"ARE YOU ARYAN?"

 “ARE YOU ARYAN?”

    Today Congress certified that Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in last November’s election, a day in stark contrast with the Trump-inspired insurrection at the last Congressional certification on this date in 2021.

    Today is  also the Day of Epiphany, or January 6 in the Western church. It marks the end of the season of Christmastide.   After this time the church switches from Christmastide to Epiphany, until the season of Lent arrives on Ash Wednesday (this year, that is March 5).

        Epiphany signifies a revelation, an opening in the individual imagination and in the imagination of the world.  The church tradition remembers this as the coming of strangers, of the Magi.  They were Gentiles coming to worship the baby Jesus and to proclaim that they had seen God’s revelation in this baby.  It is striking in Matthew’s account of this story in chapter 2 that the first people outside the family to see the baby are Gentiles, seers from another culture.  It is also striking that Matthew contrasts this worshipful attitude of the Gentiles with the murderous impulse of the rulers of the area, most especially King Herod.

Matthew’s story tells us that the Magi show up in Jerusalem, inquiring about the new ruler of Judea.  Herod, the ruler at that time, is filled with anxiety at this news, and he develops a plan to find this baby and kill him.  The Magi, however, counter his plan and do their work without revealing to Herod where the baby is in Bethlehem.  Herod reacts to this with horrific violence, ordering all the boys of Bethlehem ages 2 and under to be murdered.  It is a chilling and horrible penultimate chapter in the Christmas story.  Joseph,  the adopted father of Jesus, takes his family and flees as refugees to Egypt – we are glad that they were a welcoming country and did not have a wall built.

I was reminded of this story as I finished reading “My Lord, What A Morning,” an autobiography by the great contralto singer Marian Anderson.  Susan gave it to me for my birthday in November, and she noted that she found it in the “used “ section in the Avant Pop Bookstore in Las Vegas.  It was published in 1956 and went through five printings.  It is a bit dated, but many of the stories are still powerful.  For those young people who read this blog, Marian Anderson was an African-American opera singer who stunned many white people in the 1930’s and 40’s with her powerful and accomplished voice.  

In 1939, she sought to schedule a benefit concert at Constitution Hall in DC, but the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused her permission to do it because she was Black.  First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt intervened and helped to schedule the concert at the Lincoln Memorial.  The DAR later relented, and Anderson sang at the Hall in 1943.

Anderson experienced this kind of thing many times, which she notes in her autobiography.  One such experience stood out to me.  In the 1930’s, she was touring Europe after Hitler had come to power in Germany.  While she was performing in Poland, she received a request from Germany to sing in Berlin.  Here is how she describes that process:

“I was not eager to appear in the Germany of those days…..My manager offered Berlin a single date.  The answer came back that this date would not be the best, but since there was no alternative, this would be accepted.  The fee was also acceptable.  There was only one other question – was Marian Anderson an Aryan?  My manager replied that Miss Anderson was not one-hundred-per-cent Aryan.  That ended the correspondence.”

“Are you Aryan? Are you white?”  Those questions are at the heart of our racial history, and as the Magi story reminds us, the first visitors to see the baby Jesus were not Aryan.  And as the Make-America-White-Again president-elect prepares to take office for a second time, we would do well to read this Epiphany story and Marian Anderson’s story again.  They will be at the heart of the next Trump administration, and we should be prepared to make our responses.