Encountering the Enemy

encountering the enemy

illustration by Seth T. Hayne for CAPC Magazine

I wrote this piece awhile back, but today my feature article for Christ and Pop Culture Magazine–on nurturing peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through film–has been made available  for free.

At a moment in history where more people around the world have been displaced by violent conflict than ever before, now is the time to ask ourselves hard questions about our role in cultivating conflict or peace. Now is the time to question the narratives we tell ourselves about war, vengeance, “redemptive” violence, and enemies. The same ignorance and fear that generates war in the Middle East and Africa and pushes refugees to the shores of Europe and North America also plays out in our own society as alienation between people of different races or faiths, and as destructive relationships between individual people. Forgiveness of others’ sin, and repentance for our own, are both central to the Christian faith. So for those of us who seek to be shaped by the life of Jesus, enemy love and reconciliation should be central to our understanding of our role in the world.

As a Jew, Reena Lazar has worked towards reconciliation in Israel/Palestine by finding creative ways to bring Israeli and Palestinian youth face-to-face with “the enemy” (each other). Yet the wisdom she has accumulated in the process is applicable far beyond the scope of this particular geopolitical conflict.  Her work has much to teach us about building bridges instead of walls, regardless of the role or the part of the world in which we find ourselves. Head on over to Christ and Pop Culture to read the article.

What Jesus Can Teach Us About Confronting Racism in Ourselves

Racism is obvious to us in hateful individuals who may utter racial slurs or openly support groups like the KKK. Unless we are willing to look more closely, racism is less obvious when embedded in the day-to-day operations of the criminal justice system, or when subtly continuing to shape the socioeconomic landscape of our country. But the most difficult place to see and acknowledge racism is likely within ourselves. Today I’ve written an article for Sojourners about what we can learn from Jesus on that difficult path of self-exploration. Strange as it may sound, even the Son of God had to conquer ingrained prejudice. Here’s an excerpt:

Many whites balk at the suggestion that their views and assumptions might be racist because they know themselves to be moral people who live decent lives and maybe even have some black friends. They certainly don’t hate anybody, and they aren’t supporters of the Ku Klux Klan. Because they understand racism on an individual rather than systemic level, it seems impossible to hold together an image of oneself that contains both “good person” and “racist.”

Yet individual guilt and hatred often have little to do with white America’s unwitting participation in the institutional racism of our society. We can’t avoid bearing a resemblance, warts and all, to the culture that raises us… (read the rest) 

This is the challenging, humbling work of repentance. If we desire to see the Kingdom come in the world, we must first be willing to clear the way for it to break into our own souls.

what Jesus can teach us about confronting racism in ourselves

Things that happened while I was gone

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Over the weekend, Andy and I celebrated our five year wedding anniversary. We were out in the woods on a small island off the coast of BC, building small cabins that will serve as “hermitages” for people on silent retreat who need a place for deep solitude and prayer. It felt good to do some manual labor, to see tangible progress as we worked, and to feel good and tired by the end of the day, in a sore-muscle rather than a screenburned-eyes or overwrought-mind sort of way. Our motley construction crew was made up of people from all over the place, some in their teens and some in their fifties, and it was fun hanging out with people of all ages—that doesn’t happen very often outside of family reunions, and intergenerational friendship is one of the things Andy and I had enjoyed so much about living in India. After spending a long Saturday on the work site, we enjoyed a brisk swim at an isolated beach. There were Canadian geese sitting on the water around us, so it definitely stretched my idea of what summer at the beach looks like!

Apparently while we were hammering away in the woods and sleeping in rustic cabins without electricity and running water, a lot was happening back in civilization, and particularly in the country of my birth.

There was the courageous act of protest by a brave woman named Bree Newsome, who scaled the flag pole in front of the state capitol building in South Carolina to take down the symbol of white supremacy and racial violence that had flown over the seat of the state government there for more than a hundred and fifty years. Civil disobedience is intended to show the moral absurdity of laws through breaking them and willingly suffering the consequences of one’s actions. Bree’s action did exactly that: South Carolina police (including a black officer) were forced to arrest a peaceful black woman, who quoted scripture aloud as they handcuffed her, for the “crime” of removing a banner under which black Americans have been enslaved, raped, murdered, beaten, intimidated, and systematically oppressed for over a century. No scene could have more pointedly demonstrated the righteousness of her cause: the law was against her, but justice was certainly on her side. She now faces up to 3 years in prison and a fine of up to $5000 for her heroic act. All of us who follow Jesus can learn from this woman’s sacrificial example.

Also over the weekend, President Obama delivered a eulogy for Clementa Pinkney, a black pastor who was among the slain in Charleston on June 17. I don’t know what opinion you hold of Obama as a person, or a politician—I can’t think of him without remembering the countless drone attacks he has authorized against innocent civilians in the Middle East—but his eulogy for Pinkney is one of the best sermons I have ever heard, and is probably THE most powerful speech I have ever heard from a head of state. Perhaps the fact that, as President, he has made important public decisions with which nearly every one of us has disagreed at some point or another makes him exactly the kind of flawed, imperfect human being who can speak with authority about grace. Seriously, if you haven’t yet listened to the speech, please, please do. It is a heartfelt lament of the ways that we have deeply wounded one another in America, an inspiring reminder of the resilience and love that have continued to grow even in the midst of violence and oppression, and an eloquent call for us to move forward together as a nation towards forgiveness and justice, extending God’s grace to one another in every facet of our lives.

“Justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other,” he remarks at one point. “My liberty depends on you being free, too.” One can hear in these words the echoes of both Jesus’ call to love our enemies, recognizing our neighbor-hood with them, and MLK Jr.’s assertion that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

The other big national news of the weekend was the legalization of same-sex marriage across the United States. The reactions of many American Christians have already become an embarrassing adventure in missing the point, but I still hold out hope that we as a Church will be able to let go of our fearful siege mentality and recognize this opportunity to love and extend grace to people who may not share our sexual orientation or our theology. I’ve always been confused by the political kerfuffle over trying to legislate a Christian lifestyle into the laws of the state, since God has never called the Church to control the government. We have been given the task of modeling the Kingdom in our own lives, creating a community that images God’s hospitality and love, and inviting others into freely-chosen, loving relationship with God.

Using legal means to force non-Christians into choices and behaviors that Christians have specifically chosen as disciples of Christ seems not only pointless, but controlling and counterproductive to our true mission in the world. If we send the message to the people around us that we are more concerned about policing their sex lives than about caring for them as people, then we’ve not just lost the “culture wars”—we’ve lost the respect and trust that would have laid the foundations for any relationship with people outside the church to grow. We’ve lost our credibility as God’s ambassadors of love. We’ve lost our purpose as a community.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be involved in wider culture—we certainly should. But even in the realm of sex and relationships, why not concern ourselves with the destructive forces of pornography, trafficking, sexual abuse, and domestic violence that are destroying vulnerable individuals and families and marriages? Which will give a clearer picture of God: a Christian reacting with fear-mongering and angry statements in protest of same-sex marriage, or that same Christian instead demonstrating a mature ability to be gracious with people who disagree with them, whose lives and choices are different from his own? Some Christians have compared homosexuals with Hitler, referred to them as “Gaystapo,” or likened the court’s ruling to the 9/11 Terrorist attacks. Regardless of what we believe about homosexuality, angry antics like these should offend our consciences as Christians. Would Jesus be stirring up fear and hatred at a time like this? Or would he be inviting a same-sex couple over for dinner to hear their story and get to know them as people, refusing to reduce the complex beauty of their humanity down to a single political issue or life decision? I get the sense that he’s probably prompting us to do that right now.

supreme court ruling on same sex marriage

The Charleston Church Shooting Is Nothing New

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photo credit: nola.com

Two days ago, a young white man gunned down nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

When confronted with such a brutal, violent act, it is tempting to dismiss the killer as an anomaly—mentally ill or emotionally disturbed, perhaps—instead of recognizing the roots of his behavior in the shared history, culture, and institutions of our society. But viewing these murders as an isolated incident obscures their connection to a larger pattern of racial violence that is as old as the United States of America.

I recently read the memoir of a lawyer named Bryan Stevenson who spent years working to free innocent men on death row, and advocating for children and individuals with mental illness or intellectual disabilities who are serving life sentences or awaiting execution. His book Just Mercy is a heartbreaking look at mass incarceration and extreme punishment in America, and his decades of personal involvement in the criminal justice system reveal the blatant influence of race in determining how Americans are treated by police, courts of law, and prison authorities.

Stevenson illuminates the concrete effects of racism on the lives of black Americans by explaining “four institutions in American history that have shaped our approach to race and justice”:

  1. Slavery. African Americans were considered property rather than human beings with rights.
  1. The “Reign of Terror” between Reconstruction and World War II. After 9/11, it was common to hear news anchors and politicians alike referring to this attack as the first time Americans had experienced terrorism within our own country. But as Stevenson explains, the fear of violence was nothing new for African Americans who grew up in the South between the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement. As one man told him, “We grew up with terrorism all the time. The police, the Klan, anybody who was white could terrorize you. We had to worry about bombings and lynchings, racial violence of all kinds.” Stevenson argues that “America’s embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt redirect the violent energies of lynching while assuring white southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price.” Today, the pairing of a black perpetrator with a white victim still results in the death penalty more often than crimes involving a white perpetrator or a black victim.
  1. Segregation and human rights violations under “Jim Crow.” The Supreme Court didn’t strike down laws against interracial marriage until 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, but marriage between whites and blacks remained illegal under the Alabama state constitution until the year 2000 (and even then, 41% of Alabama voters cast their ballots in favor of upholding the ban). In 1945, Stevenson points out, “the Supreme Court upheld a Texas statute that limited the number of black jurors to exactly one per case,” and after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, many southern states continued to exclude African Americans from serving on juries at all.
  1. Mass incarceration today. The United States has the highest rates of incarceration of anywhere in the world, and the vast majority of the 2.3 million people currently in prison are black or brown. People of color are often arrested and sentenced for the kind of nonviolent drug offenses that white teenagers and college students engage in without consequence, and frequent police harassment increases the likelihood of black and Latino teenagers developing criminal records. Stevenson argues (as did Michelle Alexander in her 2010 book, The New Jim Crow) that mass incarceration functions to control and disenfranchise African Americans in much the same way that Jim Crow did in the past. Some states permanently take away the right to vote from anyone with a criminal conviction, which means that there are now several states in which a higher percentage of African American men are barred from voting now than were disenfranchised before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

These institutions stretch from the birth of the American nation down to today, showing that racism is not an imagined problem, a historical phantom long since put to rest, or the extreme ideology of some fringe individuals in society. Racism is embedded in our history, our culture, and our civic institutions. It’s not something that will fade out automatically—it’s a glaring problem that all of us need to confront as a nation and in our own hearts and minds.

Recognizing our fears or ignorance about people who are unlike us does not make us bad or hateful people. If we want to walk in the truth and to love our neighbors well, then we must be willing to acknowledge the ways we subtly buy into untrue assumptions about people of other races, or support policies and institutions which negatively impact their lives. An ongoing process of critical self-reflection is necessary for anyone who wants to live a just and compassionate life, and it is especially important for those of us in the racial majority who have never experienced discrimination.

In the wake of yet another tragedy, I am grieving with the families of the slain. But grieving is not enough. White America has two choices: we can continue to look away from the festering wound of racism in our society, or we can confront our past and our present in order to pursue a different future on the basis of truth and reconciliation.

India is honest

A friend from Australia, visiting India for the second time, remarked that compared to his own country, India is very honest—honest in the sense that when you’re here, you can have no illusions about the injustice and suffering around you. It’s right in your face: income disparity, discrimination, sexism, poverty, disease. Rich and poor meet on the street, where wealthy men in their big SUVs bully and sometimes run over the poor men on bicycles. The rich and poor interact daily in homes, where the wealthy pay a pittance to impoverished servants who cook, clean, and sometimes even raise the children of the wealthy without ever gaining their respect.  The powerful abuse the weak in every arena of life: men harass and rape women, influential families bribe the cops to get away with land grabbing, murder, and everything in between; police and lawyers alike extort poor families for money with threats of their loved ones being indefinitely imprisoned otherwise. People make no secret of their dislike for dark skin and openly discriminate in marriage, the work place, and the community based on skin color. Restaurants and factories openly use child labor to create everything from furniture to motorcycles to potato curry.All of these power dynamics, and all of the suffering that results from it, are disturbing to watch. People’s arrogance, self-importance, prejudice, and blatant disregard for other human beings is infuriatingly obvious in the most routine daily interactions of Indian life. But my Aussie friend is right that there is something refreshing about at least having it out in the open. In our home countries, the child labor that goes into our home furnishings and wardrobe is hidden away in factories on the other side of the world, far away from the air-conditioned malls and classy stores where we actually buy our stuff. The disparity between the wealthiest and poorest members of our society has never been higher, but the spheres of the rich and poor are separate enough to keep them from ever interacting with each other: rich people don’t take the bus, poor people don’t go to private school, and poverty is contained in certain neighborhoods whereas wealth is contained in certain other neighborhoods—usually neighborhoods with gates or at least with a buffer zone of several miles of carefully landscaped distance between them and the nearest depressed area.

And so our prejudices remain intact, but we’re too tactful to voice them most of the time.

We hide them, even from ourselves.

Our politics are perfect, utterly correct, when it comes to language.

At least, usually this is how it is. But then a white police officer shoots a black teenager and then even if you don’t consider the event itself to be indicative of any larger problem, it’s impossible to observe the aftermath of the shooting and deny that our country has a race problem. The underlying fear and alienation that’s been there all along bubbles up to the surface: an entire [black] community rises up, refusing to consent any longer to a well-armed authority structure that has never had their interests at heart. The [white] police respond by declaring war on the community, betraying the deep-seated fear they have harbored all along of these people they consider sub-human; voicing aloud the belief that they are “f***ing animals” who have never deserved the full protection of the law anyway.

I find it ironic that so many people whose conservative leanings would generally lead them to denounce big government, expansion of government power, and any infraction of citizen’s rights have automatically sided with a police officer acting as judge, jury, and executioner of an unarmed teenager in a stunning corruption of the legal system as we know it. Furthermore, they continue to side with heavy-handed state violence against ordinary citizens exercising  their democratic right to protest.

I find it depressing that so many people whose Christianity should generally lead them to feel compassion and to side with the oppressed have instead sided with the oppressor, not only pontificating judgmentally and heartlessly about the character of the victim and how his execution was likely deserved (due to a $50 theft), but also condemning the community’s reaction to this unjust situation instead of calling out the injustice for what it is.

I think the reason for these strange reversals of loyalty in both cases is that the deepest loyalty actually lies along fault lines of race rather than religion or politics. If a white teenager had been killed, and if the protests were happening in a wealthy white suburb, then things would be different. Suspicion and judgment would fall on the murderer and not the murder victim. Sympathy would lie with the grieving family and their community rather than with the state apparatus. If the guns and the tear gas and the armored vehicles were pointed at “us” and not at “them”, then we would be quicker to recognize this as the blatant, evil, violent abuse of power that it is. The killer would be awaiting criminal trial instead of enjoying paid administrative leave from work.

When we look at how quickly this one man’s death has escalated into police firing tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of peaceful protestors from the safety of an armored vehicle, and protestors responding with rocks and now Molotov cocktails and bullets of their own, we realize that this didn’t start with Michael Brown. It didn’t even start with Trayvon Martin, though the blatant miscarriage of justice in that case certainly reinforced the message that the system—police, courts, public opinion—will automatically operate with a racial bias towards protecting and believing whites over blacks. This is part of a legacy of fear, hatred, and separation that is as old as our country, and it is a disease that will continue to plague our society until we decide to face the beast by exploring the dark fears and prejudices in own hearts, even and especially the ones we are not fully aware of. Healing ourselves and our nation will require admitting the ignorance on which so many of our attitudes and ideas are based, because we have been so busy justifying ourselves and defending our establishment to ever truly listen to and engage with the experience of the Other. As a white woman, I don’t believe that most of us white Americans have ever truly acknowledged the race situation in our country. We are too eager to “move on” with history, to sweep the sins of the past under the rug and encourage everyone to simply pretend that there are not still festering wounds and real-life, still-unfolding consequences of everything that has gone on before.

Many people have angrily pointed out the violence of some of the protestors in Ferguson, implying that perhaps Michael Brown had it coming because he was just as violent, or that this behavior demonstrates how  inherently violent the black community is and how their complaints are therefore invalid. It’s true that if demonstrations had remained entirely peaceful, they could have been an even more powerful witness to injustice by throwing the violence of the police into the sharp relief against the defenseless and brave confrontation of unarmed protestors. I am saddened that a few community members have muddied the waters by turning to violence as their expression of grief and anger, because paradoxically it is they—the powerless ones, the ones who have been wronged—who actually hold the power to transform the situation. The right to extend forgiveness and thus break the cycle of evil is theirs and theirs alone.

But don’t think for a moment that the violent actions of a few individuals invalidate the grief and anger of this entire community against injustice. They—and we—should be furious about the slaying of an unarmed black man for no apparent reason. We should remember that it was the systematized, unchallenged violence and disdain of the mostly-white police department over several decades that provoked the current violence in Ferguson.

To quote Paulo Freire, “Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, or unrecognized… It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the ‘rejects of life’… It is not the despised who initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate men, but those who denied that humanity… For the oppressors, however, it is always the oppressed (whom they obviously never call ‘the oppressed’…) who are disaffected, who are ‘violent’, ‘barbaric’, ‘wicked’, or ‘ferocious’ when they react to the violence of the oppressors.” –Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 41

As a white American, I have been disturbed by the fear, suspicion, and anger that many other white people have been expressing on social media over the past several days. I am saddened by the knowledge that Michael Brown’s death, which should be a wake-up call for us to address the root issues of violence and alienation in our society, has instead become an occasion for rallying around the people who are like us. We are becoming more closed, more angry, less willing to listen, less willing to admit our own conscious and unconscious role in creating this broken, sinful, segregated society. Laws have been passed and progress has been made towards equality, but we still have a long way to go in this country if we are seeking racial reconciliation. Legal reform won’t take us the rest of the way, because the violence and separation that remains is within our own hearts and minds, and within our continuing isolation from one another. We continue in our unwillingness to suspend judgment long enough to enter into the experience and perspective of the people who aren’t like us. We’re too afraid of their anger (and perhaps too afraid of our own guilt or the awkwardness of dealing with strong, wounded emotions) to even hear them out.

I grew up in an upper-middle class white suburb, so I had very few black people in my life growing up. In college I had a few black friends and even attended a mostly black church for awhile, but with this limited experience I still cannot claim to know the first thing about what it’s like to be black in America. I have also lived for several years in cross-cultural situations in which I am the racial and cultural minority, but the color of my skin has always worked in my favor, commanding instant interest and respect. If I have ever been stereotyped, it has usually been as someone more qualified, educated, or wealthy than I actually am. I don’t know what it’s like for my skin color to work against me; to automatically trigger suspicion, fear, or disrespect.

If your background is at all similar to mine, then you share my ignorance.  It’s time for us to be honest about what we don’t know, to ask others to teach us, and to be willing to shut up and listen when they do.

As limited human beings with particular sets of experience, we all start off being ignorant of what lies beyond our own immediate field of vision. Taking on our society’s subtle assumptions, stereotypes, and prejudices as children is entirely natural, unavoidable, and doesn’t make us bad people. Moral decision only comes in when we begin to realize our ignorance. Then we have a choice: either remaining as we are, covering our ears, closing our eyes, or talking over others to claim that we already know; or opening our minds and our hearts to others in the humble admission that we do not know, that there are things about which we are wrong. We have the choice to be willing to learn, and to change.

The more tightly we hold onto the belief that we can already see, the more blind we become.