Читать книгу The Craft of Innovative Theology. Argument and Process онлайн
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Box 3.5
Having operated a level of generality (and having shown that the implications of the Golden Rule are evaded by the assumption that African Americans are inferior), the author now wants to take a case study and provide a more detailed analysis. She turns to the SBC in the Jim Crow Era.
In his dissent in the Plessy case in 1896, US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote famously that although whites see themselves as the dominant race in America, in the view of the US Constitution, there is no such thing as a ruling class of citizens. He argued:
Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.19
Justice Harlan eerily predicted the tragic consequences of Jim Crow segregation in American life. He believed that Plessy would permit “the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law” and create distrust between the races.20 Justice Harlan had the foresight to understand that the social and political inequalities legally enshrined in American society through Jim Crow segregation would have logical but tragic consequences: racial hate, racial distrust, and interpersonal and mob violence. These consequences and the attendant social instability ultimately would lead to the civil rights movement in mid-twentieth century.