“Now your true colors are coming out.” By this, we mean the mask has been removed and the performative self has taken a bow.
Cover blown; I’ll see myself out. Unwittingly, they have shared what they really think. Show’s over.
This is not to be confused with the social colors of race: beige, that is, “mixed race,” black, brown, red, yellow and white, which stereotypically indicate your character traits. It is an oversimplified idea that is both loud and wrong. Besides, “the Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation,” Frantz Fanon taught us in “Black Skin, White Masks.”
And I coined the phrase socially colored, because our bodies are not physically colored beige, black, brown, red, yellow or white. Henry Louis Gates is right to ask, “Who has seen a black or red person, a white or yellow or brown? These terms are arbitrary constructs, not reports of reality.”
I would say the same for red, blue and purple states, which color-code the American population based on political party affiliation. Of all the choices the citizenry can make, they are only given two.
I find political coloring problematic as it creates yet another false binary. Liberal versus conservative, the two extremes are not defined for Americans to meet in the middle.
Ironically, the church is in on it— though not officially for taxable reasons. Christlike and anti-Christ candidates, the imagery has always troubled me. So, like Will D. Campbell, this “steeple dropout,” went looking for the right words to name my discomfort.
It’s called political messianism. While imploring the church to practice a faith that is indicative rather than imperative, Will D. Campbell and James Y. Holloway wrote in “Up to Our Steeples in Politics,” “Instead of witnessing to Christ, the social action of the Church lends support to the totalitarianism of wars and political systems. By its social action, the Church permits and encourages the State and culture to define all issues and rules and fields of battle.”
They continued, “The Church then tries to do what the State, without the Church’s support, had already decided to do: to ‘solve’ all human problems by politics. And this is specifically the political messianism of contemporary totalitarianism.”
It also continues the politically expedient task of summarily defining entire groups of people for the sake of a political contest, which, not surprisingly, always finds half the population entirely wrong. Still, both parties believe they are the ones to “save America.”
Left or right wing of American politics, it’s still the same bird, yes? “Oh yes, they both reach for the gun,” to employ a line from the musical film “Chicago.” Why the connection to violence?
Because as Kelly Carter Jackson rightly pointed out in “The Story of Violence in America,” “We benchmark history with violence. … The watershed moments of historical record are draped with violence.” She continued, “Classes are taught from conquest to slavery, from slavery to the Civil War, from the Civil War to the Iraq War, from World War I to World War II.”
Even when the country is not at war, the United States has continued to fund them, supplying weapons to other countries and assassinating leaders around the world— so much so that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was “forced to cut back.” Some have argued that the Congo has never recovered from the assassination of its first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. He was murdered by a firing squad, “his body then dismembered and dissolved in acid.”
These details remind me of the murder of the enslaved preacher and slave revolt leader, Nat Turner, on November 11, 1831, in Jerusalem, Virginia. After he was lynched, he was beheaded and “likely skinned.” John W. Cromwell said, “Turner was skinned to supply such souvenirs as purses, his flesh made into grease, and his bones divided as trophies to be handed down as heirlooms” in the 1920 publication of the “Journal of Negro History.”
It is then this history of choosing who gets to be violent that reveals our true colors. “We say to these leaders, how can you tell black people to be nonviolent and at the same time condone the sending of white killers into the black communities?” H. Rap Brown, the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, asked on July 27, 1967.
He continued, “Violence is a part of America’s culture. It is as American as cherry pie.”
From violent land theft, the enslavement of Africans and extracting of resources at the country’s founding to the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate to the latest incident of police brutality to the next mass shooting to all the places around the world this violence is exported in the name of colonialism, conquest and white supremacy, American violence just keeps coming. But this should come as no surprise.
We needed only to do as Maya Angelou advised, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
