Perhaps one of the most significant things that I have learned as a historian is that racial reconciliation is a myth. For this to make sense, however, one must understand the three constitutive elements of that statement: race, reconciliation, and the role of myth.
As I’ve hinted in past pieces, race is not a neutral construct. It is a particular historical one. Whiteness, blackness, Asianness, indigeneity and other such terms are often flexible and stretched by their uses rather than their Platonic forms. This is why Jonathan Tran and others focus less on what race is, a conversation that could occupy much of our time with little tangible effect on the lives of our brothers and sisters, and focus more on what race does: that is, the tangible ways that the construction that we call race shapes our lives. By “the myth of racial reconciliation”, I mean this story that we tell ourselves: that if we just get people with different racial identities together in a room or if we just build more extensive and diverse friend groups, racial disparities will fade and racial injustice will cease. After all, no one wants to be racist…right?
It is unfortunate that there are still Christian circles that latch onto this language because it is, at its root, less than Christian. I know and respect many dear brothers and sisters who use the language and justify it, but I personally cannot. This is not to say that the language of reconciliation is sub-Christian: reconciliation lies at the heart of the human being’s relationship with God and her fellow human beings. But when one appends race to the term, it loses its historical significance. Reconciliation with God and reconciliation with your neighbor assume prior peace broken by sin and later restored. When we talk about race, we are talking about a concept whose very root is exploitative. What is sub-Christian about the term is that it obscures the historical reality that there is no relationship to restore. Rather there are wounds to heal, modes of domination to dismantle, and methods of exploitation to resist. Such an idea is summed up in my favorite sentence of one of my new favorite books, as Jonathan Tran explained Cedric Robinson’s term “racial capitalism”:
Racism helps set the conditions of domination necessary for capitalist exploitation, just as exploitation in turn elicits the justification that, under conditions of domination, racism provides…the process of exploitation produces [racial] distinctions.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said it this way:
It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalization to clothe their acts in the garments of righteousness. And so with the growth of slavery, men had to convince themselves that a system which was so economically profitable was morally justifiable. The attempt to give moral sanction to a profitable system gave birth to the doctrine of white supremacy.