Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

For any white person living in America there is a deep puzzle at the heart of the American experience. Almost all the settlers were Christians. The Founding Fathers recognized the importance of God in the Declaration of Independence and spoke about the equality of humanity. Yet it is a country that, for a whole host of reasons, perpetrated the evil of slavery against black people and continued to tolerate the evil of institutional and legally entrenched segregation until the late 1960s.The racism of America is an export from Europe. It was the European powers that created the trade in slavery; it was the European settlers who brought a theology of superiority that was indifferent to the non-white. The words of James Cone summarize this history with brutal clarity:How do we account for such a long history of white theological blindness to racism and its brutal impact on the lives of African people? Is it because white theologians do not know about the tortured history of the Atlantic slave trade, which according to the British historian Basil Davidson, “cost Africa at least fifty million souls”? Have they forgotten about the unspeakable crimes of colonialism? Author Eduardo Galeano claims that 150 years of Spanish and Portuguese colonization in Central and South America reduced the indigenous population from 90 million to 3.3 million. During the twenty-three-year reign of terror ... log in or subscribe to read full text