Reflective Ethics

The institution of slavery stated, quite matter-of-factly, without words, that blacks were not humans for which the owners had any responsibility to treat better than livestock. But the reality of the situation erupted through the veneer of institutionalized brutality: Blacks were as much human as the Big House masters, possibly more human. While the slave-masters used humans as a means to an end, the slaves were chastised, in the corporal sense, for occasionally doing the same thing. The masters were making a comfortable living on the backs of slaves. But on occasion, the slaves found themselves so hungry and weak that their only choice was to take food from the Big House. Consider this account from a former slave named Sarah Fitzpatrick:

"Niggers didn't think dat stealin' wuz so bad in dem times. Fak' is dey didn't call it stealin', dey called it takin'. Dey sa, "I ain't takin' f'om nobody but ma' mistrus and Marster, an' I'm doin' dat 'cause I'se hongry!"

When crime against humanity is institutionalized either in government, business, or religion, crime is legitimized throughout all of society. When we are complicit in crimes against humanity through the institutions in society, we may not take offense at crime in any part of society. Malfeasence among the powerful legitimizes crime among the powerless.

We must examine our social institutions unceasingly to prevent the clandestine crimes of the powerful from becoming the actionable offenses of the powerless.

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The Taproot

In botanical terms, a taproot is the center root of a plant that grows vertically downward and from which all other roots emerge. The taproot searches for a source of water and anchors the plant deeply into the soil. The nature of that taproot is hope. That one root is the hope for survival of the whole organism.

Within the civil rights movement, its laborers hope for various things. Some hope for integration and others hope for revolution. Some simply work for reconciliation. But these various and sundry goals are subsidiary outgrowths of the taproot of the civil rights movement that seeks, ultimately, to see all people affirmed in their humanity. Once that taproot has found an anchor and sustenance, the subsequent roots can work together for mutual benefit of the organism that IS true equality.

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Thoughts on Hope

"With us there's a saying, "La esperanza muere ultima." Hope dies last. If you lose hope, you lose everything."

Jessie de la Cruz, retired migrant farm worker, quoted in Studs Terkel, Hope Dies Last.


"The differences between black folk and white folk are not blood or color, and the ties that bind us are deeper than those that separate us. The common road of hope, which we all traveled, has brought us into a stronger kinship than any words, laws, or legal claims."

Richard Wright ,12 Million Black Voices


"When hope dies, the killing begins. Hopelessness and brutality are just two sides of the same coin."

Jurgen Moltmann, In the End - The Beginning: The Life of Hope.


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Moral Obligations?

"We have a moral obligation to balance our budget."

U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, a conservative Christian, on why he voted for a budget bill that would cut assistance to the needy.

WHAAAA?

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Interview with Rabbi Michael Lerner

The Religion section of the February 25, 2006 Dallas Morning News contained an interview with the unapolgetically liberal civil rights activist, Michael Lerner. The following is an excerpt from that interview.

Q: What spiritual struggle do you sense in America?

A: "There is a big spiritual crisis in people's lives based on the selfishness and materialism of society. It translates to people spending all day in the world of work, in which they learn that the bottom line is money and power, and their goal must be to maximize the bottom line or they will get thrown out. They quickly learn to see other people from the standpoint of "How can you be of use to me?" What it does is create a tremendous feeling of isolation, a lack of certainty about others, because it appears everybody is out for themselves."

Q: How does this spiritual crisis infiltrate the family?

A: "It plays out in the whole issue of can you teach your kids values. Kids quickly learn that the real world is based on manipulation and control. Get ahead and make as much as you can for yourself.
In marriage, relationships increasingly become based on a kind of implicit calculation. People make commitments on the basis of, "I'm committed to you, because you can fulfill more of my needs than anybody else who's likely to fall for me in the short run." This creates tremendous insecurity in families. Nobody can be sure that at some point their partner won't be able to cut a better deal."

Q: What's the alternative?

A: "The spiritual path says you're valuable not because of what you can do for me, but because you are fundamentally an embodiment of the sacred, the God energy of the universe. Instead of looking at you in terms of what I can get from you, I look at you as somebody who deserves to be cared for, regardless of what you ever produce.
People are desperate for that kind of spiritual consciousness. And the only place they've heard it articulated is on the right.
How do politicians respond to society's hunger for meaning?
The right says: "Yes, there is a crisis of materialism and selfishness in this society." But they blame that on the "demeaned others" of society. This is how the right works all around the world. In Europe, the demeaned other was the Jew. In this country, it has been African-Americans and, now, gays and lesbians. Feminists. Liberals. Secular people.
The left sees the right blaming these people. The left says: "Oh, we know what spirituality or religion is about. It's about sexism, homophobia, racism." They are unable to see that there is an actual spiritual crisis. Instead, they think "spiritual crisis" is just code for sexism and homophobia and racism. They give the whole spiritual domain to the right.
My criticism is of both parties: The Democrats are almost as bad as the Republicans in their inability to articulate a vision that could be transcendent."

Q: When in your lifetime have humanitarian impulses been at their strongest in the United States?

A: "I saw it in the civil rights movement, tremendously. There was a capacity in people to recognize each other as fundamentally valuable.
Instead of treating racists as pure evil, [Martin Luther] King and the civil rights movement insisted on seeing the humanity of white people who were oppressing blacks. They insisted on a vision of what we could all be together – that possibility of transcendence."

Poverty Rates

According to 1999 U.S. Census information, 24.9% of the African American population is below the poverty level. The only other ethnic group to have a larger percentage of its members below the poverty level is Native Americans (25.7%). When this statistic is compared to the relatively low rate of 9.1% for whites (the lowest of any racial designation) it is clear that there is yet work to do before African Americans and First Nations people can be considered full participants in the "American Dream".

Don't think of this as a self-righteous campaign on the part of the "White Man's Burden". I do not offer these statistics from the comfort of an insulated, middle class existence. My family of four is sitting within a few hundred dollars of the poverty level right now. We receive food stamps and have had our kids on state provided insurance programs in the past. Yet, I am keenly aware of the difference in the degree of opportunity available to me as compared to that available to African Americans and First Nations people. Much of the difference is between the educational and vocational opportunities afforded me earlier in my life as a resident in solidly middle-class suburbia.

Cornel West refers to "the most basic issue now facing black America: the nihilistic threat to its very existence." He continues, "This threat is not simply a matter of relative economic deprivation and political powerlessness - though economic well-being and political clout are requisites for meaningful black progress. It is primarily a question of speaking to the profound sense of psychological depression, personal worthlessness, and social despair so widespread in black America."

For a person of any color to transcend these circumstances they must feel that there is hope beyond their current suffering. Until black America is affirmed in its blackness as full-participants in humanity, there will be no hope for the defeat of this nihilistic threat to its very existence.

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Travesty of Complicity

George Whitefield corresponding with John Wesley [1751]:

"...though liberty is a sweet thing to such as are born free, yet to those who may never know the sweets of it, slavery perhaps may not be so irksome." He admits, "I should think myself highly favored if I could purchase a good number of them, in order to make their lives comfortable, and lay a foundation for breeding up their posterity in the nurture and admonition of the Lord."



G.T. Gillespie, "A Christian View of Segregation", 1954:

"Since Christ and the Apostles taught the love of God for all mankind, the oneness of believers in Christ, and demonstrated that the principles of Christian brotherhood and charity could be made operative in all relations in life, without demanding revolutionary changes in the natural or social order, there would appear to be no reason for concluding that segregation is in conflict with the spirit and teachings of Christ and the apostles, and therefore un-Christian."


This, and much more, is a hideous thread that is woven into the fabric of our Christian heritage. Christians have much for which we should daily atone. These sentiments still pervade the minds and wills of white Christians everywhere and represent ideologies that we must challenge as an utter rejection of the gifts of divine mercy.

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People You Never Thought Were of Color

Alessandro de Medici (1510-1537): The first duke of Florence, de Medici, known as “the Moor,” was what we have to call an African-Italian. His mother was a black peasant from Colle Vecchio who worked for a relative of Pope Clement VI.

Aleksander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837): The father of Russian literature, Pushkin was descended on his mother’s side from Abraham Petrovich Hannibal, known as “the Negro of Peter the Great.” The Shakespeare of his country, this superb poet created the Russian literary language.

Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870): The producer of more literary works than any writer in history, among them The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo.

Robert Browning (1812-1889): One of England’s greatest poets, Browning was the dark-skinned son of a Creole woman from the Caribbean island of St. Kitts.

Source: The African-American Book of Lists compiled by Michael E. Livingston.

Part of the solution...?

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Everyone in the Black Power movement, from Stokely Carmichael to James Cone, stress that the best thing whites can do is to stay out of the way. What I am learning about the Black Power movement is that it is not about becoming equal to whites. It's about becoming human beings, affirmed in their blackness, who are full participants in the institutions of society.

It's all quite simple. White Americans simply need to allow themselves to conceive of an African American president and the possibility that they have been saved by a black Jesus. For Americans, the institutions of government and church are the most sacred and it is not surprising that Americans are dominated by the idea that the leaders of these institutions must be white. We have never had a POTUS of color and, for some odd reason, we insist on conceiving of Jesus as a white guy. Putting African Americans at the helm is such a simple thing to do. But maybe it's not that simple. Remember, equality is not the goal here. If Americans are going to solve "the problem of the color line" [W.E.B. DuBois coined this phrase as the greatest challenge of the 20th century], we must allow all citizens, without regard to color, to be full participants in every corner of society. If blackness is going to be affirmed in American society whites, who have dominated the institutions of government and religion, must get out of the way and allow ourselves to be darkened by the blackness of our brothers and sisters of color.

Chuck D of Public Enemy said in "Polly Wanna' Cracka'": "White is right, Black is bad. Black and white is still too bad". I never thought I had any hangups with blacks. Except that when I considered what it would mean for my world to become a little darker, I found I had some issues to tackle. I considered what it would mean for my faith if I allowed Jesus to be black. There was little that tripped me up there because I always understood Jesus as being of a different ethnicity than me. But when I imagined Jesus dying on a cross, I couldn't accept THAT Jesus to be black. Sure, a black Jesus could hang with fishermen, prostitutes and tax collectors. He could even preach a sermon on the side of a hill. But die on a cross? That was my limit. I was horrified that I couldn't reconcile that one barrier to being open to a black Jesus. In the interest of complete honesty, I discovered that I couldn't accept that a black man would be able to be faithful to that end. My stomach knots up to see that typed on my computer screen. I don't know where that idea came from. I have since come to utterly reject that prejudicial indictment on the faithfulness of blacks.

You see, allowing my world to darken is inconceivable, not because I reject the humanity of African Americans but because of unencountered, latent prejudices instilled not by racist propaganda but by an institutional compliance with the marginalizing of African Americans for centuries. Jesus has never been black so he never can be. There has never been a black president so there never will be.

If white America is going to see black America as true peers, we must get out of the way and let the blackness of our society make its own mark on society. The Black Power movement is alive and well and it is at a revolutionary roil. The work that white America has to do is examine itself, one person at a time, and consciously reject the latent prejudices that infect our ability to fully affirm the humanness of black America.

Race Relations

It was the third grade and I was at recess. I recall that it was the fall because I was wearing a jacket. I don’t know which of my friends I was with but I was relating a joke that I heard someplace. We were alone on a far corner of the playground, safely out of ear-shot of anyone who might overhear my inappropriate joke. All I remember about the joke is that its telling necessitated the use of the word “nigger”. Lurking nearby, unintentionally eavesdropping, was a classmate whose name I don’t recall but I remember that she was short and fat and as I was about to discover, she had a big mouth. When I had finished telling my joke and after the tittering had subsided, we turned to walk back to the center of the playground and I was terrified to see Regina Brown making her way to me with Big Mouth McFatterson close behind. What happened next is fuzzy and maybe I have learned to block out the pain and humiliation but there was the distinct sound of someone cracking open a can of whoop-ass and then I remember the smell of wet pea-gravel and dirt while being pummeled by Regina. As I recall Regina, she was about 8 feet tall, very black, and not at all amused by my racially charged musings. She used words that I had only heard my teenage brother use when my parents weren’t around. I took my beating for what seemed like hours but, in reality, was probably only a few short moments long. By the time she finished wearing me out, our little breakdown in race relations has drawn a sizable crowd of witnesses.

I remember looking at the Dairy Queen sign across the street because it directed my face away from the crowd of onlookers. I was choking back tears of pain and shame. Seven year old boys DO NOT cry on the playground, even those who just had the shit beat out of them by a girl. No teachers intervened and there were no further corporal repercussions from the incident. While the elapsed time of the beating was fuzzy, I was painfully aware of every second that ticked by while lying on the ground. It was an eternity. There were some kids laughing and others were wondering what the hell happened. I was humiliated. I was embarrassed about the whipping I took. With the wisdom of thirty years hence, I can only conjecture that I was equally embarrassed that I used the word nigger. I never knew the power of words until that day and I suppose, in retrospect, Big Mouth McFatterson deserves my gratitude. Martin Luther King, Jr. may not have approved of Regina’s methods but I believe he would be happy with the results these many years later.

No matter how I feel about that incident today, there is nothing I can do to make it go away. As a Christian who believes that we may find Christ in all circumstances, I ask myself, “Where was Christ on that playground almost thirty years ago?” As far as I can tell, he was thirty years in the future waiting to teach me about the power of words. I may not always see Christ in the midst of suffering but I can rest assured that he is somewhere in time waiting to teach me about my suffering.

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A White Response to Black Theology

Black theology, or the theology of blackness, finds its nexus in the dawning of the 20th century. W.E.B. DuBois, while not a theologian, began to reflect upon the place of faith and religious action within the slave communities. DuBois laid the groundwork for Historians like Franklin Frazier, Ethicists like Dr. George Kelsey, and Theologians like James Cone to examine their world from a position of blackness. It is my hope to unpack issues of prejudice that lie beneath the surface of my conscience. I have begun to examine my thoughts and my behaviors to see to what or whom my soul is oriented.

James Cone wrote:

"Being black in America has very little to do with skin color. To be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind and your body are where the dispossessed are."

As a student of theology, I hope to uncover the insidious rot of inhumanity that quietly infects the spirit of mankind. But as a human being I hope to find the blackness within myself.

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