Of all the sadness that is our news right now, the genocidal attack on the Yezidis in the breaking apart of Iraq, the spread Ebola in West Africa, the influx of children fleeing the horrors in Central America, running into the arms of American immigration officers, and so much more, right now, this moment, the public eye has mostly turned to Ferguson, Missouri.
In the wake of the shooting of teenager Michael Brown by a police officer, many issues have arisen. The racial disparity between the overwhelmingly black population of Ferguson, with an equally overwhelmingly white police force, the long simmering anger of the local population at feeling more occupied than policed, and then this sad, sad killing, has led to a week of continuing protests, which have flared several times into violence, continues as I write these words, unabated.
Out of this I’ve seen reflections on a number of things. The militarization of our American police has been noted, lamented, and challenged. The mistreatment of journalists has been raised.
But, the current running through it all is race.
It is, I believe, difficult to untangle issues of race from the issues of class in all this. Class is an issue that cannot be turned from, particularly today with the hollowing out of our American middle class and the increasing amount of poverty that is just being accepted as the way things are.
But here, now, I find it critical to look at the race issues.
I find it absolutely incomprehensible that a significant number of white Americans can deny the whole issue of race, saying it isn’t really an issue. It is like those who deny climate change even as the effects of that reality are beginning to become a part of our ordinary weather reporting. People don’t see what they don’t want to see.
But, even as the consequences of our postponing deal with climate is making matters worse for many, denying racial issues, and particularly institutional racism, the built into our ordinary lives extra burden of being black in America (and, in differing degree and impact an experience by all racial minorities in our country), the overwhelming sadness that black parents have to give the “talk” to their children.
It happens that today the Episcopal church honors Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a seminarian who took the full force of a shotgun blast protecting a seventeen year old girl during an altercation with a sheriff’s deputy in the wake of demonstrations against white-only businesses in Fort Deposit, Alabama in 1965. The girl was black, the seminarian and the deputy were both white.
For me this moment, this day, calls us to remember we’re all in this together. And that any kind of justice calls all of us to respond to these events.
As a part of the majority (for the time being) community, I think mostly about what is my responsibility in all this.
For one thing, this demands noticing the way things are. It demands seeing how things are stacked against people of color. It demands understanding the realities of privilege. Now seeing this takes nothing away from other realities, there need be no pretending it is not hard for poor white people, again that class thing; but this race thing is pervasive. It is true. And it is corrosive of any kind of genuine community of equality of aspiration and access to possibility.
There are many reasons we not only should do such a deep examination, but must. Not the least that small passing note that those in the majority today, will not always be in the majority. And grievance has a habit of sticking around.
But, there’s something more important than enlightened self-interest here.
And that is the deeper truth that we are all in this together.
We are bound together.
More tightly than words can ever say.
What happens to one, marks all of us.
And so long as we allow these injustices to occur and not object, not stand against, not stand for something good and hopeful, the world becomes a worse place.
So, we need to attend to what happened. We need to ask questions. Why was young Michael Brown shot? Was this, as it certainly seems, a police man who over reacted to a situation? Did it become murder? And what about what has happened in the wake of this terrible event? This needs to be pursued.
All of it…
The good news, the lesson we might learn from Jonathan Daniels is that we don’t have to repeat the old patterns.
We can change.
It is dangerous.
But then what is that is important, that is not dangerous?
Time to stand up, and to stand with…
Time.
Past time…
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