reciprocity trumps racism; a place where relational give and take is expected and accepted. So far, for this compassionate racist, it feels like a better place to be.

—Mel Leaman, West Grove, Pennsylvania, is Assistant Professor of Religion, Lincoln University. Leaman was raised in a Mennonite home, then following college and a few years of teaching, he was Christian Education and Youth Director at Asbury United Methodist Church, Maitland, Florida, and joined the UMC. A minister in Ohio and Pennsylvania from 1981 to 1999, he received a D.Min. in marriage and family from Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1990. He can be reached at jmleaman3@juno.com.