I have lived in the White Ghetto all of my life. Only briefly, for the first two years of my life, did I live in a multi-racial/cultural neighborhood in Chicago. Aside from the pictures that my parents took of me during that time, I remember little to nothing of that time (Ironically, my first and only memory of that time is that of coming home from the hospital as an infant and being passed among the neighbors in the apartment building in which my family lived. I was less than receptive to all the attention given me, especially that of Harold Burress who smelled of tobacco and beer.) Whether it be the suburbs of Chicago, the white neighborhoods of St. Paul, the rural communities of southwestern Minnesota, or the Czechoslovakian town of New Prague, I have lived in the White Ghetto all my life. I do not know the intentions of my parents as they chose homes when we moved from place to place during the years I was growing up. However, it has not been by design that Ruthie and I have lived and raised our family in the White Ghetto. It has been primarily driven by where we found our employment.
When immigrants first came to our country, many ended up living in ghettos. While there were some ghettos to which society assigned them, many of these were self-created. Being in a strange land with customs and language different from where they had come, people lived together in order to preserve the comfort of a common language, culture and traditions, and for reasons of protection from the prejudices and violence they encountered in this new land. Within St. Paul itself are neighborhoods labeled “Frog Town” where the French community settled, “Swede Hollow” along West 7th Street, where, obviously, those of Swedish descent lived. Rice Street and Maryland Ave was where the German immigrants settled. West St. Paul was where the Latino immigrants congregated and so on.
Many Catholic parishes were built to address the needs of these nationalistic ghettos, hence the Irish went to the Irish church, the Italians to the Italian church, the Germans and the Polish to the their specific national churches, and so on. God forbid that an Irish family worship in a German Catholic church! Intermarriage between Catholics of different nationalities was frowned upon. And a Catholic to marrying a non-Catholic was downright scandalous. In such cases, the only place allowed in which a Catholic and non-Catholic could be married was in the rectory.
Overtime, these nationalistic barriers were softened and eliminated altogether as second and third generations of the original immigrants intermarried with people from other cultures and languages and settled into the melting pot that is the United States. While this is a generalization, in Minnesota, we have new ghettos, formed with those of white European descent clustered together in areas of our cities, suburbs and rural communites, and ghettos within our cities, suburbs, and rural areas in which people of color are clustered. While American society has progressed in which people of all races and cultures are intermarrying producing children of multi-racial ancestry, there has been in the last 20 years a reestablishment of hardened racial divide in our nation.
During the last election cycle, this racism, especially among the white community, has shown to us that the racial and religious prejudice that has scarred American history is just as alive and as horrendous as it had been in the past. The enabling of racial bigotry through the inflammatory rhetoric of Trump and a great number of the hardcore, right-wing political conservative segment of our population has brought to the light of day the deep, dark underbelly of racial bigotry present within what we thought were trusted businesses, municipalities, law enforcement and other areas of our society.
The danger of living in ghettos self-imposed and imposed upon a group is that one begins to believe that the cultural values, religion, and customs of the ghetto are superior to those outside the ghetto. Without the interaction and intermingling of race, culture and customs, whereupon a person discovers and values the many blessings that each race, each culture and each religion brings to the human family, the person is prone to be fearful of anything that is different from his/her own race, culture, and customs. We have heard the Social Darwinism of alt-right bigots claiming that with the ascent of Trump to the presidency, White culture reassumes its rightful place in society, where it should dominate all the “sub-races, sub-cultures, and sub-religions.” This is a grave sin against humanity and a grave sin against the Incarnation of Jesus!
Jesus, the Logos, the Word of God through whom all humanity was created, was born into the human race as a person of color, a brown-skinned, Palestinian Jew. His parents were brown-skinned Palestinian Jews. The “master race” that dominated politically all of Europe at the time of his birth were Romans. Yet, God chose the Palestinian Jews of Judea, a conquered race enslaved to Imperial Rome as the race into which Jesus was to be born. Were we to leave the Incarnation of Jesus here, limited to his ancestral, racial, and religious heritage, we would be guilty of Social Darwinism, too.
The Incarnation of Jesus must impress upon us that it was not just to the Jewish race that the Word of God was chosen to be born. Rather, the Incarnation of Jesus shows us dramatically that in the birth of Jesus was a uniting of the divinity of God to all of humanity. The Incarnation is an action by God by which all of humanity shares in the divinity of God. No one race nor one culture is superior to the other. All races, all cultures are divine. At the creation of the world, all of humanity bears the likeness of our God, who created us. In the Incarnation of Jesus, God putting on the flesh of humanity, this likeness extends to all of humanity a share in the divinity of God. The Incarnation of Jesus shatters the artificial ghettos that the races of humanity have constructed about ourselves. The Incarnation of Jesus rips apart the falsehoods the races of humanity have raised about their own superiority over other races and cultures. The Incarnation of Jesus tears from the heart of humanity the sin of prejudice that defiles the human soul and blinds us from seeing and honoring the divinity of God present in all peoples, cultures, and races!
If we are truly to celebrate the Incarnation of Jesus this Christmas, we must call upon the Christ Child to free us from the Ghettos into which we have placed ourselves, and compel us to mingle with, honor, respect, and rejoice in the divinity of God present in all peoples, cultures, and races.
