Carly Simon once sung the words: “I’ll bet you think this song is about you…”
Those were my thoughts as I reflected on the racial controversy surrounding a recent post by Dr James White on Facebook (an archived copy of the original can be found here). The post revolved around the sighting of a 15 year old African-American male giving police the finger, shorts below his pants as he casually littered on the street. Dr White’s commentary on the lack of respect for authority being related to fatherlessness, promiscuity and abortion almost broke the Internet. Needless to say, the response from Christians has been volatile.
Though the initial furore may have died down, questions still linger. Chief amongst them for me was: As a black man, why was I not in the least bit offended by what Dr White had to say?
I actually began to wonder “Am I just not ‘black enough’ to be offended?”
Many black Christians were in an uproar. How dare Dr White make such sweeping generalisations about the “black community”? But did Dr White actually address the black community? In his initial response to the outcry, he wrote:
“It was about how judgement is coming upon our land, about how restraint once existed that exists no longer, and it was a lament about what happens when the God-ordained structure of the family breaks down.”
So why did black people feel targeted?
“I’ll bet you think this song is about you? Don’t you?”
Primarily I chock it up to viewing the world through a racial lens versus a biblical one. But maybe I also wasn’t offended because my experience as a young black man in the UK doesn’t mirror that of a young black man in the US. I don’t carry the same “racial baggage”. That’s not to say that institutional racism doesn’t exist in the Met Police; but in politically correct, multicultural Britain, we don’t have the same racial tensions as in the US. The disparity between us is far more pronounced.
Case in point, in 2007 I flew to NYC for my sister’s engagement. As we were driving through Queens, we noticed a pair of cinemas literally feet apart. When I asked my brother-in-law why on earth there were two cinemas right next to each other, he told me that one was the “white” cinema and the other was the “black” cinema. You knew which was which because the “black” cinema had a metal detector and a security guard with a gun.
Segregation still exists, but who is doing the segregating?
Were African-American Christians angry at Dr White because a black youth was “racially profiled”, or because a “white man” dared to open his mouth? What does the fact that they thought this was racial profiling say about their emphasis on “race” over and against scripture?
The song wasn’t about you, but maybe the fact that you thought it was is the real story.
(For more information on the fall-out from these events click here)
