November 06, 2008

By James Kushiner, publisher of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity

Post-Election Comment: Skin Color & Blindness

I am glad that the presidential election campaign, which seems as if it started about 6 years ago, is now in “the history books.” Certainly it will go down in history as a turning point: the first African-American elected president of the United States. It does speak symbolically to the broadmindedness of the general American public, our general desire to be above race and to be color-blind. This is something that does pertain to the moral universe of the Christian. One might well argue, rightly, that apart from the Christian gospel and its embrace of all the races, where there is neither Jew nor Greek, it’s not likely we’d see something like this.

The irony about the election of our first black president, an irony which I wish did not exist, is that while blacks have risen from the indignities and injustice of slavery in which their bodies were sold and consumed as property, and have endured segregation and second-class citizen status and racial discrimination, and have now one of their own elected to the highest office in the land, this very president-elect, Barack Obama, will increase the death toll among black human beings if he fulfills his promise to enact a Freedom of Choice Act, which will serve as a firewall around Roe v. Wade, the Dred Scott decision of our times. Helping to fund abortions also will likely disproportionately increase the number of black victims consumed by this holocaust. Someone might point out that policies about abortion, too, in this post-racial age of enlightenment, should be colorblind, so anyone who cares about the skin color of its victims is a racist, and that appeals to blacks about not aborting black babies is an appeal to a presumed racism on their part.

Discrimination based on the color of one’s skin is not now the burning issue of our time, however. It’s that we’ve forgotten the value of human skin in the first place. The human skin of the baby in the womb, the human skin of the severely disabled (candidates for “selective” abortion), the human flesh and blood of the elderly, and the bodies of those near death, from whom we cut organs while they are, yes, still, alive—this human flesh is abused and sacrificed on various altars. Resting on the hard-earned laurels of enlightened colorblindness, many have forgotten, or deny, the sanctity of the very flesh about which we say we are so indifferent as to its color.

Now that, I submit, is a modern blindness of the highest (or lowest) order, not much different from Dred Scott’s perspective on slaves. We’ve removed the log of judging by skin color, only to have plucked out the very eye.