| | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | A White Man Makes the Case for Reparations | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Rev. Dr. John C. Dorhauer August 13, 2020 Of all the things white allies were willing to activate for through decades of civil rights movements, reparations were the one thing that even the most committed white leaders have avoided talking about, much less fully committing to. In 1969, Jim Forman interrupted Sunday morning worship at the iconic Riverside Church in uptown Manhattan. He had already warned the Rev. Dr. Ernest T. Campbell (then pastor at Riverside) that he would be there to present the Black Manifesto. Dr. Campbell agreed to receive it but asked that there be no oral presentation. In defiance of those orders, Jim Forman marched down the center aisle and began reciting the Manifesto. It begins with these words: “We the black people, assembled in Detroit, Michigan for the National Black Economic Development Conference, are fully aware that we have been forced to come together because racist white America has exploited our resources, our minds, our bodies and our labor….” Dr. Ernest tried to drown out his voice by having the organ play. It didn’t work. That it didn’t work didn’t matter. There was certainly sympathy among white church leaders for what the movement was saying and asking for – but none of that sympathy translated into money. I can’t think of anything that more thoroughly indicts white America’s ongoing commitment to racial equity than this. You can have our words, our actions, our toil, our sweat, our pain, our righteous anger. You cannot have our money. Every time I hear reparations talked about in largely white audiences two themes quickly surface. The first is: I didn’t own slaves. Why take my money when it wasn’t me who created the injustice? The second is: I worked hard for what I have. I pulled myself up by my bootstraps (I literally hear that phrase repeated over and over again – although it really is devoid of any meaning). Let them (the most often used reference whites use for blacks – ‘them’) do the same thing. The level of either naiveté, utter and damnable ignorance, or flat out denial of all that is there to be known in order to perpetuate these mythologies is deep and consistent. This is a case for reparations. As my doctoral instructor often reminded me, think of this work as repairing the damage. America lives with a deep and festering wound. There is a passage in the book of Jeremiah where the prophet indicts the leaders of his time, religious and political leaders, with these words: “You have healed the wound of my people lightly, crying ‘Peace! Peace!’ when there is no peace.” I can’t think of a more fitting way to describe white America’s commitments to racial equity. We have healed the wounds of our people lightly. We cry ‘Peace! Peace!’ when nothing like it yet exists. That whites have made sacrifices to move the arc of history towards racial equity is undeniable. That we have made lasting and significant contributions to this cause is evident. But there is scant little, if much of anything, that demonstrates a willingness on the part of whites to battle long and hard for a crucial and, some might argue, essential missing piece to this movement: reparations. And the lingering and long denied truth of this matter is that the damage we are being asked to repair is far deeper than just the economic damage done to entire races of people. Oh, to be sure, there is that. And we will not come anywhere close to equity or to a more thorough healing without significant commitments to both the redistribution of wealth and the ongoing means of continuously accessing wealth. But the healing sought isn’t only through economic solvency and greater access to wealth for black populations. Also to be healed are the deeply damaged souls and psyches, spirits and imaginations of white and black, red and brown, yellow and tan peoples of America. All races are deeply damaged by the white race’s lingering love affair with white skin privilege – including the white race. Reparations is the balm that facilitates a transition from light healing into deep healing. Whites have consistently shown they are happy engaging in civil rights movements just long enough to assuage our guilt (and feel relatively righteous) and just deeply enough to brag about important steps forward: “Hey, look. We elected a black president!” We have yet to invest enough spiritual and psychic and emotional energy to risk losing our unfair access to and possession of wealth. Without that investment, there will be no real healing. I want to note three important works, and more importantly, three key concepts that will help me make my argument about reparations. The first comes from George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness. In it he argues “Whiteness has a cash value.” The second book is by Randall Robinson and is called The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks. He connects the dots between enslavement, Reconstruction, disenfranchisement, lynching, Jim Crow, and many other white schema to argue, quite cogently and very persuasively, that the distribution of wealth in America today unfairly favored in the past and favors now in the present those with white skin. The third work is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the age of Colorblindness. She takes us into the smoke-filled rooms in which leaders of neo-conservative politics had to imagine pathways to maintaining white control of wealth after the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Their scheming was built on the myth of the black savage, an untamed beast for whom education could never really eliminate rage and passion. It echoed the sentiments that fueled mass lynchings across the South in the early half of the 20th century. It was a myth played out over and over again on film and TV by roles in which black men were always portrayed as unintelligent and quick to violence. Conservative politicians would win favor with largely white constituencies with a more subtle form of racism branded not in the overt racist language of George Wallace and Bull Connor, but of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater: Get Tough on Crime. The rewriting of drug laws and the consistently unfair enforcement of those laws to incarcerate more and more black men rebuilt the political landscape of the next generation of voters. Among the things felony convictions do is deprive you of income while incarcerated, limit earning potential after incarceration, and deprive most felons of their right to vote. Meanwhile, by the turn of the 20th century it was being reported that within a generation it would be likely that one in three black males will have been convicted of a felony. Get Tough on Crime initiatives got many white politicians elected. It got many more black men arrested and convicted. Statistical data showing the growing racial disparity between arrests rates, convictions rates, plea deals, and sentencing terms showed that this stratagem worked brilliantly. Whites and blacks entered two very different judicial systems. Whites consistently entered and left the judicial system with far fewer long-term effects on their wealth and lifetime earning potential. Blacks entered and left, in fact still live, with lives often irreparably shattered and with little hope of ever financially recovering from discriminatory sentences that permanently branded them as social outcast and unfit for employment. We are only now waking up to and paying close attention to how utterly damaging and sinisterly calculating this whole thing was from the start. Damage has been done. As for the ongoing, now centuries long, commitment to the economic disenfranchisement of black bodies and communities, whites still want to perpetuate the myths that a) it doesn’t exist; b) if it did exist it isn’t our fault because most of what caused it no longer exists; c) whatever wealth we have we earned honestly; and d) none of what we earned belongs to anybody other than us. Damage has been done. In a remarkable work of theological creativity and critique called The Wounded Heart of God, Andrew Sung Park tries to describe to western audiences the Korean concept of ‘han.’ Han, he points out, is untranslatable into English. Likely, it is un-understandable to white western culture. It is the condition of the soul one lives with under sustained and oppressive injustice. It describes the spiritual wounding one cannot escape when: a body’s labor is conscripted for/to/by an oppressor and does not feed you or your family; you know no leisure because your entire existence is subject to the will and whim of another; even your imagination succumbs to the certain knowledge that hope for a way out does not exist. That whites cannot understand han is evident in the bewilderment many whites have about why so many buildings were set on fire after the murder of George Floyd. Without the experience of han, such acts make no sense. Worse, without another framework like han to engage deeper understandings into the despair that fuels such movements, the active burning of property is seen only as a confirmation of the myth created two millennia ago in Greece and perpetuated through western culture ever since: the myth of the savage beast. Whites who know no han will always fall back on that default narrative of the savage beast who must be tamed. Overcoming not just racial bias, but also the economic disparities that racial bias will always pursue, will mean rewriting our shared mythos about what it means to be black and what it means to be white. No real healing will ever take place without that. Whites want no part of the kind of oppressive suffering that damages heart, mind, soul, and spirit with han. Fearing the rage of those who do live with han, whites are forced to cling ever more desperately to the wealth they falsely believe inoculates them from pain and suffering. To be perfectly honest, whites are willing to exchange healing for themselves and healing for those whom we have systematically oppressed for centuries now because of these things: we love our money; we appreciate living in a system that gives us access to it because of our white skin; we have no concept of han and therefore lack the empathy to see it or the desire to ameliorate it in another; we fear even more than the loss of our wealth the emergence of our guilt. The combination of enjoying wealth and fearing guilt creates a massive disincentive for whites to speak at all about reparations. The irony of course is that our unprocessed guilt and shame both fuels our consumptive fetish and deprives us of the true healing we want, need, and will never be whole without. Soon, and very soon, whites must realize that what we have always wanted - our money and wealth to provide - isn’t coming, not until we take the work of reparations seriously. Damage has been done. There are wounds to be healed. Whites are the primary impediment to that healing, including the long overdue healing that can only come from our active and willing participation in a shared and comprehensive commitment to reparations - to repairing the damage. In the essays that follow, I will try my best to lay out a white man’s argument for white investments in racial equity and justice, in healing and in repairing the damage. I invite you into the conversation and anticipate whatever and all commitments you are willing and able to make in order to change the shape and future of a lingering and persistent America in which whiteness has a cash value. ~ Rev. Dr. John C. Dorhauer Read online here About the Author Rev. Dr. John C. Dorhauer was granted a Doctoral Degree in White Privilege Studies in 2007 from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, OH. He also has degrees in Theology and Philosophy. He is the author of two published books, Beyond Resistance: the Institutional Church Meets the Postmodern World and Steeplejacking: How the Christian Right Hijacked Mainstream Religion. He is a recipient of Eden Seminary's "Shalom Award," given by the student body for a lifetime of committed work for peace and justice. John was ordained as a Christian minister in 1988. He currently serves as the 9th General Minister of the United Church of Christ, one of the USA's most progressive faiths, whose vision is "A Just World for All." He is a frequent speaker on the subject of white privilege, and is especially committed to engaging white audiences to come to deeper understandings of the privilege. He is particularly interested in how whites manifest privilege every day and how it impacts people of color, two things whites remain largely either ignorant of or in denial about. He has been devoted to his bride Mimi for over 36 years, and they have parented three children - a composer/musician, an author/painter, and a poet. John and Mimi have two grandchildren they dote on constantly. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By A Reader What can we as a nation learn from the aftermath of George Floyd's death? A: By Rev. Irene Monroe Dear Reader, Change is a shared responsibility. No one person or group of people can do it alone. Our elders of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement have given us wise counsel on how to proceed. For example, John Lewis's final essay titled "Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation", which he requested to be published on the occasion of his funeral, stated: "Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself." To improve our Democracy, we need to listen to one another. However, with the cacophony of voices and continued violence in the streets of America, we miss the vital importance of listening. George Floyd's death was an inflection point for many Americans, and more people are now listening. Nevertheless, listening to one another is difficult because it requires being non-defensive, hearing without judgment, taking notice and responsibility for one's action, and acting toward the request for change with good intentions. In my opinion, there are five levels of listening. However, the one that would bring about the Beloved Community, for which both Martin Luther King and John Lewis spent their lives advocating, requires compassionate listening. Ignored listening makes no effort to listen. Pretend listening gives a feigned appearance to being listening. Selective listening hears what interests or serves one's agenda. Empathic listening hears with both one's heart and mind to understand the speaker's feelings and struggles. However, what Martin Luther King preached about the Beloved Community, and John Lewis wrote about in his final request to us as Americans, requires compassionate listening. Compassionate listening and empathic listening are related. They differ in that compassionate listening not only hears with one's heart and mind, but it's listening with an impetus to help and to improve the lives of the suffering. Compassion means "to suffer together." From a theological perspective, I understand compassion to be both rooted in a praxis of action and an ethic of social justice. In other words, it is a type of consciousness and an "awokeness" to others distress - emotionally, personally, and systemically - with a desire to alleviate the suffering. Also, compassionate listening is an understanding of the interconnectedness between ourselves and others. It allows you to see the "other" as yourself, which is sacred. Compassion listening opens us up to the world and provides an opportunity for radical inclusion. Moving forward as a nation in the aftermath of Floyd’s death and in honoring the legacy of John Lewis, who said, "we can redeem the soul of our nation" if we embrace intersectional concerns and goals to best address systemic racism and police violence. James Baldwin said, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. It starts with listening! ~ Rev. Irene Monroe Read and share online here About the Author The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH. She is a weekly commentator on New England Channel NEWS and is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist for the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe. Monroe stated that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist she tries to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. | | | | | | | | Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together.Thank you for being a part of this community! | | | | | | Join our FB community today! Spread the word, share with friends. Thanks! | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Origins of the New Testament, Part IV: The Oral Period Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong October 29, 2009 Where did the story of Jesus reside in that dark tunnel of time where no records exist? That tunnel began with the crucifixion in 30 CE and lasted until Paul wrote his first epistle to the Thessalonians in about 51 CE. From those silent years we have nothing that has survived in writing. From the years 51 to 64, we have available to us Paul alone, but he relates very little about what Jesus said or did. It is not until we get to the gospels that were written between 70 and 100 CE, or 40 to 70 years after the end of Jesus’ life, that we receive a consistent story, but little of that can be looked at as history. Today we can line up the books of the New Testament in the order in which they were written (Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John) and see quite easily how the Jesus story grows and develops. For example, Mark adds miracles, Matthew adds the virgin birth, Luke adds the cosmic ascension and John adds the farewell discourses. From the years 30 to 50, however, there is absolutely nothing that remains, and these years present a huge challenge to Christian scholars. When we can see and date from gospel sources the expansions of the Jesus story from 70 to 100, we cannot help but wonder how the story might have grown during this oral tunnel of silence. In this column, I will seek to throw some light on this darkness. Where does one go to look for clues? I know of only one possible place. If a subject is filtered through any vehicle for a significant number of years, that vehicle ought to leave an imprint. So we study the gospels looking for signs that identify how the material was preserved. Such signs are not hard to find in the early gospels. The first clue comes when we examine how often the word synagogue appears in the gospels. One finds a reference to the synagogue or synagogues eleven times in Mark, nine times in Matthew, sixteen times in Luke and five times in John. Historically we know that the Christian movement was expelled from the synagogue in 88 CE and that John’s gospel is the only one of the four that reflects that expulsion, which is perhaps why synagogue references drop in John. The fact remains that deep into the fabric of the Jesus story, as we have that story in the gospels, is written a very deep connection between people’s memory of Jesus and the synagogues of the Jews. The second clue is to see how it was that by the time the gospels came to be written, Jesus had been interpreted through, presented as the fulfillment of, and his story had been wrapped inside the scriptures of the Jewish people. There are constant references to these scriptures in almost every line of the gospels, especially Mark, Matthew and Luke. Indeed the gospel writers assume that their readers or listeners will have a deep familiarity with these scriptures. In the very first verse of Mark, the first gospel, the author writes, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ; as it is written in the prophets.” And he proceeds to quote both Isaiah and Malachi. Mark moves on to tell the story of Jesus’ baptism by presenting John the Baptist as the new Elijah. Mark clothes John with camel’s hair and a leather girdle, the clothing that Elijah wore, according to the Old Testament. He suggests that John’s diet consisted of “locusts and wild honey,” the food that the Old Testament tells us Elijah ate. Mark locates John the Baptist in the desert or wilderness, which is where the Old Testament suggested that Elijah lived. Only those familiar with the Jewish Scriptures would understand the level of communication that was going on here. The feeding of the multitude by Jesus with five loaves and two fish in Mark is reminiscent of the story in the Hebrew Scriptures of Moses providing bread to feed the multitude in the book of Exodus. The miracles that Mark ties to the story of Jesus are closely identified with the miracles attributed to Old Testament heroes Moses, Elijah and Elisha, or with the miraculous cures that Isaiah says will accompany the coming of the messiah. Once again only an audience familiar with these sources would know their original form and what it was that Mark was trying to communicate. When one turns to the second gospel, Matthew, who adds the account of Jesus’ miraculous birth to the developing tradition, we discover that Matthew suggests in those opening chapters that everything that happened to the infant Jesus was a fulfillment of the prophets. Why was he born of a virgin? To fulfill words from Isaiah that Matthew immediately quotes, or in this instance actually misquotes. Why was Jesus born in Bethlehem? To fulfill the expectations of the prophet Micah, who once again Matthew quotes. Why did the wicked King Herod come to Bethlehem and slaughter the male children two years old and under? To fulfill the prophecy of Jeremiah that Rachel, one of the “mothers” of the Jewish nation, would weep for her children who were not. Why did Joseph flee to Egypt with Mary and her baby? To fulfill the prophecy of Hosea, Matthew said, who wrote that God would call his son out of Egypt. Even the later move from Bethlehem to Nazareth occurred, said Matthew, to fulfill the prophets. When we turn to Luke, this pattern continues. Luke simply copies much of his narrative from Mark, but when he adds material, it is also out of the Hebrew Scriptures. Only Luke tells the story of Jesus healing the ten lepers, one of whom is a foreigner, a Samaritan, which is deeply reminiscent of the story of Elisha healing the leprosy of a foreigner, Naaman the Syrian, from the book of II Kings. Only Luke tells the story of Jesus raising from the dead the only son of a widow in the village of Nain. This story is clearly patterned to conform to a story of Elijah raising the only son of a widow from the dead in I Kings. There are countless other illustrations of the fact that the memory of Jesus had, by the time the gospels were written, become deeply wrapped inside the Jewish Scriptures. The question is where could this coalescing of the memory of the life of Jesus with the scriptures of the Jewish people have happened? The answer is only in the synagogue! Why? Because only in the synagogue did people hear the scriptures read, taught, discussed or expounded. Only in the synagogue was there any familiarity with the Hebrew Sacred Scriptures, which would enable the readers of the gospels to understand how these Jewish stories had been applied to and retold about Jesus. The next step in this discovery process is to place ourselves inside the experience of the people who lived in the first century world, and then the picture becomes very clear. The printing press had not yet been invented. Books were rare because they were expensive. Every book had to be hand copied. Therefore, individuals did not own personal bibles. There were no Gideons to place the Hebrew Scriptures in your motel or hotel room. The only place in which first century people could possibly have become familiar with the Jewish sacred story was by attending the synagogue and hearing those scriptures read. For these scriptures to have been used to interpret Jesus’ life was an activity that could only have happened in the synagogue. For this reason, we can be fairly certain that in the silent period we call “the oral period” the memory of Jesus, including the things he said, the things he did and the narratives told about him could only have been recalled, restated and passed on in the synagogue. We add to this knowledge the tradition attested in the gospels that suggests that the life of Jesus was lived inside and interpreted through the great events of the Jewish liturgy. When that connection is made, we have another major clue. All of the gospels, for example, tell the story of Jesus’ crucifixion against the background of the Jewish observance of Passover. In the story of the transfiguration there are echoes of the Jewish observance of the Festival of Dedication, or Hanukkah. In the narrative of John the Baptist with which Mark opens his gospel, there are numerous notes of the Jewish observance of Rosh Hashanah. The memory of Jesus was not transmitted individually. It reflects rather the corporate presence of the synagogue gathered in worship. In the first century synagogue’s liturgy there would be just a long reading from the Torah, the books of Moses; then a reading from what the Jews called the former prophets (Joshua through Kings); and finally a reading from what they called the latter prophets (Isaiah through Malachi). At that point, the synagogue leader would ask if anyone wanted to bring the message. Followers of Jesus would stand and relate their memories of Jesus to the reading of that Sabbath. In this moment the story of Jesus was recalled, Sabbath by Sabbath, year by year, until the gospels appeared 40 to 70 years after the end of Jesus’ life. Thus we shine the light of the synagogue onto the dark, mysterious oral period of Christian history, and suddenly the darkness of the unknown fades and we begin to see that the gospels are the product of the synagogue. That clue will open a rich interpretive vein, which we will discover as this series on the New Testament unfolds. Paul was the first person to break that silence with his letters that we still possess. So we begin our study of the content of the New Testament with the person of Paul. When he wrote, the followers of Jesus were still participants in the synagogue. The church as a separate institution had not yet been born. These “followers of the way,” as the Christians were then called, represented a challenge to the traditions of the Jews. Paul began his life as a rabid opponent of that challenge. We turn to Paul next week. ~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements How to Build Resilience in a Polarized World - Practical Tools for Reducing Stress and Finding Balance This online Course runs August 24th - September 20th. The course has a wealth of tools to help bring this about. 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