“I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate … who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
— Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Meditation
Our meditation this morning is written by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who on April 16, 1963 wrote a Letter from a Birmingham jail—an open letter in response to 8 white clergymen who had written a public statement of concern and caution.
“… I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative. …
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. …
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”
First Reading
In an op-ed piece from last week’s Jan. 14 New York Times, “Is the United States a Racial Democracy?” Jason Stanley and Vesla Weaver wrote—
“The Columbia professor Herbert Schneider told the following story about John Dewey. One day, in an ethics course, Dewey was trying to develop a theme about the criteria by which you should judge a culture. After having some trouble saying what he was trying to say, he stopped, looked out the window, paused for a long time and then said, ‘What I mean to say is that the best way to judge a culture is to see what kind of people are in the jails.’ Suppose you were a citizen of another country, looking from the outside at the composition of the United States prison population. Would you think that the formerly enslaved population of the United States was one of the most dangerous groups in history? Or would you rather suspect that tendrils of past mind-sets still remain?”
Second Reading
From a Jan. 20 2012 New Yorker article, by Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America.”
“The rate of incarceration in most other rich, free countries, whatever the differences in their histories, is remarkably steady. In countries with Napoleonic justice or common law or some mixture of the two, in countries with adversarial systems and in those with magisterial ones, whether the country once had brutal plantation-style penal colonies, as France did, or was once itself a brutal plantation-style penal colony, like Australia, the natural rate of incarceration seems to hover right around a hundred men per hundred thousand people. (That doesn’t mean it doesn’t get lower in rich, homogeneous countries—just that it never gets much higher in countries otherwise like our own.) It seems that one man in every thousand once in a while does a truly bad thing. All other things being equal, the point of a justice system should be to identify that thousandth guy, find a way to keep him from harming other people, and give everyone else a break.”
Third Reading
by Michelle Alexander, the Preface to her book The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.
“This book is not for everyone. I have a specific audience in mind—people who care deeply about racial justice but who, for any number of reasons, do not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration. In other words, I am writing this book for people like me—the person I was ten years ago. I am also writing it for another audience—those who have been struggling to persuade their friends, neighbors, relatives, teachers, co-workers, or political representatives that something is eerily familiar about the way our criminal justice system operates, something that looks and feels a lot like an era we supposedly left behind, but who have lacked the facts and data to back up their claims. It is my hope and prayer that this book empowers you and allows you to speak your truth with greater conviction, credibility, and courage. Last, but definitely not least, I am writing this book for all those trapped within America’s latest cast system. You may be locked up or locked out of mainstream society but you are not forgotten.”
“A Positive Peace”
The Rev. Elaine G. Gehrmann, January 19, 2014
In an article in the Dec. 17, 2013 issue of The Atlantic magazine, Bobby Constantino, a young white former district attorney, who came to see the racial disparities in those who were charged with crimes, decided to undertake his own experiment. First he walked around Brownsville, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, which was known for its large rate of stop and frisk actions by police. He was carrying a poster size stencil and two cans of spraypaint, and just possessing those items is a crime in New York. He walked from Brooklyn to Wall Street all the way to City Hall, passing by approximately 200 policemen, some far away and some close enough to touch.
He writes, “Though I was conspicuously casing high-profile public targets while holding graffiti instruments, not one of them stopped, frisked, searched, detained, summonsed, or arrested me. I would have to go further.
“I walked up to the east entrance of City Hall and tagged the words ‘N.Y.P.D. Get Your Hands Off Me’ on a gatepost in red paint. The surveillance video shows me doing this, 20 feet from the police officer manning the gate. I moved closer, within 10 feet of him, and tagged it again. I could see him inside watching video monitors that corresponded to the different cameras.
“As I moved the can back and forth, a police officer in an Interceptor go-cart saw me, slammed on his brakes, and pulled up to the curb behind me. I looked over my shoulder, made eye contact with him, and resumed. As I waited for him to jump out, grab me, or Tase me, he sped away and hung a left, leaving me standing there alone. I’ve watched the video a dozen times and it’s still hard to believe.
“I woke up the next morning and Fox News was reporting that unknown suspects had vandalized City Hall. I went back to the entrance and handed the guard my driver’s license and a letter explaining what I’d done. Several police officers were speaking in hushed tones near the gates, which had been washed clean. I was expecting them to recognize me from eyewitness descriptions and the still shots taken from the surveillance cameras and immediately take me into custody. Instead, the guard politely handed me back my license, explained that I didn’t have an appointment, and turned me away.
“I went home and blogged about the incident, publicizing what I’d done and posting pictures, before returning to the guard tower the next day, and the next, to hand over my license and letter. Each time, the guards saw a young professional in a suit, not the suspect they had in mind, and each time they handed me back my license and turned me away. On my fifth day of trying, a reporter from Courthouse News Service tagged along. At first skeptical, he watched in disbelief as the officer took my license, made a phone call, and sent me on my way.
“On Friday May 4, 2012, I turned myself in at Manhattan Criminal Court. Two Intelligence Unit detectives arrived and testily walked me outside to a waiting unmarked police car. Court papers show that they’d staked out my apartment to arrest me, and that I unwittingly kept eluding them. In one dramatic instance, two officers had tailed me as I walked down Eastern Parkway. I’d entered the subway station at the Brooklyn Museum, unaware that I was being followed. One of the officers had followed me through the turnstiles while another guarded the exit. The report states that the officers then inexplicably lost contact with me.”
Bobby Constantino didn’t look like a criminal.
On the tv show, What Would You Do, which is a more recent variation of the old show, “Candid Camera,” there is an episode where they set up a hidden camera in a public park, with a bicycle locked to a sign, and then show an actor going over to the bike and trying to steal the bike, first with a hammer, then saw, then use a large boltcutter to cut off the lock. They repeat this scenario three different times, with three different actors. The first actor is a young white male, and several passersby do stop and ask him what he’s doing, and he responds he’s trying to get the lock off the bike, one asks him if it’s his bike, and he responds, not exactly, he then continues and at several points he asks an onlooker if they ‘happen to know whose bike this is?’
In the course of an hour, over 100 people pass by, but only one couple tries to stop him.
The second actor is a young African American man, dressed exactly as the young white man was… and within seconds after beginning to try to remove the lock, an older white man confronts him, and within minutes a crowd gathers, calling the police, and taking photos of him. They set up the scenario again, and this happens several times, each time involving a number of people yelling at him and calling 911 and reporting him.
The third actor is a young white woman, who is blond and quite attractive…
Not only does no one call the police, several men offer to and insist on helping her remove the bike lock and chain, even as she admits that it’s not her bike… “Please, let me help you steal this…”
The point of the episode is that we do have biases in terms of what we notice and how we interpret what we notice… we make assumptions about guilt and innocence, criminality, entitlement, and worth.
Many of you know that Axel and I have an international marriage. Axel was born in Germany, to German parents. While he recently became an American citizen, he retains the German citizenship he has had all his life.
However, I bet that most of you don’t know that Axel and I also have an interracial marriage… Axel is 1/16 black… his great great grandfather was an African sea captain…and as verified by recent DNA results… 6.25 percent of his DNA is from Africa.
All these years Axel was not only ‘passing’ as American, but also passing as “white”—
During the Jim Crow era in America, during the period of separate but equal, with segregated schools, facilities… in as many as 18 states Axel could have been classified as black, and limited accordingly.
And therefore actually, both of our children, are 1/32 black… which at some times and in some states would also have classified them as black…and denied them certain rights and privileges based on that classification.
I remember I was very surprised when I learned that Homer Plessy, the man who was the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which created the separate but equal doctrine of legal segregation, which lasted from 1898 - 1954… Homer Plessy was of Haitian Creole and French descent, and was 1/8 black… (like Axel’s father)… and he was chosen to be the test case of the segregated rail cars, because he was white enough to
get on the white train car, but black enough to be in violation of the law.
Vestiges of the ‘one drop rule’ continue to this day… that somehow whatever portion of African lineage or blackness trumps the purer white ancestry…
The most obvious example of this, is of course, our current president… how do we so thoughtlessly accept that his having one black parent makes him black, but having one white parent doesn’t make him white. 50-50… but clearly one of those 50% means much more than the other… is more powerful, given the history of race in this country.
In 2008, after Barack Obama’s election, there was a lot of talk of a ‘post racial’ America… that now we could be done with race… that obviously because we had elected a black president… that clearly race was no longer a limiting factor in our society…
“But as Derrick Ashong has said—America is not now post-racial, and likely will not be post-racial anytime soon, and America will have a significant problem so long as she is interested in being post-racial, as opposed to getting to the place where race is no longer a problem.” (Baratunde Thurston, How to be Black, p. 206)
As Michelle Alexander points out in The New Jim Crow, numerous studies have repeatedly shown that “People of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates.” But she says “When people think about crime, especially drug crime, they do not think about suburban housewives violating laws regulating prescription drugs, or white frat boys using ecstasy. Drug crime in this country is understood to be black and brown, and it is because drug crime is racially defined in the public consciousness that the electorate has not cared much what happens to drug criminals—at least not the way they would have cared if the criminals were understood to be white. It is this failure to care, really care, across color lines that lies at the core of this system of control and every racial caste system that has existed in the United States or anywhere in the world.”
* * * * *
How many of you have at least one friend who is an attorney?
How many of you have friends who have friends who are attorneys?
How many of you could afford a private attorney if you or your child were charged with a crime?
How many of you have done something illegal in your life time—perhaps in your youth… or even as an adult—
How many of you know that your children have done things that are illegal—
Underage drinking, pot-smoking, sexual contact with someone under 17…
Shoplifting, lying about their age to get onto internet sites, into restricted movies…
How many of you feel that you or your children should be arrested for your infractions?
How many of us exceed the posted speed limit on a regular basis? How many of us go and turn ourselves in? When our child is the one the police bring home, without arresting—do we demand that there should be a criminal justice remedy--
Or do we appreciate the ability to have a stern conversation, a grounding or other punishment… without the expense and other complications of interacting with the criminal justice system.
In their recent op-ed piece in the NY times— Jan. 14 NYTimes, “Is the United States a racial democracy?” Jason Stanley and Vesla Weaver wrote—
“Evidence suggests that minorities experience contact with the police at rates that far outstrip their share of crime. One study found that the probability that a black male 18 or 19 years of age will be stopped by police in New York City at least once during 2006 is 92 percent. The probability for a Latino male of the same age group is 50 percent. For a young white man, it is 20 percent. In 90 percent of the stops of young minorities in 2011, there wasn’t evidence of wrongdoing, and no arrest or citation occurred. In over half of the stops of minorities, the reason given for the stop was that the person made “furtive movements.” In 60 percent of the stops, an additional reason listed for the stop was that the person was in a “high crime area.”
Stanely and Weaver continue, “If the American criminal justice system were colorblind, we would expect a tight link between committing crime and encountering the police. Yet most people stopped by police are not arrested, and most of those who are arrested are not found guilty; of those who are convicted, felons are the smallest group; and of those, many are nonserious offenders. Thus a large proportion of those who involuntarily encounter criminal justice — indeed, the majority of this group — have never been found guilty of a serious crime (or any crime) in a court of law. An involuntary encounter with the police by itself leads to withdrawal from political participation. If one group has an unjustifiably large rate of involuntary encounters, that group can be fairly regarded as being targeted for removal from the political process.”
Glen Loury in his December 2007 article “Crime Punishment and the Question of Race” from the Boston Review--
“Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In June 2006 some 2.25 million people were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes. … Inmates are disproportionately drawn from the most disadvantaged parts of society. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.… In his fine study “Punishment and Inequality in America” (2006), the Princeton University sociologist Bruce Western powerfully describes the scope, nature, and consequences of contemporary imprisonment. He finds that the extent of racial disparity in imprisonment rates is greater than in any other major arena of American social life. At eight to one, the black-to-white ratio of incarceration rates dwarfs the two-to-one ratio of unemployment rates, the three-to-one ratio of non-marital childbearing, the two-to-one ratio of infant-mortality rates, and the one-to-five ratio of net worth. While 3 out of 200 young whites were incarcerated in 2000, 1 in 9 young blacks were. “
I hope that a number of you have seen the recent movie “12 Years a Slave”—
If you haven’t seen it, I emphatically encourage you to do so.
As most of you know, it is based on a first person account of a free black man, Solomon Northup, who was living in Saratoga Springs, New York, and was kidnapped during a visit to Washington D.C. in 1841, and then enslaved in Louisiana for 12 years. I was struck at how it is a very powerful and very effective movie, especially because I think it is so easy for middle class white people in particular to identify with Solomon Northrup. He was successful, educated, employed, a musician, living with his wife and two children, joking with the general store owner, and in general living the good (and perhaps post racial) life. Then in an instant, he is transformed into a slave… with no rights, no recourse, no ability to challenge his condition… not even able to communicate his plight to his family and friends…
And this is clearly something that could not have happened to the general store owner he joked with… because for all their similarities, that fundamental difference, primarily in how they were viewed by the larger society, because of their skin color, made all the difference in that very particular situation.
I encourage you to see the movie, and I won’t say much more about it now, except to point out that there are two primary slave owners that we see, where Mr. Northup is enslaved… the cruel and somewhat fanatical Edwin Epps played by Michael Fassbender, and the benevolent and more compassionate William Ford played by Benedict Cumberbatch.
For me one of the most heart-wrenching scenes was when Solomon Northup, who had gotten into a confrontation with an overseer, was going to be sold by William Ford to save his life, Solomon tried to explain to kindly William Ford that he was actually a free man… and it became clear that William Ford did at some level realize this was probably true, but indicated that he was not able (or willing) to do anything about it… he said “I cannot hear that”… “ and also said that he had a debt to pay" on Northup's purchase price.
This is a theme that while is seemingly overshadowed by blatant acts of violence, cruelty, horrific acts of physical and psychological abuse-- it is nevertheless the theme that we people of good intentions, we who care about human dignity and justice and liberty… we who care about peace... we need to look at ways that we are complicit in the ongoing racial caste system in America… primarily through our acts of omission rather than commission…
Like William Ford we often turn away, we act kindly whenever we can, but we often are blind to the larger systemic structures, or feel helpless to do anything about them, and therefore do nothing…
William J. Stuntz, in his recent book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice wrote,
“We must remember that Thomas Jefferson was utterly wrong about slaves and slavery. Black slaves were not wolves ready to devour their white oppressors at the first opportunity. On the contrary, they were human beings victimized by a mind-bogglingly unjust social and legal order. The oppression could stop whenever their oppressors chose to make it stop. The massive number of young black men (and the increasingly large number of young black women) who live in prison cells are …are human beings … and their humanity entitles them to … a measure of understanding, and the mercy that flows from a justice system whose rulers remember that they too are tempted to do wrong, and often yield to the temptation.” (p. 311)
As many of you know, we have just begun a six month interim church-wide social justice initiative, focusing on incarceration. The proposal for the initiative reads in part--
The UUCUC anti-racism chalice circle, through its discussions last year, has come to see the issue of mass incarceration as an issue very much related to racial justice. Michelle Alexander's book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" lays out the issues very clearly, and locally, Rebecca Ginsberg and the Education Justice Project are working to help humanize people who are incarcerated. Denominationally, the UUA is also concerned with this issue, and a number of congregations across the U.S. are working on issues of mass incarceration and racial disparities. Locally, there are community groups working on issues related to the county jail, court-watching and other criminal justice issues. This is a very timely issue, with many opportunities for education and activism in many forms, both locally and nationally.
We see this issue as comparable to LGBT and marriage equality, which UU congregations focused on years ago. In that movement, we had to assess our own biases, prejudices, stereotypes and fears before we could become a Welcoming congregation and take effective action as a congregation. We had to start with ourselves, and work outward, and this takes time. We start out as change agents for ourselves, then for others. We believe a similar cycle will be needed for the congregation to address the issue of mass incarceration.
We have a number of activities already being planned, and we encourage all of you to get involved. We are beginning a book discussion group of “the New Jim Crow’ in February and will be collaborating with the Education Justice Project and Prison Justice Project on several upcoming events.
Glenn Loury tells us, “According to a 2005 report of the International Centre for Prison Studies in London, the United States—with 5 percent of the world’s population—houses 25 percent of the world’s inmates. Our incarceration rate (714 per 100,000 residents) is almost 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (Bermuda, Belarus, and Russia). Other industrial democracies, even those with significant crime problems of their own, are much less punitive: Our incarceration rate is 6.2 times that of Canada, 7.8 times that of France, and 12.3 times that of Japan. We have a corrections sector that employs more Americans than the combined workforces of General Motors, Ford, and Wal-Mart, the three largest corporate employers in the country, and we are spending some $200 billion annually on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government, a fourfold increase (in constant dollars) over the past quarter century.”
Angela Davis, (in her book Are Prisons Obsolete?) tells us that “the prison industrial complex is much more than the sum of all the jails and prisons in this country. It is a set of symbiotic relationships among correctional communities, transnational corporations, media conglomerates, guards’ unions and legislative and court agendas…What then would it mean to imagine a system in which punishment is not allowed to become the source of corporate profit? How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment? Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?”
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King asks that we don’t settle for a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, but strive for a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.
How are we to do this?
Sherry Tochluk— in her book, Witnessing Whiteness, which a group of us just finished reading and discussing, says that— we need to do four things—build knowledge, build skills, build capacity, and create community. She says--
“We need to continue to build knowledge and make use of knowledge gained. We have to build skills, a set of tools we can use when witnessing either subtle or overt racism. Many of us also feel intense emotions when dealing with issues of race. We must build capacity to make use of our skills in the face of our emotions, a process that takes courage and practice. Finally we need support to continue to practice these skills during moments when we feel confused, disappointed, or frustrated. For this reason, part of witnessing also includes creating community, consciously developing a community of people around us who understand our striving, re-inspire us when we fail, and celebrate our successful efforts.”
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said-- “Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”
Finally, 0ne of the world’s best known and most beloved former prisoners, Nelson Mandela wrote-- “I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.”
We are hoping to offer a number of opportunities in the coming months, to build our knowledge and our skills, to build our capacity and to create community—to better understand and address these issues, which affect and concern us all. We look forward to you joining us on this journey, to deeper understanding, wider compassion, and more justice and freedom for all.
Amen.
