From “Super-Predator” to Image-Bearer
Reflecting Upon a Racialized Evangelical Panic
The Superpredator Scare
During my teenage years in 1990’s New York City, a particular moral panic took hold in the American consciousness. Media outlets and politicians predicted that widespread criminality was about to break out from “a group of extremely violent juvenile criminals who kill, rape or maim on a whim.” Blighted by “moral poverty,” these youth lacked a basic sense of human conscience and ethical remorse, predisposing them to untold depravities.
According to the “myth of the superpredator,” these menaces consisted largely of inner-city black and brown men — who looked more or less like me.
The fact that this “bloodbath” never came to pass — crime actually dropped during the anticipated period — did nothing to reverse the damage of this scare. The result was still that exceedingly more young black and brown inner-city men (who looked more or less like me) were torn from their families and warehoused in prisons for petty crimes (like carrying small amounts marijuana) that they committed at comparable rates to their suburban counterparts.
Furthermore, the fact that this myth never took shape in reality did nothing to mitigate its psychological impact, which was formative to my life as a young Christian seeking to merely know and be known.
Proving Myself
Around this time I was beginning to experience my first stirrings of faith. My family had recently moved from Brooklyn to a quiet Washington, DC, suburb, where I began attending a local evangelical church. I had recently “received Christ as my Lord and Savior,” and I felt genuinely alive in response. I wanted to live a life that pleased him. Stepping through the doors of this evangelical church, I took on the new community as the model the new kind of person I was supposed to become in Christ.
It so happens that the vast majority of the people at the church, as in the other evangelical Bible churches in the area, identified as right-wing conservatives. Because I didn’t have the capacity at this age to disentangle the difference between faith and politics, I took their collective political identity as the only natural expression of a pure Christian faith.
I came to immediately believe that to be “a good and proper Christian,” I needed to conform to the proper “biblical” — meaning hard-right — politics. So I silenced my conscience and adopted an entire political faith, surrendering myself to the work of building up the Republican party as much as the kingdom of God, for I saw the two as one and the same.
So what was I to do, then, with the fact that so many of these evangelicals clung to the superpredator mythology promoted by their favored politicians, seeing it as the natural extension of their Christian faith as well? What was I to do with the view, held by fellow brothers and sisters in the pews, that young black and brown men who looked more or less like me are inherently amoral and dangerous? That some hot element in our blood predisposes us to savagery?
What else could I do but prove myself, show that I was different? That I could serve as a really good right-wing conservative Republican, morally honorable and upright in the world.
I went so far as to work on the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan, that 1990’s Trumpian forerunner.
One afternoon, I was at his campaign office silently licking and folding envelopes. Some volunteers referenced comments he had made about immigrants being a plague upon American soil—comments he would later clarify thus: “an invasion of illegal aliens” has imported a “raft of diseases never seen here before… multiple drug resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, measles, syphilis, Chagas disease, dengue fever and new strains of hepatitis. Even bed bugs have invaded half the American states.”
I stayed silent after their comments for fear that they’d detect the ‘hood in my voice.
But when I did first speak, a full week later, it was only to point the finger at the other young men who looked like me, accusing them for lacking the personal responsibility necessary to reform their fallen genetics.
I was not like them.
Across the years, this charade took a profound toll in me.
And as if all this weren’t bad enough, looking upon this entire era of my life from the distance now of some 30 years, I see something even more insidious at work as well in my reasoning. I had come to believe the logical flipside to the superpredator myth: that white Christians — or perhaps people of northern-European descent in general — were somehow closer to God. I pictured God holding them closer to his heart, raining down his love and pride upon their radiant faces….
What human soul can endure this internal violence for long?
What happens when such a soul collapses, within nothing more to give?
Made In His Image
But that was then; this is now.
Now, as I approach my 50th birthday, I’m asking what my entire Christian life has been about — my panicked striving for success, my overdrive to wow and impress.
I’m ready to lift my gaze to new horizons beyond all this. I’m done!
I’m ready to demolish this toxic God- and self-view and to reconstruct it around the imago Dei, which celebrates all humanity — every single one of us! — as made in the image of God. I’m unlearning the divine scowl of my youth and relearning the face of Jesus as beaming down upon me — and those who look like me — with all the joy in his divine heart: no more or less beautiful or flawed than any of the rest of his creation.
To be sure, this is the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Self-help books and counseling have played a role in helping me chip apart this old worldview, but these tools just aren’t enough by themselves. Positive self-talk needs something real extending into the world, some form of incarnation outward.
A few years back, I discovered what this embodied dimension would look like on the campus of the small liberal arts Christian college where I serve as an English professor. It showed up at my campus office hours one quiet afternoon. But instead of walking into my open office as any other student would, this particular young man sat down just outside it, on a chair there, silently gazing forward for some 30 minutes before I even realized he was there.
When I walked out and saw him, I knew immediately what was happening. I’d been there myself decades ago.
“Hey man, what’chu doin’ out here?” His eyes dart up to mine — a flash of recognition.
“C’mon man, let’s go grab lunch — on me. I gotchu’; it ain’t no thing.” He emits his first signs of emotion, the promise of a smile.
This young man’s journey is now my journey, and in mentoring him, I re-create the young man in me who likewise sits waiting outside the gates of his worth. As this student begins to come alive to the possibility of his full humanity, so do I. My redemption is mysteriously interwoven with his, and we journey together.
I want him to know that he doesn’t have to be anything or anyone else to be worthy of God’s love or to deserve the respect of the other people on campus. Increasingly, this young men can look you in the eye — not a predator, but an image-bearer!
And so are the rest of his peers from the inner city, young men and women of color who take the bus long distances for their chance to know and to be known in this world. God’s glory is awesome in them, and in learning to see them, I feel at times I’ve caught glimpses of God himself. For as Father Thomas Merton reminds us, “the gate of heaven is everywhere,” if only we have eyes to see.
