The Supreme Lie

The lie of white supremacy is that I am better, stronger, smarter, and more worthy than people of some other race. If that were true, I would never feel inferior, threatened, or intimidated by the actions and successes of those other races of humanity. Allowing for their full humanity would be no threat to my position.

Michael Jordan would never feel threatened by me on the basketball court or the baseball diamond. He would have nothing to prove in measuring himself against me. We could play HORSE all day long, and he would win every time. We could play one-on-one, and I would be lucky to take control of the ball ball from him, much less get off a shot. There would be no contest it, for I would be far outclassed, outperformed, and outmaneuvered with no hope of scoring the first point.

I played ping pong one time against the fourth rated ping pong player in Brazil. He gave me a lead of ten points to start the match. I got lucky. I managed to score a couple of points on a couple of serves on which I managed some really strong spin on the ball. I was not consistent, however. If I had played every volley with that level of spin, I might have fared decently. As it was, I scored two points while he scored 21. He was be superior player by leaps and bounds.

He had nothing to prove. I was no threat. I was no challenge. I was not even an opponent to him. He knew he was going to win and there was nothing I could do about it.

That is what white supremacy presupposes. That is what it pretends. The problem is that reality does not measure up to its bluster. I might have been a big fish in a small pond among my ping pong playing friends. I was no match, however, against someone who really knew what they were doing and had real skill with the game. As long as I am aware that I am playing basketball against Michael Jordan, I also have nothing much to prove. I can accept defeat at the outset. The problem is when I believe myself to be superior when there is no reality to back it up.

Our history of Black athletes entering professional sports was fraught over this very issue. Jackie Robinson was not allowed to play because he might show up the white players on the field. His success was a threat to the underpinnings of white supremacy. After some time, we started explaining the successes of Black athletes in professional and college sports as the result of being bred for hard menial labor. We tried to cling to the notion that only in the field of athletics could a Black person excel, because we white people had bred them like dogs for physical performance.

We ignored that there is much more to the games of basketball, baseball, and American football than physical strength, speed, and dexterity. We ignored that there is also an element of thought, processing movement, projecting where the play is headed, learning the playbook, and developing a rapport with the other players on the court or field. We could ignore that, because we were concerned with propping up the notion of racial superiority.

Our basic fear of being shown up as being something less than superior, however, is something we never addressed. For generations, we wielded fear as a weapon to control populations of color. We made sure they stayed in their secondary place. We did not allow them entry into our universities. We did not allow them loans to purchase houses. We did not allow them the means to open successful businesses. We tried to force them to continue as the lower working class we could abuse for our own economic and social gain.

Then we elected an educated, eloquent, intelligent Black man as president. Suddenly, all of those notions of our superiority as a race were threatened. Suddenly, a Black child could look past all the stories we had crafted to keep them in a subservient position. Suddenly, that Black child could dream of rising to whatever position of authority, power, respect, or prominence they might believe themselves capable of achieving. We felt threatened. We felt attacked. We felt lied to. We felt that so much of the way the world around us was structured was in chaos.

We weren’t threatened. What was threatened was that underlying, often unspoken, unwritten rule that only white people could rise to prominence. The notion that people of color simply did not have what it took was under attack. It was proven to be false by the results of a national election. We could not stand by and allow that reality to go unchallenged.

That is a lot of what we are responding to today amid the chaos around us. So many voices are seeking and finding a platform not so much to spew hate, although that is the way it often sounds, but to cry out in angst, railing against the lie we had so embedded in our society that white people were as superior to people of color as Michael Jordan is superior to me on the basketball court.

Oh, we might know better. Indeed, we do. The problem we face is that we are confronting that reality for the first time and it makes so many of us angry, afraid, and uncertain. We feel cornered by the beast of a lie we created to give us a sense of superiority, comfort, and courage. Now that beast has been shown to be our own enemy, rather than our friend. It has lied to us for generations. It did so, because that is the beast we created, crafted, and trained. It was never truthful. It never really granted protection. It just built a fake wall of security that is finally crashing down.

It is way past time to let go of the lie. There are people of color who are smarter than I am. There are people of color who are better educated than I am. There are people of color who are more skilled than I am. There are people of color who have risen beyond so many barriers we have erected to keep them in a state of oppression. That is not where they belong. That is not where anyone belongs. We are all one human race. We are all of the same original stock. We are all different, unique, special, and worthy of being granted full participation, respect, welcome, and dignity.

For those of us who claim to follow Jesus, we would do well to remember that God chose to be born into a human family of color. He was no Scandinavian, freckle-faced, red-haired, blue-eyed male. He was a Middle-eastern Jew, related to the Arab peoples we know today much more closely than any Caucasian we might know. Jesus never taught any lie akin to that of racial supremacy. Instead, he called us all to see ourselves as children of God, siblings bound to one another by the love, grace, and full acceptance of God in Christ Jesus. In our shared humanity and siblinghood, there is no room for demeaning one another as inferior to our own position and standing. The whole notion of being superior is just a lie crafted to justify the oppression of some for whom Christ died.

— ©Copyright 2020, Christopher B. Harbin

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