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