The Elephant has Constructed the Room. Teaching Racism as a Biblical Scholar

One day in 2009 after President Obama took office, I walked into my Greek exegesis class at Ashland Theological Seminary in Detroit and one of two white male students asked, “Dr. Smith, don’t you think we live in a post-racial society given we have elected a black President and here I am sitting in your class a black female with a Harvard Ph.D.?” I didn’t doubt my student’s sincerity. I’d like to think that he felt safe enough in that space to ask that question of me. I breathed and seized the opportunity to address his question and discuss the masses of poor black people that, as Howard Thurman would say, continue to live “with their backs against the wall.” (Philippians, Acts or Eusebius were no worse for the wait). We must transcend our own class privilege as educators. The dilemma of the masses motivated me to write one of my first womanist biblical interpretation articles (“The Black Masses, The Global Imperative: A Womanist Reading of Luke’s Soteriological Hermeneutical Circle” in Reading Minjung Theology in the Twenty-first Century, Yung Suk Kim and Jin-Ho Kim).

My own experiences with racism (sexism and classism) have taught me that liberation is not achieved, for oppressed or oppressor, by avoiding “the elephant in the room.” But liberation is more likely to occur if we can acknowledge that “the elephant” has constructed the room. Racism is not just about individual acts of violence or aggression against a person based on their race, particularly by those of the dominant race, but it also concerns structural, systemic injustice. As Cornel West argues in Race Matters the first order of business is to recognize that “structures and behavior are inseparable, that institutions and values go hand in hand. How people act and live are shaped…by the larger circumstances in which they find themselves” (West, 8).

As a biblical scholar teaching others to be responsible, critical, liberating readers of biblical texts, I affirm that no exegesis is without presuppositions, as Bultmann argued. The presuppositions that we bring to our analysis of texts are part of the matrix that is our social location. Our social location is shot through with assumptions and judgments about race, class and gender. We live in a racialized world where we are asked to identify ourselves by socially constructed categories of racial distinction. Many of us live in segregated neighborhoods, attend segregated monochromatic schools with matching administrators and teachers, and worship in segregated churches. How can we talk about biblical interpretation and not talk about race – “the elephant” that is the room?