A Moment of Turning

We are a people on a journey—a journey from centuries of conquest, genocide, and slavery to conversion, repentance, and new history; a journey from exploitation and oppression to a time of turning, healing, reparation, and redirection. When a people are on a journey, there are two inseparable questions: Who am I? Where am I going? Identity and direction.

I struggle with answers that flow out of my distant past when African-American people experienced the whips and the chains, slave ships and auction blocks, plantations, the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, separate but equal, bus boycotts, picket lines, and now the racism of the '90s, which continues to manifest itself East, West, North, and South while our president attacks the "politically correct" movement, states in clear terms his view that the government does not have the responsibility to provide for the human welfare of the people, and vetoes the civil rights bill.

The 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in America has become the occasion to ask the question of identity and direction for all of us who have been touched and shaped by the world-changing realities that it set into motion. The world has not been the same since. The impact of Christopher Columbus' arrival on each of our histories in the particular and in the collective created a new world order defined by genocide, conquest, and slavery.

For some of us, this is a kairos moment—a moment of truth, a moment of turning, a moment of redirection and new commitments, a moment to forge covenants that will lead us from the despair of our past and present to the promise and hope of our future.

AS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN, I experience with a great deal of pain the history that was set into motion when Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492. Six years later Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. As the indigenous people in the Americas were exterminated, the invaders found themselves forced to locate an alternative labor force to continue the exploitation of the vast resources. They turned to Africa as a supply base of labor.

It was in 1518 that a Spanish ship carried the first cargo of our people from the Guinea Coast to the Americas. This opened a slave trade that was to endure for three-and-a-half centuries. The human cost is staggering. Some statistics put the total number of Africans who lost their lives during the middle passage (or before by resisting capture) at 200 million. The number of our people who reached the Americas as slaves was in the tens of millions.

We can never forget that we were taken by force, in chains, or that some of us came on slave ships called "Jesus." We were seen as chattel, not human beings; as objects, not subjects; as property that could be bought, owned, possessed, and sold. In this nation of the free and the brave, we were only three-fifths of a human being, and we possessed no rights that whites had to respect.

With Christopher Columbus came a worldview of domination and control and a system that justified and sanctioned exploitation and enslavement. Within the context of the growth of capitalist wealth, doctrines of race and race difference began to appear. The worldview of domination and conquest saw the world in black and white. White, of course, was genetically superior and black genetically inferior. 1492 and the worldview that it represented rooted itself in a doctrine of racism that justified exploitation.

Racism became a strong support pillar for the worldview. Racism was legitimated, institutionalized, and locked into the social consciousness of the people at large. It became part of the collective psyche. The horrors that accompanied the plundering of Africa had to be justified. Race and racism therefore became a permanent stimulus for the ordering of exploitative relations.

The system of exploitation was also justified on the basis of religion. The power of the church was called upon to undertake the legitimating task. The church accompanied the explorations and was an intimate partner—a co-partner with colonial power and privilege.

There was a close relationship between missionaries who represented the church in its goal of conversion of the heathen and the economic goals and objectives of the invading countries. Missionaries often had a free passage on merchant ships; they often helped as interpreters to complete business transactions; funds for missionary work came largely from the state. And according to Arthur Schlessinger Jr., in his book The Missionary Enterprise and the Theories of Imperialism, some missionaries did not hesitate to hint that the Christianizing of the heathen lands would produce much commercial benefit.

A congregational minister in a sermon in 1850 before the American Board of Commissioning for the Foreign Missions said, "If the manufacturers of our country find their way to Africa and China, to the Sandwich Islands, and India in increasing abundance and produce correspondingly remunerative returns, it is because the herald of salvation has gone before, seeking the welfare of the people, changing their habits of life, breaking down their prejudices, and creating a demand for comforts and wealth before unknown."

This history of racism continued into religious structures in the Americas where slavery was preached as the will of God. Slaves were taught to be obedient to their masters and segregated into what were called the "Nigger Balconies." The independent black church was therefore born as an alternative and protest to the racist practices and ecclesiology of the white church. It created the free space where African Americans could worship God in the way they wanted to worship. It was the space where African Americans were affirmed as subjects, not objects. It became the instrument that provided for the social, economic, and political welfare of African Americans.

IT IS THIS HISTORY and the continuing practices and policies of legitimating racism that require the church to come to 1992 in a truth-telling, confessional, and resistance posture if new history, new behavior, and new actions are to occur. The imperative for the church is to stand and confess its faith; to renounce in clear and unambiguous tones the false perceptions of reality; and to resist the vicious circle of destruction of peoples and the earth.

Lest we forget, I take us back to a moment 22 years ago, in 1969. A prophet by the name of James Foreman walked down the aisle of Riverside Church in New York City and presented the Black Manifesto. This manifesto had emerged out of the Black Economic Development Conference and was directed at the problem of exploitation of African Americans both in the United States and overseas by a racist, white, capitalist America. It demanded from the white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, as part of the system of domination, $500 million in reparations for education, communications, and economic development.

In addition to walking down the aisle of Riverside Church, Jim Foreman and a group from the Black Economic Development Conference occupied the Inter-Church Center offices of the United Church of Christ, the United Presbyterians, the Methodist Church, the Reformed Church of America, and the office of the National Council of Churches. For this form of truth-telling and witnessing, the denominations responded by requesting an injunction. The courts responded by issuing a temporary restraining order against Foreman.

While the issue of reparations and the manifesto itself divided the church and were the source of heated debate within and among African-American and white Christians, it was Gayraud Wilmore of the then-United Presbyterian Council on Church and Race who struck a prophetic note in a 15-page response to the Black Manifesto:

No institution in American society has made more confession of guilt for its involvement in the sin of slavery and in segregation and discrimination against Black people than has the Christian church. No institution in America has issued more high sounding pronouncements of the principles of a commitment to social justice. If reparations are truly an acceptable form of the concrete form of repentance, then the White Churches of the nation have a religious duty to demonstrate the seriousness and the sincerity of the Christian conscience by repaying to oppressed minorities whatever reasonable portion can be calculated from the benefits which have accrued to them through slavery and Black subjugation.

Whatever one may think of James Foreman's politics and the tactics of disruptive confrontation, the church should recognize that this is not the first time God has called upon the wrath of those outside the church to summon it to repentance and obedience. The great wealth that the churches have accumulated has become a spiritual liability, because rather than help men and women to destroy the dehumanizing, demonic structures that cripple them, it has been used to enhance the welfare of the churches and their members.

The time may be at hand for the cleansing of the temple as our Lord accomplished it. The time may be here, as the scriptures warned, for a judgment to begin in the household of faith. It may well be that for all his vehemence and rudeness, James Foreman is being used by God to declare to the churches: "This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?"

SISTERS AND BROTHERS, the time is at hand. We cannot continue with business as usual. The threats to life in this nation and around the globe demand from all of us a new way of thinking, acting, and being. It is time for new affirmation and new covenants. A radically new orientation is required; a movement of unity, solidarity, and resistance is required in all parts of the world if we are to pursue a vision of a just peace for all of creation.

I believe that 1992 presents us with a pivotal moment in history. This is a truth-telling time, a world-changing time, that can provide us with new identities, new behavior, and a renewed mission for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all of God's people. This is a time for unity, solidarity, and resistance—not fragmentation and division.

The question has come up over and over again with regard to whether 1992 is a time for Native Americans to take the lead, to offer out of their pilgrimages insights and wisdom for the facing of these days. To teach us out of their rootedness to Mother Earth their understanding of peace, harmony, justice, wisdom. And the answer is obviously yes. We all—African Americans as well as Hispanic Americans, Asian and white Americans—have much to learn from our Native American sisters and brothers. The shameful reality of our histories is how little we know of one another and how the history of divide and conquer has defined and continues to define the relationships among us.

And yet I truly believe that this position alone is not adequate, for it can become a way of making 1992 simply a Native American affair. It is not.

The past 500 years of exploitation, genocide, and slavery have impacted us all. We are all implicated in one way or another. None of us is immune.

This therefore has to be the occasion when each of us faces our story and how we have been shaped as a result of our journeys. This must be the moment when we make connections, see the linkages, and forge where possible common affirmation and strategies toward a world of justice and peace that respects the integrity of creation.

I believe that 1992 must be a moment when we in the United States face our kairos—this is a time of reflection and turning from the social paradigm that has guided us for the past 500 years. A system that produces a permanent underclass is unacceptable; a system that is willing to be built on the backs of and at the expense of the poor and the marginalized is unacceptable; a system of racism, materialism, and militarism is unacceptable.

This is the time for an inclusive movement—a broad-based movement, a radically and culturally diverse movement, a partnership movement of grassroots organizations and churches that are reaching for the America that has never been and yet must be.

—Yvonne V. Delk

This article is adapted from a speech she gave in May 1991 at the National Council of Churches' consultation "1492-1992: Faithful Responses."

A Snapshot of Our Social Reality

For the truth-telling to start in 1992, we first need to look inward. The National Association of Religious Women (NARW), a Catholic feminist social justice organization, has made the following points the bone and muscle of its movement:

• Our work is grounded in the experience of each woman's voice and participation.
• Our experience as women helps us make the connections among the issues of sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, imperialism, and ecocide.
• Our experience found voice in the outpouring of feminist/womanist/mujerista liberation theologies and spiritualities that provide critical reinterpretations of the sacred.
• Our analysis and theological vision has brought about action and a commitment to work for change.

Even though we proclaim wholeness and struggle for justice, 1992 reveals the historical fissures and barriers that shape our present day. Although efforts are being made, most faith-based women's groups are still not inclusive. Where are the real life connections—the genuine relationships and sustained friendships—with the diversity of women who live in our communities? Our capacity to find ways to build new relationships among ourselves as women—and by extension, among our families and communities—is the real issue for creating a transformed society for the next hundred years.

1992 is a "teachable moment" because we will pause and take a serious look at 500 years of division, segregation, discrimination, and exploitation. 1992 hands us a snapshot of our pyramid-shaped social reality where we can see that today and throughout the past 500 years women have experienced victimization and victimized each other. 1992 offers us a precise moment to acknowledge this legacy, which hangs before us, even as we commit ourselves to the task of consciously building organizations that are inclusive.

The kairos moment, the presence of God and the clamor for truth in our times, is already here. Grace sputtered quickly across the United States last spring when women of faith initiated a "Caravan of Solidarity: Women Resist and Respond." In 14 cities, 100 groups united to send humanitarian aid to women and children in Iraq, while medical supplies were donated to the homeless and transitional houses serving women and children at each stop in the United States. New links in our work, and inclusive connections among Arab and Christian women, were forged.

May the kairos moment in 1992 become an accelerated time for the dismantling of the barriers around us and the building of genuine relationships, sustained friendships, and inclusive community among us.

—Kathy Osberger