THE COLOR TAX

Take your wrongdoing out of my sight. Cease to do evil. Learn to do good, search for justice, help the oppressed, be just to the orphan, plead for the widow. - Isaiah 1

Aside from what has happened and may still be happening to the Negro in the South, there are some disturbing facts coming out of the North in reference to the black man’s plight in that part of our nation.

Take an enlightened city like Chicago for instance. The black man lags far behind the white man in virtually every area of living, even in those cases where the Negro has equal education. The housing market is severely restricted for Negroes, even when they have the money to pay, and this is believed to be at the heart of many other problems. The black houses in Chicago arc on the average 20% smaller and five times more dilapidated. Still they pay the same average rent - and on incomes that are one-third less! This means that white folk, who have more money, spend no more for their superior housing than Negroes do for their slums.

A Negro college graduate in Chicago earns less than a white high school dropout. Because one happens to be black he has more difficulty finding suitable employment, advancing to a higher salary bracket, and living where he chooses to live at an equitable cost. This ean well be called the color tax, the only difference being that one is of a different color. He has to pay more for l(\5s, work just as hard for less opportunity to advance, and get less pay for the same work. Some progress has been made in some of these areas, but our nation has hardly measured up to Isaiah’s call for justice.

It has not been too many years since the Chicago Real Estate Board would expel any of its members who would sell “white” property to a Negro, and the time was when the homes of blacks would be bombed whenever they attempted to settle among the whites. Even the F .H.A. encouraged community development “along racial lines,” thus preserving segregation in the queen city of the midwest. This is Chicago we are talking about, not Birmingham or Atlanta.

That was back a generation or so, and we can be thankful for the progress made. But we have hardly begun the search for justice that the prophet calls for. Let us face it. We still tax men for their color, even up North.

I doubt if even we Christians realize how sinful this is, how terribly unjust, how grossly oppressive. Racism is more than a crime against a fellow human being, for it is a heinous sin against God. And we are racists whenever we allow color or nationality to make a difference in either the way we think or act toward our fellows.

Racial prejudice is surely the most insidious and deceptive of all our sins. It eats like gangrene within us, as cancer sometimes does, without our being conscious of it. We are unlike God when we are respecter of persons, and our adversary the devil has us just where he wants us in having us believe that our “benevolence” toward the Negro means that we are not racists.

In an East Texas town I recently sat around the table with men and women who are surely as spiritual as any of its citizenry. They love Jesus and the Bible and enjoy edifying conversation. When the conversation turned to Negroes I noticed a distinct change in attitude. Oh, they all love the Negroes of course, and they believe in treating them right. But . . . One does not have to discuss intermarriage for racism to raise its ugly head. The business man speaks of the peril of hiring “one of them.” The society woman talks of the impropriety of “one of them” in her garden club. The PTA officer tells of the problems he or she has with “them” at the meetings. The churches of course are segregated.

It is more of the color tax in East Texas — and in Colorado and California, in Kansas and New York, and in our hearts. We penalize a man because of his color. We allow color to make a difference. A person like myself runs the risk of actually losing friends in suggesting that “I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one of them” is a racist judgment. For some reason one hardly ever hears “I wouldn’t want my son to marry one of them.” Perhaps this is because, consciously or not, the white person has always assumed that the white male has right to both black and white women.

That term “one of them” is a disrespectful, degrading way of referring to people for whom Christ died. It assumes a stereotype — the lazy, shiftless, dirty, stinking, step’n-fetchit nigger. It seldom occurs to whites that when this stereotype does fit, and of course it does in some cases (with some whites thrown in as well), that it is our sins and the sins of our forebears that are at least partly responsible. History tells us that some of the blacks of Africa, when tracked down by white slave traders, killed themselves rather than be sold on the slave block. They hardly fit the stereotype. When people have been deprived for centuries by slavery and depression we can hardly expect them to be paragons of humanity. And how responsible is white America for that slavery and depression for the black man?

For those of us who believe there is only one important question: what does Jesus think of a color tax?

His behavior in the synagogue in Nazareth, when he spoke to the folk about their racial prejudice, would suggest he honors no racial lines nor any color tax. He told the prejudiced Jews, who thought of themselves as heaven’s special people, that God was equally concerned for the likes of Sidonians and Syrians. It was here that his own people in his own home town attempted to kill him for his liberal racial views.

Knowing what it means to be despised and rejected. Jesus knows what it means to be black. This he learned through suffering, and that may be why so few of us can identify with the oppressed. When Isaiah calls for learning to do good, the implication may be that we too must suffer before we learn to do good and search for justice.

What might be done through legislation about the color tax is an open question, and we will rejoice in whatever progress comes through such means. But disciples of Jesus have the higher obligation to see to it that in their own lives and hearts they become color blind and therefore refuse to levy any color tax - none at all. — the Editor