thechanelmuse:

Rituals reinforce social norms, values, and beliefs. Rituals can empower some groups and individuals; rituals can also serve to weaken and oppress others.
The ritual of immediate and expected black forgiveness for the historic and contemporary suffering visited upon the black community by White America reflects the complexities of the color line.

Black Americans may publicly—and this says nothing of just and righteous private anger, upset, and desire for justice and revenge—be so quick to forgive white violence and injustice because it a tactic and strategy for coping with life in a historically white supremacist society. If black folks publicly expressed their anger and lack of forgiveness at centuries of white transgressions they could and were beaten, raped, murdered, shot, stabbed, burned alive, run out of town, hung, put in prisons, locked up in insane asylums, fired from their jobs, their land stolen from them, and kicked out of schools. Even in the post civil rights era and the Age of Obama, being branded with the veritable scarlet letter of being an “angry” black man or “angry” black woman, can result in their life opportunities being significantly reduced.

The African-American church is also central to the black American ritual of forgiveness. A belief in fantastical and mythological beings was used to fuel struggle and resistance in a long march of liberation and dignity against white supremacy, injustice, and degradation.

The notion of “Christian forgiveness” as taught by the black church could also be a practical means of self-medication, one designed to stave off existential malaise, and to heal oneself in the face of the quotidian struggles of life under American Apartheid.

Likewise, some used Christianity and the black church to teach passivity and weakness in the face of white terrorism because some great reward supposedly awaits those who suffer on Earth. The public mask of public black forgiveness and peace was also a tool that was used during the long Black Freedom Struggle as a means of demonstrating the honor, humanity, dignity, and civic virtue of black Americans–a group who only wanted their just and paid for in blood (and free labor) civil rights. […]

Whiteness is central here too. Whiteness imagines itself as benign, just, and innocent. Therefore, too many white people (especially those who have not acknowledged, renounced, and rejected white privilege) view white on black racial violence as some type of ahistorical outlier, something that is not part of a pattern, a punctuation or disruption in American life, something not inherent to it, and thus not a norm of the country’s social and political life.

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Christianity is a hell of a conditioning drug used by white chattel slave owners who instilled a docile nature into enslaved Africans in America (in this case) through Bible scriptures, wiring them to be forgiving to their masters who own, whip, sexually violate, starve, and murder them in cold blood. This docile, forgiving behavior was passed down to their offsprings with Black people appointing themselves in the position that was once occupied by the white chattel slave owners (Pastors/Ministers) to continue the conditioning. Upkeep.

Black Christians will find a bible verse to demonize the way gay people choose to live their lives. They’ll profess their own scripture on proper dress code in the name of Jesus, even if it’s not their life. But the second a white person murders, violates, or mistreats their Black loved one or someone Black, in general, they immediately forgive, excuse, and cape for those descendants of white chattel slave owners as if they are the victims and out of fear of going to hell because Jesus forgave them… (Whether if their white ancestors owned enslaved Black people or not, they are still nesting, thriving, and benefiting from their space in white supremacy.)

The way sanctified Black people are with the Christian faith flows in the same vein of the “We Sick Boss” syndrome. Like Malcolm X stated in his speech, “The House Negro and the Field Negro” (1965) :

“And he could talk just like his master - good diction. And he loved his master more than his master loved himself. That’s why he didn’t want his master hurt. If the master got sick, he’d say, “What’s the matter, boss, we sick?” When the master’s house caught afire, he’d try and put the fire out. He didn’t want his master’s house burned. He never wanted his master’s property threatened. And he was more defensive of it than the master was.”

Black Christians are unknowingly conditioned to keep that white supremacist house from burning down…in the name of Jesus…