There is a continual temptation in the heart of man to live within a racialized society as if it were race-neutral, or at least race-less. The truth is that we live in a racialized world, one where we see color, see color as race, and that awareness has conscious and subconscious implications on how we treat one another.
As of late, and by late I mean the last sixty years of North American thought, some people have assumed that race, this dynamic socio-political-classist idea that has dominated the world for the last five hundred years disappeared with the advent and departure of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the passing of certain Civil Rights voting rights acts, and the overall absence of Klansmen roaming the streets.
From the 1970s to date, we have fooled ourselves into believing the myth that race no longer matters, more so, that race no longer exists and therefore no longer plays a role in the formation, evaluation, advancement, or abasement of our society — some racial groups more than others.
The truth is that many communities, white communities, in particular, have been duped into believing that we are now living in a color-blind society, where the betterment of one’s life rests solely on their merits and efforts and little, if at all, on their social-demographic and racial makeup.
The presence and success of Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, and Barack Obama are the only signs of Black progress in America needed to prove and support the myth that race, more so racism, is no longer at play in our North American society. The financial and national success of some three dozen or so Black Americans is all that is needed to promote the idea that racism is dead and the presence of virulent discrimination of the past is behind us.
But we know, we understand that race is still very much at play in how our mixed society evaluates people, promotes some, demotes others, incarcerates some, and liberates others, on the conscious and subconscious efforts of people who are still very much plagued by the psychological disease that is racism.
Without color consciousness or race consciousness, we will protect a society where discrimination based on color and race is not discrimination at all. We will stand in awe as one person berates another, calling them racially derogatory terms, but we will not be able to categorize that behavior as racially insensitive.
It is like someone attempting to disregard the presence of the force that pulls objects to the ground when we drop them, stating that objects are not falling, they are simply not rising, because gravity does not exist. Thus, when objects do fall, the person will simply deny the reality of the fact and claim that it isn’t gravity, it must be, simply, the non-rising of objects. A play on words to avoid the reality of the issue that not only does gravity exist, objects do, in fact, fall.
Living in a color-blind society does little for racial reconciliation and betterment. It does in fact thwart our progress as a society.
It is impossible at this point, these many hundreds of years into a racialized world to do away with the concept of race. One person said that race is but the offspring of racism, stating that prejudice and discrimination were present before the actual categorization of the race itself ever came to be. I don’t disagree.
But now it is illegal to discriminate against someone based on race, therefore, doing away with the idea of race, people will discriminate based on it but will be free of any liability to it.
Race exists. Socially. It is a social phenomenon. It is a socially devised category to elevate certain racial groups and devalue others. We have lived so long under these realities that it is impossible now to do away with the conscious reality of race.
And since race is here to stay and discrimination must go we must learn to live in a race-conscious society, devoid of racism. In the same way, we live in an ethnic-conscious society without becoming proponents of ethnocentrism.
Living the myth of color-blindism is like living in a world where the terms misogyny (intense hatred of women) and femicide (murder of women) do not exist, therefore, when women are mistreated for no other reason than they are women and when women are killed for no other reason than they are women, we frown at the sad reality, mourn their passing, arrest the perpetrators but are unable to give a name to the targeted type of mistreatment and crime.
A color-blind society is afraid of its racial diversity, and in many cases, it is afraid of the reality of its racially homogenous makeup. Communities of color know that their demographic is made up of people of color, minorities, and racial minorities who are easily identifiable. But communities strictly made up of white citizens tend to view it as not a community made up of white citizens but simply as a community.
The race factor is removed from its vocabulary although it is present in its subconscious.
This is clear when minority community members have added to this race-neutral or faceless community, there is a stir, unspoken at first, but discussed in other, raceless terms in the future, because the addition adds something, although they cannot name it, a difference, to their previously indifferent community.
The luxury of race blindness or racelessness is one found within the white community alone, as their ancestors exclusively invented the concept of race and distinguished the difference between normalcy, namely, whiteness, from non-whites, namely, Black, yellow, and red peoples. The standard was always raceless as long as raceless meant white, but the moment a minority factor was added to the mix, color had to be included to better explain that difference.
A community is a community since it is white, albeit devoid of its racial categorization. When a community is half or mostly made up of Black or Hispanic people, it then gets categorized as a minority community or a Black community, or a Hispanic or Latino community.
When a business is owned and governed by white people, it is simply a business. But when a business is owned and governed by people of color, it is called a minority-owned business. Race, thus, becomes only evident in the “other” race to say the standard race, the white race, is either non-existent to the majority white group or that it is invisible to them.
The use of “white majority” communities or “white majority-owned business” is unheard of, even in a world where we have the absence and presence of the opposite when it is used to define and categorize non-white color and race groups.
We must not allow another generation to enter a world where color blindness is the standard by which we live because the absence of color and race gives way for discrimination to intensify without its proper terminology.
A color-blind society, one devoid of racial descriptions, allows for people who are very much racist to evolve and thrive even, in their problematic prejudices without repercussions.
Judges who disproportionately sentence Black youth to lengthier prison stays than their white counterparts who commit the same crime can simply state that they do not have a racist bone in their bodies and the discrepancy is just that, a discrepancy.
Law enforcement officers who use excessive force against minority groups during arrests, using their tasers, dogs, and even weapons, at a higher rate against these community members than they do against white community members who commit the same crimes, can state that their decisions are race-less, devoid of prejudice because they do not have a racist bone in their body.
Physicians who believe that Black women have a higher pain threshold than white women will refuse to assist Black women in labor when they complain of added discomfort, pains, and issues. When those Black women die under their care as a result of their negligence they defend their decisions on supposedly clear medical arguments, stating that they did not believe, at the time, that their patient was being forthcoming about their situation and that the decision to refuse help or dismiss concerns was strictly consequential and not racial at all.
Community watchmen can chase down a Black young man in their community, harass him, and upon his defending his person, they can gun him down with extreme prejudice, return home, delay their own arrest with the help of the local district attorney, and deny that, once they are arrested for predating upon a Black man, that their racialized targeting was racist. This, of course, is made available by the presence of post-racial theorization that allows for racism to be exercised liberally without the acts ever meriting the categorization of racism.
Raceless communities tend to be white communities. Colorblind institutions tend to be white majority or white exclusive communities. Post-racial or raceless theories tend to just be theories devoid of racial categorization.
Theology is called theology because it is Euro-American, namely, historically white. But when it is acted upon by Black or Latin American theologians it is called Black Liberation theology or Liberation theology.
That is one of the thousands of examples where color blindness only benefits members of the invisible race class, white people.
We live in a racialized society that must exist devoid of racism.
We must meet each other as we are, Black, white, Latin, Asian, and more, and love one another in that diversity. We mustn’t diminish or elevate based on race. We must love in the reality of race.
Failing to understand that leads us to a place where we live in a racialized reality where we are afraid to discuss race, mention race, talk about race, and even believe that race still exists because to name it is to see not only the realities of those who suffer in this paradigm but also those who benefit from such disparities.
Seeing race can and does lead us to societal betterment and improvement.
Denying race in a racialized society leads us down a dangerous road in the 21st century.
Teach yourself and your community members that race is still very much a part of who we are, of what our society is, and we must address that reality without ill or hate, with love and respect, understanding and patience, to move forward to a racially just, diverse, inclusive, and integrated society.
The opposite will give us more harm, hurt, and death at the hands of racists who get away with their racism by claiming they could never, ever be racists since they claim to not see race.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
Currently Reading
“An unusually sensitive work about the racial barriers that still divide us in so many areas of life.” — Jonathan Kozol
Many of us want to believe that the prejudices witnessed during the Civil Rights Era, namely, the images and videos of police officers beating Civil Rights activists, police dogs mauling men and women in city streets, sit-in protestors having ice cream dumped over their heads, freedom riders being shot at by vigilantes, and of klansmen parading through town, have since disappeared from our national purview and with them the prejudices they carried.
In this state of mind, we believe that the racism of yesteryear, the racist policies attached to that era, and the Jim Crow laws of the Deep South or the silent segregated liberal Northern states has since vanished. This line of reasoning is accepted because we aren’t witnesses to successful or failed assassination attempts against Civil Rights activists anymore. We haven’t witnessed high profile cases like the lynching of Emmitt Till (1955) or the assassination of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) in two generations, therefore the racism that allowed for those reprehensible crimes to take place must have since disappeared from the American plain of memory and conscience.
And I must not be remiss by failing to acknowledge the many Civil Rights advances that have happened within the United States from 1865 to date.
In 1865, the United States added the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, thus abolishing slavery in all its states.
In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution granting persons born or naturalized in the United States the right to American citizenship. This benefited Black Americans who hitherto had been considered property, not persons, therefore undeserving of citizenship.
In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution, and it forbade any state from depriving citizens of the right to vote because of their race, color, or previous state as ‘slaves or indentured servants.’ Namely, Black Americans were now allowed to vote.
Attached to 1870 and 1871, the United States federal government passed three distinctive laws or edicts to combat the rise and prevalence of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan had instigated terror against newly freed and now voting privileged Black Americans, killing, maiming, and torturing them away from voting centers. The federal government sought to penalize and hold legally accountable any Klansmen or group that sought to deprive Black Americans of their Constitutional right to vote.
In 1875, a Civil Rights Act was passed that prohibited the exclusion of Black Americans from jury duty and also allowed them the right and privileges to convene in public places and share land and water with their white counterparts.
In 1954, the United States Supreme Court decided in the Brown v. Board of Education case to integrate previously racially segregated public schools. White and Black Americans were now not only allowed to attend the same schools but to prohibit the integration and matriculation of students based on their race or color was unconstitutional.
In 1957, another Civil Rights Act prohibited state officials from discriminating against people of color who wanted to cast their vote. Although the federal government had granted Black Americans the right to vote 90 or so years ago, state and local officials sought to abuse their power by intimidating or outright prohibiting Black Americans from voting at certain polling sites. The act pushed back against illegal state legislation and its legally compromised officials.
In 1960, another Civil Rights Act was passed to bring criminal charges against any state or federal official who prohibited or attempted to prohibit colored Americans from voting.
In 1964, one of the more popular Civil Rights Act was ratified to “prohibit the discrimination in public accommodations, facilities, and schools.” This act also promoted and presented the Equal Employment Opportunities in public and private sectors since Black and colored Americans had previously been refused career opportunities based not on merit nor education but solely on the color of their skin or their identifiable race. This act also enforced voting rights for all American citizens, once again.
In 1965, the equally popular Civil Rights Act was passed to further protect black and colored Americans’ right to vote and also pushed for federal observers to be present at voting sites to ensure that Black and colored Americans were not being discriminated against. They pushed to make sure voting-eligible citizens were registered to vote and made it to the booths and community centers to vote without harassment. They banned poll taxes which halted poor Americans, which Black Americans were a predominant part of, from making it to the voting booth to vote since they did not have the cash required to pay the tax to vote. And this also provided criminal penalties for whoever violated this federal edict.
In 1968, the same year Dr. Martin Luther KingJr., was assassinated, the 1968 Civil Rights Act (Fair Housing Act) was ratified to prohibit state and federal housing officials from discriminating against Native Americans and colored Americans from land or property purchases.
And from 1968 to 2022, the American government has continued to improve Fair Housing Acts and Voting Rights Acts in hopes of bringing the country to a place where people are not discriminated against based on race, sex, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. To prohibit anyone from such liberties previously and historically afforded to white land-owning American men is now considered a violation of one’s constitutional rights in American.
We have seen wondrous advances but in light of the benevolent steps toward equity and equality, we may be blindsided by the varied prejudices that allowed for these injustices happen and later carry on for as long as they did. It is very easy for us to believe that just because something, namely, discrimination has been outlawed on a federal and state level, that it has ceased to exist in other places like policing, housing markets, lending firms, community centers, board of education staff, hiring management, church or religious environments, and private firms or private schools.
From 1954 to 1971, the United States of America witnessed the funding and establishment of more than 197 partially or completely segregated schools and academies in the American Deep South (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia). Unsurprisingly, these states had also been part of the Confederate States of America which seceded from the United States of America to fight for the Deep South’s right to own black people as slaves. After their cumulative and disastrous loss to the Union Army in the American Civil War, these and other Southern states sought to further harass black Americans by initiating Jim Crow laws and policies to further disadvantage black Americans. When these laws and policies lost hold, especially within the education department through the Brown v. Broad of Education case, Southern whites sought to create their racially monochromatic safe havens in private segregated schools and communities.
Most of these private schools are still open and active today. Many have since been integrated but most have not, not entirely at least.
What is heartbreaking is that these schools, most of which are Christian academies, were named after slavery defending generals or Confederate army heroes and sympathizers. John C. Calhoun Academy (est. 1966, SC), Robert E. Lee Academy (est. 1965, SC), John T. Morgan Academy (est. 1965, AL), Stonewall Jackson Academy (est. 1965, SC), and John S. Mosby Academy (est. 1959, VI) to name a few.
These schools were formed and established with the explicit intent of being segregated institutions. And no wonder they were called as such, segregationist schools.
As the American federal government ratified laws that prohibited the discrimination of Black and colored Americans in the public and private sectors and institutions, many American institutions, private schools, and businesses found loopholes to continue perpetuating racist policies to disadvantage or refuse patrons of color.
The schools named after Confederate generals, lawyers, and sympathizers hold the same names to this day, as aspects of pride and honor, celebrating their heroes, albeit depicting them as such is morally and historically questionable, but Lost Cause fanatics know of no other interpretation of the Confederacy’s embarrassing loss or they refuse to accept the correct one.
Although various amendments were made to the Constitution and Civil Rights Acts were ratified in the American civil conscience, many towns, cities, and states have found other means by which to protect their prejudices and discriminatory practices for decades ever since.
And this brings us to the problem of our day. People who fall victim to the seemingly innocuous but cancerous statement, I don’t see color fail to realize that they are protecting a racist system by denying its very existence.
This sentiment is shared by people who refused to grapple with the current realities of a racialized society or the horrible racist past of our nation(s). Dealing with the past is too grim an endeavor for them to undertake and to connect that not too distant past where grandparents may or may not have been involved in discriminatory practices is like swimming in bloody water for many.
We don’t want to confront the possibility that in our family line, the very people we love and look up to as heroes, veterans, lawyers, doctors, and statesmen, were at the same time, racist, prejudiced, and discriminatory individuals who today we view as evil men and women. Faceless men and women, to be exact.
We don’t want to add a face nor a name to these racists of yesteryear because doing so will then qualify them as being human and of having families and racist people don’t have families. They’re to allowed to, you see. They live, hate, and die alone somewhere in the black and white Deep South of the 1950s and 1960s. It’s impossible that those hate-filled segregationists ever had children and if they did, there is absolutely no way their socio-racial-political sentiments could have passed down to the next generation.
Therefore they created this national myth, and by ‘they’ I mean white Americans, both the liberal and conservative ones, that we live in a post-racial or color-blind society.
This concept benefits no one other than people who continue to perpetuate racist sentiments. One can be racist but now has the luxury of changing the motivation for their hatred, namely, turning a racist act into an act of insensitivity, unneighborliness, drunken spell, sleeping pill-induced slip of the tongue, or uncharacteristic vitriol attributed to high or low blood sugar.
In a color-blind society where race still plays a part in its foundation, it is inconceivable that anyone can still be racist. They’re anything but racist.
In his revelatory book, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva tackles this all-too dangerous concept of willful racial blindness experienced in post-Civil Rights 1960s America.
“Compared to Jim Crow racism, the ideology of color blindness seems like ‘racism lite.’ Instead of relying on name-calling (niggers, spics, chinks), color-blind racism otherizes softly (‘these people are human, too’); instead of proclaiming that God placed minorities in the world in a servile position, it suggests they are behind because they do not work hard enough; instead of viewing interracial marriage as wrong on a straight racial basis, it regards it as ‘problematic’ because of concerns over the children, location, or the extra burden it places on couples.”
And he concludes on the detriment racial blindness can cost a racialized society.
“If race disappears as a category of official division, as it has in most of the world, this will facilitate the emergence of a plural racial order where the groups exist in practice but are not officially recognized – and anyone trying to address racial division is likely to be chided for racializing the population.”
Color-blind racism or racist-less racism is present in the equally revelatory comments made by then-Republican campaign consultant, Lee Atwater, who helped push the conservative party’s Southern Strategy movement that set the pace and style by which Republicans would dog whistle to their racist constituents, discriminate against Black Americans, and win elections for the next five decades.
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’”
Racism without racists creates a dangerous environment where someone can disparage someone, badmouth them, refuse them work and opportunity, deny them a loan or the opportunity to apply for residency in a particular community, deny them service in a certain part of town, all based on race without explicitly saying the intent was racial.
As Atwater stated, being explicitly racist, using derogatory or pejorative terms against minorities, has gone out of vogue since the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, a section of racist peoples in the United States of America (Canada and Europe included, but primarily within the United States of America), had to adapt and code-switch so that they could hold on to their discriminatory practices without losing social capital with the new and now more progressive world.
Calling someone a nigger is likened to committing public suicide in the age of social media, but refusing to hire someone named Tyrone, Jerome, DeVante, Devariste, or Kunta Kinte simply because those names are believed to be connected to African American men, is the new normative.
Calling a dissatisfied and rightfully upset Black woman an ‘angry sassy mamy’ or ‘an unhinged negro’ is unquestionably horrendous but to call her a lazy welfare queen dog whistles to the covert racists of our society that there is a mutual understanding on the agreement and intent about the verbiage. It is derogatory and it has been racialized by new racists who benefit from the neologism that shields the public from their wanton intentions when using these words.
There is a select portion of our society, predominantly so here in the West, more so within North America, that only views racism or racist acts as prejudice (pre-judgment) and discrimination (actions based on pre-judgment) happening on an interpersonal level.
Racism to them is only racism if it happens from one person to another.
Racism for most white Americans is only racism if men dawn white robes and burn crosses; it’s only racism if women sew up effigies of Black men hanging from trees; it’s only racism if Black women are told to sit in the back of the bus; it’s only racism if someone outright uses the word nigger, because to some whites, nigga, niggah, and negro is a socially acceptable term to toss around amongst white friends since some Black Americans use it in their respective circles.
White Americans have a difficult time realizing that racism surpasses the interpersonal prejudice because racism is endemic to the society it exists within. What I mean is that if there were only ten racist people in all of American history then it would make sense to believe that racist acts could only have been committed by those ten individuals. But what many white Americans cannot accept or have not come to understand is that millions of white Americans for almost four hundred years built a society (a nation) on a racial hierarchy that benefited white Americans and because white Americans are still the majority of the country to this day, the same systems that were in place at the inception of the nation to protect and advantage one group, namely, whites, whilst harming and disadvantaging another, namely, colored peoples, are still very much a fabric of this society.
Racism was co-opted and disseminated through religious circles as well and because I am a Christian, I will now quote minister David W. Swanson on the reason why white Americans and white Christians have a very difficult time seeing the structural and systemic tentacles of racism.
Here is an excerpt from minister Swanson’s book, Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity.
“Individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism have built renowned and racially homogenous ministries, but these have been cold comfort to those members of the body of Christ who exist outside the boundaries of racial whiteness. If white Christians are to reckon with racial discipleship, we must also look critically at the deeply held assumptions that have thus far hindered our attempts to address racial segregation and injustice. While it’s been over a hundred years since Ida B. Wells and Dwight L. Moody overlapped in Chicago, the dynamic they illustrate continues today. In the current cultural moment, black Christians are fighting for more equitable criminal justice policies, immigrant churches are advocating for policies that don’t separate asylum-seeking parents from their children, and Native American believers are lamenting as ancient tribal lands are being polluted by oil pipelines. At the same time, there are prominent white Christians publicly debating whether justice, from a biblical vantage point, can ever be social. Some of these leaders wonder whether justice can even be considered Christian when not limited to an individual. As disheartening as this divide is between white Christianity and many Christians of color, white Christianity’s tools help us to see why we haven’t been able to move past it.”
Minister Swanson opened my eyes to the Cerberus of color-blind racism that I hadn’t thought of before.
He states that individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism prevent white Christians (and Americans) from coming to terms with the harmful effects of racism connected but not limited to interpersonal prejudice.
The individualistic aspect of American liberal thought allows Americans to believe that everything that happens to someone is disconnected from everything else around them, to an extent. You rise and fall by your merit. You are impoverished, not due to interconnected faults of national and local policies, geological disasters, and local oligarchs, but because you haven’t tried hard enough to get that best possible job you need to break out of poverty.
Author and descendent of a Ku Klux Klan member, Edward Ball, further explains the dangerous extrapolation of American individualism in his phenomenal biographical work, Life of a Klansman.
“The cult of the individual that dominates modern minds, the ideology of the ‘I,’ prevents most of us from seeing ourselves as products of the chronicle and choices of our predecessors.”
The idea that we are disconnected from the past and each other, allows us to get away with what someone else does with the same dangerous believes we hold dear to our hearts.
If your neighbor chases and then guns down a black man down your community and then ensues on calling him a nigger as the Black man lays there dying, we want to believe that our neighbors sentiment is disconnected by from the broader history of our peoples and that such behavior is unbecoming of our community standards. This, of course, is another technique that favors color-blind racists because they will hide behind the veil of individualistic innocence. Not understanding or willfully ignorant of the past and co-current effects of racism and violence have had and still have on the American conscience.
Swanson also mentions that relationalism and antistructuralism found in the defensive psyche of white Christians (and Americans) prohibits them from recognizing the structural reach of racism.
He mentions that these techniques are used to deflect the possibility that racism is anything but interpersonal prejudice because when relationalism is applied, the defendant or racism-denier, will say that when someone denies someone work based on race, there must be an underlying issue that forced that hiring team to deny that colored man the position. Albeit studies have been produced time and again that resumes that display a name that may sound or is perceived as belonging to an African American man or woman are ignored and resumes that have European-sounding names are favored instead. The relationalist will state that perhaps, just perhaps, there was something else. They will forever want to know if there was something more going on between the perpetrator and the victim, to give a name to the prejudice or assault or harassment, since it wasn’t racism or a racist act in their mind.
The antistructuralist will forever deny connections between peoples and systems because they are stuck within an individualistic prism that prevents them from connecting centuries of prejudice with the noose hanging from the church spire down the street from his home.
It is almost as if the very things most people of color were refused, namely, individual rights, relational freedom, and structural power, are the very things white Christians (and Americans) use as techniques to refuse to admit that racism is more than just interpersonal prejudice.
In light of this, many people, white Americans and white North Americans (white Europeans included) live in a post-Civil Rights altered reality where racism has simply vanished with the ouster segregationist signage and the disappearance of Klansmen. This supposed vanishing of racism began and continued through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. To say that the racists of yesterday failed or were unsuccessful in passing their hate down the line is a win for white Christians (and Americans).
To believe this fallacy would mean that the various neo-nazi, nationalist, anti-government, anti-immigrant, doomsday militias, and accelerationist white supremacist groups that still exist and continue to pose a credible threat to American democracy are not run and maintained by racist individuals.
According to color-blind disciples, these groups who recruit from police departments and military veteran pools, are just young men and women going through a phase. The swastikas tattooed onto their necks is just a bet gone wrong, a triviality of youth. And the armed training courses they routinely run in black sites, the dark web forums that exist where they discuss the kidnapping of government officials, and the bombing of federal buildings are all but inconsequential, unconnected segments of a matrix-less body of sad and upset patriotic Americans experiencing what is considered a natural side effect of growing up in America, namely, national blues.
White Christians (and Americans) who suffer from individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism are unfortunately the one group of people most susceptible to defend violent or would-be violent racist groups and factions who intend on causing interpersonal harm, possibly death, to minorities.
They would never call Native Americans derogatory terms but they do call them lazy alcoholics.
They would never call African Americans niggers but they sure call their youth super predators and welfare queens.
They would never call Jews kikes but they feel comfortable calling them greedy bankers or goblins.
They would never publicly tell immigrants that they’re unwelcome in America, that they’re dirty, and that their difference in color and language is what makes them unwanted in white communities. But they vote in a man to the highest office of the land who calls them rapists and murderers, and then proceeds to build a wall dividing the country from brown immigrants to the South but allows the white immigrant population to the North (Canadians) to flow in and out of the country, overstaying their visas, in the hundreds of thousands without a single complaint.
They would never called refugees and immigrants racial slurs but they continually dehumanize them by calling them illegal immigrants, illegal aliens, and disease carrying, crime promoting, gang member or cartel sicario migrants.
In a color-blind world, racism festers and grows but it is masqueraded as something else. Always as something else.
I liken the dangers of color-blind racism to a world where we refuse to acknowledge and accept that toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and misogyny exist.
Because if we can do away with these terms then we can accept the reality that feminicide isn’t the targeted hatred and murder of women but it then becomes the unfortunate disproportionate murder of a particular yet indescribable portion of our population.
If genocide ceases to exist or rather, if we refuse to acknowledge it as such, then the Holocaust and the Final Solution of Nazi Germany to exterminate every single Jew in Europe was but a sizable yet eventually forgettable mass killing that happened a long time ago.
When we refuse to acknowledge the root of sin, or an issue, or a crime, or what further complicates an already problematic situation, we can become complicit in its perpetuation.
Greed and power are what exacerbates impoverished groups, but you add war to greed and power you create destabilized groups and introduce the possibility for slavery. But you add racism, which precedes race, to this concept and you have not just the initial harms of greed, war, power, and slavery, but you further demonize an already hellish system under which it can live and survive for decades, if not centuries discriminating against a particular group of people on the basis of race, gender, sex, orientation, religion, etc.
In a color-blind racialized society, those kids who didn’t want to play with my daughter because, as they said, “We don’t want to play with you because you’re too dark” Get away with being racist because to their parents, I am sure, those kids cannot be racist. The words they utter and the behavior they enact seem racist, but it is inconceivable, that children reflect in public what they learn in private.
A society that fails to acknowledge the reality and prevalence of racism and how color is real and how race, albeit is a social construct (a very consequential social construct) has shaped our society, we will never, ever admit that a racist act or a racist system is in fact, racist.
The dangers are many and the consequences are suffered on both sides of this conversation as disadvantaged minorities grow resentful toward the white hegemony who perpetrate and perpetuate the harm; and the ones who grow silent in the face of it. And also, white Christians (and Americans) suffer what is considered perpetrator-induced PTSD. This is experienced by individuals who work within unfavorable industries, usually ethically questionable ones, where they exterminate animals, operate slaughterhouses, and serve as executioners, but are considered socially acceptable functions within society. These individuals suffer from perpetrator-induced PTSD.
White people suffer from racism even when they are not the ones who are directly disadvantaged from prejudice and discrimination.
They take upon themselves a burden no one was ever supposed to carry, namely, the burden of pseudo-racial superiority complex, and they also alienate themselves from their very diverse body of citizenry.
For us to make changes, changes for the better, we must stop believing that one, racism has disappeared; two, that racism is prejudice on an interpersonal level only; three, admit that there is color and that race is very much a part of our society; and lastly, four, we must confront our racist family member and racist friends.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of race. The issue here is racism where we then discriminate against someone because of the category they fall within.
Many white Christians (and Americans) want to do away with racism by doing away with the category altogether. But this will not work because we still live in a racialized society.
It’s like trying to roll a rock uphill well knowing you are not dressed in the proper boots and the rock is the size of the Empire State building.
Jason Stanley, author of How Propaganda Works, describes the harmful effects of changing the behavior toward a structure instead of changing the structure itself. This inability to confront a rotten foundation and the rotten soil under it will result in a structure that is prey to an imminent and catastrophic collapse.
“The racial dispositions of white Americans are very well documented. They appear in fact to be a permanent feature of the American psyche. The belief that blacks are excessively prone to criminality and inherently lazy is a central feature of white American ideology dating back at least two hundred years. … What is true is that certain kinds of previously acceptable, very explicit forms of racism began to elicit strongly negative reactions from white Americans. It remained the case that claims that are legitimately regarded as racist remained an acceptable part of American public political discourse. … As the Lee Atwater quotation we have heard attested that certain kinds of previously acceptable racist claims became unacceptable in the late 1960s. The new less racist norms of public political discourse forced political propagandists to see a way of reaching the racial biases of Americans without explicitly and obviously violating the new structure of explicit norms surrounding race. … After the Civil Rights movement, the vast majority of Americans consciously adhered to a norm that made very explicit racist expressions impermissible. However, Americans retained the racial biases that are so central to the national identity of the country.”
In all, it is imperative that white Christians and white Americans confront the harmful narrative of color-blindness in a racialized society.
For the time being, it is right to accept that race will be a part of our society for the next generation or two. Experts claim demographics will change drastically in the next twenty-five years sending caucasian citizens to minority status in North America for the first time in centuries. I expect that this shift will not create a reciprocal effect of racial disparity and inequality, but this time, at the hands of colored Americans. Were that to be the case, I believe the issue of racial hatred lies not in the hands of a white hegemony but more so in the heart of humanity itself.
As of today, since we have yet to see racism, in its structural, systematic, and systemic force, used and abused by colored people to exploit white people, I am left to presume that white culture, Whiteness (capital W), and white supremacy as we have come to accept it, albeit by force or coercion, for the last five hundred or so years, is to blame for the rise and existence of structural racism within American society.
If we are ever to reach a time where racism is not part of society we will then have to confront racism in the heart, mind, intellect, history, language, faith, geography, policies, policing, and politics of those who espouse it with impunity now. We must confront this socio-political evil today.
For racism to face consequences, we must first acknowledge that one, it exists (and it does) and two, we must condemn it in all of its forms, together.
Teach your children to acknowledge color, and also acknowledge the fact that race plays a very big role in our society. Not in the sense that one’s race makes one better or worse, but that this diversity is a beautiful aspect of our society.
Teach them to see color and to love it.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
Currently Reading
“In this critical moment where we have fallen so far apart, The Sum of Us is a book we all need, a must-read for everyone who wants to understand how we got here but, more important, where we can go from here – and how we get there, together.” –Alicia Garza, author of The Purpose of Power and cofounder of Black Lives Matter
Few of us have heard the name and fewer yet would consider a reason why we should and that is because the myth of Richard Poplar is glorified in Lost Cause sensationalism typically relegated to the dampest, dumbest, and most racism swamps of the American Deep South.
What I mean is that this black man whose remains now rest in Blandford Cemetery (Confederate Soldiers Wasteland) is a legend to Lost Cause fanatics. These miscreants expropriate Richard’s name, race, and military ‘service’ throughout the Civil War to form a myth about him, purporting an image of him as a hero of the vanquished Confederacy.
This could not be further from the truth but Lost Cause sympathizers know little about truth, to begin with.
FindAGrave.com eulogizes Richard’s poor soul with a romanticized version of his ‘service’ in the Confederate Army.
“A Black Virginian who cast his fortunes with the Confederacy. Dick endured many weary months as a prisoner, rather than desert his friends and comrades. He was a highly esteemed, honest, industrious man. A member of the famous Sussex Light Dragoons, he joined in April of 1861, and fought with them until Gettysburg, where he and many of his unit were captured in retreat. Held at Fort Delaware for five months, he was taken to Point Lookout for fourteen more, and exchanged in 1865. He returned to Petersburg, where he lived the rest of his life. Befittingly, he was buried with full Confederate honors, a loyal son of the South.”
This beatific rendition of Richard Poplar’s life as a Confederate serviceman and prisoner of war is problematic. Know why?
It’s false.
Well, Richard Poplar was a black man in the Deep South. Let me explain this further for the American history neophyte.
Richard Poplar was a slave turned kitchen worker who was forced to live under the subjugation of white masters and then cooks for white men who were fighting and dying to retain the right to own black men… like Richard Poplar.
In The Atlantic’s June 2021 Issue 5 327, I found an eye-opening article written by Colin Smith titled, The War on Nostalgia: What will it take to end the myth of the Lost Cause? Colin visits this same Blandford Cemetery to get a vibe for the place and get a better sense of why the local community harbors an unabated iconolatry of Confederate soldiers.
While conversing with a guide he happens upon a Memorial Day pamphlet hosted by the cemetery and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. This organization was founded by the children of Confederate criminals after the Civil War and later funded by southern states and other Confederacy sympathizing private entities to memorialize the sacrifice southern fighters made on the battlefield. Alongside this diabolical tribe, we find the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group of, you guessed it, women, both daughters, and widows of fallen Confederate soldiers who would wander throughout the Deep South, raising funds to erect statues of Confederate generals and soldiers in public places. Much of this was done decades after the end of the war to retain some form of respect in the family name and the cause for the war.
Thus igniting the Lost Cause sentimentalism where many believe the Confederacy fought for something else, not for the South’s right to own and trade black people. They believe the South fought for states’ rights but seldom explain what those rights were. But we know.
These two groups were present for this Memorial Day celebration Colin decided to attend.
Colin is black. Colin was the only black man present at this celebration.
Confederate sympathizer and secessionist, Paul C. Gramling Jr., was present on this day and gave a speech that afforded him applause and cheers of agreement. One of his statements is endemic to the way Lost Cause sympathizers think and reason through reality just to retain the shroud of lunacy over their eyes.
“I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like it.” Paul C. Gramling Jr.
Paul C. Gramling Jr., Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Sons of Confederate Veterans claim disruptive ‘Defund Nascar‘ flyover at Telladega as a show of strength against black Nascar racer Bubba Wallace.
Once the Confederate celebrations came to a close and guests were on their way to greet one another, shake hands, chat about their convoluted Lost Cause shenanigans, Colin met an attendee named Jeff. This man went on about how there are people out there trying to erase the truth about what truly happened back then (during and after the Civil War). You know, about why the Civil War was fought in the first place.
“They can’t learn the truth if you do away with history,” Jeff said. “You’ll never learn. And once you do away with that type of thing, you become a slave.”
Jeff’s perception of slavery is distorted beyond rescue but knowing this man was present at a Sons of Confederate Veterans Memorial Day celebration is all I need to know to determine the man is a dunce.
I’ve exhausted my patience with Confederacy sympathizers a long time ago.
Anyway, Jeff goes on to educate Colin about a tombstone not too far from where they stood and conversed, where an honorable black man named Richard Poplar had served the Confederate army, had been captured by the Union army and held prisoner by Union soldiers for the better part of nineteen months. Jeff states that Richard refused the right to freedom so that he could endure imprisonment with his fellow Confederate comrades and wait out the war, in hopes that the South would win. Jeff claims this bit of history is used to prove that blacks fought, willingly and passionately, for the glorious cause of the Confederacy.
Here is Colin Smith on this interaction with Jeff.
“Poplar, I would learn, is central to the story many people in Petersburg tell about the war. The commemoration of Poplar seems to have begun in 2003, when the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans pushed for an annual ‘Richard Poplar Day.’ In 2004, the mayor signed a proclamation establishing the holiday; she called Poplar a ‘veteran’ of the Confederate Army. The tombstone with his name on it was erect at Blandford.
But the reality is that Black men couldn’t serve in the Confederate Army. And an 1886 obituary suggests that Poplar was a cook for the soldiers, not someone engaged in combat.
Some people say that up to 100,000 Black soldiers fought for the Confederate Army, in racially integrated regiments. No evidence supports these claims, as the historian Kevin M. Levin has pointed out, but appropriating the stories of men like Poplar is a way to protect the Confederacy’s legacy. If Black soldiers fought for the South, how could the war have been about slavery?”
It is abuse on the part of these obtuse individuals to consider using a slave, a man subjugated to subhuman living conditions, destroyed by society, by war, by infamy, by the color of his skin in a white man paradise-turned-hell for black people, to consider him a willing soldier for a cause as demonic as the Confederacy.
I liken this situation to Stockholm Syndrome, where a kidnapped person shows sympathy for her kidnapper. After spending enough time with the assailant, the person develops a bond with the criminal as a psychological response and a means to survive the ordeal. It only happens as a way to cope with the reality of imminent danger, pain, and death. Outside of this circumstance the person would never side nor show sympathy for a cause as disastrous to their health, as, say, being kidnapped.
Even if, and I’m speaking in the hypothetical here, even if Richard Poplar marched in cadence with an integrated Confederate battalion, was fed daily rations, paid his sum for his service, offered a service rifle and training for which to use that rifle, walked on to a battlefield, aimed his rifle at Union soldiers and killed them, even if that, he would still be a victim operating under coercion and traumatized for life, willing to do anything just to survive.
Poplar would not have been in the proper headspace to understand that his fight, had his side won, would eventually be his ultimate ruination. Perpetual slavery in the antebellum South and perpetual slavery in the postbellum South had the Confederacy won, would have been the worst world imaginable for a black person.
Fear might drive a man to fight for an army and a people whose respect for him is nonexistent. We don’t know if Richard Poplar had a wife and kids if they were threatened by his slave drivers, overseers, slave traders, or slave masters.
“On the left is George W. L. Bickley, head of the Knights of the Golden Circle. There’s a conspiracy that Lincoln’s assassin was a member of this society.” Website.
Maybe the Knights of the Golden Circle (a secret white supremacist terrorist organization that wielded power and influence in the antebellum South) had threatened slaves who refused to fight for the Confederacy with death. Mind you, the Knights of the Golden Circle would later become the Knights of the White Camelia after the war (the Knights of the White Camelia would jumpstart another group now known as the Ku Klux Klan) and these guys would lynch black people as if they were rodents.
“Often referred to as Louisiana’s version of the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia emerged during Reconstruction as a force to combat the social and political changes wrought by the “radical” state constitution of 1868.” Website.
The pressure of fear, isolation, shame, torture, and death was ever-present in the black conscience before the war. Hostilities toward black Americans had been incensed and inflamed the closer the nation got to a Civil War and once the Confederate army lost its steam, its leaders lost their way, and its cause met with catastrophic losses, it was open season on black bodies in the South.
There was not a better time for white rage to retaliate against innocent black souls without fear of reprisal or consequence.
This is the stuff of nightmares that would drive a man mad and possibly an incentive, albeit a dangerous one, that might’ve led someone like Richard Poplar to fight for his captors for fear of reprisals.
But the truth is that Richard was an innocent man idiotized by a nation-state that wanted nothing more than to keep Richard and his fellow colored citizens in a perpetual state of bondage and imbecility.
A free black man was a threat to the local community. A free and educated black man was a threat to the very fiber of a racist nation.
Conclusively, this story brings Deep South white supremacist fanaticism and revisionist history to the forefront, further reminding us of just how dangerous the Lost Cause and its proponents can be in perverting the narrative of what truly happened during the Civil War and why it was fought to begin with.
Colin Smith continues:
“I asked Jeff whether he thought slavery had played a role in the start of the Civil War. ‘Oh, just a very small part. I mean, we can’t deny it was there. We know slave blocks existed.’ But only a small number of plantations even had slaves, he said.
It was a remarkable contortion of history, reflecting a century of Lost Cause propaganda.”
This story, the story of Blandford Cemetery celebrating and honoring traitors on Memorial Day, the story of Richard Poplar, and the continual virulent bile of the Lost Cause spewed across the nation is a sure sign that white supremacist ideology is alive and well. It has not suffered a final blow. The Confederacy lost the war but won the culture and revised the history books for its children, thus rekindling the flames and calling for a resurgence of the South.
“The South will rise again.” Is not just some innocuous statement spewed by Lost Cause simpletons. It’s the motto, the battlecry of an insurgency praying for its resurrection from the depths of shame and defeat.
White supremacy will use all means possible and available to save itself from public scrutiny.
If we say the war was fought to end slavery because the South wanted to protect their peculiar institutions, Lost Cause fanatics will say blacks fought for the Confederacy. If we say slavery was a horrible institution, they will say most slaves were treated like kin. Cases of violence on the part of slave owners and overseers toward slaves were rare, if not nonexistent, they say. If we say racism played a major part in the formation of the Southern economy, they will say it was greed, instead. If we say blacks were treated as subhuman, they will say blacks would have been no better off as free men in Africa since they weren’t as intellectually prudent as their white masters.
They will say slavery was a saving grace for blacks. They will say the Union wanted to encroach upon Southern pseudo-constitutional liberties. They refuse to accept the reality that the south was the aggressor in the war. They suggest that slavery played a very small part in the reason behind the war because the only reason why the Confederate states seceded from the Union was because of states’ rights!
But they never give you enough of an explanation as to what those rights were all about.
It was the states’ right to own blacks and do with them as their owners saw fit.
So, here we are, to this day, seeing just how prominent a thing it is to use black people as tokens, mere tools to promote harmful racist ideas for the benefit and promulgation of white supremacy.
I was used as a token black man in a church I frequented not too long ago. I remember a member of that predominantly white church boasting about just how multi-cultural/multi-ethnic our church had become. I asked her where the other cultures or ethnic groups were because I was one of two black people in a church filled with white Slavic people.
She simply said, “Well, you’re here!” As if I were a golden chalice or something.
White Slavic worship leaders. White Slavic pastors. White Slavic board members. White Slavic treasurers. White Slavic Russian and Ukrainian songs now and then. White Slavic cuisine. White Slavic everything.
Except for one black man who is the youth leader. Me.
And here we are, a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural church. Strange that when I began to challenge the ills of racism within this church and society outside of this church, no one wanted to speak about race and racism. No one wanted to confront it. I was asked by the leadership at the time to stop talking about it.
So I left.
Sadly, to this very day, black people are used as tokens to further promote ideas, economies, policies, laws, and social philosophies that do not benefit them.
Richard Poplar is just one very famous case of this horrific strategy racist people use to protect their white hegemony in north American society.
And please, understand I am not generalizing all white people. I’m speaking of the white people, or black people, and other minorities who tokenize people, who use someone, just one person, to promote something their race would not collectively agree with.
Richard Poplar is a man whose legacy deserves nuance. We must consider his surroundings to then make a judgment on whether the man fought for his demise or fought for something he truly believed in, namely, the perpetual enslavement of his fellow black people.
Outside of this, vacuous minded individuals, namely, Lost Cause adherents, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy will religiously protect this fallacy and continue to promote the idea that Richard Poplar was a hero of the Confederacy, instead of a $30 black mule forced to serve his masters a devilish war.
Because in all honesty, that’s all he was for this dejected, soulless, God-forsaken, demon-possessed, hate-filled Confederate nation. It should have burned down and stayed in the rubble well over a century ago but it is still here.
In America, unfortunately, this racist idea of the Lost Cause will continue to smolder and burn, further gaining traction because racism was never tackled and destroyed the way it could have been. The way it should have been confronted in the Reconstruction Era. Germany eradicated Nazism from its horizon shortly after the end of the war but the United States of America opted for post-war amnesia to suture the previously seceded states back into the Union without issue. Plus, slaves had been emancipated so there was no point in dealing with racism any more than in holding traitors accountable for their insurrection. The US was not able to eradicate Confederate fanaticism because in tackling the ideology behind this failed state they would also need to confront the animosity in the soul of the nation: racism.
Richard Poplar’s tale is unfortunate but it is not rare.
Our society is fraught with examples similar to the one mentioned above by Colin Smith. Situations where black people, namely, but not only black people, have been used to further harmful structures only benefit their users.
This has to stop. And not just the Lost Cause mania that permeates the American Deep South but the tokenism that saps a person of their agency and denigrates the collective convictions of other people groups.
And I wish the Confederate iconophilia was relegated only to the American Deep South but the unfortunate truth is that I have seen the battle flag of the army of Northern Virginia hang high on the back of pick-up trucks here, in Edmonton, Alberta, CANADA! What does a flag that belonged to the failed coup, to a degenerate insurgency have to do with my city here in Alberta?
It’s a disgusting symbol that carries with it the blood of Americans, both white and black Americans who died, some to continue the disgusting institution of bondage and others in an attempt to end it.
And the fact that so many people can wield this flag with such pride is emblematic of just how far through time racism and hate can travel and shapes-shift to survive.
“It’s my Southern Pride! Nothing more!”
Pride to honor a cause that existed for no other reason than to protect a white man’s right to own black slaves, you mean.
I’ve had it.
God bless Richard Poplar’s memory. I pray that this destructive narrative that depicts him like a hero, a legend, a willing participant in a terrorist insurgency, namely, the Confederacy, crumbles into a black hole where there it dies a thousand deaths.
Long live the shame of the Confederate States of America. Long live the defeat of the Confederate States of America. Long live the death of the Confederate States of America.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
Racism is the new ‘black magic’ and social media has become the arena on which we burn our new witches. If someone braves the allegation of perpetrating a racist act, they’re doomed. Without evidence or a proper trial, ostracization is the only outcome. We condemn the innocent without their having a proper trial. They merit a disgraceful punishment on the chair of public cancellation without redemption. We crucify the accused without a shred of evidence. We then bathe ourselves in the sea of their damnation. All this to appease our conscience. An improper term, hostile gesture, or an unwise choice of hairstyling is all it takes. Innocuous behaviors merit individuals an unwarranted spot on the wall of racist infamy. There they will hang and rot with the likes of Hitler, Goebbels, Wallace, and Jefferson.
Racist Americans are fearful that their cantankerous woke grandchildren will oust them. They presume we have become too unforgiving a generation. A generation that is too quick to judge and too quick to condemn. One that is slow to listen, to understand, and to forgive.
The questions begin to flood the social sphere.
Where can a racist person live out their racist sentiments without the fear of public reprisal and invective? Where can a citizen of the free world express his most heartfelt sentiments? Ideas about outsiders and immigrants? Concerns about national purity without sugarcoating their statements through partisan talking points?
If you are an unfortunate soul struggling with these questions, then you have come to the right place.
James Baldwin was a renowned erudite, poet, author, and activist of yesteryear. He once stated that what gives racism its grip and hold over society is not color alone but power. Here is one of his quotes on power and racism published in The New Yorker on November 9, 1962.
“In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatsoever. And those virtues preached but not practiced by the white world were another means of holding Negroes in subjection.”
He speaks on the factor that makes racism more nefarious than other evils in the world: power. Without power, racism is but a feeling. It shrieks and shouts in a room that has no ears to hear it roar. It echoes into the nether. It becomes a fork without a handle or a spoon with a hole in the middle of it. Without power racism is ineffective.
Without power, racism is not racist. It is offensive only. I want to instruct my racist reader(s) on where he or she may disseminate his or her racist sentiments. Offer them a place where their ideas can flourish without fears of repercussion.
So, then, where can you be racist or where is it ever acceptable for you to be a racist man or a racist woman?
Before I answer these and other questions you must understand something very important. There are many places where you CANNOT express, live, and move as a racist human being.
Let us explore these minefields together first.
Law Enforcement and Military
You cannot join the police department and/or police academy if you harbor racist sentiments. Nor should you join the military if racism festers in your heart.
These institutions grant you an overwhelming level of authority and power. Remember, racism is most nefarious when it has the power to drive hate forward and wield it over people. No other institution on earth grants you as much immediate access to power as does a badge or a uniform.
You cannot be racist and responsible for protecting and serving a diverse community. You cannot hold racist sentiments while helping diverse communities abroad either.
The power you have under that badge or that uniform can help or tarnish your reputation. Your racism soils the entity you represent. It can further reinforce the idea that institutions are corrupt. This conundrum subsists because you are perverting the badge or uniform without consequence.
Law enforcement and the military do not mix with racism.
Your racist sentiments cannot exist in any of the above-mentioned positions. Your racist sentiments will infect your professional sphere and seep into your work. It will influence your decisions. This is not conducive to the well-being and social health of a diverse society.
Should your racist sentiments come to light, ostracism is your reward.
These positions can create systems, laws, policies, and structures that exploit people. In your hands, they will exploit the vulnerable even further.
Your position has the authority to control law enforcement and military forces. These institutions can then commit all sorts of wrongs under your command.
That does not help you in the long run.
If you want to be a lawyer or a judge while espousing racist sentiments, you will fail. These antiquated prejudices will get you nowhere but a seat on the stage of public scrutiny. The higher the rank within the government you find the higher the risk. If you’re ever ousted, an expedited flight to Switzerland is your only saving grace.
It might be safe to assume you’re a wealthy racist individual. But please avoid this sphere of influence. The greater your influence the hotter the human-sized boiler gets. This new generation has an irrational dislike of high-ranking government officials. Imagine the riot should they find out that you’re a racist government official. A rich one at that! It’s too great a risk.
Please, for your safety, refuse every opportunity to work within this industry.
President, Prime Minister, or Chancellor
Now you’re wondering, is it impossible for a racist man or woman like myself to ever become a leader of the free world? No, it is not. 2016 happened in the United States of America and that end with an insurrection. Exactly. The last racist chancellor who waltzed into the chancellory role managed to cause a world war. We estimate that well over sixty million people lost their lives as a result.
Racism is an unpalatable fashion (fascist) statement for presidents, prime ministers, and chancellors. Racist presidents of yesteryear would celebrate Klan terror. Woodrow Willson selected The Birth of a Nation as the first film to ever play in the White House. This film celebrated Klansmen’s terrorism in the South. The plot surrounded the protection of white female purity from ‘marauding blacks.’ The only black people in the film were white men in ‘black face.’
Again, every time we have a racist national leader we can see a spike in exploitative policies. The people whom they hold the harshest ideas about end up suffering the most. They perish in concentration camps, pogroms, or death camps. They’re relocated to reservations, residential schools, or internment camps. Forced to migrate through the transatlantic slave trade or racist deportation cycles. Experiencing the pains of colonization, cultural genocide, lynching trees, and more.
You wouldn’t want the deaths of thousands of innocent souls on your conscience, would you? Exactly. So please, for everyone’s sake, avoid these positions of power at all costs.
Are you a Christian? If the answer is yes, then, by all holy writ you are not allowed to be racist and a Christian. The two do not mix. I mean, Jesus is a dark-skinned Jew from Israel-Palestine.
Now, if your answer is ‘no’ to that question then this complicates things. You’re now stuck with the conundrum of differing worldviews. Religious systems that may or may not challenge your racist sentiments.
As a Christian, I follow Jesus’s advice on these issues. I am comfortable discussing Christian ethics and values. Time spent studying the life and purpose of Jesus has helped mold my moral worldview. Christianity points a person away from an individualistic lifestyle toward love-centered altruism. Racism cannot exist within a regenerated conscience. Racist sentiments are at odds with the commands of Jesus.
I’m comfortable condemning racism because I’m comfortable with Christ’s love ethic. There’s no room for racism in Christianity. If one is racist they are not Christian. They’re racist-ians.
Now, to dispel racism with Islam you need to converse with an imam or a caliph. If you want to inquire about racism in Buddhism you must speak with a monk. Condemnation of racism in Judaism comes from the Torah. If you’re struggling with racist sentiments as a Sikh you must sit with a guru for advice. In Taoism, you’re at the intellectual mercy of an abbot or a provost. For moral clarity or confusion in atheism, you sit at the feet of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, or Hitchens. I’m not sure any of these blokes can offer a succinct refutation of racism. In a world where social Darwinism is king then some races succeed and others perish.
I’m being crass but at least I’m not a jerk. Yes, I’m talking to you, Dawkins.
Anywho.
Now, back to racism, Christianity, and clergy.
If you identify as a racist individual you cannot, under any circumstance, lead a church. Are you evaluating people by the color of their skin? Listening to the cries of one race over another? Are you willing to segregate your congregation based on race? Do you use pejorative terms when referring to immigrants? Have you recently renewed your subscription to the Klan? The White League? The Knights of the White Camellia? The Knights of the Golden Circle? Was that tattoo you got a year ago a swastika? Does your YouTube video history consist of people attacking refuge migrants?
Congratulations! You’re a racist person.
And still, you’re disqualified from church leadership.
But don’t fret, this is a great thing. A benevolent act of God on your behalf.
What do I mean?
Christianity condemns ethnocentrism; which boasts of cultural or ethnic superiority. It shuns xenocentrism; which wallows in cultural or ethnic inferiority. This faith denounces classism, sexism, and yes, racism. The examples of these misfortunes you witness in history are deviations. Perversions of divine literature, obfuscations of love, truth, hope, faithfulness, and altruism. Abuse of power and the abuse of people made in the image of God, Imago Dei, is damnable.
So, if you don a cassock, stand behind a lectern, and recite a homily whilst racist at heart, you’re a fool. Your only accomplishment is redressing hate with tulips and roses. You’re upgrading your trip to hell from economy to first-class. This is not to your benefit, my dear racist reader.
A healthy hermeneutic and a racist heart are incongruent with the Christian faith. Your theological orthodoxy is rotten if racism sits comfortably in your sermon notes. Your faith tradition is moldy, sick, and broken if racists live unconvicted of their sin while in your church. And in spreading racism to children you’re better off tying one end of a rope around your neck and the other around a heavy stone and jumping off the side of a bridge. Because what else would kids learn from your Sunday school programs? About Jesus? In part, yes. A racialized Jesus, a deity used to promote one race and diminish the worth of others. Grab the noose, minister. Your gospel is poison.
Racism and the pulpit produce structures that denigrate and devastate. From chattel slavery to Jim Crow. Segregation to race-based insurrections. Evil committed in the name of Jesus with the blood of innocent people on your hands.
It is reflective of no one but the devil.
Racism and the church don’t mix.
Management, Professorship, Teaching, and Parenting
Now, this last category is broad. I want to drive home the point that there are far more places where racism is not allowed than places where it is. Fox News is a prime example of where it is not only allowed but where it becomes quite a lucrative endeavor. Fox News is not covered under this category. Fox News is its own category of horrors and filth. But I’ll leave that for another post another day.
Let’s return to our pressing issues.
Are you qualified to supervise a construction workforce? Have you graduated with honors and are now eligible to teach university students? Do you love teaching children about geography, social studies, and biology? Do you hope to someday rear a child into this world?
If your answer was yes to any of those questions you cannot, as a racist, do any of them.
Your racism disqualifies you from them.
What do I mean?
Each of those positions affords you unchallenged power. Unchallenged for some time, I mean. It may take years before your racist antics face repudiation. By then, your ideas may have influenced colleagues, students, and children for decades. Who, unbeknownst to them, believed that racism was normal. That covert racism was okay. That racism was acceptable in the workplace, in school, and at home.
Research shows that racism and power afford us nothing but disaster and death. If you infuse racism into management you’re left with lawsuits and litigations. Racism in higher learning creates incomplete intellectuals. Racism at home breeds hatred and trauma. Cognitive dissonance becomes the method by which your children cope with reality. In the face of overwhelming evidence, they turn to darkness for comfort. You are that darkness and the comfort you give is poison.
You’re sapping your workspace of diversity. You’re corrupting our academic circles. And you’re killing your kids.
Consider the lifestyle of the surviving children of Nazi war criminals. Examine their shame. See how much love they have lost for their parents. Appreciate their courage in denouncing their parents’ racism. See how much trauma they have endured, the extent some of them went to never procreate.
Consider the damage your racism will cause the next generation.
Your children need a healthy environment in which to grow. A racist parent is not conducive to a healthy environment at home.
If you’re granted power in any of these categories then our world has failed you. You will only lend a hand in further indoctrinating and brainwashing our society.
In other terms, you make more disciples of yourself. Devils, in short.
Coworkers may challenge your behaviors but will be unable to confront you because you’re the boss. You’re the HR personnel. You’re the managing supervisor. You’re the CEO! Who’s ever going to question you? So, this category is too risky for your racist sentiments.
And if you think about it, you’re racist because your parents were racist as well. Otherwise, you learned your racism from Fox News.
Kids do not have the know-how to decipher whether mom or dad are full of evil in their hearts. They trust you with their entire existence so what you tell them is ‘Bible.’
And racism, come to think of it, is evil. So if you want to be a good parent you cannot be a racist parent, so, you shouldn’t become one.
Conclusion
So you’re left wondering: Where can I be racist and free? I don’t hate so-and-so but I dislike them in my country. Where can I go to be myself? To be racist without consequence?
No. Not the Republican party, as tempting as it sounds. There’s plenty of that already there but we’re trying to divest that system of its venomous racism.
The answer, however, is crystal clear. You can espouse racism freely as long as you are not in a position of power, influence, authority, or control.
If you have power, influence, authority, or the ability to control anyone, even Mr. Wrinkles; that ugly swastika patterned collar sock-wearing dog of yours, you have failed this test.
You cannot be racist and integrated into society. You will in one way or another influence your workforce. Disrupt your community. Indoctrinate your family. Brainwash your social (media) sphere thus further disseminating your racist nonsense.
The only place left for you, Mr. or Mrs. Racist is that lazy boy in your basement. That place where rats once occupied. The place where hopes and dreams go to die. Where mold grows on the walls and trash is left uncollected. Where rusty pipes are days away from bursting. Where an imminent flood is due. Where no light can reach, where depression festers, and where darkness lurks.
That’s your safe haven. There you can find your sanctuary. Worship your dead racist heroes in that pit of sorrows.
You’re free to lock yourself down there. Free to salute the images of dead dictators ad nauseam. Paint the walls red and black. Pink, even. I hear that’s the new thing now with the Boogaloo crowd.
You can do your ten push-ups in hopes of joining some sort of failed insurgency. Plaster your flags of defeated armies on the wall, because every racist nation ends up losing. It’s history.
And there, from the lowest point of your life, you can be as free a racist as you want to be.
The day you grow tired of blabbering about scientific racism you can come out. When you’re tired of rekindling the flame of Lost Causes, you can leave that dungeon. Once you’re done throwing a racist tantrum you can come out of time out. Rejoin society. Our diverse society.
But remember, you cannot, for fear of public repudiation, live out your racism in public.
The moment you do the fires are burning and the witch hunters are hunting for more wood for their fires.
You are the wood for their fires and you will disintegrate into social oblivion.
If you think they are harsh then consider racism’s legacy.
Do you see the blood? The devastation? Good. Never forget it.
Social ostracization as your only punishment is merciful.
So, if you want to be racist, go back to your basement.
And take your racist leader, Donald Trump, with you.
Christ is a nigger, Beaten and black: Oh, bare your back!
Mary is His mother: Mammy of the South, Silence your mouth.
God is His father: White Master above, Grant Him your love.
Most holy bastard Of the bleeding mouth. Nigger Christ On the cross of the South.
Contempo, December 1, 1931.
Thoughts
An interesting fact about Contempo’s 1931 article is that it references the Scottsboro Eight. This random group of African American boys, two of them as young as thirteen, had boarded a train from Tennessee to Alabama and beyond in search of work. Somewhere along this train ride, the locomotive machine was stopped by police and the eight African American boys present were arrested and accused of rape. Mind you, there were dozens of white vagabonds on the same train cars but only the black teens were taken by local law enforcement officers.
These young men served a combined 130 years behind bars on trumped-up and false charges. The jury was ambivalent on one thing only, should these teens receive life imprisonment as the harshest punitive measure or should they be executed by the state by means of an electric chair.
They were all convicted and years later released.
Some of the teens fled to other states once paroled. Others remained behind bars until they were set free and declared not guilty, their innocence restored. One wrote to governor George Wallace while in hiding in New York State, asking if he was still a wanted man by the state of Alabama. The governor in question was a staunch segregationist who later changed his views and adapted to the new social norm, favoring integration only to remain in office. He hesitantly relented and later granted the falsely accused soul his innocence and pardon.
These teenagers turned men turned beasts and monsters by jailers who beat them blue and black, coercing and torturing false confessions out of them; enduring years of hell in Alabama state penitentiaries, alone, desolate, crazed, raped, bruised, stabbed, horrified by daily beatings at the hands of black Americans gone mad by their state dejected existence and by white Americans who knew nothing else but hatred for blacks. Many served their time on death row, often abandoned by guards and left to rot with their innocence intact and insanity ramped up.
It would have been an easier road to the afterlife if these teens had been lynched by one of the thousands of lynch mobs in the South. The fires, the castration, the noose, the buckshot to the chest, the kicks to the kidney and stomach, the bowie knife swallowed by the neck, and ropes tied around one’s ankles and later dragged by a horse, a carriage, a car, or a truck. The police siren blasting in the distance not in hopes of rescue but as a signal that the lynching has begun so gather your kin and come watch. The public spectacle, the journalists, the pamphlets gone out inviting neighboring communities to come and participate, because there will be souvenirs, you know. There’s always something you can take home. A finger, a toe, perhaps. Maybe someone will take home the genitals of the lynched negro, dry it out in the sun, tie it to a lamppost or let it hang from the porch to welcome visitors. A souvenir indeed. Pictures of a hanged corpse, slumped by its own weight, bloodless, are sent to distant family members the same way we send our family members pictures of our trip to Disney World, Universal Studios, or the Eiffel Tower. Look here uncle Bob, another lynched nigger in the books! I hope the kids are doing well. Give them and your wife, Lisa, our warmest regards.
This miserable sight seems more merciful than decades of imprisonment in an Alabama state prison during the terror of the Jim Crow South.
Quotes
“That thing they had here on May Day what good did it do. Not any at all. I’m still locked up in the cell. Instead of the I.L.D. trying to make it better for me here in jail they are making it harder for me by trying to demand the people to do things. Listen, send me some money. Send me three dollars like I told you in my first letter.” Olen Montgomery, 17 years old at the time of arrest, Letter to his mother after a May Day rally. May 3, 1934.
“My name is Clarence Norris, one of the Scottsboro Boys. I was arrested in Alabama in 1931 and sentenced to the electric chair three times. The governor commuted my sentence to life in prison. I was released on parole twice, once in 1944, and I broke my parole and went back to prison until I got out in 1946. I broke my parole again and I have been free ever since. I want to know if Alabama still wants me.” Clarence Norris, 19 years old at the time of arrest, explaining the reason for his call to Alabama Governor George Wallace, 1973.
“I’d rather die than spend another day in jail for something I didn’t do.” Haywood Patterson, 18 years old at the time of arrest, after getting 75 years, rather than the requested death sentence, January 24, 1936.
“I just got to say I think I am doing well to keep the mind I got now. These people make wise cracks talking about somebody in Alabama to defend us, say I would get out better. They won’t let the New York people come around.” Willie Robertson, 16 years old at the time of arrest, [he said] to a visitor to jail, 1937.
“Please tell all the young mens to try hard and not to go to prison for my sakes.” Charles Weems, 28 years old at the time of his arrest. April 1944.
“Sorry about my last letter — hope it didn’t make you angry. Didn’t mean any harm whatever. only telling you how I felt towards you and what’s more I could not help it.” Eugene Williams, 13 at the time of his arrest. Letter to the International Labor Defense apologizing for a frustrated outburst, December 1936.
“They whipped me and it seemed like they was going to kill me. All the time they kept saying, “now will you tell?” and finally it seemed like I couldn’t stand no more and I said yes. Then I went back into the courtroom and they put me up on the chair in front of the judge and began asking a lot of questions, and I said I had seen Charlie Weems and Clarence Norris with the white girls.” Leroy “Roy” Wright, 13 at the time of his arrest. Roy Wright, to New York Times reporter Raymond Daniell, March 10, 1933.
Conditions Behind Bars for the Scottsboro Eight
Blinded by Fate
“Extremely myopic, and with a cataract in one eye, Montgomery could not see well at all. He was en route to Memphis, looking for work to buy some new eyeglasses, when he was taken from the train and arrested in 1931, at the age of 17. The pair of glasses he had was broken on the day of the arrest and he went for two years without a new pair.”
Of Dreams and Nightmares
“In jail, much of his time was spent on death row, and he was haunted by the executions he could hear from his cell, and began dreaming of his own death.”
The Power of a Pencil and a Bible
“While in prison, Patterson found he regretted skipping out on school. “I held a pencil in my hand, but I couldn’t tap the power that was in it.” But he taught himself to read using a dictionary and a Bible. Patterson was not particularly well liked, by the other Scottsboro defendants ( Clarence Norris swore he would kill Patterson if he had a chance), by other prisoners, or by the guards that ran the prisons. In Atmore Prison, he had to keep perpetually vigilant against physical and sexual assaults. To avoid the latter, Patterson himself became a sexual predator, and kept a “gal-boy.” He lost faith in all things but one: ‘I had faith in my knife. It had saved me many times.’
In February 1941, a guard paid one of Patterson’s friends to kill him. This “friend” stabbed him twenty times, puncturing a lung and sending him to the brink of death. Amazingly, he recovered.”
Shot in the Head
“Patterson was tried and convicted again in January of 1936. Following the swift group conviction days after the incident, Ozie Powell had been imprisoned without a retrial for five years. While being transported from Patterson’s trial back to the Birmingham Jail, he pulled out a pocketknife and slashed Deputy Edgar Blalock in the throat. Sheriff J. Street Sandlin stopped the car, pulled out his gun and shot Powell in the head. Blalock was out of the hospital the same day with ten stitches. Remarkably, Powell also survived.
His mother visited him in the hospital while Powell recovered. ‘I done give up,’ he told her. When asked why, he replied, “Cause I feel like everybody in Alabama is down on me and is mad with me.” He suffered permanent brain damage from the shooting.”
An IQ of 64 and Syphilitic
“Although he made it through to seventh grade in Atlanta, a doctor later measured Roberson’s IQ to be about 64, and his mental age at nine. He could not read or write and had difficulty speaking, and was the butt of many courtroom spectators’ jokes.
Roberson had boarded the Southern Railroad headed to Memphis in search of free medical care for his syphilis and gonorrhea. He was in pain and lying in a car near the back of the train when he was arrested along with the 8 other African American teenagers accused of rape. The cane he used to walk with was thrown away on orders of the deputy that took him into custody.
This painful, syphilitic condition was evidence to defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz that Roberson could not have committed this crime. Judge James Horton agreed that it was unlikely that Roberson could have jumped from car to car as Victoria Price claimed. However, when it was revealed that Ruby Bates had been treated for syphilis herself, Roberson’s venereal disease was cited as evidence of his guilt. Horribly, he was not treated for his condition until 1933.”
Gassed and Airless
“While in prison, Weems was tear gassed in his cell for reading International Labor Defense literature, and he asked his correspondents not to mention any labor actions in Birmingham, Alabama. In October 1937, after some of his fellow defendants were released, Weems was in the prison hospital for tuberculosis. In March of the next year, in a case of mistaken identity, he was stabbed with a knife by the prison mill foreman.
He was paroled in November 1943, and was offered a job in a laundry in Atlanta. He married and settled down into obscurity, keeping his job and his health, although his eyes would persist in bothering him from the tear gas a decade earlier.”
Just Another Black Bastard
“In 1937 Andy Wright was sentenced to 99 years in jail for rape. He wrote a letter to the Scottsboro Defense Committee expressing concern that he and four of the other defendants had had their freedom traded for the four released that year. In Kilby Prison in Montgomery, Alabama, he was assaulted by both guards and prisoners, and spent time in the prison hospital. His continually poor health made it difficult for him to work in the prison industries and further antagonized his tormentors. Wright narrowly escaped an attack when Charley Weems took his shift at the prison mill and received knife wounds intended for Andy.
As bad as the physical punishment was, the psychic punishment may have been worse. By independent accounts, Wright was a good-natured prisoner, but he wrote: ‘A colored convict’s very best behavior is not good enough for these officials here. Every time they open their mouths it is [‘]you black bastard.[‘] When we think we are doing right we be cursed at and kick around and beat like dogs.’
In 1939 he wrote: ‘I am trying all that in my power to be brave but you understand a person can be brave for a certain length of time and then he is a coward down. That the way it is.’ When advised to ‘snap out’ of his depressed state, he wrote: ‘What do you think I am a iron man[?] You all is out there w[h]ere you can do for yourself and get things done and then have a nerve to write and tell me to cheer up.’”
Eleven to One
“At the initial trial, Roy testified that he had seen some of the other defendants rape the two girls, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. Later, he claimed that that testimony had been coerced. His own trial ended in a hung jury, with 11 jurors seeking a death sentence and one voting for life imprisonment.”
Thoughts Concluded
It is in this environment in which Langston Hughes pens this didactic poem, comparing the Christ of Calvary with the black man in Alabama.
Langston was aware that should Christ have walked the streets of Alabama, had Christ been on that train that day, crossing from one side of the state to the other, in hopes of healing some and preaching to others, He would have been apprehended and torn to pieces by loaded billy clubs and filled with buckshot.
Christ would have been a nigger in Alabama. Lightskinned, a mulatto, a colored man whose lynching would have been praised by bloodthirsty locals with Bibles in arms. No different than the lynching He suffered in the outskirts of Jerusalem two millennia ago.
Langston decries the hypocrisy of Southern Christianized peoples who worshipped a brown savior but thought him white man. Thought the Jewish rabbi from Palestine was a white man whose sole purpose in existence was to preserve the sanctity and dominance of white supremacy on the North American plains of Turtle Island.
But in Alabama, of all places, Christ was just another nigger.
Southern Christians were more distressed by the color of their Christ than by the presence of the strange fruits hanging from their trees.
Speak up for those who have no voice, for the justice of all who are dispossessed.
Speak up, judge righteously, and defend the cause of the oppressed and needy.
I dedicate my one-hundredth blog post to my lovely wife, Irma.
One hundred blog posts, hundreds of hours of research, and near the same amount of time dedicated to writing and possibly double that in editing alone all pale in comparison to the time spent with my wife.
Every word I dedicate to public knowledge, every thought I manage to scribble onto paper or type into a computer in hopes of producing something intelligible and worth sharing is because my wife has supported me in this effort.
The effort? To clear my mind through journaling, albeit public and communal journaling on things surrounding life, love, theology, and history. It’s my catharsis.
Her intellect has been a point of reference as I grow with every conversation we have on the topics I research.
Thomas Merton once said, “Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.”
It is disadvantageous to the writer, myself included in that category albeit in the nascent stages of writing, to presume that fame, prestige, and legendary status be the utmost goal in life.
I have found love in this true destiny of which the initial and end goal is love itself.
I have found it thanks to my wife.
Thank you, my love, for being so amazing and encouraging.
Other desires and aspirations, again, pale in comparison.
I have my love, my girls, and my books.
One day, I’ll write my own book or several. Until then I will continue to express that which is stuck and pressing in my heart and mind on here.
And, of course, I have my Christ and He has me. It all works out just fine in the end no matter how it ends.
This gives me comfort.
On to post #101! On to the many things I will cover and we will discuss together.
Thank you for reading these stories, ideas, and thoughts. Thank you for visiting the innermost thoughts and sentiments of a capricious writer.
There are many things the polyglot can learn from the German people but one of them is best left untouched and that is their unnecessarily strident effort to produce unpronounceable multisyllabic words that torture us none German-speaking people.
If you were to attempt to pronounce vergangenheitsaufarbeitung correctly while vacationing in Berlin without being affluent in German you’d most likely end up in the back of a pub, pants missing, and unsure of what day of the week or weekend it is.
Don’t ask.
The term, laughable as it might be, means to work off the past. It’s a term post World War II Germans developed to confront the demons of the Third Reich. The endeavor, first in a communal and later in a philosophical effort to grapple with the reality that the Wehrmacht was a willing participant in war crimes, not just the SS or the SA or the Gestapo, was too much for some German citizens to grasp. Their fathers, brothers, and sons had participated in war crimes against minorities and other Germans who dared resist the Reich’s ascent to power.
What was more compelling was that many if not most Germans saw themselves as victims of Russian Bolshevism to the east and American hyper-Capitalism to the west. Having capitulated in both wars, endured the humiliation that came with the Treaty of Versaille, and now the global rage at their participation in electing the world’s most dejected autocrat, Adolf Hitler, caused German minds to resist guilt and blame.
As Nazi masterminds fled the country for safer havens in Argentina, Brazil, and Washington D.C., German citizens were abandoned by their leaders to face the shame of their national wrongs alone. The allied forces made sure of it by forcing citizens to visit concentration camps where Nazi leaders and soldiers exterminated millions. Those who could not make the trip were forced to sit through hours of footage of German POWs digging up mass graves under the rifle of Russian or American soldiers.
German citizens could not believe that they had elected a government into power that could commit such atrocities and when their one thousand year reign came to smoldering ruins in a short tumultuous twelve years of horror, they were too ashamed, if not entirely shocked, that their good intentions were now considered war crimes and crimes against humanity.
So you can imagine the sudden humiliation so many of them must have felt and how much outrage they must have expelled at the thought that they were equal perpetrators of these crimes alongside Goebbels, Himmler, Eichmann, Goering, and Hitler.
It was easier for some of them to take such an escapist approach because so many of the concentration camps and extermination camps were well outside of city limits. They voted for the removal of the Jews, did nothing to protect them once the pogroms and deportations began, and so, to their knowledge, the Jews simply left Germany to live in the outreaches of the lands belonging to the Untermenschen.
Few actually understood that the ash falling over their homes was that of men, women, and children having been shoved into ovens and burned to crisp.
Millions of German citizens refused to take any blame for these war crimes because they claimed that they had never pulled a lever, sealed a door shut, or pulled a trigger to kill a single Jew or resister.
The unwillingness to admit any fault, feel any guilt or remorse, or apologize was culturally, historically, and nationally endemic to the German mind.
That is why, for years and years after the war many philosophers, sociologists, professors, and other unmentioned entities ventured into Germany, into the schools, the churches, the academic halls, the sciences, the farms, hospitals, and homes to better understand and also educate the German people that they must work out their past.
Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung!
They must work out of it the reality of their participation in order to progress as a nation. Progress without amnesia.
Certain focus groups were put together where Germans, both members of the former Reich, and their children were sat in rooms to discuss the goods, bads, and neutrals of Nazi Germany. Participants could not understand why they were seen as such vile people. How could the world hate them so much when they had never so much as launched a rock at a Jew. Though many felt Jews were inferior they did not exhibit the animosity that SS, SA, and Gestapo militants enacted on innocent people.
Learning from the Germans by Susan Neiman
One old lady, as recounted by Susan Neiman in her book,Learning from the Germans, used religious language to understand the ramifications of vergangenheitsaufarbeitung:
“Only a single participant in the Group Experiment expressed the kind of moral reflection you might expect. She was an older Catholic woman, one of the few subjects to use religious language. ‘I take my being bombed out as atonement for the great guilt we incurred toward the innocent. The Americans are right that we murdered more Jews than they murder Negroes in a year. That is the truth. I was bombed out three times. I haven’t done enough wrong in my life to justify that, but I would not ask God ‘What have you done to me?’ There was so much guilt to atone for that a part of the nation must atone for it on earth. Even if our children must atone for it again.’”
How humbling an approach from the old and wise Catholic woman whose willingness to confront the evil of her contemporaries, herself included, condemning it and receiving in that condemnation punishment for it actually set her free to the truth of reality.
This working out the past, as Susan states, is never final and never finished. Not in the sense that one lives with the guilt of their forefathers but that they live and are proud to carry the responsibility of making sure it never happens again.
Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung.
Germany has since accomplished one of the most exemplary multicultural societies in the world. This was previously an unimaginable feat considering the legacy of the Third Reich.
How did it happen? How has Germany advanced so much after two of the most humiliating military losses of all time?
Yes, yes, the nuances are many and we know they had help, financial help from the outside.
That’s a given.
But what is so enamoring about post-war Germany is that with time, decades even, they came to admit their participation in the war and their guilt as perpetrators and co-conspirators of the Nazi regime. Without that initial introspective adventure, I don’t believe Germany would have been able to progress out from Hitler’s shadow. But now they pride themselves on being responsible for the truth so that they never have to sink back to that level of complicity and apathy that got them into the war in the first place.
The truth is that the Germany of old, the Third Reich, was made up of average day-to-day Germans who wanted nothing more than to make their nation better for Germans, no matter the cost.
The price they were willing to pay ended up burning their nation to the ground but we mustn’t forget that from those ashes rose a hope-filled nation. Not hope from dismissing the truth of what happened but of confronting and accepting it.
The reason why Susan Neiman’s book is called Learning from the Germans is that she is a Jewish woman born in Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised in the American Deep South in a time where white Americans would lynch black Americans for sport, out in the open, in front of authorities and judges, who at times would participate in the crime.
Susan makes the claim that the United States of America never experienced this vergangenheitsaufarbeitung because there was no one around to point out to them that hate and racism is wrong.
After the American Civil War, Confederate soldiers returned home as losers. Confederate prisoners of war were released in mass if they simply signed a piece of paper certifying that the Union army was right to wage war against them for owning slaves and that they would now work together to make the country one again.
Easy out, if you ask me.
The same disgruntled soldiers made it home, humiliated, and now broke because their main source of income, slavery, was now outlawed and their former slaves had gone free or runaway while their owners were out in war. These same men launched terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, and the White League, and continued to murder black Americans for the better part of the next one hundred years.
The Civil Rights movement took the scene in the late 1950s and 60s, and even then, Southern Americans refused to confront the narrative that their cause in the war was evil and that their loss was the best possible outcome for the betterment of the nation.
Americans in the South had not faced their past but had reconstructed their cause as a movement to be proud of. The petition to retain the right to own black people had become a war for states’ rights.
The American Deep South never faced international humiliation that forced them to reconsider the racism in society that spawned the need, or, rather, the want of race-based chattel slavery in the first place. Nor were they pressed from within, by the North, the Union Army to reconsider their literature, their ideas, their social and cultural understanding of prejudice and descrimination so there was no desire nor pressure to confront their wrongs.
In fact, the South never saw their cause as inglorious or pitiful. Theirs was a cause of American ideals and constitutional right to land and property (property being black slaves). No wonder there’s such a chasm of mercy and love in the American Deep South because right after the Civil War a vacuum of power was created as the Union Army dissolved back to the North which allowed for Klan terrorist activity to dominate the Southern plain for the next one hundred years.
A great part of the United States has yet to experience their vergangenheitsaufarbeitung and it shows. It shows by the continual appearance of Confederate flags flowing freely from government buildings. It shows by the various statues dedicated to Confederate leaders, soldiers, and generals still visible from predominantly black communities. It shows when the prevalent idea of the Lost Cause has revised the way Southerners view themselves as victims of an encroaching North instead of perpetrators of kidnapping, murder, and crimes against humanity. Throw terrorism in there as well.
It shows how on January 6, 2021, madmen stormed the United States Capitol building wielding the Confederate flag in the process, as if to say, the South will rise again but what these poor souls fail to understand is that the South never went away to begin with.
No one has ever worked off their past in the United States and much of it simmers to the top when discussions surround reparations or racial equality and reconciliation. The diatribe and visceral vitriol that spews from right-wing echo chambers and the darkweb are just another signifier that the racist sentiments of old are still very much alive.
Is it too late to ask the United States to vergangenheitsaufarbeitung? No. It’s never too late. The better question is who would force it to do this work?
Germany was forced to look at their own blunders, their national sins by the Americans, the Brits, the French and the Russians.
But what nation is powerful enough to turn America’s gaze away from the Orient and toward itself?
Perhaps that strength will not come from without but from within. Maybe this generation has only begun the planting of ideas and the next will water them. Perhaps we’re a generation too soon in considering a revisitation of our past.
I know for a fact we’re far behind Germany in working off our past.
Had America ventured into vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, had they worked off their past shortly after the Civil War, perhaps we would never have heard of Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, James H. Cone, or Martin Luther King Jr.
In fact, perhaps these precious souls would not have been assassinated during the Civil Rights era:
Medgar Evers
James Chaney
Andrew Goodman
Michael Schwerner
Viola Liuzzo
Vernon Dahmer
Martin Luther King Jr.
Nor thousands of innocent black Americans have perished under the rage of white lynch mobs.
Germany has accepted its past. It has accepted the fact that regular day-to-day citizens enabled the Nazi regime to take control of the country and enact the horrors it did. It accepted that its once proud and strong army, the Wehrmacht, was just another murderous instrument of the Reich. It accepted that the German culture and intellectual academies of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s had created the racist Autobahn necessary to catapult the Third Reich into power.
Hitler could have lived and died a miserable life and we would have never heard of the man had it not been for the overwhelming support he had received from the German people. But their desire for land, prestige, racial superiority, wealth, and dominance had clouded their moral compass…. Or had it?
But Germany has come out of that era. The new Germany, or perhaps the same, just sober now, is better. It is brighter and more aware of the venom of racism and ethnocentrism that still brews and festers within its subculture and in certain political circles. This new Germany denounces and condemns the resurgence of every nationalist entity that dares show its face. It has even criminalized Nazi rhetoric and memorabilia.
But in the US, however, whenever white supremacist resurge with rage the president asks them to stand back and stand-by thus dog whistling to the undertones of an unresolved past that, hey, at least here in America, this is still okay.
The resounding issue with the American mind is that triumph has clouded its moral memory. This great nation has won too many skirmishes, battles, wars, and revolutions thus allowing it to believe that these various wins thus makes them morally right. This line of reasoning is dangerous. It makes the 1776 American Revolutionary War as morally defensible as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Just remember that very few, if any Americans were ever held accountable for the My Lai massacre the same way numerous German SS, SA, Gestapo, and Wehrmacht soldiers were tried, sentenced, and executed after World War II.
This refusal to revisit the past or perhaps confront our national complicity in these various atrocities committed by American citizens keeps us comfortably isolated in willful ignorance. We’re too proud to admit fault and too embarrassingly proud about questionable victories.
Hermann Goering
Hermann Goering, a German World War 1 veteran pilot, then Oberkommando der Luftwaffe (high commander of Nazi Germany’s Air Force) and the sixteenth president of the Reichstag demonstrated just how ridiculous it can be to evade the reality of our national crimes when confronted with them. While under trial in Nuremberg for crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the peace, and conspiracy to commit various other crimes, Goering viewed himself and the Reich’s cause as triumphant in the face of victors’ justice and revenge in Nuremberg.
“In fifty years you’ll be building monuments to us.” Goering states, superciliously so, at one point during his trial.
Many caricatures (such as one pictured here by Arthur Syzk) often played off of Göring’s weight and flamboyance. [Website]
Goering would later be sentenced to death by hanging but managed to escape the merciful fate by ingesting cyanide in his cell. The highest level living commander of the Reich had succumbed to chemical compounds of potassium cyanide in a cold cell.
Suicide was his last self-righteous act.
Goering’s prophecy never came true, thankfully. Not in Germany anyway.
But it did come true, in other ways, and in more prevalent ways, in the United States of America as statues and monuments erected in honor of Confederate dissidents peaked over the Southern horizon by the hundreds not many years after the Civil War came to a close and there they stand to this day.
Why?
Because the United States has yet to work off its sinful national past.
And Other Things
I’m old. I’m much more of a cantankerous old man today than I was yesterday. My health is depreciating quickly and my mind even quicker. My ability to retain information has lessened by half if not more these last few years and it troubles me greatly.
But, in hindsight, there’s much I rather not remember, perhaps much more I prefer to forget. At times, I find myself eerily content with the content that has discontentedly dislodged itself from my mind.
I’m happy with my wife and happy, sorry, I am overjoyed with the beautiful family that I’ve been blessed with.
Should all my memories fade away, and they will eventually, I will be content in knowing that my last thought is that I love them and I am loved by them.
And then all things will gray away and return to black… and then the Light.
Until then I’ll be here picking fights with no one other than my ignorant self and whoever else dares to join the fight.
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Thoughts
Why is Langston Hughes’s poetic prowess in this rhetorical quest to decipher the end of poorly developed or intentionally hampered dreams so enticing?
Were we not aware then as we are now that a dream deferred, a dream ignored, a dream erased, and a dream transformed into a nightmare subsists and barely exists as anxieties under which we are ruled?
Are these not the new authorities that guide our steps and our emotions to the penitentiary of destitution of all hope? Is not a dream deferred the equal of a meal misplaced, a payment deviated from our account, love rejected?
Is not a dream deferred the culmination of anxiety and depression, the twin sisters of misery, playing a dirty, dirty trick on us? Incarnate now in the frontal lobe and later in the metaphysical center of the soul?
Do dreams dry up? Of course.
Can they fester? As does gangrene.
Whence do they run? Away from us, assuredly, as quickly as they can, with or without legs.
Are they as odoriferous as rotten meat? Dreams have no scent as we understand the term but if a deferred dream were to release an odor I am sure it would reek of death. Dreams die too, you know. And deaths stinks.
Can it crust over with sweet enrichment, delivering to the dashed dreamer a pleasant sense of freedom from the responsibility of accomplishing this said dream? No. God no. It is bitter, without the slightest tinge of sweetness.
Will it sag with time, gravity working it below our feet, the feet of the grave, below that yet, under the feet of our planet and slip out on the other side of our spherical abode into the nether world?
Yes, yes. A dream deferred slips into the abyss never to be found again. A deferred dream once dead has less hope of recovery than souls trapped in the mythical purgatory.
Does a deferred dream explode?
Lest we fall back into ignorance we must admit, yes, it does, not as a renewed hope or aspirations from which we derive existential fulfillment but as deprivation of all joy and avaricious which consumes all hope.
A deferred dream is found in the life of the day-to-day moribund worker whose sole purpose is to work and make money and vacation and work again than in the man or woman whose improvised explosive device is close to razing a building to the ground.
A terrorist is a terrorist not because of a dream deferred but because of a malicious dream. Nightmares insatiably malignant transformed in the mind of a dreamer turned killer by sheer indoctrination.
But the standard person whose dream is deferred, delayed, paused or made stagnant by whatever causal ill is more dangerous than the terror of fire, gun powder, and time.
This is because the standard soul who lives dreamless or with a dream unfulfilled believes that this realm of loss of hope is acceptable and normative.
When dreamless souls accept this reality then our world becomes a place where dreams are born only to die shortly after their first breath.
Does it explode?
Yes, yes, it does, but the explosion is moderate, genteel, working its way out of the heart and into the mind, erasing all passion and drive. Ebbing the coolness of hopelessness from one wealth of life, the heart, to another treasure of life, the mind, destroying not with fire but with deference, the future of the soul.
And to the rhetorical questions asked by Langston Hudges, we must admit that one of them, perhaps, intentionally or unintentionally we do not know, is left unasked: what happened to my dream?
This question is one we dare not ask nor do we venture on spending enough time digesting it to muster an answer for it.
For it is more pleasurable to delve into the abstract deferred dreams of others than to confront the concretized reality of our prorogued aspirations.
“Washington, who with our fathers purchased our freedom by blood and violence, are lauded as patterns of patriotism and Christianity. Nat Turner, and his associates, who endeavored to work out their own salvation from an oppression incomparably more grievous and unjust than our fathers endured, were treated as rebels, and murderous assassins, and were ruthlessly hung, or shot like wolves, and their memory is corrupt.” (February 13, 1836)
William Lloyd Garrison
Styron received plenty of heat for his novel on the cryptic phantom of the black Spartacus, Nat Turner.
I advise the reader to pick up the 25th Anniversary Edition where Styron expresses his sentiments on the backlash the book received from disenfranchised black groups who had made a god of Turner whereas Styron had made him a man, who as expected, struggled with rage, lust, and the other mundane things a man of that era might have struggled with. Styron adds almost fifty pages on his understanding of the critique, the analytical part yes, but admits a resolute head-scratching at the mindless distaste for his work from people who never read it.
I had not known that Styron had hosted James Baldwin at his home and even received advice and blessings from Baldwin to venture into this first-person narrative of Nat Turner’s life.
Styron admits the liberty he took in recreating the antebellum world so we could understand the multifaceted grievances Turner might have had against the slave trade.
In reality, we don’t need many reasons to understand why. Nat Turner and a group of seventeen slaves set off to kill fifty-five white people in the antebellum south. Their position in life was the only precursor necessary for their vengeance upon their slave masters.
It is, however, impossible to develop a most accurate understanding of Nat Turner’s life when his confession was undersigned by a white lawyer who had been appointed to him by a court that saw him as nothing more than ‘property gone rogue’ and property worthy of hanging, quartering, and burning.
Either way, it’s an expressive work of art and demonstrably true of the horrors of American history, which, retrospectively, was all deserving of Nat Turner’s insurrection.
Sadly, his bid for freedom is seen and described as an insurrection instead of a revolution. Why? You ask. It’s because Nat Turner failed. Unlike his predecessor George Washington, who fought with the same fervency and won, Nat has been relocated to the forgotten and dismissed recesses of American history where he remains a negro terrorist instead of the black Moses he was for his time.
One cannot help but wonder… what if Nat Turner had succeeded?
The bodies of those executed, with one exception, were buried in a decent and becoming manner. That of Nat Turner was delivered to the doctors, who skinned it and made grease of the flesh. Mr. R.S. Barham’s father owned a money purse made of his hide. His skeleton was for many years in the possession of Dr. Massenberg, but has since been misplaced.
Drewry, the southampton Insurrection
Nat Turner’s original confession can be found and read in its entirety here. One must remember that Turner’s confession was transcribed and sealed by a white lawyer appointed to him by the court. We cannot rely on the accuracy of this confession because the court and his legal representative were, culturally, societally, and legally structured to work against him. We can only assume that some of what is undersigned and sealed about Turner’s undertaking are true, but how much, and exactly how accurate, we may never know. In 1831 a slave had little to no value other than the work he or she provided their masters and absolutely no rights or freedoms. We must, unfortunately, take T. R. Gray’s account down with us in history, hesitantly so, as it is the only account of this story recorded in history. We needn’t venture far to wonder why Turner’s insurrection was not as well recorded and disseminated through the Americas as was the stories and triumphs of George Washington. Some insurrections were acceptable while others were worthy of the highest levels of contempt and erasure. A military assault coordinated by negro slaves was the most horrifying news any slave owning and slavery favoring antebellum American could ever conceive of. Their worst nightmare came true in the enigmatic phantom of the black Spartacus, Nat Turner.
So it has come to my attention that I have been accused of presentist sentiments in my analysis of history. This accusation arose from none other than my cantankerous second personality, Mr. Critique. And this perturbs me greatly because I did not know, nor was I ever taught what presentism means. This is a result of my being quite the unschooled pupil. I was not aware that presentism is even a thing.
Mind you, outside of the terms many uses I did not even think such a thing existed. On a philosophical level or say, a metaphilosophical level, presentism argues that everything that exists only exists now. The past is gone. The future doesn’t matter because it isn’t present, therefore, it isn’t real, and therefore, even the present that we ascribe to now will become the past by the time we acknowledge it exists thus making that present the past.
It is a cyclical think-hole that I am way too young to comprehend and way too old to study. Maybe not, but not my niche at the moment.
But the presentism I refer to isn’t one that delves between the philosophical aspects of time and reality, of ontological and epistemological arguments, of which, if I am to be honest, I’m not the most interested in at the moment. This is not to say that I think these ideas and thoughts are of little import, I believe they are of great import, and at times boring, but they’re just not things I’m grappling with in the year 2021.
Not yet.
I will in due time. As it stands, as my mind stands today, I’m focusing on the formation of the Christian church, how the church became complicit in one of the most dastardly trades of all time, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. How the church promoted, participated, and benefited from the social construct of race and colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy in the west.
I’m looking into important figures and events.
Later, when I’m wiser, and yes, more humble, it may take some time, I’ll sit patiently and long enough to understand their epistemological arguments for said behaviors.
For now, I’ll recount these events to the best of my abilities through the lens afforded me.
And this is where I run into this new (to me) conundrum of historical presentism.
Historical Presentism
This changes the understanding or rather the application of the term where it removes it from the abstract philosophical approach and becomes an applicable tool by which the interpreter of an event infuses his or her present moral judgments into past events.
Historians pejoratively call this historical presentism.
Usually, this negative connotation is ascribed to people who venture into an event as horrific as slavery.
Now, we all know that slavery is evil and our historians will even venture, feebly so, hesitantly so, to condemn slavery as evil. But historians hesitate to attribute a moral decision on the ills of slavery when they look at it or retell its presence in society former because they do not want to project modern moral standards onto previous generations who ascribed to a different set of moral standards; so they think.
Meaning, because race-based slavery was such a widespread phenomenon in the formation of western society (slavery was a widespread phenomenon in the formation of many societies and kingdoms, not just western) historians want to bring our attention to the reality that it was inconceivable for the western mind to see it as anything other than commerce and trade.
Jus’ ‘nother day ‘n slave ownin’ country is all!
Historians will promote the idea that for the 17th and 18th-century western mind, the ownership of a negro man, woman, and their children was as common then as us owning a VW Beetle, Ford Escape, or a Cadillac Escalade today. They will pull our attention to how people viewed and understood these systems and metrics then instead of allowing us to transport our nascent and more advanced moral standards to a time before us.
This is quite a complicated process and to an extent, I will even promote this particular idea. But only to an extent.
We must understand people within their time. I agree, to an extent.
But… what historians fail to do or willingly omit from their work is that many individuals who partook in the formation of western society and civilization despised slavery as an institution and despised it even more so as a racialized institution. Previously, long before the Trans-Atlantic slave trade began, slaves were comprised of every ethnic group imaginable. Blacks would enslave whites. Whites the not so whites. The lower whites would enslave the yellows. The reds enslave reds. And whatnot.
I’m generalizing here for the sake of brevity.
Because before European scientists ventured to categorize people and classify them by the color of their skin and physical characteristics like hair color, eye color, nose symmetry, and whatnot, everyone was up for grabs on the possibility of becoming someone else’s slave. And even then, slavery had its limits as indentured servants would work under contract for some time and then be graced by the possibility of manumission. Some slaves were paid, albeit not much, for their labor. Others were delivered from slavery unto family inheritances and so on.
Slavery in the former world was brutal and at times humane. Depending on the area of inquiry you will find benevolence or outright disregard for human dignity. None of it, however, was based on race.
Somewhere along the line, a select group of immoral scientists decided not only to invent race, as it is a social construct but also to dignify some races while denigrating others. And, as history has shown, you can see which groups have benefited and which have been exploited on the basis of race over the years.
What I want to bring to our attention is that there is a class of reputable historians who want us to shy away from condemning previous societies for enslaving and owning slaves and also mistreating the same because by doing so we can fall into the all-too cyclical and dishonest loop of presentist historical analysis.
I counter this argument with the fact that many, hundreds, and later thousands, and even later-er than that, millions upon millions of western minds fought in the social, then religious, then political, and finally on the battlefield to eradicate not only slavery but also race-based slavery in the west and in the world.
Being a man of faith; not a good one, and having ascribed to the principles and worldview of Christianity, I have greater reasons to detest the pejorative moniker, ‘presentist’ because I believe morality to be universal and objective and not subjective and mutable.
Meaning, the same Bible that was used by my patristic church fathers in Antioch, Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and beyond, is the same bible that slave overseers used when they set off to whip the skin and fat off the back of black people in the field.
The same Bible and divine literature that instructed its adherents to love one another, not creating division on the basis of ethnicity, class, sex, geography, language, and etc, in the first century also instructed its adherents in the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, and now the 21st century to do the same.
Approaching morality from the metaphysical and universal, I can conclusively condemn the acts of slavery as it is presented in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and later in the American Deep South without the slightest hesitance!
Again, I believe that historical presentism is only possible if the historian approaching time in question has a subjective moral framework.
However, condemning the ills of society former on the constant revelation of universal morals is not presentist but truest to the morality I ascribe to, which, to my limited understanding, is coherent with reality as reality is understood to us as a collective.
So, even though I fight against anachronistic tropes and philosophical presentism (contrasted with eternalism or actualism) I am comfortable committing to historical presentism as an agency for good because the basis on which I condemn slave owners, slave traders, and slave murderers are on the same moral book they used to govern their life hundreds of years ago.
Their failure to properly understand that same book is not a fault of mine nor is it a responsibility on my part to excuse their ignorance on the beauties of scripture when it calls us to love one another. In fact, I will go even further to accuse them of not only illiteracy, ignorance, and moral corruption through avarice and pride, but also condemn them of perverting the holy writ and abusing their fellow man, which, our Divine Christ, commands us to die for.
Therefore, I will continue to learn about historical presentism, I will struggle with this idea, and I will also ask myself and the historians who accuse me and others like me of being ‘presentists,’ WHO is it that benefits from this avoidance? Who benefits when we fail to condemn the ills of society former? Who benefits when we’re amoral on something as universally evil as kidnapping, murder, rape, genocide, and land theft?
Who benefits from the Doctrine of Discovery? From Manifest Destiny? From the Monroe Doctrine?
Who?
Could it be that the sentiment leading these same historians to hesitate on condemning these previous figures is the same sentiment that forced slave drivers to whip blacks without the slightest provocation on whether whipping people is right or wrong in the first place?
We’ve yet to truly understand the reach and grip of White Supremacy in our society and I would not be surprised, although there is evidence yet to be compiled in its entirety if this cancer has not already infected the way we look at history.
I presume the virus of white supremacy has infected the academia as we find resistance there anytime we venture onto subjects as tenebrous as slavery in the west.
Especially how we look at ourselves as the triumphant peoples of the Americas, continually so, and rarely, if ever, look at ourselves as the brutes we were. As the children of monsters.
Anywho, go on about your business and I will get back to my research, where, upon my liberties, I will condemn the behaviors of the men and women who sought to enslave and eradicate my people, and by my people I mean humanity, not just black people. In enslaving blacks on the basis of race, little did they know that they had in fact enslaved themselves to the manacles of immorality.
I’m only 28 pages into William Styron’s 25th-Anniversary Edition award-winning book, The Confessions of Nat Turner and my emotions are everywhere.
For those of you who don’t know, or perhaps, better stated, for those of you who were never taught about Nat Turner I must advise that this is no children’s tale. This here, the story of the largest revolt of enslaved persons in the United States of America is not a replicable Hollywood stunt, nor is it something you toss onto a playwright’s lap in hopes that she’ll hire a batch of actors talented enough to emulate such a feat. No. Nat Turner’s story surrounds the life of a spellbinding man who was born into slavery, raised up as a prophet, a dream decipherer, a reverend, an insurrectionist, a hero, and ultimately, the most hated man, sorry, property in America.
In short, Nat Turner led a revolt, a company of some fifty or sixty enslaved men to bring upon their masters and family members the same level of indecency they had endured from birth. They massacred will over fifty men, women, and children, indiscriminately killing them from the darkest hour of the night until the sun was high in the sky.
They killed. Stabbed. Chopped. Shot. Hacked. Strangled. Decapitated. Beat with clubs, weapons, and fists, every white slave owner they could find in their vicinity until their insurrection was stamped out by a local militia.
Nat, the last surviving member of this revolt was eventually apprehended, tried as a terrorist (a neologism yet unknown then but the meaning is clear), and killed by the state.
Turner was coerced by the court, and later, some believe, impressed upon by God to confess, not his sins of a violent revolt because to Turner this was not a sinful act but an act of deliverance and immediate emancipation.
Turner confessed to the step-by-step process he took in eliminating every single slave owner he knew and could find that day.
This document was presented to the court as Bible against Turner and his story spread through the American plains, from the racist abolitionist North to the slave-trading South.
Nat was the Osama Bin Laden of his day.
The problem, however, as there are many problems with retelling or the accurate telling of history is that Turner committed the crime of wanting his freedom at all costs, just as American founding fathers had ventured to liberate themselves from the grips of an imperialist Britain, so Turner sought to wring himself free from bondage.
His insurrection initiated slave patrols in the south. Slave dogs began to roam plantation fields. Negroes were from there on forbidden from learning how to read, write, and also to congregate in numbers larger than three or four, at a time.
Because if one negro can plan and execute an insurrection, what then, might other negroes do?
Had Nat Turner successfully revolted against his masters, mustered hundreds, possibly, thousands of other negroes, and whites, unto his cause, to rid all black men, women, and children from the bondage of slavery, perhaps we would know him as a triumphant liberator instead of an insurrectionist.
Wording matters.
The same way we see Washington, we would see Turner.
But Turner was black. A black slave. Turner was property.
There’s a higher chance you’ve heard of William Wallace, the freedom fighter turned martyr whose story or legend was adapted into a big-budget movie where Mel Gibson brought Scottish knight to the silver screen.
At the end of this violent film, we watch as Wallace, played by Gibson, is stretched over a table whilst in entrails are removed from him as he suffers the gruesome death at the hands of the State. He manages to ring out a shout for freedom just before his life is taken from him with force. This heroic depiction of William Wallace, the enemy of the English state, is etched into our memories as a man who fought to protect his people, his land, and their dignity in the face of an encroaching king.
But Nat Turner was tortured, hanged, and quartered. His shout for freedom came by the same means as that of Wallace but the difference is that Wallace, a marauder, and criminal, an enemy of the state, an insurrectionist murderer was martyred whereas Turner was captured and treated like a dog.
But to the American mind, he was equal to a dog. A dog that turned on its owner and with the help of other dogs managed to kill several dog owners. He was hunted down, captured, humiliated, enchained, violently wrestled from doghood down to vermin-hood, where, as less than human, less than property, less than a dog, he was ripped to pieces and those pieces burned and what was leftover discarded in some undiscoverable place.
The difference between Wallace, George Washington, and Turner is that the first two were white men whose criminal acts have gone down in history as heroism in the face of tyranny.
Turner, having lost his physical battle and the ensuing cultural bone as well, was a devil in the eyes of every white person in America, except, say, William Lloyd Garrison:
“Washington, who with our fathers purchased our freedom by blood and violence, are lauded as patterns of patriotism and Christianity. Nat Turner, and his associates, who endeavored to work out their own salvation from an oppression incomparably more grievous and unjust than our fathers endured, were treated as rebels, and murderous assassins, and were ruthlessly hung, or shot like wolves, and their memory is corrupt.” (February 13, 1836)
Anywho, I’m angry when reading about Nat’s failed revolt. I’m angrier yet at the circumstances that existed that forced Nat to revolt in the first place.
There’s much to be said by how many words are spoken, also by how many are left unsaid. We rarely delve into how quickly someone answers a question, perhaps a nervous tick, pride, or presumption are the precursor to these witty remarks. But seldom do we stop or slow a conversation down enough to realize how a question may affect the hearer.
That glazed-over look they have when a question hits somewhere deep, so deep that it causes them a moment of panic and they have to do something or anything possible to swim up and out of the pit of self-realization. Their reaction is to answer the question as quickly as possible because to think about things, especially the thing you had taken this long to learn, is to look weak or to be perceived as an obtuse individual. No one wants to be portrayed as obtuse. That’s too crass a qualification. So a quip, a verbal jab, a cackle, and possibly a crude joke to dissuade the seriousness of the question you were just asked helps you do away with the all-too-real possibility that you have been wrong about something for decades.
I believe I saw this look earlier this week whilst in conversation with a peculiar gentleman. An older gentleman, of course. I did say decades did I not? This sir, this mister, this gentleman I speak of has the given post-military-serviceman look. The military haircut, clean-shaven chin, furrowed eyebrows and eyes stook in a squint as if the sun were always before them. He dawns a bottom down, which he neatly tucks into his blue jeans. Belted, of course. Wears boots, drives a Harley, and also owns a truck.
I once asked him if he had served, if he had spent time in the desert or in a foreign village where the language was indecipherable, the food undigestible, and the living conditions, well, unlivable. His response, after hiding a hint of embarrassment, was no. He reads well and reads much. Consumes literature about soldiers, mercenaries, real and well, half-real military veterans. His personal favorites are navy seal veterans who now speak at veteran conventions, TED talks, police academies, late night shows, and men who have written enough books about their personal traumas at home before the wars and their personal traumas after the war that their lives can be made into Tom Clancy movies for decades to come.
I’m always suspicious of the military types. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with someone who admires the work of valiant soldiers, their sacrifice on the field, and the continued sacrifice to live with trauma once they return from battle. That’s honorable. Although I find American wars ethically and morally questionable. But that’s not the point.
I’m suspicious of the types who idealize the military complex, the ruggedness, the rough and tough stance, the superman, the American boy-turned-man by blood, sweat, and the pure desire to disintegrate the enemies of the state. But I am even more suspicious of the type that has never joined nor served, has not participated in any military drills, national guard, paramilitary venture, not even the local police force. Their admiration for this kind of life, or rather, service, irks me.
Either way, this gentleman I speak of has the look of a healthier and somewhat younger Clint Eastwood. Same characteristics except, well, like I said, healthier and fifty years young, because I think Clint Eastwood is anywhere between 100 to 110 years old at this point. This man I reference looks rugged and tough but is actually quite docile and kind. His words are direct, his attitude astute, his conduct like that of a serviceman, his gait is wide, consuming the hallway as he walks even though he’s quite slim for his age. I presume he works out. He gives off the vibe of someone who would. He’s a gentle soul. Laughs when his face isn’t shut-in. Jokes when in the company of others. He will stop his day just to show me pictures of his granddaughter, which, let’s be honest, is one of the nicest things anyone can do. Anyone who shares family photos, especially of cute little babies with others, is a kind-hearted human being. And he is. I truly believe he is.
But today’s post is a reflection of a conversation that this gentleman and I had earlier this week on the voices that dominate our headspace.
We were discussing recent events, the news, and also the violent overthrow of a statue of a Canadian saint whose legacy is under scrutiny. The statue in question was toppled, spray painted and decapitated with the help of several angry people wielding sledgehammers.
Toppled statue of Egerton Ryerson.
The gentleman was more concerned with this toppling and beheading of a statue than he was concerned with the history of the individual whose statue had been toppled.
Side note: the person in question began Canadian residential schools, where, under the authority of Canada’s government and with the help of local churches with the social support of white Canadians, many indigenous families had their children forcibly taken from them and forced into schools that would erase the savage Indian from their memory along with their cultural identity. This saint would teach these kidnapped children to hate everything about their former life. This is this man’s legacy.
But this gentleman wasn’t focused on the legacy and history of this saint. He was more perturbed by the toppling of statues and severing of metallic heads. This, to his hardened character, was a step too far.
“These people hate people like me. Wealthy white men.” Paraphrasing the gentleman. He points his index finger at his forehead as the last few words fade from his mouth. I have to complete them for him to which he reaffirms. As if the reality of him being wealthy and then white, lastly, a man, are all too heinous a combination that to speak such words in public is dangerous. Thankfully, at least in my opinion, they are not.
This gentleman has studied well, in a professional scope and also a religious one. He has attended and graduated from a renowned religious institution. One we both know well and whose history in academia is envied. He has sat under a very prominent lecturer who our shared religious world respects very much. So, when it comes to philosophy and theology we have a common ground so in this conversation, I dared to approach his fears and agitation from there.
“I need to ask you a question,” I began, trying not to sound too forward as his anxiety over the severed statue head was at its peak. He used laughter to ward it off but it wasn’t working. We both noticed. “While in seminary, say, during your spiritual and vocational formation and throughout the many years of your schooling, how many of the writers, theologians, and teachers that you had read, whose materials you had consumed, were NOT of European descent? You know many books from non-white writers have you read?”
This, at this moment, is where I can see it. Even if for a split second, the tiniest amount of time passes but I see his eyes brighten, decades of bliss are pushed away from the seat of comfort and the reality of blindness and seclusion are made bare on his conscience and I see it.
Hands in pockets, back stiff, and a visible agitation is made clear as he bounces off his feet and responds as quickly and jovially as possible, proud of the answer but still, somewhat unaware of the gravity of his answer.
“None.”
I nod. He nods. I smile. He does too, for a bit, we trade a few more pleasant remarks over our religious circles and culture. He blames the culture. I blame the religious circles for being part of the problem that started the culture-related problem for us. We exchange our salutations and greetings once more, he reaches for his phone to show me more baby pictures, we both smile, and off he goes in military step, drill, and cadence back to the Forsaken Land of Statues of Genocidal Murderers and their Statuette Preservationists.
Racial Catalog and Inventory
This interaction, this conversation between the gentleman and I was another step in my realization of just how anemic some of my white friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and the like are about the subject of race, racism, scientific racism, structural racism, and so on.
In working my way through Daniel Hill’s book White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White, I realized, as Daniel did, that too many white people are unaware of just how much white literature, film, history, wars, triumph, culture, music, cuisine, philosophy, theology, politics, and policies have influenced their thinking.
Like this gentleman I conversed with, he was unaware of just how much of his theological framework was produced and built upon by white theologians, professors, mentors, pastors, deacons, elders, friends, parents, and social clubs who lacked the diversity to help him understand the hostility toward a statue of a man who purposely caused the deaths of hundreds of Indigenous children and destroyed the identity of thousands more through residential schooling.
So, I made a list of the the voices that dominate my headspace. Voices that have influenced me over time.
And yes, having grown within a particularly religious environment I can attest to the fact that I, too, was influenced by a generally Eurocentric body of scholarship and work.
(Note: Allow me to pause here and explain to the reader that there is nothing inherently wrong in studying European folklore, history, literature, theology, and social formation. In fact, it is healthy for one’s educational formation to study European history. There is nothing wrong there. What I am challenging here is Eurocentrism, ethnocentrism, or blindness and unawareness of just how much one has been influenced by Eurocentric materials and later finds themselves dismissing other perspectives, usually the perspectives of minority groups. One usually precedes the other.)
So, the books we read in our religious circles were written by European or white American scholars. The religious commentaries we referenced were written by European or white American scholars. The scholastic structures we followed and graduated from were produced and later adopted into our denomination by European or white American scholars, and listen, I’m a black kid from Brazil at this point, unaware, myself, that much of my formation is absent of the voices of people who look just like me.
I hadn’t realized this until recently.
I have had to revisit much of my ‘scholarly’ materials to determine who it was that influenced my thoughts, opinions, both political and scientific opinions, my convictions, and so on. And I found that especially surrounding my religious formation, which, to me is the most important aspect of my life, was formed, built, structured, developed, and advanced by European or white American men.
If I had not been a minority (black and Brazilian), I would have assumed, like the gentleman had, that the decapitation of this statue was more egregious an act than the man whose statue was toppled, racist and murderous legacy.
Chances are I would not even have ventured into who the individual was, why his statue was there, or what he had done to merit the honor of being memorialized. I would have spent more time decrying the iconoclasts than questioning the idolization of the iconophiles who erected his statue in the first place.
Like the gentleman, I would be oblivious to the struggles of minority groups because everyone I know, from my parents, my friends, my siblings, my community, my schools, post-graduate studies, theologians, lecturers, pastors, deacons, ministers, worship teams, accountants, builders, architects, engineers, managers, colleagues, executives, and with the exception of a few cleaners and laborers I happen upon on my way into and out of work, are all white.
Without committing to this inventory of thought formation, I, too, would have never realized just how much of my society has been set up to shield me from its hyper eurocentric or exceptionalist white American inception.
But this is somewhat of a contradiction because being a black man in American (or North America) I was obviously aware of the many horrors and genocides that preceded me in these lands. What troubles me further, however, is how unaware I was about how much of my educational formation had been comprised of Eurocentric thinkers.
Having purposely gone out of my way to listen to women, women of color, black men, Latinos, Filipinos, Koreans, Native Americans and so, has opened my mind to more historical events and perspectives, which, have been and continue to be denied by my Eurocentric and white American circles to this day.
See the correlation?
And this has helped me realize that the proponents of ‘Why topple that statue? What’s next? Me?’ dismissive trope are people who have very few friends of color (or none at all) or little to no influence from minority individuals in his or her life.
And this places a stumbling block in front of them where they cannot learn on the current issues of race, racism, racial equity, history, and so forth because most if not all of the voices that have influenced them up until now have never experienced these wrongs. In fact, the voices that have influenced them have all but participated in the wrongs, in overt or covert ways.
Minorities…
So, if you’re a minority like me and you’re reading this I need you to understand that when you’re in conversation with someone who is hostile to current events and dismissive of our calls for justice, reparations, remuneration, racial reconciliation, a push for more accurate and all-encompassing history books, a need for holding bad cops and killer cops accountable, and the toppling of statues of individuals who perpetrated genocide, understand that the person you’re in conversation with is working from a limited and restricted perspective.
They do not have the language by which to define what has happened. They do not have the empathy by which to understand these wrongs. They do not share the community hurt that it takes for change. They are limited in their understanding and restricted in their emotional capacity.
The only thing that will help them venture out of this circle of Eurocentric and white American bliss is when they befriend people of color who are compassionate enough to teach them and love them out of ignorance.
Hate and violence will only drive them further into their white fog of ignorance. It may in fact rekindle a white superiority complex so, please, what is done must be done from love toward love.
So go befriend that person and over time, time allowing, educate them. Share with them your personal experiences. They will begin to notice, time allowing, that whenever whiteness comes into contact with non-whiteness, Whiteness (with a capital W) customarily wins.
If You’re White…
And if you’re white, please, commence upon the project of cataloging the voices that have influenced you over time. Produce an inventory of the news stations you listen to or watch, what these anchormen or anchorwomen have to say about minorities, whose books you’re reading, music and genres you’re listening to, political sources, and origins you’re consuming and being shaped by.
Are they overwhelmingly white?
100% white?
Fret not. By God’s grace, there is nothing wrong with listening to white voices or in being white. It’s a blessing to be white as much as it is in being non-white.
But you’re holding out on yourself by limiting your understanding of our very diverse world by listening to only white voices.
Go out. Befriend people of color and listen to their stories. Not to challenge them with a well, maybe that wasn’t racism, that was just a jackass being mean, kind of narrative. No. Listen. Sit there and once the story has been told, sit with that reality. Digest it. You don’t need to rush to save, to defend, to even give a response. Your presence in our pain is more important than your perceived solutions to it.
Over time you’ll begin to realize that there is a wealth of voices out there that have so much to offer and add to the white voices you have been overwhelmed by.
Befriend people of color. Venture outside your monochromatic world and community. There’s fear, at first, yes, I understand. But with time you will find that fear of ‘the other’ dissipate and disappear as you realize they are no more different from you with the exception that they have a bit more pigmentation than you do. And sometimes they’ll speak a different language. That’s okay. It’s a beautiful addition to our expansive and diverse world.
Read up James Baldwin’s material. Listen to women of color on the news. Minorities concerning political science and economics. Pick up history books that were written by reliable and competent historians of color who can give you added and historically accurate perspectives on the issues of race and the formation of our western world.
If you’re a religious person, read up on materials written by persons who are not from Europeans or white Americans.
Believe me, you’ve read quite a lot from white Europe and white America and you will do yourself a favor to learn more from others as well.
Put Calvin, Luther, Edwards, and White (I know, given), aside and pick up the works of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Jemar Tisby, Justin Giboney, William Lloyd Garrison (white), Robert Kumamoto, Susan Neiman (white), Edward Ball (white and descendant of a Klansman), James H. Cone, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (who wrote extensively on the horrors of lynchings of blacks in the Deep South), W.E.B. du Bois, Ben Crump, Brian Zahnd, Lemuel Haynes, Kristie Anyabwile, and Anthea Butler, just to name a few.
Diversify your friend and learning pool. Diversify it because it’ll make you more compassionate toward the harms done to your neighbors. Those who are screaming, smashing windows, toppling statues, and beheading them with sledgehammers are exhausted by how quiet their white neighbors have been for decades; whereas others have been complicit for centuries.
What we’re seeing today is the side effect of an exhausted generation. One that has seen and experienced way too much silence and ignorance from their white counterparts who, for the most part, have been at the top of the food chain of western civilization for the better part of the last four hundred years and who they can partner with to make the world a better, less hate-filled place.
But this cannot be accomplished, this step toward progress and reconciliation, if so many of our white neighbors are blind to the problem: willful ignorance and apathy.
We need people on our side who will be more upset about a man whose legacy involves kidnapping, murder, genocide, and coverup than people who are upset with a statue being defaced and toppled.
Please, come out of the bubble of white bliss and into the community of humankind, which, by all standards, is beautifully colored.
You’re colored too. That skin of yours ain’t all white. Pale, maybe. But not white.
Whiteness is a social construct invented by people who wanted to use physical characteristics to differentiate between people groups to enslave some, liberate others, enrich some, and exploit others.
Whiteness is an inherently evil concept. Being white is beautiful.
Join us in fighting racism and dismantling the statues of horrible criminals.
Produce your catalog, produce your inventory, and go out and befriend, learn, love, listen, and grow.
I love you. Most of us do too. We just don’t like your lack of sympathy and your willful ignorance concerning our pain.
I’ve been listening to Duke Kwon and Gregory Thompson’s audiobook, Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair where they deal with, you guessed it, reparations. If you’re unfamiliar with the term it simply means bridging the gap between two parties or peoples, usually, by financial means. The offending party makes restitution for its offense. It repairs the situation. It reparates.
Lexico defines reparation this way:
“The action of making amends for a wrong one has done, by providing payment or other assistance to those who have been wronged.”
The conversation surrounding reparations has become controversial because when we delve into it we tend to allude to the possibility that the American federal government will have to compensate the people who they robbed of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for centuries.
Discussing reparations today is like diving into a pool of hostility and bitterness because too often the responses on either side of the discussion reach a stalemate.
“Pay us back. If you don’t you’re racist.”
Or,
“We want five trillion dollars! Now!”
Or,
“My family never owned slaves and I’m not racist so why should I pay for what white people did centuries ago?”
Or,
“Yes, my family owned slaves but that was centuries ago.”
Or,
“Why should they be compensated? They’ll just squander the money and waste it and then they’ll ask for more.”
Or,
“They’re forcing us to pay for something our ancestors did. Who is the racist one now?”
The scenarios are endless but you get the gist.
The call for reparations is not new, in fact, I found out that the federal government is very much in favor of reparatory compensation as a means to maintain the peace, stability, and unity of the United States of America. History will show that the federal government leads this discussion by example.
The only problem is that the reparation made regarding the emancipation of the negroes in the United States was not made toward freed slaves but toward former slave owners.
“Wait… wait wait wait wait wait wait a minute. Pause. Rewind. Redux. Whatever redux means. And say that again.”
You heard me the first time loud and clear but I’ll elaborate.
The District of Columbia Emancipation Act
In the year 1862, president Abraham Lincoln signed a bill called the District of Columbia Emancipation Act that benefited the Union favoring slave-owning southerners by granting them up to $300 for every slave they set free.
A little bit of math here for context.
The New York Times pulled up an old newspaper from the golden civil war era. In this article, they find that a slave could be sold for anywhere between $40 – $400 depending on the slaves’ age, sex, and quality of health. Prices varied and later escalated toward the start of the civil war as I imagine slaves became a commodity as valuable as gold itself.
Either way, let’s pull up the value of a cheap slave at $40 and the value of a great slave valued at $400 and ultimately the highest priced slaves around $1,000 and compare them with today’s evaluation system.
Adjust for inflation, time, and all that mambo jumbo stuff, were we to purchase slaves today, this ‘investment’ would set us back a lot of money.
$40 in 1862 would amount to $1,048.02 today.
$400 in 1862 would amount to $10,490.18 today. That’s a Django kind of slave.
And, for the ultra optimal performing slave, you know, the kind that can work like a bull twelve hours a day, is built like a tank, and able to produce an offspring like non-other the price would be around $1,000.
$1,000 in 1862 would amount to $26,225.45 today.
Now, do you understand why slave-trading and slave-owning Americans were so resistant to the idea of abolishing slavery? Plantations would own and house anywhere between fifty slaves and the larger plantation companies would house hundreds of slaves. So do the math. It was a multimillion-dollar industry that if one were to ‘invest’ in the property of slave-ownership they were either rich or on the road to becoming rich simply by procreating his slaves. Two slaves today. Seven in ten years. The value adds up. Procreate them. Work them. Sell them. Buy them. Repeat. Amass wealth.
Anyway… back to reparations.
So with this District of Columbia Emancipation Act signed by American favorite, Abraham Lincoln, allowed the federal government the power to easily dispense $300 dollars to slave owners for each of the slaves they released from bondage.
$300 in 1862 would amount to $7,867.63 today.
If you were a Georgian slaveowner who wanted the civil war to end sooner than later but were lacking in your financial stability you could release your slave and be awarded $300 by the US government as a means to help you in your dire predicament.
If you had ten slaves and you wanted to release all ten, well, guess what, Abraham Lincoln’s war-torn Union would pay you for releasing those slaves.
But…. but the slaves, however, well, it’s America you see and in America, the one thing Americans cannot do is help former slaves or the descendants of said slaves rise up from their miserable predicaments.
In fact, the American government suggested freed blacks emigrate to Liberia and offered them up to $100 if they left the country altogether.
$100 in 1862 would amount to $2,622.24 today.
So, if you were a slave and you worked for forty years, day and night, back-breaking, whipped-up back, denigrated dignity, no education, no reading or writing skills, and psychologically damaged for life and here, in 1862, the US government says it plans to set you free and will pay your master $300 for your liberation and will pay you $100 if you leave the country and head to Liberia.
If you stay, however, you get nothing.
You’re just… well… free?
But if you leave, to a country from which you did not originate, to a land you do not know, to a people who are not your people, they will pay you $100.
Eight months after Abraham Lincoln gave out ‘free money’ to slaveowners he signed the Emancipation Proclamation to abolish and end slavery in the United States of America once and for all.
And here, with this monumental edict, blacks, and indigenous peoples went without reparation whereas Americans of European descent and whose sole rise to fame and luxury arose from the plundering of black and indigenous bodies went on to amass a little more wealth with the help of the US government.
Some will say that Lincoln’s District of Columbia Emancipation Act was a war tactic to destabilize the Confederacy and bring the war to a swift end without further loss of life.
It was Lincoln’s good heart that sought to pay white slave owners for their slaves with federal funds just so they could help bring this unnecessary war to a conclusion.
Possibly. But possibly isn’t good enough.
The Issue: Hypocrisy
The issue here is that the American Government paid slaveowners reparations for disrupting the slave trade but refused to financially, culturally, socially, and geographically structure and stabilize black and indigenous peoples during and after the civil war. And they refuse to repair these two communities to this very day.
I understand that in wartime, government leaders make drastic decisions to advance their position and hopefully win a war not worth the loss of life. I get it. Drastic times call for drastic measures. Whatever. But either Lincoln or his defamed successor could have worked for this effort but failed to because the issue in America was more endemic and pervasive than just slavery.
We know that white supremacy is the issue here but they were too blinded by their racial superiority to consider it.
Either way, I was shocked to find that the same government that today dares not dip its fingers into the conversation of reparations is the same that pushed for reparations for slaveowners 150 or so years ago.
And understand this, reparations are not an issue relegated to financial restitution alone.
It’s about restoring relationships, acknowledging wrongs, giving back that which was taken and stolen, without limits!
Whole states were wiped of their indigenous peoples. Wiped clean. Certain governments paid citizens for the scalps of Native Americans.
State-sanctioned violence toward Native Americans, y’all. You could make a living by killing Native Americans and collecting your bounty from federally funded locations.
What… the…. Hell.
I’m losing my cool here but that’s okay because no one should be calm and collected when discussing the rise of this great nation whose sole identity is based on its patriotic endeavor to liberate people from oppression and give them new liberties and freedoms here, in the West.
The same group was responsible for razing indigenous peoples, responsible for immoral and unethical land seizures, unlawful colonization, and unwarranted violence in that endeavor. They removed millions of black lives from one continent and subjugated them to race-based slavery and inferiority in this ‘new nation.’ It wasn’t new because there were other groups already there. They amassed international financial dominance off of slave labor only to repay slaveowners for disrupting the slave trade and then giving native Americans a little patch of land somewhere in the plains where the buffalo are gunned down by white Americans for sport.
Bruh….
And the same government is hostile to the idea of repairing and restoring that which they took? Barely admitting to its wrongs, quickly alluding to how long ago these things happened, and ignoring the reality and continuity of these harms that are still present in our nation today?
By our nation, I mean the United States of America and the western hemisphere that was affected, one way or another, by the transatlantic slave trade and the Doctrine of Discovery which initiated a church-sanctioned call to conquer the lands to the West.
But none was more complicit in moral and international hypocrisy than the land that swore that they stood for freedom but enslaved others. Stood for freedom of expression but silenced others. Freedom from unlawful forfeiture of their property but considered black people property and seized the lands of those native to that same land.
I believe it’s time for the second District of Columbia Emancipation Act to be signed into law but this time the money, the financial stability, the property allocation, and respect must go to the right groups. The black and indigenous groups.
It is true that none of our federal employees own slaves, and possibly, most of them have ancestors who may have never owned slaves but the thing is that they’re still responsible for repairing the damages done to the colored communities centuries ago.
Of Blessings and Curses
Americans today benefit from the sacrifice Americans made centuries ago. Those who crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of a better life, those who ventured deep into the bush in hopes of finding better land, those who ventured west in pursuit of gold and wealth, those who fought in wars and built the nation that exists today. We’re all benefactors of their sacrifices, their pain so we could live in comfort, their loss of life so we could be alive and live freely.
But, this same system created evils and damages that linger to this very day, that have settled into how the culture operates and how even our communities are set up, how some of us come from money and others don’t, and those who don’t are normally people of color.
Shall we accept only the good our ancestors committed but shy away from their evils?
Are we are shocked when descendants of slaves and indigenous peoples seek that which is rightfully theirs?
An Illustration
Duke Kwon uses an example in his book that makes sense but even this simple example is not encompassing enough to demonstrate or explain just how complex this situation has become.
Imagine I steal your car and drive it for twenty years, it’s a Toyota so it’ll last that long, and I pass it down to my children. They didn’t commit grand theft, they simply inherited something from their father, unknowing of its origin or acquisition. But years later the true owner of the vehicle shows up demanding their car back and my kids say, “Well, I didn’t take anything. I’m just driving it. It has been passed down in my family! I’m no thief, are you mad? If you take my car away now you’ll disrupt my life! There’s a very good chance you’ll wreck the car if I give it back to you now. Why should I have to pay for my father’s mistakes?”
Do you see what I mean?
Whose car is it in the first place? Right.
Who gets a say on what happens to the car? Me, my children, or the owner or the owners’ children?
Native Americans want their land back.
African Americans want reparations for all their hard work as descendants of slaves.
That incentive should have never made its way to former slaveowners or the children of these slaveowners who amassed wealth first from slavery and later from emancipating their slaves.
Sighs…
Either way, much work to do, perhaps, with a more diverse nation, one more aware of its history and one with a willing heart to repair and reconcile this issue will rise up in the near future to fix these wrongs. To make amends for the wrongs committed ages ago.
We’re not there yet but one day we might be.
Perhaps the United States of America might become something other, something else. Part United States and part Turtle Island.
Part Wakanda.
People of color will have the chance to remove confederate terrorist symbols and statues from government buildings and public spaces the same way Germany removed Nazi symbols and criminalized them after the war.
The Confederates prided themselves as rebels, you know. A violent insurgency that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. An army and pseudo-nation that plagued the world by fighting for the preservation of white supremacy and slave trading. And we still see their battle flag wave about here and there as if over time it has come to mean something other than seditious terrorism.
Reparation demands that the offending party or the group or agency that benefited from this offense admit fault, repair that which was broken, replenish that which was robbed, reconcile that which was severed, repent of the white supremacist ideations that caused these evils in the first place, and rebuild that which was destroyed over time. It is a call to do all these things under the banner of collective responsibility to do what is just and what is right.
This isn’t an easy thing to accomplish but if this nation has survived this long through so many wars and troubles it can survive a necessary reparations act that will benefit the descendants of peoples who were wronged.
Because what was taken from black bodies and indigenous bodies was not just money but land, identity, culture, a right to voice their grievances, to vote, citizenry, protections, futures, posterity, education, religion, and dreams.
We’re still struggling with the legacy of white supremacy within the United States and we will continue to struggle against it further but the calls for reparations have gone unanswered and ignored for too long.
The time for restitution and reconciliation is now.
Or we could just stick with $300 for the children of former slaveowners and call it a day.
The Christian Conscience
In Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair, the authors speak primarily but not singularly to Christian conscience. They appeal to Chrisitan holy writings to drive the point that is it a Christian’s duty to repair and restore things broken and stolen. We’re to be the Good Samaritans in a situation where many have walked away from a demanding task. A task that requires we sacrifice personal comfort and experience public scorn. We’re to take time away from our comfort to suffer a little so that others may be comforted. As followers of Christ, we are obliged to live as Christ lived, calling out injustice where He saw it and giving our lives for one another.
Mind you, it was a supposedly Christianized nation that enslaved and pillaged these lands for centuries and again a supposedly Christianized people who sought to abolish slavery. Again, a supposedly Christianized conscience sought to bring equality between the races and the dignity of colored people back from the chambers of darkness.
Therefore, it must be a Christian conscience that spears this fight for reparation because we created this mess and we must fix it.
We are supposedly the sole guardians of a clear conscience, a clean heart, and clean hands. Therefore let us use these for good.
If we fail then another institution, secular or religious, will lead this project and their means and ends may be more disastrous than our complicit participation in slavery and our complicit silence on the topic of racism, white supremacy, and reparations.
Go and reconcile men and women unto God but do not leave the same destitute, naked, and abandoned in the process. That’s not our purpose on this earth. Restore the entire man or restore nothing at all.
Derek Chauvin, the former police officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until George expired under this weight, has been found guilty of all three charges brought against him. The charges: second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter.
It is both a relief and a reprehensible thought that we are relieved that a bad cop is facing punitive consequences for taking someone’s life without cause.
It is a relief to know that George Floyd will get justice. We can now celebrate that which we all knew and were continually denied for just short of a year: that what this officer did was wrong. It was unnecessary. It was grotesque. It was evil.
It. Was. Evil.
Law enforcement officers are sworn to serve and protect their communities. Sworn to uphold the law and embody a shield of protection, honor, and sacrifice for their fellow man. A stamp of courage shines over this profession, in theory, as men and women, public servants who rush into trouble to save those in distress and those under the threat of death.
We have been struggling with this emblematic view of law enforcement compared to its implemented force on the streets, where, instead of protecting the vulnerable we see them take lives, continually, without cause.
Mind you, this is not to dismiss the rightful case for use of force. No one is questioning the rightful use of force to subdue dangerous individuals. We’re calling into question the unnecessary excessive use of force, the disregard for human dignity and life, and the unnecessary killings of unarmed civilians.
We are relieved that another bad cop is removed from the streets and is paying for his bad policing.
Relieved.
But at the same time, it is reprehensible to think that we find relief in knowing bad cops are off the streets and we’re celebrating the first steps of accountability in a system as destructive as modern-day policing.
Why has it taken this long?
Mind you, our celebration is bittersweet because Floyd had to die so that Chauvin, a repeat unnecessary excessive use of force offender, could be taken off the streets and removed from a position of power and authority. Someone had to die, blood had to be shed, and life sifted from our world so that one bad cop could face the music.
Now, the bittersweetness of today’s conviction turns more bitter as we dive into the numerous high-profile cases within the American (in)justice system where bad cops managed to walk out of court free men. Free to offend again. Free to kill, again.
Taylor
We can easily recall the names of the officers who wasted Breonna Taylor’s life, endangering the lives of her neighbors and whoever else could have been hit by their unnecessary flood of bullets. Plainclothes officers Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison, and Myles Cosgrove attempted to serve a complicated and perplexing warrant at Breonna Taylor’s apartment and there are conflicting arguments over whether or not they knocked before bashing her door in, they traded fire with the occupants within the apartment.
Not only is the documentation for the warrant dubious but the no-knock operation was also called into question when the residents of the apartment, Breonna, who is now deceased, and her boyfriend, Mr. Walker, and their neighbors, claim they did not hear the police knock on the door. Only that the door was bashed in. To protect him and his girlfriend from would-be intruders, the residents of the apartment fired a single round in their direction.
We know the rest.
Ultimately, one of the officers involved in Breonna’s death decided to countersue Mr. Walker for emotional damage.
None of them have faced a single day behind bars as bad cops, evil cops, or killer cops.
They’re free to roam the streets under a different badge in a different city.
And one of them has since signed a book deal with a major publisher to explain his side of things and possibly make millions from the sales alone. Not to mention future speaking engagements with police departments and law enforcement conferences around the nation later on.
King
I wasn’t old enough to comprehend the gravity of the assault Rodney King experienced at the hands of the four Los Angeles police officers, Sgt. Stacey C. Koon, Officer Theodore J. Briseno, Officer Timothy E. Wind, and Officer Laurence Powell. Watching the low-quality video of these same officers beating King to a pulp as a kid was disheartening. Rewatching the same video as a teenager, it was evident that what happened to the man was just wrong. Rewatching it as an adult, understanding the complexities of that stop, the history of race within the United States of America, was traumatizing. They beat King until his black body turned blue and purple. They smashed their batons over his head, hands, arms, shoulders, neck, and back, and beat him even though he did not resist. He was on his knees, possibly begging for mercy, begging for his life, but they kept beating him.
This was all caught on tape, man. Evidence!
And, to no one’s surprise, the same four men were acquitted of all charges. Free to roam the streets again to beat more people, white, Hispanic, black, and Asian, to a pulp at a moment’s notice and claim they feared for their lives and that their victim was resisting arrest.
They were free to return to their position of power and authority where their operational methods would never be questioned again.
Ducksworth Jr.
We revisit the unnecessary murder of a military officer from Maryland, Roman Ducksworth Jr., who was on emergency leave from his duties in order to be present for the birth of his child. He was on a bus on his way to the hospital when Taylorsville, Mississippi, Police Department officer William Kelly stopped the bus, pulled Roman Ducksworth, Jr. out, and claimed that he fired a shot into the military officer’s chest in self-defense. The case was closed because this was ruled as justified homicide.
Mind you, the only reason Southern officers were pulling buses over is that students and citizens from all across America were bussing from their hometowns to the South to join civil rights desegregation protests.
Riding a bus to desegregate the south was worthy of criminal charges. Of death!
In Roman Ducksworth, Jr.s’ case, he was a military officer who was excited to meet his new baby but was mistaken for a Freedom Rider and killed without cause.
His surviving family members were later forced to relocate because they would wake to a burning cross in their yard.
What. The. Hell.
Accountability Please!
I recall reading an article written by the University of Alberta professor of sociology, Temitope Oriola, Ph.D. In it, he delves into the different ways we can better our policing in hopes of maintaining a healthy stream of communication between police departments and their community without severing that tie through unnecessary use of force and unnecessary killings of unarmed civilians.
Concerning de-escalating police-related violent interactions he states:
“The evidence in support of reducing deadly force by hiring more women in police departments is overwhelming. Female officers are less likely to use (excessive) force as they deploy de-escalation techniques and engage verbally.”
And I’m all-in on hiring more women, competent women, of course, to police our cities because there exists an unhealthy rate of male officers sexually abusing civilians and too many male officers high on testosterone. So please, by all means, let’s diversify the sexes within our police force if that’ll help reduce the number of fatal interactions in this relationship between cops and their community.
Professor Oriola then suggests that:
“Officers without university degrees populate the ranks of killer cops. Officers with university degrees are more likely to request mental health support for suspects and demonstrate a higher appreciation for the complexity of social life, individual problems and subtleties of working in an increasingly diverse environment.”
And listen, I understand this can be a financially weighty burden placed on our police departments but listen to me, no, listen to the facts, I don’t care if police unions and departments are complaining about allocating funds initially set apart for tanks and frag grenades over to education banks for their trainees. I would prefer a well-educated police force that has a broader arsenal of tactics by which to resolve their problems other than batons, mace, tasers, and service weapons.
If they’re trained well enough to understand the difference between a civilian who is having a psychotic-mental episode, one who is having a drug-induced episode, one who is dealing with emotional stress, and one who is threatening a terror attack, that helps everyone involved.
Because a well-educated and trained officer will reach for his phone or radio quicker than he will his service weapon. This will have more persons hospitalized and in treatment than people rioting and burning down businesses to the ground because someone died at the hands of the law enforcement as a result of a mental episode.
On the matter of an ethnically diverse police force professor Oriola adds:
“Evidence from the United States is less settled regarding racial characteristics of killer cops. However, most studies find that white, non-Hispanic officers are more likely to shoot or kill civilians. A few studies suggest Black officers are more likely to shoot and kill civilians. These have been criticized for poor methodology.”
And listen, here is the thing, I understand colored people may be averse to joining a publicly funded force that had and continues to terrorize them but we need them to join. We need to see our community better represented in every industry, especially the industry sworn to serve and protect us.
I understand that we ought not to judge an officer by the color of his skin but history in the United States of America has been tarnished by the fact that far too many white officers have been complicit in committing crimes against innocent colored community members and hiding behind other white officers who help them cover their tracks.
If we have a more diversified force we can better instill trust between police departments and their communities.
If residents of Mobile, Alabama are 51% black and their police force is 80-90% white, I’m theorizing here, even if 100% of these officers are great cops, which isn’t the case, there will be a level of misrepresentation between the force and the community it represents and serves.
A diversified police force can rebuild their community.
Diversify and diversify now.
And lastly, professor Oriola speaks on accountability and as he calls it, ‘the way forward.’
“I propose a two-pronged policy — a “kill-and-go” policy and “three strikes policy” — for police accountability.
Kill-and-go means any officer who kills an unarmed civilian or a suspect who had a weapon but did not deploy it against an officer is dismissed from service and prosecuted.
The three strikes proposal is similar to the disused California anti-crime law of the same name. Any officer involved in three excessive use-of-force incidents in which a civilian is mistreated and sustains injuries is automatically dismissed from service and prosecuted. There should be no expiry to each strike across an officer’s career.”
And listen, listen to this man, a genius at work but compassionate where I lack compassion.
He proposes a ‘kill-and-go’ shift in policing where if an officer is involved in a shooting where an unarmed civilian is killed he should be let go from the force. Terminated. This is such a common-sense approach I don’t think I need to elaborate further but because I’m a sinner I will.
Interrogator: Did you shoot the suspect/civilian?
Officer: Yes
I: Did he/she have a weapon?
O: No.
I: You’re fired. O: But I feared for my life. I: Get a job elsewhere.
O: But my life. I: Bye.
It’s that simple!
And then he proposes a three-strike system, which is reflective of the racist American three-strike drug laws that incarcerate black Americans for deplorable lengths of time for nonsensical and non-violent crimes. So, if you’re caught dealing weed on the streets three different times you will be given a lengthier sentence on the time you’re caught. Lengthier than that of a convicted pedophile. It’s crazy.
But here, professor Temi proposes that if an officer is accused of using excessive force three times he is fired from the force and prohibited from joining another force elsewhere. And listen to me. Listen. I’m shouting in my head as I type this stuff.
There is so much common sense involved in professor Temi’s approach to police reform that we can call it police reform instead of police defund.
We wouldn’t have the inflammatory moniker “Defund the Police” if “Reform the Police” had caught on, say, sixty years ago and things had actually changed.
Concluding Thoughts
I am content with this verdict. I am also distraught by how many other officers have escaped justice over the years. Not just abusive brutes who wielded their power and authority around as a means to control and abuse civilians but I am also referring to the socio and psychopathic killer cops behind the badge who have never faced a day behind bars.
Chauvin is a small fish in a sea of bad, corrupt, and evil cops. Killer cops who may never face justice.
May never…
But they will. In life or in death. They will.
Let us hope that Chauvin’s sentence is just. That he is not treated like an animal nor that retribution be the aim here. We’re civilized even when our protectors are bestial. We’re not asking for black America to be given the chance to kneel on his neck until he dies. We’re asking that he serve the maximum sentence for each of his charges, of which he was found guilty by a jury of his peers. Faithfully and justly so.
Let us hope the judge overseeing this case uses prudence and righteous metrics by which to sentence him. We hope that no matter how long Chauvin sits in a cell that his life is preserved. We’re not calling for the death penalty. We’re calling for this dangerous man to be held accountable. That he be taken off the treats so he doesn’t kill again.
We hope for peaceful times. Times without riots. Without the pain induced by cops killing unarmed civilians; the pain felt by cops killing black people. Unarmed black people. The history is weighty there and has yet to be reconciled in this would-be great nation.
Let us hope that Chauvin’s case sets precedence by which killer cops are held accountable. Unlike the cops in Taylor’s, King’s, and Ducksworth Jr.’s cases who all walked away from justice without an inkling of moral perturbance over their immoral acts and behaviors behind the badge.
When evil thrives undeterred the people revolt and riot. It is but the consequence of brokenness in our society. Evil must be stamped out and we have civil metrics by which to hold these criminals accountable. Because when we do our nation rejoices.
The old Proverb said it best:
“When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices; when the wicked perish, there are shouts of joy.” Proverbs 11:10
Let us rejoice, but for time. Let us shout, but for a time. There is still much work to do. Many more killer cops who need to face justice.
“When I heard their outcry and these charges, I was very angry.”
Nehemiah 5:6
Nehemiah’s Prerogative
I recall our home group discussing this revelatory chapter from the ancient post-exilic autobiography of Nehemiah. This Jewish cupbearer to the Persian King Artaxerxes was born in exile and later managed to secure a temporary leave of work in Persia to take on the role of construction manager in Jerusalem. With the king’s blessing, financial support, and minor military escort, Nehemiah found himself at the entrance of a dilapidated city-state where his task was to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.
He is faced with the level of destruction the city had endured under the wrath of a now-defunct Babylonian empire. That which he had heard from his parents in tales and stories he now sees with his own eyes. The land that was promised to his forefathers lay in ruins, stones and the remaining citizens within, shattered and scattered.
His first opposition arose from the wanton efforts of foreign rulers and leaders who had settled in and around the crumbled city of God, their might on full display as their intentions were laid bare before Nehemiah.
If you think you’re going to rebuild this city, dear boy, you are wrong. We won’t allow it. We’ll take your life if we have to.
And Nehemiah, unafraid of the taunts of a physical and present threat, reverberates opprobrium so harsh the malefactors disappear from the scene for some time. His rebuttal was divinely backed, morally sound, and characteristically prophetic.
Nehemiah then encourages the local Jerusalemites to rebuild the walls of the city and manages to convince local cities and minor-states to join this effort. The construction is underway and we now know that it comes to completion in a record-breaking fifty-two days.
But what we miss out on is what takes place in the middle of this building process. In the fifth chapter of this thirteen chapter autobiography, Nehemiah faces troubles from within the walls.
He is presented with a social and moral dilemma where a famine sweeps through the land, Jerusalem’s enemies encircle their trading routes, and interrupting and disrupting their much-needed logistics to supply food and military defense. To further complicate this national disaster, the wealthy within the city begin to demand interest from the poor, hold their fields hostage against them, take their daughters as slaves as collateral for their debt, and mistreat the less fortunate as if they were dung.
Nehemiah hears of these issues from the outcry of the people and his response is heroically commendable.
“When I heard their outcry and these charges, I was very angry.”
He set off to produce a case against his fellow countrymen before the general congregation of Jerusalemites. He demanded their immediate compliance, demanding they liberate those taken in as slaves, return the fields and livelihoods of those who were robbed of them, and repent of their avarice in the face of a national financial crisis.
Nehemiah does not allow injustice on a local scale; the secondary and possibly tertiary issues of the time, to prolong its stay in the hearts and minds of the Jews. He set off to immediately correct the wrongs his people faced and to restore and restabilize something that had lost its equilibrium within his society.
Wrongs were righted. Injustice lost its play to justice. Morale was restored. The poor cared for. The slave set free. And the reconstruction project for this great city was finished in less than two months’ time.
Murder Trial: Justice Delayed
What we can take from Nehemiah’s troubles in light of Derek Chauvin’s murder trial is that when presented with evil and wrongs our resolve is to demonstrate a posture of righteousness (doing the right thing and being just). This does not involve self-righteousness (gloating over one’s perceived good behavior) but one’s proclivity toward righting wrongs fairly and expeditiously.
We’re presented with a complex situation where a white police officer, sworn to serve and protect his community, is being charged with killing an unarmed, non-threatening, non-combative, hand-cuffed black man.
The world watched as George Floyd, the victim of this case, was brought out of a grocery store, hand-cuffed, manhandled into the back of a police car, and then pulled from it by four police officers and here cellphone cameras capture the moment where Derek Chauvin places George Floyd on pavement and places his knee behind Geroge’s neck and there it stays for the total of eight minutes and forty-six seconds.
The world watched and re-watched this grueling scene as George gasped for oxygen, begged for a moment of reprieve so that he might breathe through the arrest and his calls for help and statements of lack of oxygen went unheard and ignored by the four arresting officers.
What is of great import is that Derek Chauvin has been arrested for the senseless and unnecessary death of a man in handcuffs. What is of greater import is that Derek Chauvin faces a fair and just court system that will right this wrong.
Our expression should mimic that of Nehemiah in the face of a wrong or as we have seen numerous times within the United States policing system, systemic and systematic wrongs that have yet to be reckoned with.
Our expression should not be retaliatory but redemptive. In hope of restoring everyone’s humanity, that of the person whose dignity was violated and that of the violaters who degraded and denigrate their own humanity by progressing through their evil actions and later covering it all up.
Independent of the verdict that is given at the end of this trial our resolve should not alter. We are instructed by our Creator to seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. We’re not factious zealots who are ready, at a moment’s notice, to take up arms, torches, and bombs to bring buildings down in the name of a good cause.
Nehemiah assembled a people who knew of the Laws of God, called upon their memory and conscience to consider the fear of the Lord (respect and reverence of God), and to consider the weight of their wrongs compared to the weight of God’s justice should they fail to rectify the wrongs committed against their fellow countrymen.
Our contemporaries function upon a secular and all-too pluralistic system but that does not stop us, nor them, from seeking justice. And should they fail to live up to the laws, morals, ethics, and systems we have all built together, that is not a case nor an opportunity for us to forsake our peacemaking efforts to riot and destroy in the name of love.
There are cases where we are called to act upon these things but this case is not it.
Nehemiah called for restitution, invoked God and priests to the public square to make sure every wrong was righted, and should the malefactors fail to correspond to the promise of reconciliation then there would be spiritual and social consequences.
Let our resolve be unique in a face of a world that seeks to crucify anyone who does wrong. Our Christ was crucified not only that we could seek justice and offer mercy and forgiveness, but also that no one else need be crucified in the wake of riotous fervor and rage.
This will be best demonstrated after Chauvin is convicted, as I believe he will be convicted, if not for murder then possibly manslaughter, and his sentencing of lesser consequence and weight than that of a tax-evader or say, a mom who lies about her address so her child can attend a better school in a different district.
Our nation is ready to erupt at the slightest mention of injustice but our resolve is to seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with and before our God. Meaning, again, independent of the verdict and sentence, we will not stop rebuilding nor will we stop loving God with all our heart, mind, and soul; nor will we stop loving and fighting for our neighbor, whose justice was denied. Namely, the late George Floyd.
And to conclude, should the question be asked of us in light of this delicate and all-too painful situation, How Should We Behave? I hope we follow in the footsteps of the great and humble cupbearer, Nehemiah:
When I heard these things, I sat down and wept. For some days I mourned and fasted and prayed before the God of heaven. Ch.1 v.4
Then I prayed to the God of heaven. Ch. 2 v. 4
To which he found a response from God and a response for his issues:
The God of heaven will give us success. Ch. 2 v. 20
And should our efforts as followers and children of the God of heaven mirror that of Nehemiah then rest assured that no matter what happens our contemporaries will know that we are children of the Light and Truth.
I couldn’t help but relive an interesting memory of mine, one of absolute horror now that I look back at it, say, should it happen to my children. Now, for context, you must understand that this incident took place after a high school football game between Lely High School’s Trojans, my team, and Palmetto Ridge High Schoo’s football team, whatever their mascot is, a beaver or whatever. Their school was so far from civilization I don’t care to spend brainpower remembering their name.
Either way, my mom was in the stands, she snapped a picture of me in my frail 130 lbs frame. I was strong enough to lift a bag of rice, maybe two, and fast enough to outrun the entire team. I was a sprinter, you see, not an American Footballer but participating in team sports was a big deal for me.
But hopes were high for this game even though our record that year was shot because our team had all the talent in the world succeed but no coordination from the coaching staff to direct us toward a win. From bull-like rushers to acrobatic defensemen, or, defense-teenagers we had all the potential necessary for a successful season but very few wins so far.
You can imagine our frustration once the game was over and yes, again, we had lost.
We were dominated by a second-tier team that had no recognizable players. Their linemen weren’t as big as ours, their runners could not run as quickly as ours could. Their defense was mediocre, at best, and they lived in the middle of freaking nowhere.
Nowhere, people.
And still, they beat us fair and square. Well, now looking at the situation they did.
But we were disappointed. Cripplied by infighting, miscoordination, troubles on the field, and others who had troubles off the field, we just could not make it to the end of a game with a winning score.
The game is over, our teams lined up against each other and we shook hands, a ceremony that was and somewhat si still practiced in the professional sphere of the game today. So we grab our gear and head for the buses, where we continue to load our gear, pick fights with one another, shift blame, curse, sweat because it’s Florida and this school is like, in the everglades, maybe, maybe not. It sure felt like it. It was hot out.
And as is a ceremony, strangely so, before every game, as ours had finished and another one was soon to start, the Star-Spangled Banner began to play from the speaker system on the field.
Almost mechanic like, our football players stopped fighting, cursing, screaming, sulking, chasing the opposing team’s cheerleaders to face the flag.
We were well over two hundred meters from the field at this point, standing beside the bus and only moments away from loading up the last knee pad, girdle, helmet, and backpack, and everyone, I mean, everyone just stopped.
The notion of loss, of troubles, of anger, or whatever everyone was feeling was put on pause because the national anthem had consumed our airwaves and thrust their seemingly important misgivings of the day out the window.
It was mesmerizing, really, it was like a hypnotic cloud drove everyone to their feet, at attention, to face the flag, which, again, was hundreds of feet away.
But I was the only one who hadn’t stopped loading their gear.
Now, I want you to understand that I am not a rebel. In fact, I am highly in favor of regulations, rules, patterns, systems, and matrix structures that serve to benefit society. I’m a law-abiding citizen even if “citizen” isn’t legally registered by my name.
I was not out to scribble my manifesto on the side of the bus with the blood of my fellow American footballers. I was not an anarchist, and am not one today. Nor am I a communist bent on bringing the “great American dream” down to its knees. No. None of that. Just an immigrant child who assimilated and learned the language of the land, adapted to the culture, appreciated the people, and wanted nothing more, on this particular day, than to make his mother proud by winning a football game. When that failed I just wanted to go home.
The last thing on my mind was facing a flag.
Anyway, as I ignored the first and second call to stop what I was doing, which was loading the bus with gear, it became evident that I was the only person who was still shuffling about whereas the entire community that lived within ear’s reach of that song stood still and in awe of this ceremonious moment.
I believe other players also called for me to stop what I was doing to face the flag because the intro was soon to conclude and the singing was about to commence but I ignored, again, because my only focus was on how to help this miserable team win a damned football game and also make it back home already.
By now, one or two of the coaching staff noticed my terroristic tendencies, my criminal intent, my want of the destruction of the American ideal, and they too began to call, almost yell for me to stop what I was doing so that I could, like they were, stand erect, statue-like, to face the flag.
I ignored. I was too angry to care. Blinded by my zeal for a win and later by bitterness from losing that stupid game.
Suddenly, a hand grabbed my shirt and lifted my ideally small frame up from the ground. I was being forced to face the American flag.
You can imagine how a bitter teenager would react to such an incident.
The coach who sifted me off my feet in the not-too-romantic fashion was a six-foot giant who weighed no less than three hundred pounds. I knew it was him because he grabbed me with one arm, because, he only had one arm. Was it a birth deformity or an accident, I don’t know, but I know he only had one arm. The man was a giant who assisted our high school offensive and defensive linemen. He encouraged our defensive backs, of which I was one. He was an honorable man. His one arm did not cripple his ability to coach nor his ability to demonstrate to us on the field what had to be done to beat our opponents. He was agile, strong, knew his techniques, all of which many of my teammates forgot but I remembered. I remembered my training hence my rage when I thought my teammates did not and thus cost us yet another game.
So there I was, struggling under the unmeasurable force of a one-armed coach, facing a field that reminded me of defeat, through a season of loss, and a sweltering hot Friday afternoon, facing this flag.
The singing began and here I was, tears running down my face mixing with the sweat from exhaustion and heat, bitter, angry, and in the middle of the everglades.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I just couldn’t.
“This is not my country!” I shouted. I sounded like King Leonidas from the movie 300 at the Battle of Thermopylae.
Now, remember, this is Florida. A red state. Even democrats and life-long blue liberals worship the ground they protest in Florida so for anyone to voice such a blasphemous line was worthy of a drone strike.
I shouted this egregious utterance so loud that the entire football team turned from their flag worship, if but for a moment as if they had stepped on to a spaceship that would fly them to Mars but were interrupted by an earthling who could not afford the same trip.
Mothers who had come to pick their children up post-game, the rich kids, of course, in their fancy vehicles had stopped as well, mid-loading their mini-vans, hand on their chest, flag dazed, to look my way in awe.
No one could believe that one, someone would disrupt the national anthem, two, that someone would shout anything but the lyrics of the same song, or three, that someone would dare scream such a heinous statement in the middle of the Star-Spangled Banner!
But here I was, restrained by a coach, forced to face a flag that I did not recognize as my own.
The last thing I recall of what the coach said to me in rebuttal was something along the lines of well, “you’ll stand and face the flag anyway.”
That bus ride back to school was awkward. Some of my teammates came to my consolation. Others chided and mocked. The ones who mocked were white and lived in quite the affluent communities. Our school was positioned in such a place that the poor and less fortunate students lived in a community that surrounded it. Whilst the rich kids lived in Lely Resort (that’s a given) and Marco Island and we were all zoned to attend the same school. So we had funding that came in from the wealthier families but with that came sentiments of disgust toward the less fortunate, and yes, immigrants and minorities. Our integrated school, teams, and events were exceptionally helpful in mending this centuries-old rift but on that bus ride back to school, one could feel the tension rise again.
Fifteen Years Later…
I can’t help but fret at how much importance is given to standing for the American flag. After Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem I realized I was not alone in my sentiment. Granted, what Colin stood, or rather, knelt for was of much greater importance and magnitude than my being a sore loser on that particular afternoon.
But what is interesting is how people, Americans specifically, behave when they think you have disrespected their flag?
Now, mind you, I spent eighteen years of my short life on this earth in the United States of America. My understanding of pop-culture, music, dance, history, economics, military exploits, sorry, military action, presidential elections, and religious affiliation are all from an American’s perspective. It wasn’t until years after leaving public schooling that I ventured into other worldviews and systems head first to learn that the world does not rotate around the USA.
I have an unfaltering admiration for the US, its ideals, its constitution, its bill of rights, its governing bodies, its infrastructure, its cinema, its love of sports, war, and orange men. So weird.
But what I love so dearly about this great nation is how one has so many freedoms, one of which, is to sit, kneel, lay down, sleep through or continuously shout through the national anthem.
It is in the United States of America where one can critique their governing officials without fear of state-sponsored repercussion and execution.
So I am in awe of how unAmerican certain Americans become when someone uses their God-given American rights to NOT stand and face the flag for thirty or so seconds.
I attended schools where every day, every single day, without fail, we had to start our day with the Pledge of Allegiance.
Now, mind you, this is from kindergarten all the way through high school graduation.
We pledge our allegiance, bugger picking, girl shoving, sandbox fighting, teacher annoying, bad-apple behaving, no idea of what the world is all about kids in kindergarten pledge their undying allegiance to a country.
What the hell, people!
Let Merriam-Website define the word allegiance for us.
1 a: the obligation of afeudal vassal to his liege lord
b (1): the fidelity owed by a subject or citizen to a sovereign or government
“I pledge allegiance to my country.”
(2): the obligation of an alien to the government under which the alien resides
2: devotion or loyalty to a person, group, or cause
allegiance to a political party
I’m thirty years old and I can guarantee you that I could never have understood this militaristic concept. And for it to be engrained into us, for well over a decade, from my first step into a school until the last step out I had to recite certain words, facing a flag that wasn’t mine, in a country that did not want me there, within a community that saw me as less, striving for a dream that did not come true, all for the sake of pledging my allegiance to this!
I now know that one can opt-out of pledging their allegiance to that flag. I now know that one can sit through the national anthem. I didn’t back then but I do now.
Do I blame the coach for thinking that my actions were unpatriotic? No. Because he has lived in this system from birth. He grew up in it as well. Probably thinking that the flag, as many Americans do, is like a deity, an unknown, faceless deity we are to pay undying allegiance to and to fail to do that merits one the social revocation of their patriotism.
Do I blame him for being physically abusive? Possibly. If someone were to lift my children off the ground and force them to do anything they did not want to do or could not consent to I would possibly kick at their knees. Gladly so.
But the problem, and I can happily say this from the comfort of my Canadian soil, is that the US has an idolatry problem.
That’s it.
I believe Americans have been taught to equate their patriotism with their nationalist religion.
What I had done that day after that football game was not an act of American liberty but an act against God himself. I wasn’t objecting to facing a flag but I was objecting to God’s people, God’s country. The flag was but a symbol that reflected the very mystical sphere of worship they found in a book but here they could pay homage to from Monday through Saturday and then come Sunday, they worshipped a book in church.
I was a blasphemer.
It is clear that is it accurate by how Americans treat anyone who disrespects the flag, thus disrespecting the constitution, the military, veterans, the confederates, I know, weird, and their land.
We have the luxury and privilege of living in a society that allows for freedom of thought and expression, even when that expression is an exemption.
Teach your children that they can, under the freedoms afforded them, think differently. It’s an American privilege to think differently. It is not unAmerican as some postulate to sit or kneel during the national anthem or to be exempt from pledging allegiance to the American flag and what it stands for.
Stand for the flag. Sit for the flag. Kneel during the national anthem, sit, lay down, if you want. It’s your right to so. Don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise because that’s your constitutional right.
Teach your children this because they’ll be met with the same request to pledge allegiance to something without properly understanding what exactly they’re binding their conscience to nor the gravity of their words.
Teach them that they will meet other children, from other countries who have a different or no understanding of what patriotism is and inform them that nationalism is bad and destructive.
To tarnish another nation just because “it isn’t as good” or “as clean” or “as strong” or “as great” as ours is devilish talk. Eliminate such disastrous and hateful talk from your house.
I’ll teach my girls; one of them is an American citizen and the other two are Canadian citizens, I’ll teach them to love their country but not to love it above their love for mankind. That their flag, their banner, their patriotism is transcendentally above national borders. That they respect the laws of the land, understand their Charter or Constitution but not come to a point where they despise others who think differently simply because they’re not willing to face a flag or sing a song.
I’ll teach mine to love their country but to love mankind more.
P.S.
Also, Palmetto Ridge High School? Middle of nowhere-land? Please, do not send your kids there.
I believe Critical Race Theory has become for modern-day evangelicals what McCarthyism and communism were for American conservatives in the late 1940s and 1950s. You see, after World War II, once war-time euphoria dissipated, once Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperialist Japan laid in ruins at the hands of allied forces, America needed a new enemy to turn its industrialized military and national fervor on so as to not lose the battle for international armament superiority.
Key in communism.
You see, communism had become a scapegoat, of sorts for every American who viewed capitalism as a golden calf, literally, because communism threatened the American free market. The American way of life. The American dream.
America had rediscovered itself on a global scale post World War II as it amassed wealth and national pride from its great success in Europe and in the Pacific. But now this German-Slavic part-political part-economic structure swore to consume the world with its strange system of redistribution of wealth at the hands of government agencies and America saw itself as the last line of defense against it.
Because of this renewed sense of nationalist pride and economic idolatry, senators like Joseph McCarthy and his cronies instigated national witch hunts looking for Russian spies and communist sympathizers within American borders.
This, as many can imagine, spawned fear in the heart of American conservatives as they sought to do whatever was required of them to protect their American way of life thus allowing for extremes to become norms to accomplish their goals.
So innocent citizens were accused of aiding, abetting, and assisting communist nations with confidential information, and these allegations were later proven false. People were hauled into interrogation rooms where they were hard-pressed on all sides to give up other spies when in reality they were regular, every-day proud Americans. American citizens were subject to intimidation tactics, false allegations, trumped-up charges, charges of conspiracy to commit treason and murder, all in the name of communism, which was later proven to be fabrications to elicit fear and from there pandemonium in Western hearts.
Senator McCarthy was later deemed unfit for office, for having lied to the American people about the prominence and prevalence of communist spies in US cities and government and later faced an inquiry to answer for his nefarious and incendiary tactics.
He is the father of 21st-century witch hunts. In order to promote himself and his office, he sought to find a communist soldier and spy in every nook, cranny, and shadow of American life. So McCarthy is remembered for his extremist tactics and outright illogical methods of investigative work. His propagandizing in the 40s and 50s were so effective that its use is still evident in pop culture and opinionated news circles today.
McCarthy’s form of accusatory tactics has become standard journalistic practice today.
Clarification for the Uninitiated
One mustn’t think that I am in favor of communism or that I support its destructive ideology. German philosophers coined the notion and later Russian revolutionaries brought it to the steps of their government buildings and burned their nations down with it. Communist Russia, communist China, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, and Cuba, to name a few, have killed more human beings in the 20th century than Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperialist Japan combined.
World War II casualties, which to date, few have dared to give an exact number for, estimate, to their best abilities, that around 60 million lives were lost as the result of expansionist axis sentiments from 1933 through 1945.
Communist regimes, however, have numbered well over 100 million deaths with most of those taking place in China and Russia through government-sponsored systematic starvation and “work camps” that were nothing more than delayed extermination camps for political opponents of the state.
Communism was supposed to be a system that restored wealth and stability to the less fortunate in hopes of forcing plutocracy into non-existence. It was to be a utopia of social welfare and care but it turned out to be one of the greatest, if not the central greatest philosophical, ideological, economic, and politically flawed structures of the 20th century.
Consequently
We must not come to the same conclusion that Joseph McCarthy did in thinking communism was the devil incarnate, omnipresent, and virulent through society proper. In McCarthy’s eyes, every person that dared challenge capitalism or critique American plutocratic wealth inequalities must have been a lunatic or a communist, and in certain cases both. In fighting the idea of communism with every extreme avenue of power available to him he also fought against the good ideals and points of social welfare systems that assist the less fortunate.
Whereas communism was the extreme ideology, social welfare continues to be a good and prudent endeavor, McCarthy’s mindset jumbled both into one box making the bread, the butter, the poison, and the knife we use to spread it all together all evil. Without an inkling of courage to separate the goods of a socialized structure to assist the impoverished from the totalitarian ills of a regime, McCarthy and his many fear-mongering friends in the senate decided to view communism, socialism, and anything anti-conservative as enemies of the state.
This was problematic.
We should have learned from these tactics when reading up about the inquisition of the Catholic church in Spain, France, Germany, and abroad. We could have learned from this when reading about the Salem witch trials. We could have learned from this from McCarthy’s evident-less fear-mongering, from former president George W. Bush’s push for war in the middle east for fears of Saddam Hussein having and producing weapons of mass destruction. We could have learned from this with president Trump claiming anyone who disagrees with him is fake news.
But we haven’t.
These horrific incidents of dehumanizing and demonizing our political or philosophical opponents to drive them out of a voice in the public square are and have always been a precursor of worse things, namely, atrocities, genocides, and so on.
When we group everything we misunderstand about an idea, a philosophy, a nation, and more, and then find reasons to shut them out of the public square without redemptively understanding them or their ideas correctly we end up showing the world and ourselves just how uninformed, uninspired, uneducated and immoral we really are.
Of Pineapple and Ham Pizza
I’m guilty of this.
I believe pineapple and ham pizza should be thrown into the trash. It’s an unsavory choice and I relegate it as rubbish. I could, in all honesty, remove the bits of pineapple from my slice and consume the rest. But in past events, I have succumbed to frustration and refused to eat pineapple and ham pizza, as a whole, because I knew pineapple would be a topping. I’m a lover of cheese, tomato sauce, oregano, ham, and other delicate pizza toppings and could have simply consumed those, but in haste, and perhaps in a disgruntled fashion, I have opted for casting the cheese, tomato sauce, oregano, and ham out with the pineapple bits I did not want.
My laziness cost me my enjoyment of pizza, sustenance, a great time, and much more.
It was not just a matter of misunderstanding how pineapple and ham pizza works but more so a blatant disregard for the remaining nutritional value of said food choice even when I remove those parts I hate about it.
Also, my hatred of pineapple on pineapple and ham pizza does not make pineapple inherently evil. Pineapple has redemptive nutritional values in and of itself when added to drinks, salads, other food choices that add to their flavor and texture, and it is delicious when consumed on its own. Preferentially speaking, I disdain it on pizza but consider it wholesome and worthy of consumption in other ways.
In the same way, I believe communism, in theory, was possibly usable but knowing how depraved the human heart is it could not have worked once put into practice. The same goes for humanism, which, when presented without a superior ethic, a transcendent ethic, is a doomed utopian view of humanity but that does not mean I disparage all of the humanistic ideas presented by this faulty ideology for I am human as well, perhaps, more humanitarian than humanistic.
So there are some redeeming ideals of a socialized structure whereas I condemn the historical evidence of communist regimes. I still believe in government assistance within a free market if done so responsibly. (Capitalism is not without its faults. It is just the devil we decide to worship because it’s a system that makes us rich).
I say we must thoroughly study certain worldviews, ideologies, structures, and systems, that though they did not work as their founders intended certain parts and ideas from them are redeemable and usable still.
If you don’t agree, then that’s okay, but you must return every former nazi scientist and soldier the United States of America naturalized after the war to further its global hegemony.
Right. No can do. See? Some parts of broken systems are redeemable.
Thus…
History: The Southern Baptist Convention and Seminary Problem
The Baptist Press covered a story about six Southern Baptist Seminary presidents (to be covered below) coming out of the woodworks to condemn Critical Race Theory.
Now, before giving the reader a basic explanation of CRT, which the Baptist Press did not give nor did any of the six presidents of said seminaries as they outright condemned it, I want to inform the reader that the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Baptist denomination in the world has a past steeped in the promotion of chattel slavery, slave ownership, segregation, racist sentiments, nationalist ideals and much more.
The SBC was founded in 1845 (a perfect time for Christians of a baptist origin to rise against slavery and racism) and sought every avenue possible to maintain cultural and clerical hegemony for white congregants alone.
In fact, it was not until 1995 that Albert Mohler (we’ll come back to A. Mohler a bit later), president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary issued a convention and seminary wide apology to African Americans for the denominations horrific past regarding its mistreatment of African Americans. Well over 150 years of silence blanketed this denomination before a formal apology for and condemnation of slavery and racism was given by its predominantly white leadership structure.
Whether this was too little too late is not the issue of today’s post.
Southern Baptist leaders’ denouncing of Critical Race Theory is.
Their hasty condemnation of Critical Race Theory, which has been around since the 60s and 70s, only to resurface with the spike in police brutality and police killings of unarmed black civilians caught on camera.
Critical Race Theory made headlines within the church no more than two years ago.
So Southern Baptist leadership was quicker to denounce Critical Race Theory, in fact, they warp sped their leadership toward the condemnation of CRT 147 years quicker than their condemnation of chattel slavery, slave ownership, segregation, and racism.
Phew!
But before I pass on to you what these six seminary presidents said in their public denunciation of this theory I want to somewhat define CRT to you if you haven’t found an explanation for this modern-day boogie-man yet.
Note, what McCarthy then with communism, what Bush did to our perception of the middle east and Muslims as a whole in the early 2000s, what Trump did in 2016 with the news and media is what evangelicals are doing with Critical Race Theory.
Let us (and by ‘us’ I mean experts) define Critical Race Theory.
Critical Race Theory Explained
Tommy Curry, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M explains CRT:
“Critical race theory (CRT), the view that the law and legal institutions are inherently racist and that race itself, instead of being biologically grounded and natural, is a socially constructed concept that is used by white people to further their economic and political interests at the expense of people of colour. According to critical race theory (CRT), racial inequality emerges from the social, economic, and legal differences that white people create between “races” to maintain elite white interests in labour markets and politics, giving rise to poverty and criminality in many minority communities. The CRT movement officially organized itself in 1989, at the first annual Workshop on Critical Race Theory, though its intellectual origins go back much further, to the 1960s and ’70s.
The launch of the CRT movement marked its separation from critical legal studies (CLS), an offshoot of critical theory that examined how the law and legal institutions function to perpetuate oppression and exploitation. However, instead of drawing theories of social organization and individual behaviour from continental European thinkers such as G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, as CLS and feminist jurisprudence had done, CRT was inspired by figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and Frantz Fanon. Critical race theory advanced theoretical understandings of the law, politics, and American sociology that focused on the efforts of white people (Euro-Americans) to maintain their historical advantages over people of colour.”
Aja Martinez, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at the University of North Texas:
“Critical Race Theory (CRT) originated in US law schools, bringing together issues of power, race, and racism to address the liberal notion of color blindness, and argues that ignoring racial difference maintains and perpetuates the status quo with its deeply institutionalized injustices to racial minorities.”
“Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is a theoretical and interpretive mode that examines the appearance of race and racism across dominant cultural modes of expression. In adopting this approach, CRT scholars attempt to understand how victims of systemic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race and how they are able to represent themselves to counter prejudice.
Closely connected to such fields as philosophy, history, sociology, and law, CRT scholarship traces racism in America through the nation’s legacy of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and recent events. In doing so, it draws from work by writers like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others studying law, feminism, and post-structuralism. CRT developed into its current form during the mid-1970s with scholars like Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, and Richard Delgado, who responded to what they identified as dangerously slow progress following Civil Rights in the 1960s.”
