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Desmond Tutu says racism is the ‘ultimate blasphemy’
By Tracy Sukraw
2002-042
2/15/2002
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[Episcopal News Service]
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 country’s 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.
EDS’s St. John’s 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 father’s 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 [Jones’s compatriot] rejected when they walked out of St. George’s 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 couldn’t 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 evening’s 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 hope—they 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, he’s 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 school’s commencement address in May.
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