Sensus Divinitatis

This Christmas holiday season our family took a road trip to Hilton Head, South Carolina, which is just south of Myrtle Beach. Myrtle Beach, it is said, is for the young and foolish. Hilton Head is the beach for the old and tired. And as we found out, to a large degree, for the rich and white. Except for those in the service industry, where some Hispanic and African Americans may be found, many of whom are bussed in across the bridge every morning because affordable housing is, as one writer says, “non-existent.”

We know many who have gone to Hilton Head and spoke highly of the beaches, museums, bike paths, and golf. We really savoured our time there, and we can see why so many go there to enjoy the weather and the island forests with the goat’s beard hanging from the trees. It’s a wonderful place to vacation! All the retail stores have to comply with a colour code that blends in with the flora and fauna. Decades ago real estate developer Charles Fraser set a pattern for sustainability and conservation, and that kind of conscientious intentionality is still evident today. In some ways, it’s a model community of preservation.

There is good reason to vacation at Hilton Head. Don’t get me wrong. I can see why busy families like mine are drawn there. Still, there are some social and historical aspects we learned about that tie the region in with larger issues with which American culture continues to struggle. As Christian scholars at GSC, we think not only about individual salvation through Jesus Christ, but about the wider call to be “ambassadors of reconciliation“–and that means paying attention to areas of conflict, suffering and injustice.

So our vacation was also an education. There is more to Hilton Head than what I am about to relate, so let me say that to some degree we chose to turn our attention to certain things rather than others. Next time we visit the South we may focus attention in a different direction: on Southern hospitality, the music scene in Nashville, the beauty of the dialect, the distinctiveness of the cuisine (hush puppies and grits), or the birds, plants, insects or reptiles.

So here is our brief education, which is just a beginning…

The Gates that Divide

When we arrived, we noted it was a collection of gated communities and toll roads bordering resorts ironically entitled “Plantations”, all designed for recreation, but also for privacy and protection. Like the famous golf courses that proliferate across the island and the state, they have a history. Country clubs were to be “safe spaces” from industrialized urban America and the poorer classes that crowded the factory quarters (see Richard Moss Golf and the American Country Club 2007). Gates suggest keeping certain people out. Sometimes for good reason, but it feels a little exclusive.

We chatted with a semi-retired black lady working in the tourist information booth in nearby Savannah, Georgia. “Hilton Head used to be 80 percent black,” she explained. “Then they raised the property taxes so the black folk had to sell their land because they couldn’t pay the tax.” She similarly spoke of local black colleges, which had been given mosquito infested land by the river. “Once the whites realized the black university’s land was gorgeous–after Civil Rights–they started attending the black colleges. Mosquitoes are not so bad anymore.”

“Knowing the history of Hilton Head fractures much of its happy commercial facade,” writes Alexa Hazel in an on-line article entitled “Hilton Head Island–Haunted by its Own History.” There is as much to deplore about the island’s history as there is to praise with regards to its recreation amenities: the devastated indigenous populations, the plantation slaves, rapacious Union soldiers, predatory developers, and stolen land. The island is a crime scene few realize, explains Hazel, focusing on black dispossession and white appropriation of the land: “home for some is predicated on the loss of home for others.” And all the gates? “Walls exacerbate the crime they were built to prevent.”

Perhaps that is overstated, but all the gates can smell like fear, and that fear can be blended with forms of racism. “Few people want to learn these things while on vacation,” she concludes, quoting writer Ted Ownby. Ultimately, what does this critical writer Hazel want from us vacationers? To do some difficult memory work and acknowledge that “we benefit from systems of violence that we did not create or consent to and from which others continue to suffer.” That is definitely not something you want to think about while on the beach, but vacation and education need not be at odds.

There are opportunities to learn. We visited a lighthouse museum that made some mention of the indigenous and black history before more substantial exhibits on the golf and coast guard history. There is a museum dedicated to the Gullah people that lived on the island years ago, a culture with roots in the African slave trade. They have their own form of English creole and various cultural connections to Africa covered in a recent book entitled Gullah Days (2020). So our vacation was a mixed experience, no pun intended. Sunshine, fresh fish, consignment stores, pickleball and bike rides, to be sure, but also a strange sense that something is amiss.

Education at the Movies

A favourite movie of our family is Forrest Gump, the fictional story of an autistic man who magically appeared in most of the seminal events of American history through the sixties and seventies. We went to the parkette in Savannah, Georgia where the famous bench from the opening scene was shot (where the feather falls from a local spire, which really happened apparently). Although the bench has been moved to a museum now, we revelled in being in the same spot. In this first scene of the film, Forrest relates that he was named after Confederate General Nathan Forrest, a distant relative (and real historical figure) and the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The camera shifts to a black and white vignette of General Forrest with a hood over his face (and a hood on his horse, too!). Forrest then says: “Momma said that the Forrest part [of my name] was to remind me that sometimes we all do things that, well, just don’t make no sense.”

Later on in the movie we observe Forrest finding a close companion in Vietnam in a black man named Bubba Blue, who also lived with a form of autism. “Bubba was my best good friend,” said Forrest. “And even I know that ain’t something you can find just around the corner.” Bubba also says to Forrest: “You know why we’re a good partnership, Forrest? Cause we are watching out for one another like brothers and stuff.”

The voice of the autistic characters in the film often reveal obvious things that those with full neurological capabilities seem to miss. “I’m not a smart man,” says Forrest with regards to the mistreatment of his female friend Jenny. “But I know what love is.”

Justice is said to be love baked into social systems. As a family, we had watched movies before about the slow abolition of the slave trade in Britain–like the story of abolitionist William Wilberforce in Amazing Grace (2006) and the way the personal and political overlapped in the judge’s decision regarding the drowning of an entire ship of slaves in Belle (2016). These movies were about government policy changes that made a difference for thousands of oppressed people all over the world.

That is the world of parliament and policy.

From our Hilton Head apartment TV, however, we saw the other end of the history: the brutal reality of a slave’s life. 12 Years a Slave (2013) is labeled a “horror/drama” and it’s based on the true story of a free black man who was kidnapped in New England and shipped south to become a slave for 12 years. The dehumanization of black people through torture, rape, and just treating people like retail products is horrifying. Then we watched Mississippi Burning (1988), a thriller based on the true story of the murder of three Civil Rights activists in Mississippi in 1964. The movie shows just how little some things have changed and just how deep racism goes: it includes the sheriff, the mayor, and of course, the invisible power of the Ku Klux Klan running the town.

My kids find it all unbelievable. But Mississippi Burning is based on recent racist history, which many say continues to this day in a different way, as suggested by the murder of George Floyd. And that happened in the far North! (Minneapolis). I say “suggested” however, as some will point out that establishing any event as wholly explained by systemic racism requires some intensive sociological labour. But still, the optics are quite compelling. Racism doesn’t take holidays.

Kids Reading on Racism

I had read my kids the famous Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave 1818-1895. As an autobiography, it is the first-person testimony of brutality and the determination to assert one’s own God-given dignity. Douglass teaches himself to read on the sly over many years, finds his freedom, and becomes a champion of abolition. The story raised all kinds of questions for the kids.

We had also read a young reader’s novel based in Canada–Elijah of Buxton (2008) by Christopher Paul Curtis–the fictional story of a boy living in a black community near Chatham, Ontario. This almost magical boy is rudely awakened to the fantastic brutality of the slave trade as they live at the end of the Underground Railroad (and he actually meets Frederick Douglass and throws up on his lap!). It was both delightful and terrifying read in the end. But it connects slavery to Canada.

One of the most arresting reads has been with my son–The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011) by black theologian James Cone. This is a socio-theological investigation into the curious fact that while 5000 black people were lynched by white mobs in America (about one every 5 days from 1880-1940), no prominent theologian ever connected the innocent deaths of blacks by mobs with Jesus Christ, who was grabbed by a mob and hung from a tree. Not even the famous theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who expounded at length on Christian realism and “the terrible beauty of the cross” ever mentioned lynching, even as a black man was burned and hung every five days while Niebuhr wrote his books.

Cone contrasts comfortable Niebuhr in New York City with Martin Luther King, who lived in the shadow of death everyday. For Niebuhr, the cross was a theological abstraction, a paradigm. For King, it was part of his daily life, including police brutality, bombs, and eventually the bullet.

Why did so many blacks–through gospel songs and the blues–turn to Christianity to find solace when it was the religion of their cruel masters? Cone shows the comfort and courage black people derived from the cross and argues that “the slave undertook the redemption of the religion that the master had profaned in his midst” (133-4). Cone then exhorts the reader to cultivate “the imagination to relate the message of the cross to one’s own social reality.” (158) What or who is being crucified today? Our salvation can come “only through solidarity with the crucified in our midst” (160).

Bringing it Home

We stopped by on the return trip at the cabin of a white colleague of mine who lives in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. He confessed his father went to a few KKK meetings, and when he was young, he witnessed a KKK parade in his home town. He lived in a trailer park, and racism was just part of taken-for-granted reality of his world. He had a dramatic conversion experience, and has since become anti-racist and dedicated his life to the diverse global community of the church. But he knows racism is alive and well today. He also knows many white Christians in his region are well-aware and ready to take a stand against racism.

Things have changed in the South, to be sure. Some things. Someone might say: “You came down to the South and you saw what you thought you would see, framed by those movies and books. But that is not all that the South is about.”

Fair enough. Not everything is racism. That is why I started by saying we paid attention to certain things on this visit. This is a superficial, first time glance at a foreign community, and more nuances will come with further visits and conversations with local people, no doubt. Education has to start somewhere, and that’s why I quoted an article and books. So its not just tourist impressions.

I told my kids as we drove home through the blue hills of West Virginia: “It is easy to see the faults of others, and they seem so vividly clear to us because of the stories we have heard and watched on TV. But the South is no more sinful than the North. Watch Wall Street — or in Canada remember the residential schools and of course climate change — and know that every society has its blind spots.”

We need to find solidarity with the crucified in our midst, said James Cone. One goal of education is to make the strange look familiar, and we certainly have our own ghosts in Canada.

It’s not that racism isn’t in Canada either. One of my wife’s good friends is from Jamaica and lives down the road from us, working in health care. “The racism I experience on the job is getting worse,” she reports. It’s here too, even in my own church, in my own heart.

It is the start of a new year, and fresh resolutions, but I don’t think our planet will ever have a holiday from racism. It is not the only sin, but it is tied together with many other sins, and historical sins, and so it is worth the concentrated attention of the church of Jesus Christ, the innocent man killed by a mob violence and hung on a tree. He and his followers seek solidarity with all those left outside the gates.

It can be complicated, but it can also be quite simple. Love your neighbour. As Forrest Gump would say: “That’s all I have to say about that.”