I've been thinking about the lie that will not die.
Hi, I’m Rick Thyne and I’m grateful that you found your way to these pages. Perhaps in these conversations we’ll find our way to more of the common good that is - for me - our best hope for a future in which all of us thrive. If you've found this column and would like to get my latest column delivered, free, to your inbox every two weeks, you can subscribe at the bottom of this page.
I’ve been on my journey of faith for over seven decades, moments of which have been filled with wonder, much of which has been the left-foot/right-foot routine of trying to be a faithful servant. Surprisingly, more of the journey than I might have anticipated has been a struggle, trying to figure out from season to season what it takes to be intellectually honest about my faith, finding ways to be morally good in a more complex moral world, and exercising my faith in the confusing world in which I live. Perhaps this struggle is why my favorite story about faith is the one about Jacob, who wrestled all night with God.
Jacob wanted God to bless him, but God, who visited him while he was sleeping by a brook, was reluctant to grant his wish. So Jacob grabbed on, tugged at God, and wrestled all night until God relented. OK, OK! Here’s the blessing. Your name is no longer Jacob; it is Israel, which means the one who wrestles with God. Then God wounded Jacob’s hip and vanished into the night. In the last scene of the story we see Jacob rising beside the brook at dawn and walking toward the sunrise, limping.
Doré, Paul Gustave, Jacob wrestling with the angel. 1855.
I never wanted a particular blessing from God, but I do want to know the answer to the two questions that faith pushes at me, decade after decade. Who Am I? and Why Am I Here? I’ve been wrestling with these questions for a long time and finally, with my own limp, have what I consider answers that work for me. Who Am I? I believe that, like every human being, I am a beloved child of my Creator. Each of us gets our sacred worth not from our moral conduct, certainly not from our ethnicity, race or gender, and not from our wealth or intellect or productivity. We are precious souls simply because we are human beings.
Why Am I Here? My answer to this question may not be at all like yours, but here is what works for me. I am here to do my part to turn the human race into the human family. I believe that, as sisters and brothers of the same Creator, we belong to one another and each of us shares the task of binding ourselves to one another. This is the sunrise I limp toward as I rise each morning.
In recent months I’ve become acutely aware that this task is made frightfully difficult by a lie in our national family that will not die. It’s not the lie about the outcome of the recent election, though that one was and remains a real whopper. No, this lie comes from the birth of our country and the original definitions of who we are as a people.
Article I, Section 2 of the US Constitution defines three categories of people in the new country: free persons (meaning white people), Indians not taxed (apparently some Native Americans paid taxes; who knew?), and – infamously – three fifths of all other persons, meaning of course Black people, who were not granted full human status. In Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, voters are described as male inhabitants of [each state], being twenty-one years of age.
Boiled down, this means that the Constitution limited voting rights to white males.
This is the lie behind this language: White men are smarter, more competent and morally superior to women and people of color.
This lie directly contradicts my belief that each of us is a beloved child of our Creator, no one more precious than anyone else, and my belief that we all share in the task of turning the human race into the human family. What follows is my view of our current common life that flows from these two convictions.
We fought a Civil War over this issue, spent the 20th century acknowledging women’s rightful place as equals in our culture and watching their influence grow, had a Civil Rights Movement that wrote into law crucial aspects about the equality of people of color, especially Black people, elected a Black president twice by majority votes, and continue to wrestle with the place of people of color, whether Black or Brown, citizens or immigrants.
For many of us as white men, if feels like we’re under constant assault simply for our race and gender, even though we feel we’ve given up a great deal to be more inclusive. What more do you want from us? Haven’t we done enough to divest ourselves of our privilege?
Well, let’s take a look at that.
Google – how did we survive without Google! – offers up a few facts.
Of the 340,000,000 residents of the US, 31% are white males.
44% of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are white males.
37% of Democrats in the House of Representatives are white males.
85% of Republicans in the House of Representative are white males.
55% of Democrats in the Senate are white males.
88% of Republicans in the Senate are white males.
100% of the twenty wealthiest people in the US are white males and their heirs.
Kutle, Ovunc. U.S. Senate meeting. 2017.
So whatever we white men have given up, and however much we feel assaulted to do more, we’re pretty much holding on to our power, pretty much still in the driver’s seat.
I cannot imagine, let alone experience the heartbreak and, ultimately, the despair that women and people of color continue to experience. Time and again, promises are made and legislative solutions passed, only to be succeeded by another form of repression. Come to a brick wall, tear it down, and there’s a cinderblock wall behind it. Tear down the cinderblocks and there’s a steel fence. Blast the steel fence and there’s barbed wire.
The Constitution’s racial lie is challenged in an Emancipation Proclamation and a period of Reconstruction, which is succeed by half a century of Jim Crow. A century of women’s rights makes it possible for a woman to vote and even to run for president, yet she cannot control her uterus while impregnating men are absolved in restrictive anti-abortion laws. A Civil Rights movement is followed by a backlash that gerrymanders voting districts, redlines real estate, creates a public/private school caste system, and charges the winning side in a presidential election with non-existent voter fraud in order to create fresh but somehow familiar restrictive voting laws.
I cannot imagine the frustration and despair.
But I can remember the first time my heart was broken over this lie and its consequence. The man I still consider my second father introduced me to my faith when I was a boy, guided me through my teens, lead me into the ministry, and showered me with the love and attention I craved. In the spring of 1963, during my senior year at UCLA and in the middle of the public drama about Civil Rights, he told me he was moving from Baldwin Hills in Los Angeles to the Hollywood hills. In the course of our conversation, he let on that he wouldn’t sell his home to a Black family because he didn’t want to threaten his neighbors’ property values. I raged at him, to no avail, and to this day carry a bruise on my love for him, even decades after his death.
So how do we overcome the power of this lie that white men are better than the rest of us? In one of our national history’s great ironies, the very group of us whom the Constitution endowed with privilege are the very ones who must decide to give away our privilege because it is founded on a lie. This isn’t a problem that can be resolved only by women or people of color resisting the lie; they don’t have the power to change this, but we do. We need to hold white men accountable for their false sense of privilege. We need to make them wrestle, like Jacob, with what they want to deny: that their privilege is based on a lie. We need to persuade the liars to give up the lie and help the rest of us find ways to create the more perfect union we all say we’re committed to.
Bejar, Dan. A More Perfect Union. 2019.
A friend who read a draft of this piece said it’s a fool’s errand to expect people who hold power to give it up simply because their power is based on a lie. Maybe so. But I can hope.
The British statesman, Sir Winston Churchill, once said that Courage is the most important virtue, because it makes all other virtues possible. As white men, it’s our time to step up, to exercise our courage, to put our power where our mouths are to create the country we say we envision. We must demonstrate that we belong in the Home of the Brave by joining with our sisters and brothers to make this, at last, for all of us, the Land of the Free.
So we rise into another morning, and limp toward this sunrise.