I have a question that Google can’t answer:
Is there Jim Crow in Heaven? Is there one cloud for blacks and another for whites? Is there one heavenly choir singing slow hymns from books and another dancing and clapping Gospel-style?
One curious feature of European colonialism was their insistence on “converting the natives.” Be it Native Americans in California missions, enslaved West Africans in the American South, diverse ethnic groups throughout the entire continent of Africa, Aboriginals in Australia or “infidels” in the Middle East, the priests always accompanied the soldiers to make sure that each colonized heathen was a firm believer in the Lord who sanctioned their oppression.
But if a “heathen-forcibly-turned-Christian’ asked, “Do I get to go to Heaven?,” what would the conqueror/ slave-master answer? That some get to go to 3/5ths Heavens? Others would be sent to Reservation Heaven on the clouds where no one else wanted to live? That they must firmly accept and believe the Gospel of Jesus, but they could skip the part about Heaven?
And if the answer was, “In heaven, we don’t have our earthly bodies so there is no color discrimination,” wouldn’t the next logical question be, “Well, hey, if we’ll be sharing a cloud for all eternity, does it really make sense to treat me so badly down here?”
I am 100% serious. This is a conversation I’d like to have with today’s Christian White Supremacist. Can someone arrange this?
Meanwhile, before assuming Google couldn’t answer this, I of course looked it up. And I found one thing—the Capital City Quartette singing the title I made up for this inquiry! So I guess someone was thinking about it. But certainly not the people in power, who would have had to look deeper into what they were—and are—doing. Check out the song.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.