Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Evangelical
Not a Fair Race: The Bible, injustice, and race#10; Justice#35

Not a Fair Race: The Bible, injustice, and race#10; Justice#35

Last updated on: September 28, 2021 at 3:52 am by Rob Dalrymple

Not a Fair Race: The Bible, injustice, and race#10; Justice#35 2021-09-27T12:29:54-08:00 Rob Dalrymple

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

To deny the presence of systemic racism in America one must turn a blind eye to our history.

Fifty meters Ahead

What if a 100-meter dash was to take place next week? And what if over the past five years all the participants had the same privileges in training for the event: They had equal access to training facilities, equipment, nutrition, etc? Everything was equal.

Now, what if moments before the event began some of the participants were given a “head-start”? That’s right: what if some were allowed to begin fifty meters ahead of everyone else? It would not be a fair race.

What if, upon completion of the event, the winner was ecstatic anyways? When asked about the “victory,” they replied that they wanted to give all the glory to God and to their mom.

And what if someone dared suggest to them that the race was not fair? After all, “you had a head start.”

And what if, the winner denied the allegations—even though everyone knows they started fifty meters ahead?

What if, sometime later, the victor admitted that they had a head-start, but then asserted that, “I earned it.”

But what if they didn’t “earn it”? What if they were given the head-start simply because they had more power than the other participants: they simply demanded the right to start fifty meters ahead of everyone else and no one was able to stop them?

This, I suggest, is the framework for the debate regarding systemic racism in our country today. Many Whites are claiming that for the past “x” years everything is equal (though even that is not true). What is too often overlooked is that people of color are not even starting the race from the same position.

Systemic Racism?

One cannot argue that systemic racism doesn’t exist today because everyone has the same rights to education, employment, and wealth accumulation. “Ready, set, go!” “Oh, btw, I’m sorry you are starting so far behind me. You really should work harder to get out of your situation.”

Systemic racism created the systems of injustice and inequity so that, even if all things were equal today, persons of color are not able to start from the same position.

The systems that have been in place since before the founding of our country have so favored Whites and so oppressed Blacks that Whites are not merely beginning the race fifty meters ahead, most Blacks are not even allowed to compete.

I noted in an earlier post that ending chattel slavery did not end the racism that brought about and sustained the system of oppression. The fact is that Whites profited from slavery. Once slavery was abolished, they had to find other ways of maintaining their economic, social, and political superiority. And they did.

[NB: Though I will not discuss many of the ways Whites maintained the oppression of Blacks in this post, I strongly encourage you to consult the work of Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.]

How racism led to the ghettos

In the last few posts, I noted that the educational system in the US is such that most children of color do not have the same opportunities for quality education as most Whites simply because they live in poorer neighborhoods where the schools are often terribly deficient.

In this post, I would like to note some of the leading reasons why most Blacks live in urban areas with suppressed property values and, consequently, lower-quality schools. Mind you: the answers are quite disturbing!

One of the means by which powerful Whites kept the average person of color from gaining access to wealth was through local, state, and federal laws that denied Blacks the ability to purchase housing in growing suburban communities.

[NB: For a detailed discussion of this topic, I highly recommend Richard Rothstein’s, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which provides significant details as to how government policies segregated every major city in the US and the disastrous effects of these policies for persons of color]

For instance, when Blacks attempted to rent housing in White communities, they were barred by laws, rules, or regulations that excluded them from doing so.

And the ability to own a home in these neighborhoods was nearly impossible for a variety of reasons. In 1933, the federal government created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) to help rescue families that were in danger of losing their homes because of the Depression. Rothstein chronicles what happened next,

“HOLC mortgages had low interest rates, but the borrowers still were obligated to make regular payments. The HOLC, therefore, had to exercise prudence about its borrowers’ abilities to avoid default. To assess risk, the HOLC wanted to know something about the condition of the house and of surrounding houses in the neighborhood to see whether the property would likely maintain its value. The HOLC hired local real estate agents to make the appraisals on which refinancing decisions could be based. With these agents required by their national ethics code to maintain segregation, it’s not surprising that in gauging risk HOLC considered the racial composition of neighborhoods. The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red. A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes.”[1]

Even when Blacks were permitted to purchase a home in a more affluent community, they were often unable to secure a loan.

The Federal Housing Authority (FHA), established in 1934, refused to insure home loans for any bank if there were any persons of color in the community because it was deemed too great a risk. This meant that White persons were no longer able to move into a community if there were already Black residents living there. It also meant that Black persons couldn’t purchase one of the homes that the Whites were fleeing because they could not secure a loan. The result is that the home values in Black communities became depressed.

Many local city councils worked diligently to ensure racial segregation in the housing markets, which lead to the depression of home values in Black communities. Rothstein notes, “Exclusionary zoning ordinances could be, and have been, successful in keeping low-income African Americans, indeed all low-income families, out of middle-class neighborhoods.”[2]

By the middle of the twentieth century, the Federal courts had issued numerous rulings against these racially motivated practices. Federal laws forbidding racial discrimination in the housing market soon followed.

It was then that some Whites took matters into their own hands. Builders imposed restrictions on selling newly constructed homes to Blacks. Homeowner’s associations imposed restrictions that forbade Blacks from being part of the associations—thus, making them unable to obtain loans that required the association’s approval before being secured.

At other times, Whites took to violence to ensure that Blacks did not move into their communities. Isabel Wilkerson, in her book, The Warmth of Other Sons: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, details the events of the Chicago riots in 1951 that resulted when Harvey Clark Jr., a Black WWII veteran, and his family moved into an all-White apartment complex closer to his work.

After the Clark family spent the day moving their possessions into their new apartment, a mob, forced them out. The mob, which grew to 4,000, then,

stormed the apartment and hurled the family’s belongings out of a third floor window: the sofa, the chairs, the clothes, the baby pictures. The mob tore out the fixtures: the stove, the radiators, the sinks. They smashed the piano the couple had saved up for their young daughter to play, overturned the refrigerator, bashed in the toilet. They set the family’s belongings on fire and then firebombed the building, leaving even the white tenants homeless. The rioters overturned police cars and threw stones at firefighters who tried to put out the fire.[3]

If space would permit, we could include hundreds and, perhaps, thousands of more stories.[4]

But those laws and practices are a thing of the past!

Of course, it is true that some Black families today are moving into more affluent neighborhoods. See, everything is fine. Racial prejudice is a part of the past!

The problem, of course, even if we assume that this was true, is that most persons of color today lack the resources needed to move into more affluent communities in order to acquire such wealth.

Housing prices in many parts of the US continue to skyrocket. In the past 6 months, my wife and I tried to purchase a home in the Phoenix area only to be constantly outbid by all-cash offers that we regularly $70,000 over the asking price. Houses in other parts of the country were selling for more than $200,000 over the asking price.

NB: As I am finishing this post my wife just stepped into my office space to inform me that our offer yesterday was rejected in favor of an all-cash offer above the asking price.

Sure, this is not indicative of all the housing markets in the US. The fact remains that one of the best ways to for a middle-class family to acquire wealth is to purchase a suburban home and to reap the benefits of rising home values. This is a race that lower-class persons are simply excluded from running.

NB: new data from the Pew Research group has shown that the rich are getting richer at a faster rate than ever and the middle-class and lower-class are declining.[5]

Thus, even if many of the lower-class wanted to join the race, it is probably too late.

So much for having a fifty-meter head start.

If you have been blessed by this blog post and would like to see others benefit too, would you please consider giving a tax-deductible contribution to support determinetruth ministries and make possible future posts like this? You may give a tax-deductible gift by following this link

Good news: If you wish to view this blog on your smartphone through the Determinetruth app simply download the “tithe.ly church” app on your smartphone and insert “determinetruth” as the church name you wish to follow. Once it is loaded, simply click on the “blog” icon and they will automatically load.

If you would like to have Rob speak at your church or organization in person or via zoom, please let us know by filling out the contact info on the Contact me tab on this site.

If you would like to share your story, or if you have questions that you would like addressed in future posts, you may submit them in the Contact me tab on this site.

[1] Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, 64.

[2] Color of Law, 59.

[3] Isabel Wilkerson, in her book, The Warmth of Other Sons: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. Cited by https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/cicero-riot.

[4] See the resources mentioned throughout: Rothstein, Wilkerson, and Blackmon.

[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/ last accessed 9-27-21.

Previous Post

September 21, 2021

Is America's racist past the source of systemic injustice? The Bible, injustice, and race#9; Justice#34

Next Post

October 5, 2021 America’s racist past: The Bible, injustice, and race#11; Justice#36

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category 000 1 Cor 11:17-34 1 Corinthians 1 John 1 Peter 1 Thessalonians 1 Timothy 10 Commandments 2 Corinthians 2 John 2 Peter 2 Thessalonians 2 Timothy 3 John 666 Abortion Acts 2:42 Ahmaud Arbery AIPAC All Saints Day America antisemitism BDS Beast Betting Bible Bible study Biblical Interpretation Biden Book of Acts Boycott Campus Protests Catholicism Ceasefire Chavez Ravine Christian Nationalism Christian Zionism Christianity Today Christmas Church Colossians Communion Convict Leasing Covid-19 Craig Blaising creation Crucifixion Daoud Nassar Deception Deconstruction Democracy Devotional guide Discipleship Easter Eden Education Election End-times Ephesians Eschatology Ethnic Cleansing Evangelicalism Evangelicals Evolution Fall Famine Fascism FIFA Freedom of Speech Galatians Gary Burge Gaza Gaza; Genocide; Boycott Genesis Genocide George Floyd Global Warming God's will Gospel Gospel of John Gospel of Luke Gospel of Mark Gospel of Matthew Government Grace Great Prostitute Hamas Harris healthcare Hebrews HeGetsUs Holy Spirit Holy Week Honor Father and Mother ICJ Immigration Indigenous peoples day Iran Israel Israel Palestine Itamar Ben Gvir James Jesus Joel Willits Jude Just war Justice Kamala Harris Kingdom Of God Kings and Queens land of Israel Law (OT) Lazarus Les Miserable LGBTQ+ Love Luke Mahmoud Khalil Man of Lawlessness Mark Mark of the Beast Marriage Martin Luther King Jr Mercy Mexican Repatriation Military-Industrial-Complex Ministry Mission Money NAFTA Nakba Netanyahu New Creation New Testament Nicaragua Nicodemus Non Violence Occupation Pacifism Palestine Parable Paul Peace Pentecost Peonage Philemon Philippians Politics Poor Power Prayer Pride Month Priests Pro-life Propaganda Prophesy Prophet Qatar Queen Elizabeth Racism Reconstruction Redemption Reformation Resurrection Revelation Roe v Wade Romans Romans 13:1-7 Rome Russia Sabbath Samaritan Seals Sermon Settlements Slavery Spiritual gifts Taxes Tent of Nations Terrorism The Beast Theology Titus Torture Trump truth Ukraine Uncategorized Veteran's Day War Warsaw Ghetto wealth Wedding Women World Cup 2022 Worldview Worship Wrath Yemen Zionism

Select a Month September 2026 May 2026 February 2026 November 2025 October 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 August 2018 June 2018 May 2018 March 2018 September 2017 July 2017 May 2017 November 2016 October 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Three friends refused to bow to a golden image and were thrown into a furnace heated seven times hotter than usual. Who were they?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Daniel, Hananiah, and Mishael Azariah, Michael, and Gabriel Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego Belteshazzar, Hananiah, and Mishael

Support this
Column