-- Adlai Stevenson
Meditation: mindful of the Jewish High Holy Days in the midst of which we find ourselves, a meditation by Rabbi Jack Riemer (SLT #634)
Now is the time for turning.
The leaves are beginning to turn from green to red and orange.
The birds are beginning to turn and are heading once more toward the South.
The animals are beginning to turn to storing their food for winter.
For leaves, birds, and animals turning comes instinctively.
But for us turning does not come so easily.
It takes an act of will for us to make a turn.
It means breaking with old habits.
It means admitting that we have been wrong; and this is never easy.
It means losing face; it means starting all over again; and this is always painful.
It means saying: I am sorry.
It means recognizing that we have the ability to change. These things are hard to do.
But unless we turn, we will be trapped forever in yesterday’s ways.
[Spirit of Life], help us to turn - from callousness to sensitivity,
From hostility to love, from pettiness to purpose,…
From fear to faith.
Turn us around,…
Revive our lives, as at the beginning.
And turn us toward each other, God, for in isolation there is no life.
Reading: by Leonard Pitts, Jr. from a column that appeared on August 12, 2014, entitled “This is not just about Michael Brown”
To believe that … the windows smashed, the buildings torched, the tear gas wafting – is all about the killing of Michael Brown is to miss the point. Brown, of course, was the unarmed 18-year-old African-American man shot multiple times by a Ferguson police officer…
… This is not just about Brown. It’s about Eric Garner, choked to death in a confrontation with New York City Police. It’s about Jordan Davis, shot to death in Jacksonville because he played his music too loud. It’s about Trayvon Martin, shot to death in Sanford because a self-appointed neighborhood guardian judged him a thug. It’s about Oscar Grant, shot by a police officer in an Oakland subway station as cellphone cameras watched. It’s about Amadou Diallo, executed in that vestibule and Abner Louima, sodomized with the broomstick. It’s about Rodney King.
And it is about the bitter sense of siege that lives in African-American men, a sense that it is perpetually open season on us.
And that too few people outside of African America really notice, much less care. People who look like you are everyday deprived of health, wealth, freedom, opportunity, education, the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of innocence, life itself – and when you try to say this, even when you document it with academic studies and buttress it with witness testimony, people don’t want to hear it, people dismiss you, deny you, lecture you about white victimhood, chastise you for playing a so-called “race-card.”
They choke off avenues of protest, prizing silence over justice, mistaking silence for peace. And never mind that sometimes, silence simmers like water in a closed pot on a high flame.
Reading: Abe Lateiner is a white blogger based in Cambridge, MA, who is working to build community across dividing lines of class and race in his city. This is an excerpt from blog entry (RiskSomething.org ) in which he struggles with his own racism.
I wish I could tell you that my relationship with my racism is just history. But it's not...it's today, it's right now. It's every day. Every day for me is shot through with a thousand moments in which I choose to either breathe life into my own racism or allow it to wither. It's happening now, as I type these words. Way down in the gut, it's there, as usual, grunting, slobbering, pleading for breath, for food, for life, and much more often than I'd like to admit, I give my racism the sustenance it wants. It takes shape, forms into hard angles, muscles contracting as it rears up, chuckling, stronger and inflating by the second, seeking a way out, a hole out of which to discharge itself.
My racism is alive right now, as I type these words, which I am aware, add up to a kind of begging, a desperate attempt to buy myself into some kind of anti-racist salvation.
My racism comes out when I read an article by a Black writer and I find myself recoiling from the writer’s “anger.”
My racism comes out when I am relieved to see that the people walking behind me on the street are White, not Black.
My racism comes out when I realize that the four students I have labeled "difficult" in one of my classes are the only four Black students in the class…
When I read a list of common racist behaviors and begin scrambling to defend myself.
No, I'm not over racism. Instead, I'm trying to learn how to be with racism.
Are We Bending Toward Justice?
A Sermon Delivered on September 28, 2014
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
I can’t imagine what things are like in Ferguson, Missouri these days. Seven weeks have now passed since Michael Brown was killed. A federal investigation is still under way. The facts about what happened that Saturday afternoon are far from certain. Accounts vary. But this much we know: Michael Brown was eighteen years old, and had just graduated from high school. He was walking on the street with a friend - not on the sidewalk - and this caught the attention of a police officer, who confronted them. There was an exchange, probably heated. At the end of it, Michael had been shot six times, and died on the street.
I have a son, who graduated from high school just a few years ago. What if my son were killed by a police officer? I can’t imagine.
The community of Ferguson is still reeling. Ad hoc memorial shrines have been built on the street where Michael died. Flowers, pictures, candles, and stuffed animals have been placed there by grieving friends and neighbors. In this way a place of tragedy is transformed in to a sacred place of memory and hope. But not everyone agrees on how we should go about finding hope and healing. This week in the News-Gazette I read that one of the memorials was doused in gasoline and set aflame. I can’t imagine how people in Ferguson, how Michael’s family and friends feel.
In Ferguson it seems simmering tensions have only deepened since Michael’s death. But as Leonard Pitts points out, the simmering tensions in Ferguson are not only about Michael Brown. Michael Brown is only the most recent victim of a much greater problem, a problem that is experienced by millions of Americans all across the country.
Michael Brown reminds me of the tragic death of Kiwane Carrington, right here in Urbana-Champaign five years ago. Kiwane was 15 years old when two white police officers wondered what he was up to on a Friday afternoon in the back yard of a friend’s house. They thought he was a burglar. There was a scuffle. The officer’s gun went off. And Kiwane was killed.
I remember Kiwane’s tragic story well, because my son was also fifteen at the time. I attended Kiwane’s memorial service, but I couldn’t imagine how his family and friends felt.
* * *
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. often said, that the universe has a moral arc, and it bends toward justice. “When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in the universe… Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
King found this idea first expressed by the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. In a sermon Parker published back in 1852 entitled “Of Justice and the Conscience,” he imagined that just as the universe is governed by laws of nature, laws of matter and electricity, it is governed by laws of morality. Just as we are all subject to the law of gravity, we are also guided by a universal moral law.
“Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right,” Parker said. “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”
* * *
Neither Theodore Parker nor Dr. King was a starry-eyed optimist. Parker was at the cutting edge of the abolitionist movement, an outspoken opponent of the Fugitive Slave Act, an advocate for the freedom and dignity of his fellow citizens suffering under slavery. And he knew there was much work to be done.
And Dr. King, who is best known for the phrase “I have a dream,” was no naïve dreamer. In his final presidential speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, he said “I conclude by saying again today that we have a task and let us go out with a “divine dissatisfaction.” … Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of forces for justice. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history…. Let us be dissatisfied.”
When King and Parker spoke of a moral universe, moral law, and moral truth, their ideas were linked to their belief in a just and loving God, whose divine purpose permeates all creation, and whose longing for good takes shape in our every human endeavor.
This notion of a good and loving God is beautiful. And yet, how can we truly believe it, when we see so much violence and evil committed every day in the name of God? America, one nation under God, is now stepping up its military action in the Middle East, dropping bombs in order to vanquish our latest enemy, ISIS, whose soldiers are waging war for the sake of their own God.
How can we believe in a divine and universal moral law, when both Israelites and Palestinians in Gaza take up arms against one another, all in the name of God?
How can we imagine a single sacred morality, when black Americans and white Americans are rarely as clearly divided, as when we gather for worship on Sunday mornings, the vast majority of churches being either overwhelmingly black or overwhelmingly white.
* * *
In his book The Evolution of God, Robert Wright makes the case for a steady moral evolution among humans. Our moral evolution is part and parcel of our biological and social evolution.
Looking at our human history, from our days of hunter-gatherer societies to tribal chiefdoms, from city-states to nation-states, to international alliances and a global economy, he sees a steady refinement of our moral sensibilities.
Our greater understanding of right and wrong, and our deepening desire to do good, is symptom of our ever-growing moral imagination. “The moral imagination was “designed” by natural selection to help us exploit [win-win] opportunities, to help us cement fruitfully peaceful relations when they’re available, to help us find people we can do business with and do business with them.” (p. 428)
Rather than seeing neighboring tribes, cities, and nations as our enemies, we are able to recognize our common interests and our common humanity. And thus our adversaries become our allies and trading partners.
Our moral imagination is the ability to empathize with others. It is our ability to grasp that other people have hopes and dreams, just as we do. Other people long to be respected and treated fairly, just as we do. Other people want their families to live in safety, want their children to prosper, just as we do. Other people feel pain and pleasure, grief and gratitude, just as we do.
Our moral imagination works very well when we are dealing with friends and family members. Empathizing with them comes naturally. Empathizing with people who seem strange, who look different, who live in neighborhoods we have never visited, or in countries we have never seen - that is much more difficult.
We are naturally very good at putting ourselves in the shoes of close relatives and good friends, Robert Wright says. We are very bad at putting ourselves in the shoes of strangers, rivals and enemies. Wright offers this example. He says, imagine a good friend.
“Your friend tells you about an arrogant prima donna at work who drives her nuts, and you are reminded of an arrogant prima donna in high school – the football star, the valedictorian – who drove you nuts. With a friend this process is automatic: you scour you memory for shared points of reference and so vicariously feel her grievance. It’s part of the deal that sustains your … relationship: you validate her gripes, she validates yours. You work towards a common perspective.
This is the work you aren’t inclined to do with rivals and enemies. They complain about some arrogant prima donna, and you just can’t relate. (Why are they such whiners?) And that’s of course especially true when they say – as a rival or enemy might – that you are an arrogant prima donna. Then you certainly aren’t struck by the parallels with that prima donna in your high school.” (p. 418)
The secret of the moral imagination, the secret of universal moral truth is this: other people are people too. Other people’s lives are just as precious as our own. Other people’s health and happiness is just as important as our health and happiness is to us.
* * *
Well-intentioned people may be tempted to think that racism is a thing of the past. It is tempting to think that racism is history, that slavery was successfully abolished in the 19th century, and that segregation as successfully out-lawed in the 20th century. And it’s true, some progress was made. But the evils of injustice are still with us.
The words of Dr. King, from his last Sunday sermon delivered a week before he died, continue to ring true today: “It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtle – the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic.” We must challenge the myth that time heals all wounds, King says.
“We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals… And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.” (“Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”)
There is a lot we can do. Anyone of us. The sociologist Nicki Lisa Cole says we can confront racism in countless ways. She offers nine easy examples on three levels:
At the National Level, (1.) we can combat racism through national-level political channels, we can write letters and sign petitions. (2.) We can advocate for Affirmative Action practices in education and employment. (3.) We can vote for candidates who make ending racism a priority.
At the Community Level, (1.) when we see evidence of racism, we can say something. We can speak out. (2.) We can cross the racial divide (and other divisions) by extending gestures of kindness and hospitality to people, regardless of race, gender, age, sexuality, ability, class, or housing status. (3.) We can learn about the racism that exists in our community, and do something about it by supporting anti-racist community events, and participating in protests, rallies, and programs.
And on an individual level, (1.) we can listen to and validate the people who share their personal experience of systemic racism. (2.) We each can have hard conversations with ourselves about the racism that lives within us. (3.) We can be mindful of the commonalities that humans share, and practice empathy.
* * *
We need to open our minds and hearts to the frightening facts and unsettling experience of what it means to be black in America. We need to open our minds and hearts to the traces of racism that exist within ourselves, that come to life in a thousand moments every day, and that take shape in our actions and inactions.
It is hard to imagine that such injustice could exist within us and around us. It is hard to imagine what it feels like every day to be deprived of health, wealth, freedom, opportunity, education, the benefit of the doubt, the presumption of innocence.
And yet if we want to understand moral truth, and if we want to bend toward that truth, we must learn to imagine. We must learn to imagine what it’s like to walk in the shoes of others. Unless we do so, we will always be trapped in yesterday’s ways. We must learn to imagine a better way.
It may well be that the moral arc of the universe is bending toward justice. The arc of the universe is long. It is measured not in minutes but in millennia. Millions of men and women today don’t have the luxury to wait for millennia to pass.
In our life-time today, it takes an act of will to bend toward justice. If we want to bend toward justice, we must consciously break old habits. If we want to bend toward justice, we must admit that we were wrong, and this is never easy.
Bending toward justice means being willing to start over again. It means recognizing that we have the ability to change.
May we learn the simple moral truth,
That all people are people, just like us.
May we have the wisdom to imagine a better world,
And may we have the courage to do the work we are called to do,
For then we will truly make miracles happen.
So be it. Amen.
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