BILL MOYERS: Marty told me that you launched a strenuous effort to help the members of that church overcome the shame, and I’m quoting him, “they had so long been conditioned to experience.” What was the source of that shame?
REVEREND WRIGHT: What Carter G. Woodson calls the miseducation of the Negro. That Africa is ignorant, Africans are ignorant; there is no African history, there is no African music, there is no African culture, anything related to Africa is negative, therefore you are not African. Chinese come to the country, they’re still Chinese-American. We have Chinatown. Koreans come, they’re still Korean. They have Koreatown. Africans come, they’re colored. They’re Negro. They’re anything but Africa. In fact, we don’t even call them Ebbu, Ebibu, Fulani, Fanti, Ga, no, no, no – they’re all “Negro.” Portuguese, “Negro” Spanish. They’re all gettin’ lumped into black, but we’re not black, we are Negro with a capital N.
The shame of being a descendant of Africa, was a shame that had been pumped into the minds and hearts of Africans from the 1600s on, even aided and abetted by the benefit of those schools started by the missionaries, who simply carried their culture with them into the South and taught their cultures being synonymous with Christianity. So that to become a Christian, you had to let go of all vestiges of Africa and become European, become New Englanders and worship like New England, worship God properly and right. Well, that shame was a part of the shame that many Africans in the '60s and the '70s were feeling.
Dr Reuben Sheares is my predecessor – he was the interim pastor at Trinity – coined the phrase “unashamedly black,” where blacks coming outta the '60s were no longer ashamed of being black people, nor did they have to apologize for being Christians. Because many persons in the African-American community were teasing us, Christians, of being a white man’s religion. And no, we’re not ashamed of Christianity. And we don’t have to apologize for who we are as African-Americans. So that, I think, is what Marty was talking about.
BILL MOYERS: So, when Trinity Church says it is unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian, is it embracing a race-based theology?
REVEREND WRIGHT: No, it is not. It is embracing Christianity without giving up Africanity. A lotta the missionaries were going to other countries assuming that our culture is superior, that you have no culture. And to be a Christian, you must be like us. Right now, you can go to Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and see Christians in 140-degree weather. They have to have on a tie. Because that’s what it means to be a Christian. Well, it’s that kind of assuming that our culture, “We have the only sacred music. You must sing our music. You must use a pipe organ. You cannot use your instrument.” It’s that kind of assumption that in the field of missions, people say, “You know what? We’re doing this wrong. We need to take Christ and leave culture at home. We need to learn the culture of people into which we’re moving, and preach the methods of Jesus Christ using the culture that we are a part of.” Well, the same thing happened with Christians in this country when they said, “You know what? Because those same missionaries who went south, they didn’t let us sing gospel music.” That was not sacred–
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BILL MOYERS: Our denomination, the United Church of Christ has called for a sacred conversation on race in America. What are the steps that you think from all of your experience can be taken to move race relations forward?
REVEREND WRIGHT: I think there are many - to start using Bill Jones’ paradigm, about how one sees God. Your theology determines one’s anthropology. And how you see humans determines your sociology. To look at how we’ve come to see race, and in others of other races, based on our understanding of God who sees others as less than important. Less than my people. And where in our religious traditions are there passages in our sacred scriptures that are racist? They’re in the Vedas, the Babylonian Talmud, they’re in the Koran, they’re in the Bible. How do we grapple with these passages in our sacred texts? The same way you grapple with Judges:19, where it’s alright for a preacher to have a concubine and cut her up into 12 pieces. We gotta argue with our texts that are, as we’ve been struggling with, battling with, wrestling with, anti-Semitic. The Christian, “The Jews killed Jesus.” No, we gotta come to grips with, you know, these texts were written by certain people at certain times with certain racist understandings of others who are different. That different meant deficient. That doing that with adults and starting with kids. that begins the conversation that Senator Obama talked about that we need to have. And re-writing the curriculum in our schools to tell the truth in our schools.
