I speak to you in
the name of Jesus, who protested injustice, was executed by the state, and
continues to rise up. Amen.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
These last words
of George Floyd, like those of Eric Garner before him, serve as an indictment
of white America’s refusal to perceive reality.
As that great American prophet, James Baldwin, pointed out some sixty
years ago,
People
who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone
who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is
dead turns himself into a monster. (Baldwin, The Fire Next Time)
We are living
through the death of white innocence.
For more than 400 years, white Americans have looted black bodies –
stealing their labor, their health, their safety, and their lives – and have
pretended to be innocent. We have
collectively denied the reality of a racist society and its victims, and now we
are surprised at the destruction of our social fabric unleashed by that
“innocence.” 400 years of chattel
slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, “separate but equal,” the “War on Drugs,” mass
incarceration and criminalization, discrimination, and brutality and, still, we
pretend that we are innocent.
“I am not
racist!”
“How could this
happen?”
“We just need to
get rid of the bad apples in the police department.”
“My family didn’t
own slaves! I haven’t benefitted from
slavery!”
“All lives matter.”
These are among the
protestations of innocence that we hear.
They seek to obscure the truth of racism and protect the fragile
feelings of white people. Let’s take
“All lives matter” as an example. It is
patently false that “all lives matter” in the United States of America. Historically, we have very precisely calculated
the value of human lives: people of
African descent counted as three-fifths of a person; not quite fully
human. The coronavirus pandemic belies
the claim that “all lives matter,” revealing the ongoing and cumulative racial disparities
in access to basic health and safety. Clearly,
some lives matter more than others; some, not at all.
We cannot watch
Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling placidly with his knee on George Floyd’s neck,
with Officers Thomas Lane and J. Alexander Kueng pressing on his chest and
legs, pushing the breath out of his body, while Officer Tou Thao diligently
ensures that no bystanders interfere with this public lynching, and pretend
that “all lives matter.” The history of
state sanctioned terrorism against black lives exposes this lie over and over
again. “White innocence” seeks to divert
our attention from the truth.
Even as police
chiefs and police officers unions issue statements condemning these officers’
behavior, they do not actually call for their arrest and prosecution. Statements such as these allow police
officers to distance themselves from the “bad apples,” while preserving the
racist structures that produce and abet them, and resisting genuine
accountability. When you have a system
that protects the “bad apples,” then the whole system is rotten – to its core. This is the truth that “all lives matter”
elides.
“I’m not racist,”
Amy Cooper has assured us. Yet, watch
her encounter with Christian Cooper (no relation) in Central Park carefully. Observe how readily she resorts to the basest
calumny when a black man politely asks her to leash her dog in conformity with
park rules. Offended at the temerity of
a black man making an equal claim on the safety of a public space, she
immediately threatens to call the police and tell them that an African-American
man is threatening her life.
Ms. Cooper plays
on the racist trope of black men as sexual predators; an old canard that white
women have used to reinforce their privilege against countless black men, whose
bodies were hung from trees by lynch mobs.
She knows that in the absence of a lynch mob, the police will do nicely;
if not to lynch Christian Cooper, at least to keep him in his place. Ms. Cooper has internalized fully how racist
social structures work. And she is fully
prepared to deploy the full force of their power. “I am not a racist.” She just plays one on social media.
Racism is not who
we are, it is what we do – and allow to be done in our name. All white people face the same temptation to
wield our privilege to our advantage.
We’ve all done it. It takes
considerable discipline and self-awareness to resist this temptation. Privilege happens, its conditions set in
place before we were born. It is our
patrimony, accumulated from the looting of black lives and passed down to
us. This is the reality in which we are
living. The façade of white innocence is
wearing thin.
We are now
beginning, belatedly, to realize that James Baldwin’s acute analysis was
correct. Baldwin writes that
. . . this is the crime of which I
accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor
history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying
hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.
One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical
concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been
best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is
not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of
devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the
crime. (Baldwin, The Fire Next Time)
We should welcome the death of white innocence. Only by
acknowledging the truth of the crime of racism, and the white privilege that
obtains from it, do we become free to affirm that black lives matter and
empowered for the work of antiracism. Those
of us formed by Christian traditions know this.
We just celebrated the feast of Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit,
the Spirit of Truth which Jesus told us would set us free.[1] Jesus told his disciples that when they
received the Spirit they would be empowered to be his witnesses, beginning in
Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.[2] What is it that the disciples witnessed?
They witnessed a lynch mob sanctioning the state sponsored murder
of an innocent man. They witnessed to
the injustice of empire and the innocence of its victims. Jesus was a brown man from a marginalized
social group living under occupation. He
resisted the evil of the system which fostered the oppression of his people,
and died in solidarity with all victims of evil. His disciples also witnessed to his
resurrection: his continuing life with
them in the movement for justice that he empowers through his Spirit.
They began in Jerusalem, the very place in which Jesus was lynched
outside the gate of the city. They
gathered a community of repentant sinners and innocent victims who together
became witnesses to the truth. They
witnessed to the power of reconciliation grounded in truth-telling to overcome
ancient injustices between Jew and Samaritan, Jew and Gentile, slave and free,
rich and poor, women and men. The power
of that witness has now spread to every part of the earth.
The gift of the Holy Spirit, the spirit of Jesus, is the power to
perceive the truth and call out the reality of injustice. It is also the power to create an alternative
community – a beloved community – in which former enemies come together as
witnesses to the truth. We see this
power at work across our nation today, as millions of people, especially young
people of all backgrounds, rise up together to fearlessly resist racist
oppression and make no peace with creeping martial law. By this truth, we become free to live in an
entirely new way, unafraid of the coercive power of death that unjust regimes use
to perpetuate injustice.
We, who are white, are not innocent. The
Church is not innocent. St. John’s
Episcopal Church, “the church of presidents” in Washington, D.C. and the
backdrop for Donald Trump’s most recent blasphemy, was founded by wealthy
plantation owners, built on slave labor.
We are not innocent. But we can be free.
We can acknowledge the reality of racism and witness to the power of
love to create God-breathed community. We
can engage antiracist work, affirming the worth of black lives; the
intelligence of black minds; the beauty of black bodies; the creativity of
black cultures; and the resilience of black communities.
There is much work to do to dismantle the racism that we have
internalized. Antiracism begins as a
contemplative practice of observing and renouncing our own racist thoughts and
reactions. It opens us to building real
relationships with people of color; the kind of solidarity that makes us willing
to put our life on the line for them. It
requires us to organize for justice, building institutions and implementing
policies that promote equality and dignity.
Antiracism is repentance, reparations and reconciliation. Too often, white people want to jump over
the first two to embrace the third. That
is cheap grace. There can be no racial
reconciliation in America without the death of white innocence and collective
amendment of life.
The confessing church, the church that witnesses to the truth,
knows how to move from the death of innocence through resistance to evil, and
on to new life. Echoing James Baldwin, the confessing church poses this
question to white America today: Will we
die to our innocence and choose life? Or
will we protest our innocence and become a monster?
Hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.
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