1. our country’s history is inseparable from the creation of racism
The history and development of racism is directly connected to colonization and European-Christianity. If we are going to understand racism and how to end it, we must realize that it was created in the name of God, and by people who share common ancestors with us. Our lineage and beliefs are directly tied to the creation of racism and in turn the creation of mass incarceration. With that harsh reality in mind, let’s dive into the history of racism with open ears to better learn from the mistakes of our ancestors in the hopes that we can right their wrongs.
Race is a concept that humans use to make distinctions between groups of people with specific physical characteristics. Below the surface there are no biological differences that can distinguish people of different races. The idea that there are multiple human races is an entirely human construct and has no scientific or Biblical support.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them”
−Genesis 1:27
Even the conservative group Answers in Genesis¹says that throughout the Bible, God repeatedly states that he created one human race and there is no distinction between his people. The idea of separating people into different groups based on physical appearance alone can be traced back to the beginning of the Age of Exploration in the 1400s. The term race first officially appears in the early 1500s, referring to a group of people with similar occupations. In the 1560s race began to be used to refer to larger groups of people and in the mid 1700s, during colonization, Europeans gave race its current meaning.²
“What the study of complete genomes from different parts of the world has shown is that even between Africa and Europe, for example, there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded.”
In the pursuit of new economic gains and religious freedom, hundreds of thousands of Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean to colonize the Americas. To successfully colonize North America, Europeans had to seize control of the land and remove the indigenous peoples who lived there. This resulted in the mass genocide of an estimated 10 million native people for the sole purpose of European gain. ⁴ The Doctrine of Discovery allowed Christians and Catholics to justify these horrendous acts through their religion, claiming that
“any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be ‘discovered,’ claimed, and exploited by Christian rulers.”⁵
Because Christianity was established as the only true religion, European Christians could view themselves as being above, more godly, more righteous than the indigenous population creating the idea of white supremacy which is the foundation of racism. Without racism and white supremacy the United States would not have been created.
“White supremacy provided the political, social, and religious permission to claim lands not previously governed by ‘Christian’ white people and to conquer, exterminate, and subjugate the allegedly inferior races found there.”
At the time of colonization, slavery had been commonly practiced for thousands of years to exploit and control both individuals and groups of people across the world. When Europeans originally migrated to North America, they brought with them indentured servants who could complete the grunt work of starting a new colony and allow their masters some economic success. Europeans would also have enslaved the native population in accordance with the Doctrine of Discovery and common European practice. However, the indigenous population was quickly growing extinct and their ability to organize and fight back against European settlers made it nearly impossible to successfully and safely enslave them. Out of the need for slaves and the successful colonization happening along the coast of Africa, the Transatlantic Slave Trade was born. Again, because of the Doctrine of Discovery, white supremacist ideas, and racism, slavery was justified through a Biblical viewpoint leading to the death of 1.5-2 million men, women, and children intransit as well as the enslavement of an additional 12 million Africans in the New World alone.⁷
Slavery in the US was a horrific institution of control and oppression built on white supremacist and racist ideas used to control African–Americans. It must be realized that slavery did not end with the Civil War, nor did racism, but simply evolved to fit the needs of a new era.
The Civil War ended with the creation of the 13th Amendment and the beginning of the Reconstruction era. The 13th Amendment was intended to eradicate slavery. However, it instead only changed who could be enslaved.
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”⁸
Slavery became a punishment for a crime. The development of the South was wholly dependent on free labor and while that was completely stripped from them, the ingrained racism in the South continued on. The slavery loophole in the 13th amendment allowed Southern states a way to regain their lost slaves through incarceration. With this mindset and the newly created laws, we see our first ever prison boom in the United States.
“While a Black prisoner was a rarity during the slavery era (when slave masters were individually empowered to administer ‘discipline’ to their human property) the solution to the free black population had become criminalization. In turn, the most common fate facing black convicts was to be sold into forced labor for the profit of the state.”
“Black codes” were created to criminalize basic human actions as long as they were committed by a black person. African-Americans were rounded up and labeled criminals for simply living and speaking. African-Americans could be incarcerated for acts such as looking at a white woman, loitering, breaking curfew, and not being able to prove they had a legal place of work. This extreme enforcement of petty crimes allowed the South to quickly round up former slaves and legally enslave them again. This led to the creation of convict leasing which allowed prisons to lease criminals out to plantation owners, returning thousands of African-Americans to slavery but this time, as slaves to the state.
“The criminal justice system was strategically employed to force African Americans back into a system of extreme repression and control, a tactic that would continue to prove successful for generations to come.”-Michelle Alexander¹⁰
“The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
Following the withdrawal of Northern troops in 1877 the Ku Klux Klan regained power and Jim Crow laws took shape. Jim Crow laws were specifically designed to segregate blacks and whites in every way possible. Any resistance whether intentional or not was met with extreme violence. From the beginning of Jim Crow until WWII, African-Americans were subjected to decades of terrorism, lynchings, enslavement, and extreme violence at the hands of White Americans in order to protect the system of white supremacy. One of the main forms of control held over African-Americans was the threat of lynching.
“Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by the state and federal officials.”
These terror lynchings of African Americans peaked between 1880 and 1940 resulting in the death of over 4,000 African Americans, that is 1,000 more people than the number of people killed in 9/11. These terror lynchings were used to maintain the social structure of segregation and Jim Crow laws establishing a rule of White Supremacy that has never been reconciled.
“Lynching also directly fostered the racialization of criminality. Whites defended vigilante violence aimed at black people as a necessary tactic of self-preservation to protect property, families, and the Southern way of life from dangerous black criminals.”-Bryan Stevenson¹²
Because of the racist beliefs left over from slavery, White Americans were used to attributing false qualities to all African-Americans. During the era of Jim Crow, the over policing of African-Americans and frequent public demonstration of punishment for suspected criminal activity, systematically led Americans to believe that all people with dark skin were criminal by nature.
“The link between lynching and the image of African Americans as ‘criminal’ and ‘dangerous’ was sometimes explicit, such as when lynchings occurred in response to allegations of criminal behavior. In other cases, white mobs justified lynching as a preemptive strike against the threat of black violent crime.”
The Civil Rights movement gained traction in the 1950s in response to the horrific near century of lynchings and Jim Crow laws that had taken place. Efforts across the country were being made to end racial terror and oppression. The Civil Rights movement culminated in the early 1960s as thousands of people organized and fought against segregation. Between 1961 and 1963, 20,000 protestors were arrested and the racialization of criminality continued. Activism by African-Americans was broadcasted as illegal action, punishable by incarceration rather than political action justifiable by the constitutional right to free speech.¹⁴ Despite these setbacks, the Civil Rights Movement continued surging forward with the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr a Baptist Minister from the South. The segregation and discrimination of African-Americans, as well as oppression of impoverished communities is anti-Biblical and MLK saw the need of the Church to take action against the oppressive system. With the support of John F. Kennedy the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed and the movement shifted focus to poverty and oppression of all people including poor whites, hispanics, and native americans. However, with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, murder of MLK, and election of Richard Nixon the movement drew to an abrupt halt and a new era of racist oppression was ushered in.
“After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the public debate shifted focus from segregation to crime. The battles lines, however, remained largely the same. Positions taken on crime policies typically cohered along lines of racial ideology.”
In 1971, only a few years after the Civil Rights Act was adopted, the Nixon Administration launched the “war on drugs.” The War on Drugs was a political scheme built to target and criminalize African-Americans by severely punishing the use of drugs that would become common in areas of impoverished black communities. At the time that the War on Drugs was established, only 2% of Americans considered drugs to be a serious issue. ¹⁶ It was later confirmed that the war on drugs was racially motivated. In an interview with Dan Baum from Harper’s Magazine¹⁷, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief and Watergate coconspirator, stated:
“We knew that we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The War on Drugs did exactly what it was intended to do. It launched a new age of “tough on crime” politics that sparked furious police raids of impoverished communities of color and a dramatic increase in prison sentences. With the Civil Rights Act, African Americans could not be directly discriminated against but, criminals still could be. So just as the South found the loophole to regain their slaves through incarceration, the United States also found a way to continue segregating and discriminating against black people through incarceration. These techniques are still used today to legally discriminate against, murder, and oppress African-Americans.
9. The Bible and Race
Even though religious leaders and colonists used the Bible to justify and enforce slavery and racism, a true understanding of the Bible shows that all humans were created equally in the image of God. Both God and Jesus repeatedly tell us to take care of our fellow human being, especially those who are in need. He also specifically warns us against the pursuit of money stating in 1 Timothy 6:10
“For the love of money is the root of all evil.”
God repeatedly condemns the act of exploiting others for one's own personal gain as well as the acts of murder, rape and robbery. The acts of racism and white supremacy by early colonizers that led to the development of the United States are completely unbiblical. It is now our duty as followers of Jesus to love the sick, the widow, the orphan, and those in prison. It is our unquestionable purpose in life to free the oppressed, which means fighting to end racism and white supremacy.
Learn how racism and mass incarceration are effecting America today.
“Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”
-Matthew 20:45
“My brothers and sisters, believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ must not show favoritism. Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in filthy old clothes also comes in. If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, ‘Here’s a good seat for you,’ but say to the poor man, ‘You stand there’ or ‘Sit on the floor by my feet,’ have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?”
-James 2:1-4
“When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.”
-Leviticus 19:33-34
“Do we not all have one Father? Did not one God create us? Why do we profane the covenant of our ancestors by being unfaithful to one another?”
-Malachi 2:10
“But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look at his appearance or at his physical stature...For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.’”
-1 Samuel 16:7
“Rich and poor have this in common: The LORD is the Maker of them all.”
-Proverbs 22:2
“There can be no mistake: in creating this world, God ultimately intended that we all be valued equally. The church in the age of exploration missed this, and the American church in the age of Manifest Destiny missed it as well”
2, 6, 16 Wytsma, K. (2019). When the world became racist. The Myth of Equality: Uncovering the roots of injustice and privilege. (pp. 29-46, 38, 60) Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press.
