by Rick McClatchy with significant contributions by Kristi McClatchy

I am so appreciative and moved by the contributions made by many clergy, especially younger clergy, regarding systemic racism within the church. These folks are shedding light on how white privilege manifests and maintains itself in religious circles. While I admire and respect the bravery these people show by attempting to address these problems, we cannot talk about white privilege without addressing white exceptionalism. 

I was first introduced to the term “white exceptionalism” (I had been using the concept since the late 1980s) when reading some of the work of Layla F. Saad. She defines white exceptionalism as "the belief that you, as a person holding white privilege, are exempt from the effects, benefits and conditioning of white supremacy and therefore that the work of antiracism does not really apply to you." She goes on to write, "White exceptionalism is particularly rampant in progressive, liberal and spiritual white people,” seeing themselves as the “good” white people. 

For white folks, one of the strategies for countering white exceptionalism is to unpack and explore our ancestry and family lineage. In doing so, we come face-to-face with how unconscious biases and racists myths, along with white privilege, permeate and echo through our family trees. 

I will try to unpack a little of my family’s history and show how a set of cultural, racist myths shaped our lives. It should be understood upfront: I am a racist. 

One of my culture’s first gifts to me was a set of racist myths that started in the 16th century. While in seminary, I did research for my dissertation regarding the beginning of the racist myths that Europeans created as they encountered sub-Saharan Africans. The racist myths they developed regarding these “Black” Africans, were that they were:

• Sub-human (something between human and ape)

• Uncivilized, wild

• Ignorant

• Violent

• Sexually promiscuous 

Research on my McClatchy family line reveals a deep interaction with these racist myths. My ancestors moved slowly westward, starting in North Carolina and then moving to Tennessee, Alabama and Texas. 

My first McClatchey ancestor in America, John McClatchey, was part of the large Scotch-Irish immigration to English colonies in the mid-1700s. He settled on the frontier in North Carolina, near present-day Statesville about 1755. He owned a few slaves, one of which was passed on to a grandson. 

The various family lines from John McClatchey show descendants owned slaves—one married a man owning around 100 slaves, and another who was a slave trader and sold Black slaves to the Cherokees. A Black family line of McClatcheys began as either former slaves of the McClatcheys or as the offspring of a McClatchey male with one of the female slaves. Evidence suggests it was probably the latter, which might well have been rape. My great-great grandfather served in the Confederate Army. 

Clearly, my early ancestors from 1755 to 1865 bought into the racist myths that underpinned the practices of slavery and benefited economically from the labor and selling of slaves. 

However, during that same period, my ancestors also experienced limited racial discrimination. John’s only son married a half-indigenous woman, which required paying an extra fee to get the marriage legalized. So, several generations later in the census records, their descendants were not listed as white. Evidence indicates some of the McClatcheys later on married people of European and indigenous ancestry. Even though they experienced limited discrimination and never would be in the upper echelons of white, Southern culture, they apparently held to the racist myths about African Americans, seeing them as inferior. This demonstrates just because a person is discriminated against doesn’t mean they are not racist.

My ancestors did not begin to very slowly change their behavior until after the Civil War. My great grandfather was living in Alabama during Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction before he moved to Texas in 1890, to get away from the influence of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan came to his house pressuring him to join. He used the excuse that his wife was ill, and the two children needed someone to watch over them. As soon as the Klan left, he told his wife, “This is no way to raise a family.” Shortly afterward, they moved to rural Texas. 

They settled on a large cattle ranch that had been broken up into numerous smaller plots. The families settling in the area all came out of Southern states. A few were even former Confederate soldiers like his father. They were not active Klansmen, but they all brought with them their racist myths. 

Of course, there were no African American families that settled in the immediate area, which placed racial issues on the back burner. Most people were just trying to survive and raise their families. In my reading about the history of the small, rural community, I saw only one mention of a Black family who worked on one of the farms as hired laborers. 

My grandfather and father grew up and lived in this rural, isolated, white community. I, too, grew up in this community, along with these racist myths. My grandfather seemed to be comfortable with the racist myths that had been passed down, and, as far as I know, never challenged them. Since this was an isolated, white community, it was never really clear how he might have acted in a more diverse community. 

Living in such isolated whiteness made it easy for the community to believe racial issues were unimportant or someone else’s problem. However, if the issue did come up for conversation in the community, then the issue always was settled on the side of white supremacy and the racist myths that supported it. I think the general attitude was that most people were simply glad not to have any Black people in the community. 

My father never had to deal with racial issues until he served a short stint in the military, where he interacted with Black soldiers daily. But sometimes this was very tense. He told me a race riot broke out in the barracks between Black soldiers and white soldiers. However, during his time in the military, he built a close friendship with an African-American soldier who played on the base’s football team with him. 

This friendship helped open to some extent my father’s thinking. Later in life, he had two close relationships with Black men from a nearby town that had a small, segregated Black population. Having this type of racial interaction in our rural white community was unusual. My father was unusual in that he never really denied the racist myths of our culture, but he went out of his way to have a friendship with two Black men. This would suggest even interracial friendship, while indeed positive and helpful, does not erase the racist myths.

My sister and I attended a small-town, white school. It was not until I was a junior in high school that a Black family moved into the town, which really had no major impact upon me. So, I went through high school never really giving serious thought about my community’s racial views, which had been passed to me. 

My sister, who is seven years younger than I, had a few more African-American students in her school experience. She dealt with our predominantly white community’s racial attitudes in ways I never did. She became friends with a wonderful young Black lady in high school. However, due to peer pressure from other white students, they never built their friendship away from school. Fortunately, they connected with each other, even though most of the other students vocally disapproved. Later, she became my sister’s maid of honor. 

In seminary, I began to analyze racism and was vocal in my opposition to racial discrimination. So, when I began my doctoral research, I found wonderful books that discussed the racist myths that underpinned the racism of my culture and ancestors. Of course, the uncomfortable part of the study forced me to ask: What about me? Am I a product and purveyor of these racist myths? Yes. 

As I did my research, I discovered I was already familiar with all these racist myths that originated in the 16th century. I heard all these racist myths repeatedly from various adults in my culture—relatives, teachers, preachers, policemen, lawyers, judges and other authority figures. The fact I already knew them before starting my research suggests they were deeply implanted in my subconscious mind by my culture, and in unconscious ways I undoubtedly had acted upon or perpetuated these racist myths. 

So, I question how much of my interactions with Black people has been influenced by these racist myths in my subconscious. I would like to think none of my thinking and actions were influenced by these cultural, racist myths, but I know that would be a lie. You never can entirely escape the impact of the culture to which you belong. 

Because of this deep cultural impact upon my subconscious, I must constantly be attentive in two ways. First, realize that I am a racist, and I must think and act with extreme attentiveness—much like a recovering alcoholic has to acknowledge his disease and act attentively, knowing that at any moment he might revert to his old behavior. Second, I must cultivate a mystical attentiveness to our—Black folks and white folks—common humanity and unity in the family of God. 

What about my children? Will they escape unharmed by these racist myths? I hope my children have grown up with a different cultural context than I did, but that will be their story to tell about our family’s journey with racism. 

Rick McClatchy is coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Texas.