And Now For Something Completely Different…. “Santa Baby”

                 I have been using Spotify regularly for the last half year, getting a feel for how it works for both music and podcasts.  As Christmas has come, their playlists have been a welcome alternative to the Christmas radio stations that play ‘current’ stuff with commercials.  It is also more convenient and portable than the CD’s of our Christmas collection.  I save those for quiet times in the living room, considering the tree and reflecting on the beauty of the Season.

                I was not looking for anything in particular, sweeping between various Christmas playlists, when I settled on Santa Baby (not sure if I was preparing to listen or fast forward to something else) and I found seven versions of the song were available from this search.  I knew a few of them and the list caught my interest.  So, my family probably thought I was a little nuts listening to the same song seven times in a row.  That is not the first time I have done that, truth be told, but its usually one particular song that I “repeat” out of my system.

                I do not know how the selections were arranged in the search, by ‘play request  frequency’ or some other criteria, but I listened in the order the search provided.  So, if you have not settled on a particular version of Santa Baby, here is a brief overview of what I found.

                “Santa Baby”, offered by the Pussy Cat Dolls.  What struck me was that this version had excellent “girl group” vocals.

                “Santa Baby”, offered by Taylor Swift.  This is a more ‘country’ version, a little slower, with Ms. Swift providing us with a more soulful undertone to the lyrics.

                “Santa Baby”, offered in duet by Arianna Grande and Liz Gilles.  They take turns and harmonize as they sing the song.  The harmonies are very pleasant.  Individually, I am guessing it is Ms. Grande who is offering a very breathy ‘Betty Boop’ interpretation of the tune while Ms. Gilles sings it in a straight forward manner.

                “Santa Baby”, offered by Gwen Stefani.  I heard a natural ‘Betty Boop’ interpretation of the lyrics that I find in Ms. Stefani’s singing.  I also got a 1940’s vibe, as though she fronted a big band. 

                “Santa Baby”, offered by Michael Bublé.  His is one of the popular versions on the radio today.  He tries to ‘dude’ the lyrics, looking for a ’65 instead of a ’54 convertible, for example.  I like Michael Bublé and I love the meme that has him emerging from his cave for the Christmas Season but maybe because he is singing against the gender assumption of the song, it has an almost parody quality to it.  This quality emerged as I listened to it against the other versions in this list.

                “Santa Baby”, offered by Madonna.  This is ‘the’ radio version that I have heard in these past few years.  Hers is the most deliberate “Betty Boop” voice for the song and I found this version to have a little more of an upbeat to the tempo.

                “Santa Baby”, offered by Eartha Kitt.  This is the original version, offered back in 1953.  It is also my favorite, for me, THE version that I would put on my own Christmas playlist (which is an idea I have to think about now…)

Please note that there is no attempt to be objective in this list at all.  I share the distinctions and distinctives that I heard in them and I invite you to enjoy this Christmas song for yourselves.

Peace,  Peter Hofstra

A Bad-Guy...but not a bad guy...

                 I love the line in Wreck It Ralph in the ‘Bad Guy’ support group of video game villains that goes something like “just because he is a ‘Bad-Guy’ doesn’t mean that he is a bad guy…”  Just because he is the bad guy in a video game does not mean he is a bad guy in life.  It is like Jessica Rabbit (going back a couple of years), “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”

                If I get this right, and I am not very good at philosophical undertakings, this is a post-modern consideration by these characters, as opposed to a modern consideration.  Well, thank you very much.  I actually liked those quotes, but now you have bored me off your blog...  I practically bored myself, except there is something bugging me.  There is a point here.  

                In the ‘modern’ way of thinking, there are good guys and there are bad guys based on how we structure the world.  In “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”, Jessica Rabbit was assumed to be bad because of how she was drawn.  Wreck-It Ralph is a bad guy because Ralph, well, wrecks it.

                So now come to the ‘after modern’, the post-modern.  Jessica is not bad because she does not consider herself to be bad.  The bad guys in the support group do not consider themselves to be bad guys.  Therefore, they are not.  One has to “self-identify” as good or bad and not be branded by the cultural structures in which they live.

                Self-identification, as I understand it, is the centerpiece of gender fluidity and the LGBTQx movement in our present culture.

                Okay, so there is the philosophy lesson.  What’s next?  A defense of one and a condemnation of the other?  Which one would Jesus support? 

                I wish it were that simple.  But here is my problem.  Traditionally, to translate that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" mandates that people acknowledge that they are sinners and turn to Jesus.  That’s the structure of the theological world that we have emerged from.  But a lot of people self-identify as being good people and wonder why Jesus automatically condemns them for just being human? 

                And here is the one that really kicks my backside.  I know good people, this came to sharp relief working with cops, who put their lives on the line as surely as Jesus gave his life for us but tell jokes and behave in ways that no church would ever want to see in, for example, the life of a Sunday School teacher.  But the way to Jesus is that they must be convicted first of being a sinner?  Of being a bad guy even though they are not bad guys?

                You can have your fire and brimstone preachers telling their audiences that they are bound for hell except for Jesus, but if the audience thinks the preacher is a big joke, then what?  Sit back and let the burning commence?

                Spending my time talking about how the grand scale of Christmas shows me a world that is looking for Jesus, in some manner, got me wondering about why the world doesn't find him so easily? Convincing someone they are a bad person in this day and age is more of a moral insult than it is a moral conviction. 

                I don’t have a full answer yet, because I ain’t Jesus-for which heaven and earth both give thanks I have no doubt.  But how about this?  The world should be pretty near perfect.  We have the science and the tech to end hunger, we have the ways and means to end war and all the global pollutions that we are threatening our earth with.  We have a world full of leaders and followers who all swear up and down that they want peace and to live in peace with everyone else.  But we haven’t, we aren’t, and it appears we are lying.

                And that hasn’t changed.  We can feed the hungry, but we don’t.  We can fix global warming, but we don’t.  So what is going on here?  The branding in Christianity for this is ‘sin’.  There is something there to be considered very seriously.  Because the world is a bad place and Jesus is the answer.  So how do we bridge that need?

                I invite you to come with me to think about that one.

Peter 

Live...Love...Believe

                 That was the message in the windows of Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street in NYC for the 2020 Thanksgiving Day parade.  The Thanksgiving Day parade begins with Tom Turkey and ends with the arrival of Santa Claus.  For many, this is the signal of the start of the Christmas Season, not the Christmas decorations starting before Halloween (and in some cases before October...). 

                “Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”.  September 21, 1897, part of an editorial response in the newspaper, the Sun, it has entered the lore of the Christmas Season and been a key part of Macy’s expression of Christmas for a number of years.  I think it is included because it underpins the call to “believe” that is ongoing part of a Macy’s Christmas.

                In some circles, there is a tremendous amount of angst about ‘believe’.  What I mean is that it seems to represent the ongoing removal of Christ from Christmas (like in the bumper sticker in the last post).  The secular call to believe pulls us away from the sacred call to believe in Jesus. 

               But, for Christendom, there is nothing new in that.  Living in a world of sin, the devil has been trying to remove everything from our faith and leave it an empty husk.  Thus, the reign of the devil can be finally confirmed with no bothers ‘from above’.

                And if we look at it that way, it is depressing set of circumstances to consider for Christmas, the theft of our belief'.  But sin is the depressing set of circumstances under which the world lives.  What if ‘Believe’ was not an advertising ploy to attract more shoppers, but something more heartfelt?  Advertising, by its very nature, seeks to sell us things.  In the worst examples, it has to convince us we are ugly, bad, smelly, weird, or whatever in order to find redemption in their products.  But for it to work, advertising has to connect with something in us-and I think they have connected with something deep in the instance of 'believe'. 

                So, a reminder of my point of view, God is in control, no matter what it might feel like otherwise.  So what are we to believe in?  Santa?  Giving?  Buying at Macy’s to walk in Santa’s shoes?  Maybe.  But the first two pieces of this ad campaign are ‘live’ and ‘love’.  Is this a cry for help?  Because Christmas is THE season that we still believe brings out the best in people.  Redemption is the ongoing theme of the season, from Dickens “A Christmas Carol” to “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”.   The world wants love to be in control and seeks what to believe to make it so-because it is not in control. 

                Believe in what?  In Santa?  In the power of the human spirit?  That is going to be a hard sell.  If we believe Santa embodies the best of humanity, love and caring and a spirit of giving, the evidence of our own senses tells us that it is not something humanity can live up to.  Maybe we are not as hard hearted as Scrooge who spoke about ‘decreasing the surplus population’, but people will go hungry this season.  (Matthew 25 talks about that in eye opening detail).

                So how about believing in the reason for the season?  Maybe Jesus did not get a float in the parade but the spirit of Christ underpinned every display.  Maybe a creche is not something that we have yet to make into a Broadway musical (but if someone reads this and decides to do it, please let me know).  But Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.  Jesus is the way to redemption.  “Acting nice” is a reflection of the true ‘niceness’ to be found in Jesus. 

                I see the word ‘believe’ and I see a call for help to find something that can truly be believed in.  And I have the joy of something true that I can, that we can believe in.  So, this season, I am looking for divine guidance to help those people who are seeking to believe.  I invite you to join me. 

I Met God and His Name is Chuck

WARNING: THERE ARE POTENTIAL SPOILERS HERE, ESPECIALLY TO THE LAST SEASON OF SUPERNATURAL.

          So Chuck is all-knowing.  This is God, the God, according to “Supernatural”.  When we met God…Chuck…he was, as in the Beatles song, a paperback writer.  If you are not familiar with the show, it has just concluded a fifteen year run on the CW.  It revolves around two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, who are hunters…and later men of letters.

          They hunt monsters.  Ghosts, urban legends, mythological beings, angels and demons, and everything in between.  In the course of the show, we met Chuck, who was essentially transcribing their lives into paperback novels.  Turns out, Chuck is God, the God, not ‘a god’ like Bill Murray thought he might be in Groundhog Day.

          This is significant why?  Because this portrayal of God is not particularly kind to the Christian tradition.  And while that is important, I think there is something even more significant in this portrayal.  I think it is significant because it reflects a lot of popular attitudes about God in the public consciousness.  After all, to be a hit show, the writers have to find some touchstone with the experiences of their audience.

          So here is a thumbnail sketch of their God.  They subscribe to the Clockwork theory of creation.  Chuck created it and then let it go, and it runs.  He is not a “hands on” kind of guy-and he is definitely a guy.  Where did Chuck go?  It was not like Genesis where God rested on the seventh day.  No, Chuck goes on to create other versions of his creation, shuffling them into a multiverse like so many cards in a deck.

          He is not really a punishing God, but is not much of a loving God either.  But while his ‘angels’ presume him to be all-knowing, Chuck created a situation in which, to kill off an apocalyptic strength character, one of the Winchester boys would have to sacrifice their own lives.  He called it an Abraham and Isaac kind of thing, but this time there would be no ram to sacrifice in place of Isaac.  So Chuck is a God who likes to play games with the lives of his creation.  And the sense was Chuck did not know how it would turn out.  So we were created with free will, apparently even beyond God’s knowledge.    

          Essentially, Chuck is a jerk with transcendent powers.  He either does not care about what happens in his creation or he purposely manipulates it for his own malicious ends. 

          Sure, this is not the God that I believe in as a pastor in the Presbyterian Church.  But how prevalent is this understanding of God in the popular culture that it is so strongly drawn in a television show of long duration and large audience?   How much of the world really thinks this way about God? 

The Sign Said that "Complacency=Violence"

Sign #4: “Complacency=Violence”

                Spent some time considering this one.  At first glance, I was not convinced.  Turns out, that lack of conviction testifies to the power of complacency.  If it is not my truth, it is not truth.  But this is not about “my” truth.  This is accepting a greater truth, of a greater reality.  To accept it, my first step was to break it down from the whole into manageable parts. 

To start with the easiest, defining the commitment of violence.  In the case of this protest within BLM, it was the police officer pinning and killing George Floyd.  It continues a trend that goes back through the history of lynching, back through the slave history of our nation, the public execution of a colored person by whites.  That is the violence, where is the complacency? 

Was it the officers who were present but did nothing?

                To my mind, they were far more than complacent, they were complicit.  They carry the same guilt as Mr. Floyd’s murderer because they knew exactly what was going on and they did nothing to stop it.  They are no different from public gatherings at a lynching, where the people ‘of the community’ are as complicit as any person who laid hands on their fellow human being to end their life.  Because they don’t believe the black life matters.

                You know who else is not complacent?  Those who self-identify with the white supremacy movement.  Anyone who conforms to the tenets of white supremacy, that the ‘other races’ are inferior, that ‘they’ must be kept in their place, that ‘we’ are above them, they…we?...are complicit in what happened.

                The complacent are whites who self-identify as not being part of the white supremacy movement, who self-identify as not being racist, or at least ‘overtly’ racist, people who ‘feel bad’ when ‘things like this’ happen.  These are people who would “never” do anything like this themselves, and certainly would not condone it in others, yet people who will do nothing to change the world in which violence like this goes on.

                Now we come to the centerpiece of this sign.  “Complacency=Violence”.  It is easy to make the case that “Complicity=Violence”, but this?  There is an intensely persuasive cultural narrative that tells whites such an equivalency is just not possible.  It is that narrative that must be understood to be pierced.

                Because its like Kevlar, bullet proof material.  You know where its strength comes from?  Layers and layers of tightly woven fabric.  Not one or two or three layers are sufficient to stop a bullet, but pile up enough layers and the bullet, its power disrupted and dispersed by each successive layer, will eventually lose its effectiveness.

                We live in a nation where the cultural narrative is a layered barrier between the daily norm of interracial violence and the complacency of the self-identified non-racist white majority.  Here are a half dozen representative layers I have identified in my own interaction with the cultural narrative.

                Layer One is the Ideal of Equality.  As Jefferson put it, “All men are created equal.”  In the cultural narrative, this is romanticized that ‘men’ transcends race, gender, or anything that divides humanity.  Thus ‘racial division’ is, by this definition, a fallacy.

                Layer Two is the Presumption of Democracy.  We presume a peaceful process of debate and discussion, of concession, consensus, and binding agreement.  We express our opinion at the ballot box, at the public forum, in our freedom of speech and the press.  We fancy ourselves to be ‘civilized’.  Thus, each episode of violence we see in the media becomes, by this definition, an aberration.  And it is amazing how many aberrations we can absorb.   

                Layer Three is the Sieve of History.  A certain spin is put on events that are carefully selected.  So, the Civil War becomes Lincoln’s deliberate battle, on behalf of the whites, to end slavery in this country.  The definitive event is the Emancipation Proclamation.  That Lincoln’s view of slavery was far more ambivalent over time, that this Proclamation was as much an economic weapon in the North’s ‘total war’ against the South, that the Civil War is far more complicated in the history of our nation, those details are filtered out.  Instead, a narrowly defined interpretation of history is offered.

                Layer Four is the American twist on the Presupposition of Colonialism.  This is the presupposition of white superiority over the rest of the world, demonstrated as Europe colonized it “all”.  What is the twist?  America broke the notion of European ‘colonial’ superiority with our spin on “liberty” but never questioned the presupposition of white superiority.  Thus “Liberty” still masks that presupposition.

                Layer Five is the Legacy of the Great Fear.  The Great Fear in the antebellum south was the slave uprising.  Slaves on farms and plantations vastly outnumbered the local white populations and by the very nature of their tortured existence, were a threat, especially to the white women and children who were viewed as particularly vulnerable.  In 1791, this fear was realized just offshore with the slave uprising in Haiti, and the resultant slaughter of the whites.  The response was a culture of brutal repression and violent authoritarianism.  We carry the legacy of the Great Fear, its psychological vestiges in every moment that we walk past a young black man and feel anxiety. 

                Layer Six is the Response to the Great Fear.  Behind the Ideal of Equality, beneath the Presumption of Democracy, while the culture of brutal repression and violent authoritarianism have changed by degree, it has not gone away.  But the white community, those not complicit in the violence, we don’t see it.  We have colored friends, minority friends, but they ‘go with the flow’ of this cultural narrative that ‘all are equal’.  Do we have any idea how much trust is necessary for a person of color to share the stories of the reality of their experiences with white supremacy with someone who is white? 

                Layer Seven…Eight…Nine…how many more?  What else weaves into the Kevlar of the cultural narrative that puts blinders on the white majority so we do NOT see the reality of this nation’s racial underbelly?  We hide in the reinforced ignorance of our self-identification as not white supremacist.  The result is our living in a utopian view of the world that overlooks every ‘aberration’ to the Presumption of Democracy in the violence committed against people of color.  That’s why complacency =violence, because we refuse to do the work to penetrate through the ‘kevlar’ of the cultural narrative.

                That’s why I said that at first glance, I wasn’t convinced of the truth of this sign.  That is not because I did not know it to be true.  It is because I felt the shame of how long I have been a part of that complacency.  For that, I must ask forgiveness, drop the blinders, and speak the truth.

Peter Hofstra

The Next Sign: “Black Lives don’t just Matter. Black Lives Inspire. Black Lives Spread Wisdom” BLM Post 3

“Black Lives don’t just Matter.  Black Lives Inspire.  Black Lives Spread Wisdom”

                So you know where I am right now?  In the swamp of change.  Life as I know it is inadequate and my world view has to change.  I am a product of white privilege and that has to change.  Last time I was here, I was struggling with the issue, in the church, of the leadership of women.  I was raised with a powerfully biblical mandated privilege of authority over women.  Took years of practical experience and intense personal imagination and growth to recognize and begin to grow out of it.

                So here it comes again.  It is going to sound naïve, it is going to sound forced, it is going to sound half-baked, but that is my process of growth.  I have found myself struggling with whether I should even post this, much less advertise it.  The plan right now is to split the difference, post but not advertise…  Chicken?  Maybe.  So here goes.

                It may seem inappropriate for a white man to talk about tokenism.  But since it is a strategy of white supremacy, it is one that needs to be talked about.  What do I mean?  Let me pull out a media reference from my youth, from the television show “Good Times”.  Situation comedy placed in the Chicago public housing projects.  One scene in particular comes to mind. 

                Michael Evans, the youngest sibling, shared with his father that there was an African in the crew of Christopher Columbus when he “discovered” America.  John Amos-who played his father-was both amazed and pleased at this knowledge.  And it is an important thing to know.  But when its done right, a ‘token’ like this can forestall how much more needs to be done.

                The sign that is the title to this post speaks deep truth.  It goes far deeper than just a conversation about policing and minority communities.  Because, if we stop there, privilege continues to exercise its power.  It can be granted that black lives are important.  It can be granted that all lives are important (when it is recognized from the positions of power).  But if it can be taken that far and no further, well, it does not challenge white supremacy so much as allow privilege to redefine the terms and limits of the relationship.

                “We” (and it churns my gut to be inclusive in that way) can work it to our advantage that offering a peaceful compromise will allow “us” to set the terms of a cultural renegotiation.  And when we put the police officers on trial in Minneapolis, when we come to terms with the protests that continue to rock the nation, we can perhaps tamp things down to the uneasy ceasefire that has defined race relations since the Civil Rights Movement without making fundamental changes.

                At least that is what I see from the ‘seat of privilege’. 

                Until our cultural foundations shift, or are shifted, this could be enough, for the status quo.

                But the status quo is racist.  In the 1960’s it was Martin Luther King Jr. who insisted to Nichelle Nichols that she remain on the original Star Trek series because THAT is where change could be seen by the television audience.  And yet the piece of television racial history carried away from Star Trek is the first interracial kiss on network television.  Not that this moment did not have profound importance for the interpersonal sensibilities of the nation.  But the Science Officer or the Engineer or the Helmsman or the Navigator would take over command when the Captain went galivanting.  What about the episode where the Communications Officer, the one trained as the first line of contact to another species, took command?  That never happened. 

                Yes, I probably should have prefaced that with a ‘nerd alert’.

                It would be an interesting task to ask people to consider who inspires them.  Black Lives Inspire, but now many whites can follow through with a challenge like that?  Black Lives Spread Wisdom, but how many of us can take that much beyond Martin Luther King?

                How about the moment when Mohammed Ali was systematically pounding Ernie Terrell, taunting him with “What’s My Name?”  Terrell had referred to Ali as Cassius Clay during a pre-fight interview and that is where Ali made his stand, that he would not respond to his slave name.  I would like to say this is a story I have known and been moved by for much of my life instead of only recently finding it out.

                Now, there are a whole lot of other issues that surround this fight.  A system that pits a black man against a black man in this battle, the environment of 1966 (year of my birth), and a dozen other intersecting circumstances.  But Ali had a line and none could cross it.  That is powerful.  The moment of greatest regret I see in his life is when he was placed in a no-win situation and had to distance himself from Malcolm X.

                I have learned wisdom from his life.  The choices he made, in religion, in his career, in his life, I find myself looking them as battlefield choices in the war behind the civil rights movement of the 1960’s.  And it may be politically incorrect to speak in ‘violent’ vocabulary now, but we are not yet in a place where we can all sit down and have a beer together to work things out.

                If white privilege can get away with making a token gesture to satisfy and appease those we have privilege over, we will.  But our souls are in peril until the day that we break that cycle and see the true worth of all humanity.

Rev. Peter Hofstra

The Sign Said: “Systemic Racism is Killing Us. Am I Next?” BLM Rally 2

Part 2 of the BLM Rally.

The speeches were good, but the signs spoke to me (as you can see in the first post in this series).  The title of this piece is the first from that list: “Systemic Racism is Killing Us  Am I Next?”  Understanding the sign is straight forward.  Racism is systemic in America.  That is what led to the killing of George Floyd.  There is not space in a blog post, nor even in a textbook, to address how complete that truth is.  This is another answer to why Black Lives Matter over and against why every lives matter.  Systemic Racism is killing blacks, not everyone.  It is a singling out of one group of people among all people that is endemic in this nation.  But then the sign gets deeply personal.  Shall we look into the face of the young African American woman who was carrying the sign and personify what it asks.  Is She Next?

As a privileged white, it is not too difficult to blow off the first part of that message.  Dismiss ‘systemic racism is killing us’ as rhetoric or hyperbole.  The second part is a little harder, especially if there is a face to tie to the message.  We must shut down our empathy to blow off that part. 

But here is what this sign did for me.  It pierced through the abstract of ‘white privilege’ (and abstracting ‘white privilege’ is an excellent way of denying white privilege) and made me see one place where white privilege was active in my heart.

So let me confess that the first reaction I had to the sign was a gut wrench reaction to blow it off.  It made me feel uncomfortable (which means, for me, that the truth was gnawing on my denial).  If I were a blowhard white supremacist, I would probably embrace my ignorance.  But I am not.  I am a white liberal, self-identifying with an open mind and open heart in a poor attempt to be like Jesus.  But there was knee jerk disbelief that came spitting out of some deep place of my soul.  It is a racist streak wrapped up in a liberal utopian attitude.

What?  Well, America is a good place.  Yah, we had slavery, but the Good Guys won the Civil War.  We lost the Peace, but that was corrected a century later.  Justice was triumphant in the Civil Rights Movement.  Sure, racism is still there, but it is more like the Xtreme Sports in our freedom of speech.  Reaching into the past, the utopian word ‘colorblind’ comes bubbling to the surface.  America’s eyes have gone colorblind, we no longer see the color of skin, so is violence due to skin color really a thing?  Maybe in isolated cases…because we liberals are utopian and not everyone has gotten to our enlightenment quite yet.

Liberal Utopianism.  Ignorant racism.

The concrete expression of my white privilege was the assumption that we have grown into what Thomas Jefferson wrote, that “all men (and I use ‘men’ with the old fashioned ‘inclusive’ meaning) are created equal”.  But the reality is that all people are sure as hell not treated as equal.  From a place of white privilege, my espoused blindness to color allowed me to deny the reality of the systemic racism that systematically snuffs out black lives in the nation that I love.

But what does it say about the power of privilege when it takes the application of classical empathy, ‘walking in another person’s shoes’, walking in the shoes of a person who lives in the daily reality that a wrong moment or a bad set of circumstances with law enforcement or a white crazed on the drug of ‘supremacy’ can bring their death?

Let me tell you about some real privilege I have received from the Black Lives Movement.  African American friends have shared stories of their experiences that are summed up in this sign.  We are in a time when things are changing enough to create the safe spaces where these stories can be told to whites.  If only we whites can truly see through our privilege to the reality of our nation, so we can undo the system of racism that holds sway.

Rev. Peter Hofstra

The Metuchen BLM Rally, June 13, 2020 A First Response

When it was time to protest, we protested.  But when it was time to listen, I tried to chronicle the messages that were present that day.  I did not get them all, to my chagrin, but these are many of the signs that spoke at the Black Lives Matter rally in Metuchen, NJ  on June 13, 2020.

Systemic Racism is Killing Us.  Am I Next?

Black lives don’t just Matter  Black Lives Inspire.  Black Lives Spread Wisdom

Complacency=Violence

Silence is Violence

Enough is Enough

No Justice, No Peace

Say Their Names

Black Lives Matter

I Believe Black Lives Matter

Make Calls.  Write Letters for Change.  Ask Me How

Matter Is The Minimum

End White Privilege

What We Want is Justice.

Smash Racism.  Injustice Anywhere is A Threat to Justice Everywhere.

None of Us Can Be Silent

If I Hid Black Americans in My Uterus, Would Their Lives Finally Matter?

Let All Be Judged by the Content of their Character

We See You.  We Hear You.  We Stand With You.

BLM: With a list of over thirty names of those who have died

The most oft-repeated counter-sign to “Black Lives Matter” that I have seen is “All Lives Matter”.  As a tactic of counter-protest, it is rather effective.  At the very least, it dilutes the message, submerging Black Lives into the sum total of the value of human life.  At the worst, it presumes to set up a contrast.  It becomes an ‘either/or’ proposition, ‘black lives’ versus ‘all lives’.  Because there is a protest and a counter-protest, each with their own signs, the unspoken message is “pick one”.

 Several speakers at the rally addressed this concern, “all lives” versus “black lives”.  They were very straight forward in their response.  OF COURSE ALL LIVES MATTER!  What then is the connection between the two?

We were in MLK Park for the rally, a fitting location, and a sign with his words explains things most succinctly.  “Injustice Anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”  There were two versions of that sign at the rally that I saw.  One laid this out as a quote alongside a picture of the Great Man.  The other began with “Smash Racism”; which is listed above.

Yes, all lives matter.  But what I am coming to understand is that the injustice of black lives shortened far too soon by encounters with law enforcement in the present media arc, and the history of impunity where black lives were snuffed out in the domination of white supremacy, what I am coming to understand that, in the light of this violence and misery, until we TRULY understand that black lives matter, all lives are at risk.

So don't be fooled.  Until black lives receive justice, all lives are tainted by injustice.

Rev. Peter Hofstra