Listening to the Tom Joyner Morning Show on the radio – 100.3 - and Malcolm Jamal Warner of Cosby Show fame is promoting his new show, “Reed Between the Lines” which is clearly on prime-time life support.  It seems the TV show is too white to be black and too black to be white, yet trying to achieve universality and cultural cross-over by using the Cosby template of 2 “professional” parents who “just happen to be black” with cute, precocious kids. Good Grief! This along with polite, subtle, tactful references to the black buffoonery of Tyler Perry ‘s movies is so draining. How can black folks get around the endless need to be black enough or white enough depending on the venue –including the White House?

Black pastors in cross-racial appointments often comment that their white congregations “love my preaching and my praying, and my singing; they even laugh at my jokes. But when it’s time to make a decision, especially a major administrative one, I become invisible and inept.”

Can we conclude that in cross-racial contexts clergy power and performance are inherently bifurcated?

People keep asking why I don’t just schedule private interviews with clergy serving in cross-racial appointments and then compile the findings for pasteurized publication, instead of hosting a Blog that people are afraid to use for open and sensitive comments.  This drumbeat of caution and caveat prompted my own revelation: Thomas Jefferson would still be one of my American history idols had I not learned about his black mistress, Sally Hemings, when I was in my 40’s.  One of Jefferson’s black great-great-great-grandchildren lived in Downingtown when I lived in West Chester.  The Thomas Jefferson I learned about as a college undergrad was scrubbed, combed and propped up on a throne in every book about him that I read. I’ve learned a lot about this popular President since then that was disappointing, to say the least.  When people started speaking up and out against normative historical accounts, and I was no longer limited to the published research of a handful of historians, most, but not all, of what I admired about President Jefferson changed. The moral of the Blog is that we all deserve to hear and live the truth. And much of the truth cannot be found in the library.

Over the last 5 days it is absolutely amazing how much fear has been personally expressed to me in face-to-face conversations about this Blog.  I am advised over and over that “no clergyperson in their right mind” is going to write on it, and not because they are too busy, but because they are afraid to talk openly about racial tension in our churches.  And posting under “Anonymous” is considered way too risky. 

The real risk (and insanity) is in thinking that seminars, retreats and specialized training of clergy and their congregations will help to eradicate racism in our churches.  They haven’t and they won’t, any more than putting the African American Hymnal next to the traditional hymnal in the pews of white churches will get us moving toward meaningful worship integration. Only open and honest dialogue will result in progress and real reconciliation.  Anyone who has a black brother-in-law or a “bi-racial” grandchild knows what I’m talking about.  When someone finally speaks up to say: “This is what I am experiencing, and this is how it feels,” there is immediate progress, whether not everyone is listening. Being heard is a start.

So if having a black man or woman in the pulpit does not change racism in our churches, what will?

Is our crusade for racial integration in mainline churches limited to and dependent upon people of color being in a position of crisis and need? 

Does our hope of truly integrated worship hinge on merely sharing in the festivities, foods and fabrics of ethnic groups?

Ministry or Minstrelsy?

Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. preached me happy in a recent revival in Philadelphia. But as exegetically succulent as his sermon was, one comment that he made about President Obama was a little pungent. Rev. Wright said that “Barack Hussein Obama was selected and not elected” to the presidency. To a nearly packed sanctuary of African American worshipers Rev. Wright supported his own opinion with this rhetorical question: “Why do you think Wall Street was at the head of the line for financial bailout funds?” He then answered his own question: (my paraphrase): “Because the supposedly elected simply did what he was selected to do,” while the marginalized and disenfranchised still are, and will remain, so.

Driving home from that revival, despite all that I know about his gifts, skills and intellect, I asked myself if my number one 21^st century hero, President Obama, was merely a pawn in the ongoing game of White American politics. And then I turned inward to ask myself this question: Do African American pastors in front of white congregations in reality serve more in minstrelsy than ministry?