-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Opening Words
Let us gather to worship mindful of the words of Margaret Mead, who said,
“Never doubt that a small group of citizens can change the world;
Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Meditation: by Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), from My Bondage and My Freedom
If there is no struggle there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation,
are [people] who want crops without plowing up the ground.
They want rain without thunder and lightening.
They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one,
or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.
Reading: by Michelle Alexander from The New Jim Crow – Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (p. 26)
The history of racial caste in the United States would [have ended] with the Civil War if the idea of race and racial difference had died when the institution of slavery was put to rest. But during the four centuries in which slavery flourished, the idea of race flourished as well. Indeed, the notion of racial difference – specifically the notion of white supremacy – proved far more durable than the institution that gave birth to it.
White supremacy, over time, became a religion of sorts. Faith in the idea that people of the African race were bestial, that whites were inherently superior, and that slavery was, in fact, for blacks’ own good, served to alleviate the white conscience and reconcile the tension between slavery and the democratic ideals espoused by whites in the so-called New World. There was no contradiction in the bold claim made by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” if Africans were not really people. Racism operated as a deeply held belief system based on “truths” beyond question or doubt.
Reading: by Kathryn Schulz from Being Wrong – Adventures on the Margins of Error (p. 5)
Of all the things we are wrong about, [the] idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.
Given [the] centrality to our intellectual and emotional development, error shouldn’t be an embarrassment, and cannot be an aberration. On the contrary. As Benjamin Franklin observed… wrongness is a window into normal human nature – into our imaginative minds, our boundless faculties, our extravagant souls.
Reading: by Martin Luther King, Jr., from Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, published in 1967, it was King’s fourth and last book.
The hope of the world is still in dedicated minorities. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been a minority. That creative minority of whites absolutely committed to civil rights can make it clear to the larger society that vacillation and procrastination on the question of racial justice can no longer be tolerated. It will take such a small committed minority to work unrelentingly to win the uncommitted majority. Such a group may well transform America’s greatest dilemma into her most glorious opportunity.
The Truth Will Set Who Free?
A Sermon Delivered on January 20, 2013
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
Once again, on a Sunday in mid-January, we take time to honor the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – civil rights leader, modern-day prophet, and secular saint.
This year is particularly auspicious. 2013 is the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. On January 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed an order that declared all men and women enslaved in Confederate territories to be forever free. With the stroke of Lincoln’s pen, over three million slaves in the South were free. The catch, of course, was that Lincoln had no power over the southern states. They were at war.
* * *
It is fitting that this year in movie theaters we can watch the new movie “Lincoln,” by Steven Spielberg. Spielberg is one of our most gifted and respected directors. The film has been nominated for more Academy Awards, more Oscars, than any other movie this year. It’s a good movie. I encourage you check it out, if you haven’t already.
It focuses on the few months preceding Lincoln’s death, during which he works feverishly to see the 13th Amendment pass in the House of Representatives, in January, 1865, which finally provides the Constitutional mandate to outlaw slavery in the entire United States.
The actor Daniel Day Lewis does a great job bringing Abraham Lincoln to life. And the movie does a good job highlighting some of the political complexities of the vote. Initially the majority of the House did not support the 13th amendment. The Civil War was still raging, and it seemed the South might surrender, with the U.S. congress leaving the institution of slavery intact.
The “Lincoln” movie focuses mainly on the few people surrounding the president in the hallways of the White House, and the chamber of congress, in which heated debates are carried out. It paints a more intimate picture of the man, as he struggles to navigate the treacherous moral territory of political manipulation, slavery, and war, as well as family arguments with his wife and his son.
I bet most viewers left the movie theater, not only pleasantly entertained by a pretty good movie, but also feeling as if they had gained a better understanding of the historical and moral dimensions of racism, and a reassuring sense that we, today, are standing on the right side of history.
And yet, that is not the only way to understand the “Lincoln” movie. Because, actually, the movie does more to perpetuate racist stereotypes, than to dismantle them. This is the point the historian Kate Masur makes. She points out that the vast majority of the movie focuses on the actions of white characters, while African Americans stand at the sidelines, often looking on in silence. “This is not mere nit-picking,” Masur says, the film “helps perpetuate the notion that African Americans have offered little of substance to their own liberation.” And nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, countless blacks were involved in political debate and civic engagement of the period. Frederick Douglass attended Lincoln’s second inauguration. He was one of many powerful black leaders there, but in the movie he is nowhere to be seen. (“In Spielberg’s ‘Lincoln,’ Passive Black Characters,” New York Times, Nov. 12, 2012)
Masur is right. If you watch the movie, and pay attention, you realize that all the people in power and at the center of events are white, while African Americans are all passive, inferior, and deferential. I don’t know what is more unsettling: that Spielberg would be so indifferent to the racist stereotypes he could have so easily challenged, or that most of the white people who have watched the movie were oblivious to its racist subtext.
How can so many people be so wrong?
* * *
Kathryn Schulz once presented a TED talk on the subject of her book Being Wrong. Toward the beginning of her talk, she asked the people in the audience a question that has stuck with me. She asked them: How does it feel to be wrong?
How does it feel to be wrong? A couple of folks sitting in the front row responded: “Dreadful.” A woman simply motioned “thumbs down” and frowned. “Embarrassing,” someone else said.
“Dreadful, thumbs-down, embarrassing,” these are great answers, Schulz said. But they’re answers to a different question. They are answers to the question: How does it feel to realize you are wrong?
Realizing you are wrong can feel like all of that: it can feel dreadful, embarrassing, or devastating, or revelatory. Or it can even be funny. But just being wrong doesn’t feel like anything.
Schulz offers an analogy. She says being wrong, is like that character in the old Looney Tunes cartoon: Wiley Coyote, who is always chasing the Road Runner. In just about every episode there was at least one instance in which, in his passion to catch the Road Runner, chasing him, Wiley Coyote would run over the edge of a cliff. The coyote would be fine, while he was running, or even when he stood still, suspended in midair… up until the moment he looked down. That’s when he fell.
For that stretch, after the coyote goes over the edge of the cliff, but before he realizes it, that’s what it’s like when we are wrong. We are already in trouble, but we feel like we are on solid ground. We are clearly wrong. But it feels like we are right.
* * *
In our efforts to eradicate racism, again and again, we are like that over-eager coyote. We think we are standing on solid moral ground. That’s what it feels like. But we are wrong.
Thomas Jefferson thought he was standing on solid moral ground when he wrote, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Clearly he felt he was right. But the fact that he owned slaves and fathered children, who grew up as slaves, these facts tell us he was wrong. He just didn’t realize it, yet.
And Abraham Lincoln thought he was standing on solid moral ground when he lobbied for the 13th Amendment, by hook or by crook, even prolonging the Civil War. That’s the way we would like to remember Lincoln. We would like to think he was a beacon of moral clarity, that he believed in Jefferson’s dream, and made it a reality.
And yet, didn’t Lincoln say in his first inaugural address: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
At some point along the way, between his first inauguration and his second inauguration, it seems Lincoln’s mind was changed. At some point, he must have realized he was wrong.
* * *
As historians know, after the Civil War came the Reconstruction. And after the Reconstruction came Jim Crow. Yes, African Americans were freed from slavery, but until well into the 20th century most black people were still not free. They were not free to live where they chose, to work at decent jobs, to get a quality education. They were not free to vote, to change the laws that oppressed them, they were not even free to eat, travel, shop, or play where they wanted.
But then came the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. And then came Martin Luther King, Jr., and great strides were made toward freedom. Today we celebrate Dr. King, and we want to believe that thanks to his courageous work, and thanks to his sacrifice, we have overcome racism.
Look -- an African American man is being inaugurated as president today, for the second time. Surely this means we are standing on solid moral ground today. That’s what it feels like, when we look around.
We are good people. We want to fight the good fight. We want to stand on the right side of history.
And yet when our children’s children look back to this day, I am not sure that that is what they will see. And if we stop, and look down right now, we ourselves may realize we are in trouble. We may end up feeling dreadful, devastated, embarrassed, “thumbs-down.”
* * *
One area in which we may be in trouble is our criminal justice system.
In her book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander makes the case that, since this nation’s founding, African Americans, again and again, “have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time. …There is a certain pattern to this cycle. Following the collapse of each system of control, there has been a period of confusion – transition,” then a new system is created. Today that system is called mass incarceration.
This is the story Michelle Alexander tells: The Civil Rights Movement itself was a period of transition. Then, beginning in the 1960s, for about a decade, the crime rate in this country rose. “Reported street crime quadrupled, and homicide rates nearly doubled.” The causes of the crime wave are complex, but mostly have to do with the demographic bubble of the Baby Boom. There was a spike in the number of young men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four – the age group that tends to be responsible for most crimes. But rather than seeing this as a demographic phenomenon, the rising crime rate was sensationalized in the media, and offered of evidence of the breakdown of lawfulness, morality, and social stability in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.
Back in 1964, two-thirds of those incarcerated in America were white, and one third black. By the mid-1990s those numbers were reversed. There were two-thirds black and one-third whites. In the course of our so-called “war on drugs,” over a period of thirty years, the U.S. penal population exploded from 300,000 to more than 2 million. And although about 70 percent of drug users are white, nine-in-ten people locked up for a possession offense are people of color. A black youth is fifty times as likely as a white youth to be incarcerated for a first-time drug offense, when all other factors are equal.
The U.S. now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Higher than Russia, China and Iran. We imprison a larger percentage of our black population now, than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.
Alexander writes,
“More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crowe, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote. The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born.” (p. 58)
Today we have more African-American adults in prison, probation or parole, than there were enslaved in 1850.
* * *
The facts paint a picture that is perfectly clear. There is something wrong with the society in which we live. That is hard for us to believe, because for most of us, most of the time, it doesn’t feel wrong. We feel like we are standing on solid moral ground. But that doesn’t mean we really are. If we stop and look down, we may realize there is no solid ground beneath us.
Kathryn Schulz believes firmly that realizing we are wrong, even though it may feel uncomfortable, is a very good thing. It is the source of empathy, optimism, conviction and courage. The surprise we feel at being wrong, is evidence of our firm belief that we can do better. “That is why error,” she says, “even though it sometimes feels like despair, is actually much closer in spirit to hope.”
Dr. King understood the realities of complexities of racism very well. He was well aware of human fallibility and frailty. But nevertheless, he maintained a spirit of hope.
Above all Dr. King believed in love. The call for freedom, he said, is a call for a “world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation.” This call “is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all [people].”
In his last book he wrote: “Love is the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. The Hindu-Moslem- Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the [words]: Let us love one another, for love is of God… God is love...”
Once we are able to understand and act on this truth – the truth will set us all free.
May we have the courage to open our eyes to the wrongs that surround us.
May we dare to look down and realize,
the moral ground on which we thought we were standing may be missing.
May we embrace the truth of love,
And do our part to turn our greatest dilemmas
into our most glorious opportunities.
Amen.
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