On Racism, Presbyterian-style

A friend asked me to comment on a broadside launched by Professor Anthony Bradley accusing the Presbyterian Church in America (the PCA) and southern Presbyterians in general of hiding their racist roots.  Here's Prof. Bradley's opening salvo:

Peter Slade's book Open Friendship in a Closed Society: Mission Mississippi and A Theology of Friendship (Oxford University Press, 2009) reveals difficult information about the racist and pro-segregationist formation of the Reformed Theological Seminary, the Presbyterian Church in America, and the role of First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, MS.

If you're black in the PCA this book will be very, very hard to read. Sorry folks, the racial history of the denomination is more than just a "blind spot." According to Slade, there was more going on.

I am amazed that people outside of the PCA know more about the denomination's history than it's own members it seems.

Read his whole commentary here.

Dr. Bradley sounds as if it comes as a shock to him that there were racists in the southern church (!) and that some southern churches were not totally on the desegregation bandwagon from the get-go (!!).  Indeed he is shocked! Shocked!! to find gambling going on in the Church.  Well not really, but his essay reads more like a confrontation between Claude Rains and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca than a real cri de coeur about the deception and duplicity of those nasty Reformed racists.

Not knowing Dr. Bradley I can't say for sure but does he expect us to believe that he is that naive?  That ignorant?  Dare I say it?  That stupid?  Nothing in his writing or pedigree would indicate a serious problem with ignorance so I would have to say of course not.  This blast reeks of artifice.  It seems more like a strategic "Plan Red" for which the staff work has been complete for years, waiting for the right moment, the right circumstance to be unleashed on the 'enemy'.  The only controversy here is to determine precisely what the good Doctor is after:  why launch the invasion now, Dr. Bradley?  What do you want?  What are your demands?

I say this as someone who has some prior experience with this form of extortion by the avatars of victimology.  I have (well had) an investment banker acquaintance with whom I attended the Chicago business school.  He was part of a loose group of perhaps ten friends from those days who shared silly emails and ribald, politically oriented humor.  All was going swimmingly until one day I crossed an invisible line, sending something to the group that this (African American) gentleman deemed unacceptable.  He immediately send out a broadside to all deeming my email 'racist', 'shit', 'crap' and so on.  And to be honest, taken from the perspective of an uninvolved outsider he had a point.  Taken from the perspective of a bunch of guys who routinely made fun of each other, however, he did not.  I of course immediately and abjectly apologized to him and the group in the latest post-modern style, all but checking myself into reeducation camp.  And then I deleted him from all of my distribution lists.  And you know what?  So apparently did every other person in that group because I have never seen him copied on anything since.

So my take on Prof Bradley's 'outrage?  Artificial, strategic, designed to make the rest of us respond to what HE wants.  It's real effect?  After the obligatory kowtowing and groveling, the lights are going to go out for Dr. Bradley, one by one by one.