wfn.org | Episcopalians: Desmond Tutu says racism is the ultimate blasphemy

[dmack@episcopalchurch.org]

February 15, 2002

2002-042

Episcopalians: Desmond Tutu says racism is the ultimate 
blasphemy

by Tracy Sukraw

(ENS) Healing can happen when you give truth-telling a chance.  
That was the good news that Desmond Tutu, the retired archbishop 
of Cape Town in South  Africa, brought to the Episcopal Divinity 
School (EDS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  The hard news:  You 
have to give it a chance.

The guest lecturer during the school's annual Absalom Jones 
celebration on February 6, Tutu reflected on his experiences of 
apartheid in South Africa and the healing power of storytelling 
that he witnessed as head of his countrys Truth and 
Reconciliation Commission.  He applied those lessons to the 
issue of racism in this country and conflicts around the world.  
His conclusion:  Without forgiveness there is no future. 

EDSs St. Johns Memorial Chapel was filled to capacity for 
the lecture, with an overflow crowd listening in via closed 
circuit from next-door Sherrill Hall.

Tutu described how the racism of the apartheid system in 
South Africa affected perpetrators, bystanders and victims 
alike.  Because of his fathers position as headmaster of a 
black elementary school, Tutu grew up protected from the worst 
excesses of racial discrimination.  But, he said, he was both 
wounded and conditioned good and proper by it nonetheless.

A prophetic voice

"It was the kind of treatment Absalom Jones and Richard Allen 
[Joness compatriot] rejected when they walked out of St. 
Georges Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia on the 
occasion when the ushers directed them to the balcony where 
black worshippers were herded together," he said.

Absalom Jones was a former slave who in 1802 became the first 
African-American priest in the Episcopal Church.  The annual 
celebration at EDS supports an Absalom Jones Scholarship Fund 
for African-American students at EDS preparing for ordination in 
the Episcopal Church.

We couldnt have found a better speaker than Tutu to 
provide teaching on racial reconciliation, Bishop Steven 
Charleston, president and dean of EDS, said in his opening 
remarks.  He introduced the archbishop as someone whose voice 
remains prophetic today not only in areas of racial 
reconciliation and peace and justice but also in areas of 
economic dignity for all human beings and the salvation of our 
planet.

Racism is the ultimate blasphemy, Tutu said, because it 
"could make a child of God doubt that she or he was a child of 
God.

"Racism is never benign and conventional and acceptable, for 
it is racism that resulted in the awfulness of lynchings and the 
excesses of slavery; it spawned the Holocaust and apartheid and 
was responsible for ethnic cleansing," he said.

"People of faith cannot be neutral on this issue.  To stand 
on the sidelines is to be disobedient to the God who said we are 
created, all of us, in this God's image."

The power of storytelling

Former South African president Nelson Mandela appointed Tutu 
in 1995 to lead the Truth and Reconciliation Commission 
investigating human rights violations that took place from 1960 
to 1994.  Tutu told of how the commission exposed the depths to 
which we humans can sink by inviting black and white people 
alike to tell their stories--heart-wrenching, burdensome tales 
of cruelty and torture, violence, tragedy and sorrow.

Telling their stories did mean you were running the risk of 
opening wounds, but in fact often they were wounds that had been 
festering and to open them now in this fashion had the chance of 
cleansing them and pouring a balm, an ointment on them, he 
said.

"I don't know why we should have been surprised at the 
healing potency of story telling.  After all, as people of faith 
we belong in a story-telling community.  We have been integrated 
into the community that tells the story of a God who brought a 
rabble of slaves out of bondage and led them through the desert 
into the Promised Land, and they commemorated it all in a feast, 
a festival, the Passover.  We continued the saga in the story of 
a young man who died on a cross and on the night before he died 
established a meal as a memorial and we have been telling this 
story and its sequel ever since," he said.

The courage to listen

One of the evenings most stirring moments came when Tutu 
deviated from his text and challenged his rapt audience to take 
the lessons of truth and reconciliation to heart here at home in 
America.  Saying he knew full well what it was like to have 
instant experts from overseas pontificating on how we should 
solve our problems, he went on to wonder what wounds might be 
healed if the United States had a Truth and Reconciliation 
Commission of its own.

You are going to become a very strong and wonderful country 
the day you have the courage to listen to each other, he said.

If Tutu brought challenge, he also brought hope, delivering 
his lecture with the joyfulness of a bearer of good news.  If 
it could happen that enemies became allies, friends, partners in 
South Africa, then it could happen in other conflict-ridden 
places, he said.  God wants to point to us and say, 'Yes, they 
are a beacon of hopethey had a nightmare called apartheid and 
it has ended.  Your nightmare, Northern Ireland, Middle East, 
Rwanda, Afghanistan, Burma, Angola and Sri Lanka, your nightmare 
will end too.  ...Nowhere can they ever again say, Ours is an 
intractable problem.

The Rev. Ian Douglas, associate professor of world mission 
and global Christianity at EDS, commented afterward, "We are 
deeply indebted to Archbishop Tutu for offering difficult and 
painful but hope-filled reflections on his experience of racism 
under the sin of apartheid, but I am particularly thankful he 
was willing to challenge white America with respect to ongoing 
racism in the United States, with specific references to the 
suffering of Native Americans and African Americans.

Karen Coleman, a third-year student preparing for urban 
ministry, said,  What stayed with me were the stories that he 
told and the way he stressed that we should tell our own 
stories.  We can be in places and not be present.  It felt like 
everyone in that room was fully present.  If people could listen 
like that to each other, hes right, we would be a great 
country.

Tutu departed immediately after the lecture for Salt Lake 
City to present to four youths the Reebok Human Rights Awards, 
being given in conjunction with the Winter Olympic Games.

Tutu and his wife, Leah Nomalizo Shenxane, are in residence 
at EDS for the spring semester.  He will give the schools 
commencement address in May.

------

Tracy J. Sukraw is editor of the Episcopal Times, the 
newspaper of the Diocese of Massachusetts.