Thursday night I went with some priest friends to see “Captain Phillips.” Saturday morning I concelebrated Mass at the African traditions celebration held in Bellmawr’s Annunciation Church. It was a quick tour in race relations for me. The film concerned the real-life piracy by Somali bandits of an American cargo ship, featured on “Sixty Minutes.” Desperate poverty drove bands of high-seas thieves to board unarmed ships for robbery and ransom. Off the east African coast, they were brutal toward the Tom Hanks character, Richard Phillips, and his crew.
The pan-African celebration of ethnic identity and pride welcomed native-born Africans here in America plus many African-Americans. Ugandans, Nigerians, Liberians, clergy and laity from Ghana, Cameroon, Sierra Leone and more prayed and beautifully sang to the God who speaks all languages and recognizes all complexions. The joy of being recognized as African was palpable. Ethnic dress showed proudly. The luncheon afterward featured African cuisine, making me wonder why there are not more restaurants offering it.
At the event I experienced being a minority. While Caucasians are always welcome at these annual celebrations held in different parishes, the event engages more folks of black skin. I was one of five whites. African-Americans are only 13 percent of the U.S. population, so they have this feeling everywhere, especially when applying for an advertised job opening. In a country with jobs being exported and three job applicants for every opening, one can understand black unemployment being half again as bad as white. This too carries a perpetual frustration for blacks wanting work, not welfare.
Jesus was an Asian who most likely had African blood in him, given that Africa was only a walk away across the Egyptian border. Mary, Joseph and Jesus crossed it when fleeing Herod. While Jesus is Lord of all, he was not a north or south American nor a European or Australian. As a Galilean he knew what it felt like to be a minority, and a despised one at that. He made minority Samaritans the heroes of more than one parable to audiences used to dismissing them as inferior half-breeds. Racism is not new.
It got me thinking during Mass. The time-honored evil of slavery was accepted here in this country, and not just south of the Mason-Dixon line, until 620,000 people died in our Civil War of 1861-65. All our wars together have not produced that many casualties. Philadelphia’s New Market Square used to be a slave market. Our very Constitution from the 18th century commands that runaway slaves from any of the 13 states be returned to their owners. The justifications for the “peculiar institution” were ludicrous, such as the Israelites being allowed to enslave gentile captives. It was only in the last decade of the 20th century that Pope John Paul II declared slavery intrinsically evil.
Slavery flourished only because people were convinced of some racial inferiority of the enslaved. Foreign war victims in the Bible were such. So were rival tribes in Africa, who often were the wholesalers for Europe and the Americas. With this group looking down on that group, plus a little economic shove like slave labor being indispensable to pre-mechanical cotton harvesting, it was a short step to institutionalized, legally permitted slavery. One even hears today of wistful southerners sentimental about their “way of life,” which has been romanticized at the expense of the labor force in chains, under the whip.
I would like to know how practitioners of so brutal a system could pretend a racial superiority, as though they had evidence that God gave them the right to profit from another person’s pain. The rationalization trick, of course, was to mentally deprive the African of his or her personhood. Seen as pack animals, they got the same consideration as did mules. It resembles our depersonalizing of unwanted fetuses, whose destruction is legal, and made legal by the same Supreme Court. Chief Justice Roger Taney was a rabid pro-slavery bigot who was also a Catholic.
John Newton was a 19th century slaver who made tremendous money at his trade. Like modern-day atheist Dr. Bernard Nathanson, who admitted to aborting 60,000 fetuses, he had a conversion experience to Christianity based on the slowly accumulated horror of his respectable, court-protected practice. Newton abandoned slaving, became an Anglican divine and wrote “Amazing Grace,” describing how God had saved a wretch like him.
Finally, racism would take a well deserved hit if we repealed the Second Amendment.
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