Part 2 of 2
by Tom Skinner
below is the second half; for size reasons we have put the halves on different pages. Click here to view the first half.
Understand that for those of us who live in the black community, it was not the evangelical who came and taught us our worth and dignity as black men. It was not the Bible-believing fundamentalist who stood up and told us that black was beautiful. It was not the evangelical who preached to us that we should stand on our two feet and be men, be proud that black was beautiful and that God could work his life out through our redeemed blackness. Rather, it took Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown and the Brothers to declare to us our dignity. God will not be without a witness.
But the problem that we have is that we tend to think that truth can come only from those people we recognize to be anointed by God. That is the reason that when Martin Luther King came along and began to buck the system and do some things to help liberate black people, immediately we evangelicals wanted to know, "Is he born again? Does he preach the gospel?" Because you see, we think that if we could just prove that Martin Luther King was not a Christian, if we could prove that he was not born again, if we could prove that he did not believe the Word of God, then we think we can dismiss what he said. We think we can dismiss the truth. My friends, you must accept the fact that all truth is God's truth, no matter who it comes from.
And so I wrote the church off. Now, like a great number of talented black young men and women, I was not a dumb kid. I was president of the student body at school. But, in my frustration and bitterness, I became a member of one of the leading gangs in Harlem. I will not go into detail, but the problem was that I wrote off any Christian message. I accepted it as the white man's attempt to subjugate me, to brainwash me.
Now you might say, "But, Tom, I don't understand. If you were a star student, if you were getting good marks, if you were president of the student body at school ( I was also president of the young people's department in my church), how do you reconcile your life?" But your asking that question just proves that you believe what all of us believe: All you have to do is pull yourself up by the bootstraps and you, too, can succeed.
But, you see, this bootstrap theory is one of the most damnable lies being preached in America today. There is no such thing as putting oneself up by the bootstraps. Nobody pulls himself up by the bootstraps. Any of us who are anything at all are what we are because somebody opened some doors, somebody gave us some breaks, somebody provided some opportunities. In the case of black people, it is difficult to pull yourself up by the bootstraps when somebody keeps cutting the straps.
My nationalist friends said to me, "Tom, it's a fine thing that you're a brilliant student. It's a fine thing that you show the brilliant qualifications of leadership. But if you've got any ideas of making it in our kind of society, you'd better think again." And here's what they'd say: "This is the white man's world, and in his world he controls things from the top to the bottom. He might allow you to be a jazz player, a rock-and-roll singer or the janitor in his building. But he will not allow you to compete with him on an open basis to make a tangible contribution to society. He does not consider you to be his equal. You may be able to make $30,000 a year and move into the best of communities, but as soon as you move out there, they're going to protest so loudly that you will never make it. If you do succeed in moving, 'For Sale' signs will go up. And among those people who will sell their homes and run will be those Bible-toting Christians who say Christ is the answer.
"If by some stretch of the imagination some of them should stay, when you move out there and grow up and have kids and your kids go out in the street to play with their kids, they are going to call their kids in their house, because they don't want your kids to play with their kids. They're afraid that, playing together at six years of age, the kids might plan to intermarry or something. They believe, of course, that integration would lead to intermarriage, and intermarriage would mongrelize the races and people would walk down the streets with black blotches on one side and white on the other." Now please do not walk away saying Tom Skinner advocates racial intermarriage. I do not know where white people get the idea that they are so utterly attractive that black people are just dying to marry them.
But just to set the record straight, keep in mind that when black people were shipped here from Africa, they were pure Negroid. Today less than 6% of all black people in this country are now pure Negroid, which means that there is a dead cat on the line somewhere. You must keep in mind that the sexual aggression could not have taken place on the part of the black person, because he would have been lynched if he were the aggressor.
In the middle of all of this, one must come to grips with where racism really lies. And so I became very angry and very bitter. I got to the point where I could bust a bottle across a fellow's head and be undisturbed about it; break the bottle in half and dig the glass in his face and not bat my eye. By the time I left the gang, I had twenty-two notches on the handle of my knife, which meant that my blade had gone into the bodies of twenty-two different people, and I didn't care. All that mattered to me was that Tom Skinner got what he wanted. How he got it made absolutely no difference. Quite by accident one night, I was mapping out strategy for what was to have been the largest-scale gang fight ever to take place in New York City. And for the first time, my rock-and-roll radio show I was listening to was interrupted by a very simple program. A guy started talking from a message written in 2 Corinthians 5:17, which says, "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new" (AV).
For the first time something came through. For the first time I was told that what makes a person a sinner is the fact that he is born into the human race without the life of God. And that it is the absence of God's life in a man that causes a man to be what the Bible defines as a sinner. Now, up to this point, in what few gospel messages I did get from the evangelical crowd, I always heard that sin was a long list of no-no's: no smoking, no drinking, no night clubs, no miniskirts. no no. no no. And I soon got the impression that being Christian meant that you carried around in your inside pocket a bunch of rules and regulations which said, "Don't do this, stay away from that, don't touch that, and, for God's sake, don't look at that."
But that night for the first time I was told that what made a man a sinner was the fact that he does not have God's life in him. And I was told that the whole reason that God became a man in Jesus Christ was for the purpose of taking me in my human depravation, my oppression, my mental and spiritual slavery, and taking God in his liberation and bringing us together.
But I had a problem with this guy Jesus: Everything that I had ever been told about Jesus Christ gave me the impression that he was some kind of softie, some kind of effeminate. Christ was always pictured as an Anglo-Saxon, middle-class, Protestant Republican. He had those nice soft hands that looked as if they had just been washed in Dove. And I said, "There's no way that I can relate to that kind of Christ." I said, "He doesn't look like he'd survive in my neighborhood. We would do him in on any street corner, and we wouldn't have to wait until after dark."
Then I discovered that the Christ who leaped out of the pages of the New Testament was nobody's sissy, nobody's effeminate. Rather he was a gutsy, contemporary, radical revolutionary, with hair on his chest and dirt under his fingernails. Perhaps one of the great debates going on today is being pushed by those people who resist the idea that Jesus was a revolutionary. But let us come to grips with what the Word of God says.
First, let us consider the definition of a revolution. You take an existing situation which has proved unworkable, archaic, impractical and you seek to destroy it, to overthrow it and to replace it with a system that works. Now, the whole premise of the Scripture is that the human order is archaic, impractical, no good, infested with demonic power, with sin, racism, hate, envy, jealousy, pride, war, militarism. The biblical position is that the whole existing human order is infested with ungodliness. And the whole purpose of Christ's coming into the world was to overthrow the demonic human system and to establish his own kingdom in the hearts of men.
Allow me to quote for you I Corinthians 1:28: "He has chosen things low and contemptible, mere nothings, to overthrow the existing order" (NEB). That is the Word of God.
But, of course, the moment we hear that - and by your silence youimmediately think of SDS, Black Panthers, Communists, running through the streets with machine guns to overthrow the order. But that is not what God has in mind. And the thing that you have got to understand is this: What made Jesus Christ so utterly radical, so utterly different, was that lie was the only man who ever walked the face of the earth who never did anything. How does that grab you? Jesus never did anything. He never heated the sick; he never raised the dead; he never gave sight to the blind; he never performed any miracles.
You cry, "Tom, heresy! I can buy a lot of that militant stuff you're saying up there. But now you're telling me Christ never did anything. We all know he was miraculous." Jesus never did anything. His Father did it. Jesus never once made a move on his own. Jesus himself said, "That which I do my Father does it in me. I do only those things which please my Father." He even said to his disciples, "I don't want you to believe me because you see me healing the sick, raising the dead and giving sight to the blind. I want you to believe me because the works I do my Father is doing them in me. And if you ever see me doing something that my Father is not doing in me, then you have the right not to believe me. But as long as I'm doing what my Father tells me to do, you'd better believe me."
Now, what made Jesus radical was that he could walk into a temple, where they had desecrated the house of his Father, and knock over the money changers and drive them out of the temple in a holy furor. And when they came to ask him, "By what authority do you perform such a radical act?" his answer was, "My Father."
No comments:
Post a Comment