Reverend Firpo Carr, PhD, Protestant Minister, firpocarr6@gmail.com, University of Phoenix, 4025 S. Riverpoint Parkway, Phoenix, AZ 85040
Deconstructing the house that is American racism starts with recognizing its existence and the creaky underpinning upon which it stands. Infrastructural racism is analogous to the foundation of that house. Structural racism would be the house itself. Institutional racism would constitute the rooms. And systemic racism would be the heating and air conditioning. The free labor of enslaved Africans and their scions serves as the infrastructure of America’s house, which has a cross adorned on its front door. By definition, then, infrastructural racism is exclusively anti-Black. And the seminary, arguably the most reprehensible among other institutional rooms, is inescapably infused with systemic anti-Black racism. Evidence of this is manifested in Sunday morning segregated church services, as Martin Luther King noted. Church leaders who are graduates of seminary wittingly or unwittingly orchestrate the dichotomy. As students, they absorbed deeply rooted anti-Black bias from their seminary professors, if not prima facie in the curriculum, by de facto anti-Black policies and practices, or by unspoken biased behavior that resulted in reward and reinforcement. As has been well documented, the present author has endured over three decades of anti-Black racism perpetrated by Jewish and White scholars and seminary professors who colluded to strategically erase his history-making accomplishments. Such behavior contradicts Christ’s own, who was “not swayed by appearances” (Matt. 22:16, English Standard Version). Seminarians and other professed Christians who succumb to infrastructural racism risk being identified by Christ as a “hypocrite” (Matt. 6:2; Greek, hupokrités, ὑποκριτής), that is, one who was “an actor,” “a performer acting under a mask,” “a two-faced person” (Strong’s Concordance), or “a pretender” (Thayer’s Greek Lexicon). While distasteful racism of any flavor is a defect in our culturally diverse humanity, individuals of all faith traditions, particularly Christians and any person seminary affiliated, should work in concert to deconstruct infrastructural racism.
