-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Musical Meditation: a song by John Legend and the rapper Common, called “Glory.” It is featured in the movie “Selma.” The movie portrays the events of March 1965, which many consider the emotional high point of the civil rights movement. If you have not yet seen the movie, I highly recommend it.
Excerpt:
…Hands to the Heavens, no man, no weapon
Formed against, yes glory is destined
Every day women and men become legends
Sins that go against our skin become blessings
The movement is a rhythm to us
Freedom is like religion to us
Justice is juxtaposition in us
Justice for all just ain't specific enough
One son died, his spirit is revisitin' us
True and living living in us, resistance is us
That's why Rosa sat on the bus
That's why we walked through Ferguson with our hands up…
Reading: by Emanuella Grinberg from the article “Why ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ resonates regardless of evidence” (CNN News, Jan. 11, 2015)
… Before a grand jury convened in the case, protesters and activists seized upon the idea of a young black man raising his arms in surrender, transforming it into a protest symbol that persists today. After a grand jury declined to indict Wilson, in rallies and demonstrations the phrase came to symbolize something larger than what transpired in the Michael Brown case.
"Hands up, don't shoot" has become shorthand for police mistreatment of minorities, one that's spreading beyond traditional protest scenes. It has evolved into a national movement with demand centered on changing what some see as systemic problems in law enforcement that lead to mistreatment of minorities.
Protesters, pro athletes, Broadway performers and congressional staffers have used the gesture in public in a show of solidarity. Last month, when nine police officers walked into a Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn, an employee raised his hands in an apparent protest of the police, the restaurant said; the officers left.
Reading: by James Baldwin from “The White Man’s Guilt,” an essay published in Ebony magazine in August 1965. James Baldwin was among the thousands who participated in the March from Selma to Montgomery in the spring of 1965.
[My skin] color seems to operate as a most disagreeable mirror, and a great deal of one’s energy is expended in reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see.
This is utterly futile, of course, since they do see what they see. And what they see is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history, known all over the world. What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present, condition which menaces them, and for which they bear inescapable responsibility. But since, in the main, they seem to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it… [But] guilt remains, more deeply rooted, more securely lodged, than the oldest of old trees.
And to have to deal with such people can be unutterably exhausting, for they, with a really dazzling ingenuity, a tireless agility, are perpetually defending themselves against charges which one, disagreeable mirror one may be, has not, really, for a moment made. One does not have to make them. The record is there for all to read. It resounds all over the world. It might as well be written in the sky. One wishes that Americans, white Americans, would read, for their own sakes, this record, and stop defending themselves against it. Only then will they be enabled to change their lives….
White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it with us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, our aspirations. And it is with great pain and terror one begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is, and formed one’s point of view. In great pain and terror because, thereafter, one enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself, and attempts to re-create oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating: one begins the attempt to achieve a level of personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power, and also changes history…
Reading: by Langston Hughes, a poem entitled “I look at the world”
I look at the world
From awakening eyes in a black face—
And this is what I see:
This fenced-off narrow space
Assigned to me.
I look then at the silly walls
Through dark eyes in a dark face—
And this is what I know:
That all these walls oppression builds
Will have to go!
I look at my own body
With eyes no longer blind—
And I see that my own hands can make
The world that's in my mind.
Then let us hurry, comrades,
The road to find.
Hands Up, Don’t Shoot
A Sermon Delivered on January 18, 2015
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
On a Saturday morning last October, when my wife, Elaine, and I joined a march and rally in downtown St. Louis in support of Michael Brown, who had been shot and killed two months earlier, I was struck by the power of people joining together in peaceful protest. That evening we joined hundreds of others for a vigil at the site of Michael Brown’s shooting, on Canfield Drive, and marched with them to the Ferguson police station two miles away. And on November 25th, the day after the announcement that the grand jury would not indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown, we joined an assembly outside the County Courthouse in Urbana, and a small march that circled from the courthouse to the County Jail across the street and back, disrupting traffic on Main Street for a few minutes.
At each of these gatherings people carried signs with slogans, there were speakers who called for justice, and as we marched, we chanted. “No justice, no peace,” or “I am, Mike Brown.” But the chant that I found most powerful was “Hands up, don’t shoot.” Shouting those simple words, watching hundreds of men and women and children – most of them black –raise their hands in the air, conveyed a message that to me seemed more powerful and poignant than anything else I saw or heard there.
* * *
The gesture of raising our hands and calling out “Hands up, don’t shoot,” of course, doesn’t capture what actually happened on that Saturday afternoon in early August, when Michael Brown was confronted and then killed by Darren Wilson. Despite the extensive witness testimonies, several autopsies, and careful analysis of bullet entrance and exit wounds, there is no consensus on exactly where Michael Brown’s hands were when he was shot – at his side, at shoulder height, or over his head. What we do know is that Michael Brown, an 18-year-old unarmed black man, was killed because a white police officer says he feared for his life.
* * *
I don’t know if you caught the news story about the shooter in Chattanooga, Tennessee. On the day after Christmas, a shooter drove around in a car through the city, pointing a gun out the window, shooting at people on the street and other cars.
The police was alerted, there was a car chase, and at one point the shooter, who was wearing body armor, even pointed a gun at a police officer. Amazingly, the shooter was “taken into custody without incident or injury.” The shooter’s name is Julia Shields. She is a 45-year-old white woman.
The New York Times columnist Charles Blow ponders the implications.
“Take a moment and consider this. Take a long moment. It is a good thing that officers took her in “without incident or injury,” of course, but can we imagine that result being universally the case if a shooter looks different? Would this episode have ended this way if the shooter had been male, or black, or both?... It’s hard to read stories like this and not believe that there is a double standard in the use of force by the police.” (“Privilege of ‘Arrest Without Incident,’” NYT, Jan. 4, 2015)
Michael Brown wasn’t shooting or threatening anyone when he was approached by a police officer.
Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy, was walking around a Cleveland park on his own, keeping to himself and playing with a toy gun. John Crawford was walking around an Ohio Walmart, talking on his cell phone, absent-mindedly carrying an air rifle he had picked up from a shelf in the store. Antonio Martin last month pointed a gun at a police officer at a gas station in suburban St. Louis, but didn’t shoot. And during a traffic stop of Jerome Reid in Bridgton, New Jersey last month, a handgun was “revealed.” That’s all.
Charles Blow writes, none of them “had the privilege of being “arrested without incident or injury.” They were all black, all killed by police officers. Brown was shot through the head. Garner was grabbed around the neck in a chokehold, tossed to the ground and held there, even as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe; it was all caught on video. Rice was shot within two seconds of the police officers’ arrival on the scene. Crawford, Martin and Reid were also cut down by police bullets… Why weren’t these black men, any of them, the recipients of the same use of force — or lack thereof — as Julia Shields?” asks Charles Blow.
* * *
What do we see when we look at black men? Do we see people, just like us? Do we see fathers and brothers and sons? Do we see friends and neighbors and colleagues? Or do we see something else?
What do we see, and what do we feel?
In the transcripts of Darren Wilson’s grand jury hearing, we get a glimpse of what his encounter with Michael Brown felt like. Wilson said, “When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding Hulk Hogan… that’s just how big he felt and how small I felt from grasping his arm.”
And we get a glimpse of what Darren Wilson saw, as he fired his pistol at the unarmed 18-year-old he was chasing and telling to stop. When Michael Brown, already shot and bleeding, stopped and turned toward Officer Wilson, he said, he saw “the most intense, aggressive face.” He “looked like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.”
But Darren Wilson is not a five-year-old, who grabbed hold of Hulk Hogan. He is a twenty-eight year adult, ten years older than Michael Brown. It is true, Michael Brown was heavier than Wilson. But both of them were big men. Both stood six foot four.
And Michael Brown was not a demon. He was a recent high school graduate, a young man at the cusp of adulthood. It is a tragedy that Darren Wilson was unable to see that Michael Brown was a person.
* * *
It seems that many white Americans have a very hard time seeing black Americans. We seem to have a very hard time recognizing that they are people, just like us. Why is that?
Judith Butler, a professor of literature and critical theory, has grappled with this question. And she has come to the conclusion that our inability to see is inextricably linked to the realities of race in America. In a recent New York Times interview she explains,
“anti-black racism figures black people through a certain lens and filter, one that can quite easily construe a black person… who is walking toward us as someone who is potentially, or actually, threatening, or is considered, in his very being, a threat. In fact, as we can doubtless see from the videos that have swept across the global media, it may be that even when a black man is moving away from the police, that man is still considered to be a threat or worth killing, as if that person were actually moving toward the police brandishing a weapon...
It may be important to see the twisted vision and the inverted assumptions that are made in the course of building a “case” that the police acted in self-defense or were sufficiently provoked to use lethal force. The fleeing figure is coming this way; the nearly strangled person is about to unleash force; the man on the ground will suddenly spring to life and threaten the life of the one who therefore takes his life.
These are war zones of the mind that play out on the street.” (“What’s Wrong With ‘All Lives Matter’?” Jan. 12, 2015)
* * *
Judith Butler’s analysis is insightful and very timely. It speaks powerfully to the most up-to-date events in the news: the latest shocking police killing of another black man.
But perhaps even more tragic than the shocking news, is that this isn’t news at all. This is history. Almost fifty year’s ago, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote,
“there is no single answer to the plight of the American Negro. Conditions and needs vary greatly in different sections of the country. I think that the place to start, however, is in the area of human relations, and especially in the area of community-police relations. This is a sensitive and touchy problem that has rarely been adequately emphasized. Virtually every riot has begun from some police action. If you try to tell the people in most Negro communities that the police are their friends, they just laugh at you.”
Almost fifty years ago Dr. King wrote,
“Men [and women] of the white West, whether or not they like it, have grown up in a racist culture, and their thinking is colored by that fact. They have been fed on a false mythology and tradition that blinds them to the aspirations and talents of other men. They don’t really respect anyone who is not white. But we simply cannot have peace in the world without mutual respect.” (A Testament of Hope)
* * *
The tragic events we are witnessing today are not news. They are history. They are examples of an experience far too familiar to African Americans for decades now, for centuries.
Fifty years ago, James Baldwin described the experience: white Americans simply don’t see him. They see something else: they see a mirror image of themselves. A mirror image of their own fears. A mirror image of their own history, and unsettling memories they would rather forget.
The image they see when they look at Baldwin isn’t pretty. It is a frightening reflection of our own appallingly oppressive bloody history – a history easily understood all around the world – but too unsettling to be acknowledged and accepted for what it is, in this country. And because we are unwilling to look at our history, our guilt remains more deeply rooted, more securely lodged than the oldest of trees.
* * *
“Hey, I’m not a racist,” I want to say. I want to throw up my hands. “I’m not racist.” I feel a knee-jerk impulse to defend myself. I want to defend myself with dazzling ingenuity, and tireless agility. I want desperately to defend myself – as if my life were on the line. I want to change the subject. I want look away. I want to run away. But, of course, I can’t.
Because the ugly history I see whenever I look into the face of a black man or woman or child, has much less to do with them, and much more to do with me. I carry this country’s history of racism with me.
Part of me continually resists accepting this simple truth. “My parents never owned slaves,” I want to say. “This has nothing to do with me,” I want to say. “Heck, I was born in Germany. And anyway slavery was abolished centuries ago.”
But, of course, it has everything to do with me. Because I am white, and I live in a country in which for years now I have benefitted from all the privileges that are granted people who look like me.
It has everything to do with me, because I have never been stopped by the police, because I looked suspicious to them, or dangerous. It has everything to do with me, because I have never been followed by store detectives, who considered me a potential shoplifter. It has everything to do with me, because I have never been denied a loan. And throughout their school career, my children have been treated by their teachers with utmost respect. And when they have acted out, as children invariably do, they were given the benefit of the doubt, and granted every opportunity to succeed.
It has everything to do with me, because every moment of every day that I am not actively working to dismantle the racism that permeates this society, I am passively perpetuating it and quietly continuing to reap the rewards bestowed upon me, simply by virtue of the color of my skin.
Our history is present in all that we do. It frames our identities and our aspirations. It is an ugly and frightening history. Confronting it can feel overwhelming. Struggling to get a handle on it, we may feel like five-year-old children in a wrestling match with Hulk Hogan.
If we honestly assess our history, the history, which has brought us to where we are today, the history that has formed our point of view, we will invariably do so with great pain and terror. If we dare to do this difficult work, it will invariably involve great pain and terror, because we are entering into battle with that most formidable historical creation: ourselves. We will have to look at ourselves in the mirror, and come to terms with the fact that the face we see isn’t pretty. It’s frightening. It looks like a demon.
But we can re-create ourselves according to a principle more humane and more liberating. We can achieve a level of personal maturity and freedom that robs history of its tyrannical power… We can change history.
We can look at the world from awakening eyes. When we look and see the walls oppression built, we can tear them down. We can look at ourselves with eyes no longer blind, and see that our own hands can make a better world.
If we dare to open our eyes, we will see Selma is now for every man, woman and child. We will see that though one son died, his spirit is revisiting us, is true and living in us.
May we open our ears to the truth that resounds all around the world.
May we open our eyes to what might as well be written in the sky:
We can’t have peace in the world without justice and mutual respect.
May that world be on our mind
And may we hurry the road to find.
Amen.
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