American Golgotha

“The Tortured Christ” (1975)

Brazilian Sculptor Guido Rocha

“The South is crucifying Christ again
By all the laws of ancient rote and rule:
The ribald cries of “Save yourself” and “fool”
Din in his ear, the thorns grope for his brain,
And where they bite, swift springing rivers stain
His gaudy, purple robe of ridicule
With sullen red; and acid wine to cool
His thirst is thrust at him, with lurking pain.
Christ’s awful wrong is that he’s dark of hue,
The sin for which no blamelessness atones;
But lest the sameness of the cross should tire,
They kill him now with famished tongues of fire,
And while he burns, good men, and women too,
Shout, battling for black and brittle bones.”

• ”Christ Recrucified” by Countee Cullen (1929)

We crucify Christ every day in America.

The first time I became aware of this was the winter of 2012… in the days following the murder of Trayvon Martin.

It was still in the relative early days of Social Media for me. I’d had a Facebook account for a couple of years, but I did not really understand the depth and breadth of racism in America… even though I had glimmerings of doubt when seeing the way much of the country lashed out against the election of Barack Obama 4 years earlier.

It wasn’t until February 26th, 2012, and the following days, weeks and months leading up to the acquittal of George Zimmerman that the last of the mud was washed away from my eyes and I thought I could finally see America for what it was. But 4 years later, standing on the courthouse lawn on a windy winter night, I began to understand that the choice to see is only the beginning.

There is a common aphorism that states that one should never read the comments section, on anything. But it was there that I began to see what (White) America thought about Trayvon Martin.

He was a Thug.

He was a Threat.

He shouldn’t have even been there.

He got what he deserved.

I saw the ways (mostly) White people tried to justify his death as if their own existences were on the line, and in a twisted way they very much were. Calls for peace and for reconciliation filled the air, often from well-meaning White Christians, who perhaps for one fleeting moment saw the cracks in what they thought America was… and through those cracks caught a glimpse of what America has actually been for centuries.

We crucify Christ every day in America.

We always have…

His name was Matthew Williams.

Born in 1908 in Virginia, following the death of his Mother at the age of 4, he and his sister Olivia came to live in Salisbury MD with his maternal grandmother Mary Handy. At age 8, he started school, but at 14 when his grandfather died, he left school to find work to help support his family. By all accounts he was a frugal, hard-working young man, who managed to find employ with Mr. Daniel Elliot, a prominent local lumberyard and factory owner.

The truth surrounding what happened next has been buried and lost. But what IS known is that by the afternoon of December 4th, 1931, Daniel Elliot would be found dead, and Matthew Williams -himself injured- would be accused of his murder.

By the time night had fallen, a mob of hundreds of Whites from Salisbury and surrounding communities had kidnapped Matthew from the Negro Ward of Peninsula General Hospital, dragged him to the courthouse lawn, and proceeded to torture and hang him. His body was then pulled behind a truck through the black neighborhoods, and finally set on fire in a vacant lot.

Despite the hundreds of local residents in the crowd that watched a young man of 23 years ritually tortured and sacrificed on the altar of American White Supremacy, no one was ever held accountable. It was determined, as always was the case with lynchings time and time again, that Matthew Williams was murdered by persons unknown.

This act was not simply “mob justice” inflicted on one person for an alleged crime, but an act of terrorism directed at an entire community of people for the crime of simply existing. Repeated time and time again across the country for almost a full century beyond the official ending of chattel slavery, and if we are telling the truth, it continues to this very day. And the message remains essentially the same.

If you step out of line, this will happen to you.

Matthew Williams, beyond whatever may have actually happened on that day, was lynched because he was Black in America. By people who probably went to church that Sunday and who considered themselves “good” Christians.

Christians who would choose silence over justice in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

Not a dozen or so feet from where he died, a large banner for the Salisbury Community Fund stood, with the words “He Who Gives All Feeds Three — Himself, His Hungry Neighbor and Me”, an image of a White Jesus accompanying this plea…

Christ was crucified in Salisbury, by persons unknown.

His name was Yeshua Ben Yosef, the dark-skinned Jewish son of a working family from Nazareth in 1st century Roman-controlled Palestine. At some point in his adult life, he became an itinerant preacher; travelling around the countryside, speaking of the Kingdom of God in parables, and teaching a way of life that exemplified radical love of God and neighbor. Some even said he could perform miracles.

And at some point along this road, he became a threat to both the religious elites of his own people, and the Empire of Rome.

By the age of 33, he had been captured… tried… found guilty… tortured… and finally crucified by Rome. Crucifixion was a sadistic, brutal and humiliating public punishment, meant to drive home the message that those who had power would use it to keep that power, and those without power could do nothing to stop it.

Jesus was lynched in Jerusalem.

In his work The Cross and the Lynching Tree, the Reverend James Cone, considered the father of Black Liberation Theology, dedicated an entire chapter to the influential American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, contrasting his ability to deftly explain the role of Christ and his suffering, but somehow always stopping short of making the connection between what happened to Jesus in 1st century Palestine and what was happening to African Americans in 20th century America. For all his good works, Cone felt that Niebuhr lacked the “imagination”, perhaps even the “empathy” to connect the dots between the suffering that was at the center of his very faith, and the reality of the suffering going on around him. He goes on to say:

“During most of Niebuhr’s life, lynching was the most brutal manifestation of white supremacy, and he said and did very little about it. Should we be surprised, then, that other white theologians, ministers, and churches follow suit?”

This is where we are today, just 400 years past the first recorded arrival of enslaved Africans on the shores of what would eventually become the United States of America. And there remains a barrier in the minds of the vast majority of White Americans as to why this matters.

There is a saying; that one should never attribute to malice what could better be explained by stupidity or ignorance, which in a way should give hope in this situation, because it would imply that a lack of education is what is the issue. If only White Americans (and White Christians in particular) were told the truth, then they would be “set free” from the sin of “whiteness”.

But if it was simply a matter of making known what the reality was, then the stories of Matthew Williams… of Trayvon Martin… of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castille, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Walter Scott, John Crawford (and countless others, known and unknown) should be more than enough to make the connection in their/our hearts.

And if America is a “Christian” nation, then the most obvious story in our shared heritage should be more than enough to inoculate us against any claim of a lack of knowledge.

Jesus of Nazareth was lynched.

That should be enough.

Yet Christ is crucified again and again and again in America, and still we consider ourselves innocent of the crime.

Because in America… for far-too-many Americans… Jesus is White.

And “whiteness”, in America, is innocence.

In “A Letter to my Nephew”, which appeared in his 1963 work “The Fire Next Time”, author James Baldwin wrote:

“I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it and I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. … But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”

It would be disingenuous of me to assume that all White American Christians are unaware of this connection. But the fact remains that were that to be true, it does not seem to be enough to change anything. Baldwin’s words speak to this paradox, when he says that they “do not know it and do not want to know it”.

The innocence constitutes the crime.

When someone is killed by police, especially if they happen to be Black, then inevitably the blame for what happened will fall upon them. There is no “innocence” for them.

And when the wider culture and institutions which allow something like this to happen are pointed out, no effort is spared in shifting and deflecting blame away from White Supremacy as a system, and back onto the shoulders of the person who can no longer defend themselves, and just as often onto the community from which they came. Even when it is acknowledged as being “a tragedy”, the unspoken thought is that the tragedy was of the victim’s own making.

I do not believe that most American Christians would say that Jesus of Nazareth “deserved” what happened to him, even if their Christology demands that he had to atone for the sins of mankind. But to most (White) American Christians, their Jesus has always been aligned with Whiteness. And American Christianity is now essentially the state-sponsored religion of the same kind of empire that crucified Christ in the first place.

Today is Good Friday, and Jesus will be crucified again by the Empire of Rome. He will die a criminal, and many around him will say that he somehow brought this upon himself. r.

Today, somewhere in the United States, a Black person will be lynched by the Empire of America. And White Christians will say that this person will have somehow brought it on themselves.

I do not want to imply that state-sanctioned violence is the only measure by which we can critique American White Supremacy. Like any system, it is complex and pervasive, and runs the gamut from the built-in inequities of our Criminal Justice system, to disparities in health care, housing, schooling, and employment, to the daily microaggressions that plague Black Americans.

Nor is oppression simply limited to a “White/Black” dichotomy.

But if anything can be considered an “original sin” in America, it’s the creation of “Whiteness”, to justify the oppression of anyone or anything not considered “White” enough.

If our Christ is White, then there is no way can ever hope of escaping the tomb in which we have become buried in. A tomb not unlike that which the real Jesus found himself in following his crucifixion. A tomb which he would inevitably escape from.

The true message of Easter to me is not that Jesus died for us, but that he lived and was killed because of us. And more importantly, God would not allow our sin in lynching of him to kill that divine connection that we all desperately need, even if we don’t know it. The Resurrection shows that ours is not the final word.

So where does that leave us?

I am not saying that the lynching of Black Americans is somehow justified as a sacrifice on the altar of American White Supremacy, or in order to somehow “save” White Americans from themselves. (And historically, lynchings took on perverse religious and ritualistic tones). But I believe that we are and have always been inside that tomb in America, comfortable in our place, and afraid to come out for fear of seeing the truth of what we have always been. And fear of what we will have to become in order to be resurrected.

Our Jesus must no longer be “White”, but aligned with those who are sacrificed in the name of “Whiteness”.

Our Jesus can no longer be the “White Jesus” of America, but the Jesus that would today have been called a “Thug”, or a “Criminal”.

We crucify Christ every day in America. But if we are brave and hopeful and yes, faithful enough, then we can be resurrected into our common humanity and kinship with God.

Our tomb can no longer be big enough for us.