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Race and PrivilegeA. Stephen Van KuikenCommunity Congregational United Church of ChristPullman, WASeptember 11, 2016Racism can well be that corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on Western civilization. Arnold Toynbee has said that some twenty-six civilizations have risen upon the face of the earth. Almost all of them have descended into the junk heaps of destruction. The decline and fall of these civilizations, according to Toynbee, was not caused by external invasions but by internal decay. They failed to respond creatively to the challenges impinging upon them. If Western civilization does not now respond constructively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men.—Martin Luther King, Jr.Call to Worship: Martin Luther King, Jr.We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted.Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear, only love can do that.We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggressions and retaliation.The foundation of such a method is love.Before it is too late, we must narrow the gaping chasm between our proclamations of peace and our lowly deeds which precipitate and perpetuate war.One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal.We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.We shall hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.Ancient Witness: Galatians 3:28There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all are one in Christ Jesus.It’s been over a year and a half that we saw images on T.V. and the internet of Ferguson, MO burning. After the Grand Jury refused to indict the police officer who shot Michael Brown, a young, unarmed African American man, six times, killing him.? Personally, I was saddened and deeply disappointed but not surprised.? This seems to me to be yet one more example of brutal, excessive and deadly force by police in this nation, and a predictable lack of accountability.Since then, we have seen other horrific videos of unarmed African American men killed by police. A slogan, “Black Lives Matter,” emerged and became a movement. And the point of that statement is not that other lives don’t matter; of course, they do. But the whole point is to draw attention to the injustice and the persistent reality that for 300 years Black lives have not mattered, and that has to change! (I’d love it if CCUCC had its own Black Lives Matter sign.)In civics class we learned that at the founding of this nation Black slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person in our Constitution! But only because it benefited White southerners to get more congressional representation. In reality, their lives mattered even less and were not persons at all, as they were bought and sold as property on the auction block.And recently, football player, Colin Kaepernick, made the news for refusing to stand for the national anthem to draw attention to this ugly truth in our nation.?In April of 2001, all hell broke loose in Cincinnati.? Anger and frustration had boiled over into riots and protests in the streets of the downtown and the Over-the-Rhine neighborhood.? The heavy-handed police response often added fuel to the fire.? I was at a peaceful protest and witnessed police indiscriminately pepper-spraying and shooting nonviolent protesters with “bean bag” rounds from shotguns.? The mayor enforced a city-wide curfew and declared a state of emergency.?A young unarmed African-American man, Timothy Thomas, had been shot and killed by a Cincinnati police officer.? And a month earlier, another unarmed African-American man, Walter Owensby, was choked to death by Cincinnati police.? None of the officers responsible were convicted of any wrongdoing.? Over a five year span, 15 men died in encounters with Cincinnati police. ?Most of them were armed; some were not.? All of them were black.?I had been the Senior Minister at Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church only for about a year and a half at the time, and our church was in a neighborhood adjacent to Over- the-Rhine.? A coalition of groups held a press conference in our church, at which I first met Angela Leisure, the mother of the slain Timothy Thomas.? I also met members of the Sentinels, an association of Black officers on the Cincinnati Police Department, who were part of the protest. ?Later, I helped organize the “March for Justice,” at which several thousand people, including Angela Leisure, engaged in a peaceful march and protest in the heart of the city.???Racial tensions were high before these deaths; the city was a tinderbox just waiting to be ignited.? Cincinnati was one of the most economically segregated cities in the nation.? And well before the deaths and protests occurred, a coalition including the Black United Front and the ACLU filed a lawsuit in federal court against the police for a 30-year pattern of racial profiling, “driving while black.”? The City of Cincinnati reached a settlement with the Justice Department in 2002 that included significant reforms in policing policy.? By the way, these “consent decrees” are one of the most effective ways to address police reform.?What have I learned??Institutional racism is real.?From the police forces in Los Angeles to Cincinnati to Ferguson, it is real.? While many of us may be unaware, many African-American communities are all-too-aware of this persistent reality.? The sense of outrage and frustration is understandable and justified.?The deaths of Timothy Thomas and Michael Brown were not simply isolated incidents; for many, they are part of a larger pattern.? They are the last straw.? They simply light the fuse to a powder keg that is already there.?There are these patterns, if we are willing to see them, of unequal attention and suspicion by the police—“Driving While Black” and Stop and Frisk, a pattern of unequal use of force by police—African Americans are four times more likely to experience use of force when stopped by police versus their white counterparts, a pattern of death at the hands of the police, and a pattern of lack of accountability. We can see these patterns in Cincinnati, Ferguson, New York, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and on and on.The Guardian has a page on its website called, “The Counted,” that is a database of “people killed by police in the U.S.” They report that in 2015, 102 unarmed Black people were killed, and in the first half of 2016, 31 unarmed Black people were killed. Unarmed Black men are five times more likely than White men to be killed by police.Today I want to talk about race, and I want to talk about these persistent patterns in our society.In his book, Sellout, Randal Kennedy wrote about Senator Barack Obama, soon after declaring his candidacy for President, was asked on 60 Minutes when he “decided” he was black, since his mother was a white American and his father was a black Kenyan. “Obama responded,” wrote Kennedy, “by distancing himself from the idea that he had ‘decided’ to be black.”He focused on three other considerations: his appearance, the response of onlookers to his appearance, and his shared black experience of those responses with others also perceived to be “black.” “If you look African American in this society,” he remarked, “you’re treated as an African American.”Today in America, determining who is “black” is determined by what is called the “one-drop rule.” That is, any discernible African ancestry stamps a person as “black.” White supremacists would advocate this to protect white bloodlines to deter interracial marriage, making the tiniest dab enough to “contaminate” a person. But more recently, many champions of black advancement have also become devotees of the one-drop rule for an entirely different reason. “The Devil fashioned [the one-drop rule], wrote Professor Christine Hickman, “but in doing so he also accomplished good.”It is because of the one-drop rule that some of the most significant leaders among African Americans are considered “black” or “Negro” despite their “white” ancestry; here I immediately think of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois. Long denounced as a method for protecting whites against the taint of Negro blood, the one-drop rule is now embraced by some devotees of black unity as a way of reinforcing solidarity and discouraging exit by “blacks” who might otherwise prefer to reinvent themselves racially.But this is a relatively recent construction. From 1850 to 1920 the U.S. Census demarcated a category for “mulatto.” And in 1890 told their enumerators to distinguish between “blacks,” who had “3/4 or more” African blood, “mulatto,” who had “3/5 to 5/8,” “quadroon,” who had “1/4” and octoroon,” who had “1/8 or any trace” of African blood. It wasn’t until 1920 when the Census Bureau ceased enumerating mulattoes and adopted the one-drop rule. The whole notion of race is a fluid thing and socially constructed.A couple years ago I read The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander (2011). It’s one of the most important books that has been written in awhile, in my opinion. The original Jim Crow was a name of a minstrel show character, and it represented a time of lynching and terror and the system of laws in the South that were implemented to demean and to keep black men, women and children “in their place” after the abolition of slavery. These were laws that prohibited intermingling of whites and black, laws against inter-marriage (finally overturned in 1967), voting and discrimination in virtually every sphere of life.In many ways, Jim Crow was dismantled by the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1965) and Supreme Court decisions that overcame the “separate and unequal” structure of schools.The old Jim Crow is gone, but we have a new Jim Crow, a new system that keeps black men, women and children “in their place,” a new system of social control.Alexander argues, very persuasively, that “mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to the dismantling this new racial caste system.”The criminal justice system, then, became the tool for a system that would keep black people “in their place.” It would begin almost immediately. “Barry Goldwater in 1964 aggressively exploited the riots and fears of black crime, laying the foundation for the ‘get tough on crime’ movement that would emerge years later,” Alexander writes.The number of men incarcerated went from 300,000 in 1980 to 2.3 million 30 years later! This was fueled primarily by the “war on drugs” declared by Ronald Reagan in 1982. This was followed by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, mandatory minimum sentences and huge expenditures for enforcement. According to a Pew Study, by the end of 2007, more than 7 million Americans, or one in every 31 adults, were either behind bars, on probation or on parole. One in 31 under local, state or federal correctional control!The United States now has the highest incarceration rate in the world, surpassing highly repressive regimes such as Russia, China and Iran. The U.S. imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of Apartheid! One in three black men will be incarcerated sometime in the life. From the beginning to the end of the criminal justice system, the black community is disenfranchised and marginalized. They experience more suspicion, scrutiny and arrests; less adequate defense, more plea bargains, harsher sentencing, and the stigma and obstacles to employment and opportunity with the “criminal” label. As a result, black families and communities are decimated and put “in their place.” The New Jim Crow.I have some first-hand experience here. For four years I did social work at a halfway house for federal inmates. My caseload was 15 to 25 men at a time, and I would help them follow the requirements of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, to whom we reported. Most of my clients were black. Most had been in prison for a very long time, many of them on drug charges. I got to know them, their stories, their families. I read their histories and hundreds of Presentence Investigations (PSIs). Their average stay was three months to a year.It was a very demanding, very low-paying job that at which many new college graduates would turn up their noses. And it was a very challenging time in my life. I was also working halftime as the pastor of a new startup church that was just a few blocks from the halfway house, also in the inner city of Cincinnati in the infamous Over-the-Rhine neighborhood.But I have to tell you, it was a blessing for me. These were some very, very tough guys. And we had a mutual respect. And I learned very soon that we are much “more than the worse thing we’ve ever done.”And me? I was a product of the system, this separateness that is so pronounced in our country. (I noticed it when I traveled abroad where this separateness isn’t so severe.) Sure, I went to school with black classmates, but I never had any close black friends until I started working at the halfway house in my late 40’s. The daily, constant interaction and close friendships that developed were and incredible blessing to me!I saw the New Jim Crow from the inside out, and it deepened my own spiritual reflection and awareness, as well as my interaction with my own spiritual tradition.Jesus, the central figure of my primary tradition, sought to transform not just hearts, but he sought to transform systems and laws that uphold privilege. He challenged and broke the purity laws of his day that divided races—Jews, Gentiles and Samaritans—that separated the poor, sick, lame and lepers from those in privilege—that divided women to subservience. And by association, Jesus was, himself, unclean.The writer to the Galatians would say that the spirit of Christ breaks down the dividing walls and that in Christ, there is not racial distinction—no Jew or Greek, no distinction between criminals and non-criminals, the “worthy” or “unworthy,” no gender distinction, no class distinction, no distinction between slave or free. All are one. All are one.Mary Douglass once famously defined dirt as “matter that was out of place.” Food on your plate is food. Food on your shirt is dirt. It’s out of place. Jesus was on the side of all of those who were “out of place” and he challenged any purity system that would put them “in their place.” He challenged not just personal attitudes, but he challenged the entire caste system of privilege and dominance, a system of “keeping things in their place.” And this is why, it seems to me, he was such a threat and had to be killed.You know, I used to subscribe to a pretty good definition that racism = prejudice + power. This is largely true and shows how charges of “reverse racism” are so absurd. Without power one cannot institute racism. But today I would go further.Racism, it seems to me, is anything that upholds privilege. It doesn’t need conscious prejudice to exist. It doesn’t need to be deliberate. It’s not just bad, hateful people who participate and perpetuate racism. It’s all of us good people who participate in a system that upholds and protects privilege. It’s not just about overt, hateful motives; that’s way too easy. But it’s mostly about unconscious participation of a purity system. And sometimes the privilege we protect isn’t just white; it’s also very, very rich—as poor and working-class white Americans, who for 30 years have been losing ground and have seen their American Dream disappear, as they are manipulated into fearing their black brothers and sisters, as they are manipulated into scapegoating our brown brothers and sisters—focusing on building a ridiculous wall, a wall that would be a monument to an unjust immigration policy, a monument to privilege of White European Americans and to a double standard—as the wealthy elite steal them both blind. Racism is more than just irrational fear or unexplainable, unjustifiable hatred. It serves a purpose! It serves the privileged, and mostly, the privileged few.And so, my friends, as White people of faith, this is not so much a matter of falling to our knees and begging forgiveness. No, this is more a matter of opening our eyes to the persistent patterns—to connect the dots—and to see a reality that is right in front of our face.(NOTE: The spoken sermon, also available online, may differ slightly in phrasing and detail from this manuscript version.) ................
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