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My Formation

6/30/2020

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Lisa has encouraged us to share our own personal stories about our racial formation. Here are a few of my own stories.

You might say that I was formed in a crucible of Whiteness and White identity. I grew up in Oklahoma, a land, known as Indian Territory that stretched from Oklahoma through Kansas and up to Nebraska, that was supposed to belong to Indigenous Americans. After the Civil War, when human beings freed from slave chains sought freedom from the South, many Black people sought refuge in Oklahoma to create an all-Black state. Oklahoma is the land on which I was formed, and those plains that were once sprawling became the suburbs of south Oklahoma City during white flight in the 1970s. 

It is the land of Oklahoma that holds the silence of the state’s violent racial history. It is a history of the eradication of Indigenous life--language, plant, animal, people--and of controlling Indigenous people and land. That fight continues today in the highest court in our country. It is a history of systemic genocide of entire Indigenous people groups in order to gain control of their land that contained vast oil fields, which means vast wealth. It is the whispered history of the Tulsa Riots in 1921 and the destruction of one of the most flourishing Black communities in the entire country. This history, silent and unspoken, I did not learn until I was in college. 

I grew up in a mostly white church in a mostly white neighborhood. My community was white, but sports provided me the opportunity to build friendships with Black people. I had a close friend who is Black, and we played sports together and had sleepovers. It was at his house that, looking back, I had my first realization that I was white and that being white meant my life and his life were very different. I knew that his mom and dad both worked and worked hard. She was a principal and he was a UPS driver. They were committed Christians of deep faith. They did everything with integrity, but our worlds were vastly different, our economic status vastly different, our neighborhoods only a mile apart but completely different worlds, our churches less than a mile apart but never any fellowship between the congregations.

I left the Moore Public School System when I was in the seventh grade and started attending a private school: Christian Heritage Academy. The school’s mission statement says, “The ultimate goal of the Academy is to produce true Christian scholars who will be used of God to propagate the Gospel throughout the whole world and to restore our American Christian Republic to its historic, Biblical foundation.” So, I was formed as a young person inside the entanglement of Christian faith and American nationalism. CHA is a small school. In my class of 52 people, though, there was not a single Black student. There were many Korean exchange students, who my white classmates and I constantly reminded that they were different from us through racist jokes and mocking their language. We wouldn’t even say their names but gave them “American” names. 

CHA started in 1972 in resistance to school integration in Oklahoma. Their documented history chalks this up to busing and wanting neighborhood schools, but that history fails to see that fear of busing and a desire for neighborhood schools was just as much about fear of white children going to school with Black children. “Neighborhood schools” is code for White schools and Black schools. There are two foundational textbooks for every CHA student: Christian History of the Constitution of the United States of America and Teaching and Learning America’s Christian History. Again, I was formed in the entanglement of faith and nationalism. A group called The Foundation for American Christian Education wrote and published these textbooks, and, just to make the history and timeline clear, that foundation started in 1965. 

I went to a private university whose student body was and still is majority white, and it was on this campus that I had the most shameful experience of my entire life. Intramural sports was a major part of campus life, and I was fully invested in playing flag football. My team of all white guys was playing the track team, a team of all Black students, who were also track athletes. In this one particular game a player on the track team and I started mouthing off to one another. I thought I was a good guy, kind and inclusive, definitely not racist. Yet, it was in a meaningless flag football game that my anger and mouthiness brought out the racist in me. I called this other young man--a successful student, a tremendous athlete, and a well-known socialite--a “boy.” I didn’t just say it once. I said it over and over. One of my professors in seminary once said that most Black people are just waiting for the moment when well-meaning white people will call them a racial slur. I became that person. I knew what I was saying. I knew the history of demeaning Black men by calling them “boys,” a history that goes all the way back to slavery. 

Over the past few weeks I have written about Whiteness and White identity. These ideas can seem ethereal, unable to be understood, slippery, overly-academic, maybe even elitist, but they always come back to the land and to bodies. These are my stories of the very real formation these two powerful ideas had on my life, my body, the bodies of others, and the land on which we lived. I’ve told these stories not just to show that these difficult concepts work themselves out in real life and on real people but to show that I am still in the process of deconstructing my racial formation. I have been in that process for 7 years now, and most days I still think I’m just beginning. 
​

I hope my stories, my formation, my deconstruction will encourage you, though, because it is in the last 7 years of reflecting on my own life that I have caught glimpses of true freedom and community. Most of all, the past 7 years have shattered me, but it’s in that shattering that I’ve witnessed the Holy Spirit putting pieces back together to make something new.

Peace,
​Brandon


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Defining Whiteness

6/23/2020

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This week I watched this video from Jacqueline Battalora’s keynote address “Birth of a White Nation.” Being the cinephile I am, I have to say that the title of her address is a riff on the 1915 D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation, a film that depicts a part historical, part fictional origin story of the Ku Klux Klan. Film students across the country still view this film in school because of how influential it was. It was the first 12-reel film ever made and the longest film ever made at that point. It was so influential, from both a film and propaganda perspective, that there was a showing of it at the White House while Woodrow Wilson was in office. 

Battalora’s thesis is pretty simple. She says, “White supremacy is embedded in American society as a matter of law.” She starts her talk with a startling claim: “‘White people did not exist in this country until 1681.” She proceeds throughout her talk to cover a vast amount of history, both political and legal. She covers the middle to late seventeenth century systems of indentured servanthood and slavery in the British colonies, specifically Maryland and Virginia, Bacon’s rebellion, and Antimiscegenation laws to track the development of how “White” came to equal propertied American citizen. Battalora also helps us understand a definition of whiteness. 

To understand the full impact of Battalora’s thesis and the scale of racial existence we still operate within, we have to go back to August 8, 1444 to Portugal when Prince Henrique the Navigator, with his royal chronicler Zurara beside him, watched the disembarkation of 235 slaves kidnapped from Mauritania. Watching this catastrophic event Zurara says, "On the next day, which was the 8th of the month of August, very early in the morning, by reason of the heat, the seamen began to make ready their boats, and to take out those captives, and carry them on shore, as they were commanded. And these, placed all together in that field, were a marvelous sight; for amongst them were some white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned; others were less white like mulattoes; others again were as black as Ethiops, and so ugly, both in features and in body, as almost to appear the images of lower hemispheres" (Jennings, 2017). Here Zurara places the world on a scale of racial existence. There is white and then there is black, and all the space in between. 
I was taught to understand whiteness as a “trajectory of endless becoming.” Another way of understanding it is a building project toward maturity. Whiteness is a journey toward maturity from owned to owner, stranger to citizen, and darkness to White (Jennings, 2019). What does that mean? It means lots of things. It means that whiteness is not reducible to skin color. It means it is a way of existing in the world. It is a project, a goal, a system that has real life consequences on people’s lives. 
Real life consequences on people’s lives. It’s important to keep that in mind at all times when we’re defining terms or telling our stories or reflecting on our upbringings: whiteness has real life consequences on people’s lives. It has economic, labor, theological, geographical, medical, and a host of other consequences for people’s lives, and that includes you and me, people who have called ourselves white. Perhaps that is the most important thing to remember with our definition of whiteness: it is a building project toward maturity that ultimately leads toward our destruction. Whiteness affects all of us. It affects us differently, but it affects all of us and not for our flourishing. 
I’ll see you next week.
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Places and Feelings

6/16/2020

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 Whiteness comes to rest in space.
-- Willie James Jennings

Thinking about whiteness and white identity makes us think about the ground, specifically the ground where we live. Thinking about whiteness makes think about neighborhoods, schools, and real estate. The reason that’s true is because from the beginning whiteness and the establishment of white identity and its power in this country was connected to land and labor, specifically private property and the labor on private property. It’s also true because at the intersection of private property and labor and nationalism is where whiteness grew and gains its strength. That means we have to think about borders, fences, boundaries, which leads us back to the ground. Whiteness always leads back to the ground. 

I was struck by this connection when I watched this video about the creation of the suburbs. The suburbs weren’t created accidentally. The reality that schools are more segregated now than in the 1960s is also not an accident. It’s a reality of the creation of the suburbs. The reality that suburbias all around this country are predominantly white is not an accident. The reality that wealth among white families dwarfs that of Black families is not an accident. All of this is interconnected, and the video from College Humor lays it out in an approachable, humorous way. 

I mention that the video is humorous because it shows that the people at College Humor know what Willie Jennings knows: “Whiteness feels.” I have experienced the feelings of whiteness. I felt the feeling of whiteness during Lisa’s sermon on June 7 when she shared some of her own experiences. I’ve been reflecting on some of my own experiences of race and my own racism. It’s painful. Whiteness feels.

You might be wondering at this point what the connection between place and feeling are at this point. The connection is that whiteness makes us think about where we live and how where we live contributes to segregated life, and that thinking is agonizing and painful and often anxiety-inducing. Here’s a concrete example. When I read recently, 
“Overcoming whiteness begins by reconfiguring life geographically so that all the flows work differently; the flows of money, education, support, and attention move across people who have been separated by the processes that have formed us racially, economically, and nationally. We start with the communities that have been left behind in the movement toward maturity [read whiteness], those no longer imagined through the goals of ownership, citizenship, or productive labor, and we join them, we move to them, or we stay in them, or we form them, or we advocate for them, or we protect them. The we here are we Christians and all those willing to live toward a different formation of places. We fight against the segregation that shapes our worlds, and we work to weave lives together.” 
I felt the anxiety, guilt, agony, and pain of living where I live and that where I live contributes to the segregation in my own life and the life of my community. I felt the anxiety of the radical call to discipleship, which is that the work of justice and undoing my own formation in whiteness might mean that I have to move myself and my family. There is a lot of feeling going on there. 

I’m sure there have been lots of feelings in all of us. We have to attend to those feelings as we are on the beginning of this journey together as a congregation, a community of people. Those feelings will intensify as we think about the land we call church, the ground we call North Raleigh, the neighborhoods we call home. We join in those places, but the formation of those places has meant that our joining is incomplete. Yet this is where we have to begin. What was the land of 11905 Strickland Road before North Raleigh was there? Who was on that land long before North Raleigh was ever thought of? What was the community and neighborhoods we call North Raleigh before our houses were built and our communities formed? How have these places formed our joining as a congregation? These are intimate questions. They make us think about our homes, the money in our pockets, the friendships we have formed, the ministry we do. But, it is in thinking and feeling these questions and places that we will be going on the road toward a new way of life.
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The Start of a Journey

6/9/2020

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My first blog post last week would have been a good time to outline what I wanted to do on here. Alas. 

It turns out to be a good thing, though, that I did not pin myself to a specific theme or topic because so much has changed since I started thinking about what to do. I would have thoughts as I was falling asleep about fun topics to cover, and I would email myself those ideas so they would not escape me during sleep. I thought about keeping a movie diary and trying to connect some of the films I’ve watched to bible stories or theology. I thought about taking some of my favorite theology books and picking a different passage each week on which to reflect. 

Then Ahmaud Arbery was murdered while out for a jog. Breonna Taylor was killed inside her own home. George Floyd was killed. In our own city we saw buildings and businesses destroyed, people tackled and beaten, fires, and curfews put in place. I looked back at all my ideas and they all seemed ridiculous. People are dying in the streets and the country is burning, and I’m writing about movies and my favorite books. Am I so disconnected that I choose to think about movies instead of these life and death issues?

This past Sunday we heard about the 21-Day Race Equity Challenge. I decided, then, that my blog will be a weekly diary of my engagement in the Challenge. Before Lisa’s sermon and Debbi’s invitation I read an old interview in Esquire magazine with James Baldwin, an author and civil rights activist in the 1960s. In that interview, the white interviewer asks Baldwin, “Let’s talk about the average citizen, the white man who lives on Eighty-ninth Street and Riverside Drive, what should he be doing [about racism in America].” Baldwin’s answer has stuck with me: “It depends on what he feels. If he feels he wants to save his country, he should be talking to his neighbors and his children.”

I hear Baldwin challenging me to take care of my own issues with race and racism before I try to do anything else for anyone else. Take the log out of your own eye, first, Jesus said. In these diaries, I will reflect on resources from the 21-Day Race Equity Challenge that deal with white identity because, like Baldwin’s challenge, I want to focus on the smallest thing, which is me. I want to go through a time of introspection of my own indifference to, entanglement in, and even my own investment in systems of racial oppression first. I want to figure out and confess how I am still complicit in and captivated by whiteness. 

So, to start, I want to invite you, whoever might read this thing, into this slow journey with me. One of the most difficult classes I took in seminary was with Willie James Jennings, and every class was like being deconstructed. Dr. Jennings warned us that this would happen, but he didn’t leave us alone in our struggles and pain. I remember that he pushed each individual person in the class toward the other people in the class. He taught us to lean on each other while going through this tense and intense class that was a personal struggle for just about every person in there. Engaging with issues of race and racism is still personally challenging and a struggle, but I know I need other people with me in the struggle. We weren’t meant to do this alone. So, please reach out with questions and ideas. I am with you in this struggle and journey, and I want you to be with me. 
​

Peace, Brandon

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Birth in the State of Crisis

6/2/2020

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“The church was given birth in something like a state of crisis, of mingled joy and terror,
in a moment out of time, as one age was passing and another was coming into existence.”
-David Bentley Hart, Theological Territories
This quote has been on repeat in my brain. Hart’s point with this quote is about how Christians think about history. Historical perspective, he says, is from the vantage of the ones who historians deem history-makers. Historical perspective is the perspective of the powerful, the authorities, the victors, the rich.

But, with what perspective do Christians view history? Jesus blows up traditional historical perspectives. Now the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of a Palestinian Jew becomes the focal point of history, and this is totally new and unprecedented. Christian historical perspective is the perspective of the One who ate and drank with sinners, showed mercy to the diseased and prostitutes, broke the Sabbath, and befriended tax collectors and demoniacs. Ultimately, Hart states, the historical perspective for the New Testament writers was that the moment of Jesus is a moment outside of time, when the end of all things is near and God’s Kingdom is on the horizon, even as it is within them now. 

That’s the state of crisis. Everything they knew is coming to an end, and a whole new world and existence was opening up to them. Thus, the “mingled joy and terror.” 

It feels like we are in the same kind of moment. I don’t even need to name the COVID-19 crisis. We’re in an economic crisis and an unemployment crisis, and the virus has disproportionately impacted communities of color for a whole host of structural reasons. We have seen the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and last night David McAtee was killed. Cities have been turned upside down, there are protests, riots, and looting. 

“The church was given birth in something like a state of crisis.” 

I wonder what birth or rebirth our cities and our state need. I wonder what birth or rebirth needs to occur within myself. I wonder what birth or rebirth needs to happen in our church. In the state of crisis within which the early church was given birth, they prayed, lived, and ate together. They shared all their possessions, they eschewed even the idea of private property, and they gave to each person as was their need. They created a way of life that is tangential to the way everyone else was living. 

How might we do that in our own state of crisis? How might our church go on a tangent and be a part of creating alternative forms of community and communion? 

I believe some of us started that tangent Monday night in a prayer vigil on Zoom. We lamented and grieved together the long history and recent deaths of our sisters and brothers of color. We lamented and confessed our own sins and failures. We confessed our idolatry of whiteness and white identity. We lamented and confessed our indifference to suffering, our judgment of how people respond to tragedy, and our fear to look ourselves in the mirror and ask, “Am I part of the problem?”

It was only a beginning, and the work must continue. I invite anyone reading this blog who wasn’t able to be on the Zoom gathering to join us in our work of undoing and unlearning racism and prejudice and working for justice and peace. Begin with us by praying the prayer we prayed together last night, and then join us in this moment of crisis as the Spirit leads us toward birth and rebirth.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Gracious God, by day and night we pour out our prayer to you. We are crying out for justice, yearning for what is right, longing for your peace. Come quickly to help us, O God; save those who call upon your name. 
We lament, O God, the senseless and needless deaths of your children. We lament the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.
We lament that these killings are but the most recent points in a whole history of violence against our sisters and brothers of color. We lament the thread of shed blood: George, Breonna, and Ahmaud, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castille, and Sandra Bland, to Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Emmett Till, countless numbers whose names are known only to you, and ultimately your Son, our Lord, Jesus Christ. 
And we confess, O God, that each of these killings is an affront to you, for having sewn your very image into them, you created and loved each one.
We lament, O God, the history of racial violence, prejudice, and hatred in our country and our state. 
We lament the unjust economic realities that exist because of a history of racial prejudice in our country. We lament the substandard housing and school systems, the healthcare inequalities, and employment opportunities. 
We lament and confess that these realities are not accidental but the consequences of slavery, pillaged lands, lynching, Jim Crow, red-lining, and mass incarceration. 
We lament, O God, and we recognize and confess our own privilege and our own complicity in systems and structures of injustice and discrimination. 
We lament the conditions that create rioting and looting; we lament the looting and theft from communities of color that goes unnoticed, ignored, and too often passes as normal and good business. We lament and confess our rush to judge the actions and responses of the oppressed without first judging our own violence, indifference, and culpability in unjust systems of racial oppression. 
We lament that we have served other lords besides you. We lament and we confess that we have not realized that racism destroys all of us. We lament and we confess that we have hoarded our riches, gloried in our privilege and power, and looked out for our own interests over those of the poor and weak. We confess our own weakness and fear to acknowledge our own prejudices. We lament and confess that we have all too often imagined ourselves to be white and not called ourselves disciples of Jesus.
We lament and we confess the church’s failure to live into the beloved community of the Kingdom of God. We lament and confess the history of using theology to suppress and oppress people of color. We lament and confess how we have used Scripture to justify racial segregation, slavery, violence, and killing. 
Help us to grieve and weep and to be angry with our sisters and brothers who are grieving. We pray for the families of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many more families who have had to grieve the loss of a father, sister, brother, mother, uncle, and aunt. We pray for the children who fear not only for their own lives but for the lives of their parents just because of the color of their skin. We pray for the mothers and fathers of little boys and girls as they carry the weight of teaching their children that their skin color will mean they are treated poorly and looked down upon and seen with suspicion. 
Help us to commit ourselves or recommit ourselves to the cause of justice and peace. It is hard work, O God, and the answers are never simple and they don’t come quickly. Help us to be diligent in the work of justice, grant us perseverance when we feel fragile, and continue to convict us and prod us so that we will not leave the work of unlearning racism behind us.
Help us to listen and pray, but do not let us stop there. Help us to look at ourselves and to speak to each other and our families and to ask the Holy Spirit to search our hearts and lives for the prejudice and racism and violence within us. Help us to do justice peacefully and fearlessly and relentlessly; help us to refuse the call to return to “order,” that old “order” is so tempting but so destructive to our sisters and brothers of color and also to us and it is not what you desire. 
Help us, against all odds, to be hopeful and joyful. 
Gracious God, keep us working and praying for the day when your justice will roll down like waters, and your righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Replenish our strength and stir up our hope as we look for the signs of your coming reign. And fill us with the peace that passes understanding--the deep peace of Jesus Christ our Savior, the one who was crucified on the cross unjustly, and in whose name we pray. Amen.
Peace,
Brandon
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    A Blog by NRPC Pastors

    Rev. Lisa Hebacker, Pastor
    Rev. Brandon Melton, Assoc. Pastor

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