CONCERNING WHITE SUPREMACY

In the May 6 and 13 issues of Gospel Guardian Bryan Vinson wrote at length on “The Racial Problem in America” in which he drew conclusions that I believe to be inimical to the cause of Christ and the unity of mankind. I am therefore submitting the following to the editors in response to brother Vinson’s strictures on the racial problem in America.

I respect brother Vinson as a person and as a writer. Even when he is wrong, as I believe he is this time, he writes responsibly and resourcefully. He is a good thinker and is always worth reading. Being a man of extra-ordinary talent, he is all the more dangerous when he errs. I am reminded of Plato’s warning that the forces of evil never bother with mediocre men, but always demand men of excellence.

Brother Vinson writes with a candor that is indeed rare in these days of racial unrest. He admits that he is a white supremacist, which must be something of a first among ministers of the gospel. First to admit it, that is, for the attitude of the southern white churches in our recent history indicates that there must be many white supremacists in the pulpit. When one is a racist, it is more honorable to admit it than to deny it. But brother Vinson basis his racist views upon scripture as well as history and reason. It is this that strikes me as most offensive: contending for white supremacy in the name of Jesus.

Even if the doctrine of white supremacy be granted as true, it is both unkind and unnecessary to make an issue of it. Brother Vinson is wrong even if he is right, for what is to be gained by reminding inferior brothers of their inferiority. The community of God on earth is a family, the members of which differ somewhat in talent and intelligence. Those brothers who are superior should be charitable toward the inferior and should make no issue of their inferiority. What parent would be so brutal as to belabor the fact that one child is not as competent as another?

It is with poor grace, therefore, for a Christian journal emanating from the southland and circulating interracially, to lend support to the old bromide of white supremacy. Would it be appropriate to circulate this essay on our college campuses where whites and blacks are learning to study together? Should we distribute it at our unity meetings where racial lines are being crossed in terms of the fellowship of the saints? Would it do as reading material at our halfway houses where dedicated workers are trying desperately to rescue black and white youth from dope and vice?

White supremacy is a proud and arrogant doctrine, satisfying perhaps to some ego-thirsty whites, but cruel and oppressive to those who are non-white. If a white man sincerely believes that for some reason God is so gracious as to make him superior to all other men, this should motivate him to work all the harder in lifting up his less fortunate brothers so that the differential between himself and them will not be so great. He certainly should not be conscious of his superiority or make an issue of it, for this is only an indignity to others.

Brother Vinson is unequivocal in his supremacist posture, for he makes it clear that he, as a white man, is both intellectually and socially superior to the Negro, and he is adamant in his denial that he is “under obligation to treat him (the Negro) as my social equal.” He is unhappy with civil rights legislation and criticizes Lyndon Johnson for supporting it as ‘President after voting against it while in the Senate. The Supreme Court was wrong in its decision of school integration, and he implies that a good case can be made, scripturally and otherwise, for keeping blacks in slavery.

This rivals anything that one could expect to hear from Governor Maddox or Bull Conner, and that it should come from a minister of Jesus Christ is unthinkable. Even the Master himself considered himself superior to no man, and it is this kind of arrogance that he grossly condemned. The lowly Samaritan was even more despised in his day than is the Negro in our own time, and yet Jesus associated with them and ministered to them. The Lord did not even place himself above the diseased lepers. The diseased, the outcasts, the prostitutes were all his “social equals,” and he warns against that attitude that prays to God and says, “Lord, I am thankful that I am not like other men.” Who can believe that with Jesus the color of a man’s skin would make any difference whatever? But with Bryan Vinson a man’s color does make a difference. Bryan, dear brother, I commend you to Jesus who is our living pattern.

Brother Vinson invokes the names of Lincoln, Clay and Campbell in his contention for both white supremacy and a separation of the races. These are unfortunate references in that these men were deeply involved with the problem of institutional slavery and were seeking a way out. Surely these men would judge the Negro to be inferior, as indeed he was, being impoverished by slavery for centuries. In proposing a separation of the races they were at least setting the stage for the black man’s liberation. It was the first step of a long journey in bringing justice to the oppressed Negro.

The question brother Vinson should ask is what Lincoln, Clay and Campbell would say if they lived in our time, with a century of the Negro’s emancipation to look back upon. There were no public schools in Campbell’s day. He was in fact one of the pioneers in the struggle to provide education for all children at public expense. Does Bryan believe that Campbell would have been displeased with such civil rights legislation that provides for blacks and whites to study together? How could it be so when Campbell built a schoolhouse on his own farm in which blacks and whites studied together? And they worshipped together in the Bethany congregation!

Lincoln, Clay and Campbell had no way of anticipating the progress that the black man has made in the last century in this country. Bryan Vinson himself appears to suffer from myopia when it comes to seeing Negro achievement, even if he has lived through it. If Bryan could spend a day with me at Bishop College, a Negro institution in Dallas where I am a professor, I could introduce him to many accomplished black folk, who might change his mind about saying that Negroes “cannot be lifted up intellectually and morally.” In associating with talented artists and learned professors at Bishop, Bryan might conclude as I sometimes do, that he will be doing well to feel equal to them!

It was Connie Mack who gave Jackie Robinson a chance in baseball, and he became one of the all-time greats. Since then the Negro has excelled in every sport where he is allowed to compete. And we still admit that it takes brains as well as brawn to be a successful athlete.

Negroes are in opera and they conduct great symphonies; they are artists and musicians. They serve as mayors, legislators and senators; they sit on the Supreme court and function as ambassadors. They are beginning to compete in business and economics. They now serve as professors in predominately white universities, where they are accepted and appreciated by the students. They also make good soldiers, and a disproportionate number of them have made the supreme sacrifice upon the field of battle for their country.

All this and much more the Negro has accomplished with something less than equal opportunity. These are the people, brother Vinson, who only a century ago were slaves that could not spell their own names, even if they had names. What would Henry Clay or Abe Lincoln say now if they could see what you can see, if you will but let yourself. Do you really believe that old Abe, the Great Emancipator, would get up in arms over a black man moving in next door to him? And can you believe that Henry Clay would object to a law that secures for a Negro family the right to spend the night in a motel?

As a teacher of Negroes I am well aware of their inadequacies, which are sometimes discouraging. And it is easy to argue for the white man’s superiority. But when one realizes the deprivations that the black folk have suffered all these years, it is reasonable to conclude that they are behind the white man only for lack of equal chance. There is no conclusive evidence from research that any race is genetically or naturally inferior to any other. Perhaps God in his goodness made us all approximately equal by nature. It is man’s inhumanity to man that has produced white supremacy, if there is such a thing. But the fact remains that the Negro has done very well for himself in recent years in terms of achievement, and for the most part he has had to fight with a short stick.

Brother Vinson identifies with Lincoln’s remark to the effect that “because I would not make a Negro a slave is no reason for making one my wife.” But no one is interfering with Bryan’s freedom by forcing him to take a Negro wife. That is not the issue. Suppose a black and a white choose to marry each other, is Bryan Vinson going to deny them their right to do so? There was an interracial marriage at Abilene Christian College only this year. There were lots of eyebrows on the part of older folk, but the students thought nothing of it, for to them it was a story of a boy and girl in love. The issue is whether the likes of Bryan Vinson will keep their prejudices and postulates out of it and mind their own business, or whether they will choose, in the name of religion, to preach racism and thus deny young people the liberty God has given them.

Bryan includes most of the odious and antique stereotypes about the black man. The Negro is irresponsible and doesn’t want to work, so multitudes of them live in idleness off the labors of others. They swell the welfare rolls by having illegitimate children, thus penalizing by unfair taxation those of us who rear children within the marriage institution. And all this is part of a moral depression that leads to the irretrievable ruin of our nation. Since the Negro cannot be lifted higher by the white man, it only remains for the blacks to pull the whites down.

Surely brother Vinson realizes that whether it is crowding welfare rolls, laziness, crime or illegitimate births the white man is as guilty as the black man. The Caucasian race has little to crow about when it comes to moral rectitude. The white man’s treatment of the American Indian is too shameful and tragic to contemplate. The British and the Germans, supposedly the most superior of all Caucasians, were brutal in their treatment of Indians and Jews.

The white man’s long enslavement of the African was so grossly cruel that we should endure a great deal in terms of inconvenience and taxation before we begin to complain. Hunted down like animals, black folk were stolen from their families, forever separated from their loved ones by being shipped across the sea under conditions of indescribable torture. Many were known to commit suicide rather than be subjected to such inhumane treatment. Sold on the auction blocks of this country, the Negro was accounted as nothing more than a dog or mule.

All these years the white man allowed the black man to have only a black woman, never a white one, while of course the white man arrogates to himself the right to have both the white and the black women. The slave owner raped the black woman, infusing white blood into the Negro race. And it was Lincoln, brother Vinson, who warned of the perils of a nation whose fathers sold their own sons upon the auction block!

If with these grim and tragic scenes of the white man’s inhumanity before you, you can still champion the myth of white supremacy, brother Vinson, I can only say that I want no part of it. I would only add, in the light of the previous paragraph, that our judgments should be tempered by the realization that many of us who call ourselves white may really be Negro. There may well be upward of 12 million Octoroons in this country, people who are at least one-eighth Negro, who pass as white. And if you have any black blood you are a Negro, according to the white man’s judgment.

How ironical it would be for Bryan Vinson, after writing such an essay, to turn out to be an octoroon. Born and bred in the southland, as I presume he was, it is altogether possible for him to have Negro blood and not know it. How tragic, for he could not even have social intercourse with himself and part of him would be inferior to the other part of him! But assuming that he is as white as white can be, for whatever virtue that may have, he is more like Christ when he judges the black man as if he too were black. Jesus teaches us that we will be judged by the way we judge others. Many a white man has vented his prejudice against the black man, little realizing that all the while he too was Negro.

In my own case, if I find out that I am among the 12 million whites who have black blood, it will be no big deal, for I don’t believe that it is all that bad to be black. Has not God made of one blood all nations of men who dwell on earth? If Jesus died for the black man as well as the white, and loves him as much, should I be too concerned if Negro boys and girls tag along with my children to school or if a black family sits next to mine in a restaurant. —1201 Windsor Dr., Denton, Texas 76201

(This essay was submitted for publication in Gospel Guardian, Lufkin, Tex., but was not used. Editor Wallace acknowledged it with a warm letter of appreciation.)