Christian “White Supremacy”

I’m being a bad Buddhist by publishing this. People on the Buddhist path should be highly ecumenical and look for the value in all religions. Unsurprisingly, the Dalai Lama set an excellent example in this regard, writing that compassion is the basis of all religions.

That may be true in the abstract, but the Dalai Lama did not grow up in a pervasively Christian culture like that of the United States, where we see the hatred and violence of Christians on a daily basis.

The good Christians who created the first successful English colony in North America, at Jamestown, literally invented “white supremacy” (which I always put in scare quotes because it is so risibly self refuting — white people are not supreme in any sense) out of fear for the possibility of alliances among free Black, Native, and poor white people. They originally believed enslaving other Christians was immoral, but a few Africans went to court and won their freedom by showing their understanding of Christianity in competent English, so the good, white Christians who ran the colony decided that the status of slave would depend on skin color, not religious belief, and pass from a mother to her child, even if the father was white.

No compassion here.

This set up the intractable problem in the United States of discrimination on the basis of “race,” a social…