“Race in America”

“Race in America”  August 20, 2017  

Roger Ray, pastor  click here to see the video

HuffPost 3-4-17  Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and the driving force behind the administration’s controversial ban on travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, has a favorite metaphor he uses to describe the largest refugee crisis in human history.

“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.

“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 2016. “It’s a global issue today — this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”

“It’s not a migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”

“When we first started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. ... I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”

Bannon has agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart — which he called a “platform for the alt-right,” the online movement of white nationalists — he made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim news a focus.

But the top Trump aide’s repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s never found a wider audience. There’s a good reason for that: It’s breathtakingly racist.

“[This book is] racist in the literal sense of the term. It uses race as the main characterization of characters,” said Cécile Alduy, professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on the contemporary French far right. “It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immigrants that wash ashore like the plague.”

The book, she said, “reframes everything as the fight to death between races.”

My daughter is a relatively fair skinned Korean, which, unfortunately, gave my subtly racist father a little reason to bargain for hope.

When she was a baby and we were watching her sleep, Dad said, “I believe there’s a lot of white blood in her.” I knew that he was looking for a way to give himself permission to love his newest grandchild but I had to burst his bubble and let him know that she was 100% Asian and she wasn’t going to change. If he was going to love her, he had to change.

28 years later, I can tell you, even though she does not have a cleft chin or blue eyes,

she is a case study of nurture over nature: that arrogant, smart-mouthed, condescending little Asian rebel is indisputably my daughter!

Still, to be fair, my father was not the worst racist in rural Kentucky. More often than not, he showed at least come empathy for anyone who was poor but he was a product of his environment and there were some real demons in those parts of the woods.

Journalists are not suppose to create news so that they can report on it and in the same way, I guess that it really isn’t cricket for a preacher to create an incident that can be used as a sermon illustration, though that is exactly what I have done this week. I can claim a certain level of innocence in that I didn’t mean to throw a rock at a hornets’ nest but since I did, you get to hear about it.

In light of all of the protests and violence sparked by the removal of Confederate memorials in southern cities, I wrote to one of our listeners in my hometown, Glasgow, KY, to inquire as to the fate of the memorial to “our Confederate dead”

 that had been on our courthouse lawn when I was growing up there. I was sincerely surprised to learn that it is still there.

So, I did something I have never done before. I wrote a letter to the editor of the Glasgow Daily Times. I reminded them that our little town elected the first black mayor in Kentucky and the second of any southern state in 1968 and that in spite of the violence in other cities, we integrated our schools without incident.

I appealed to them to move the Confederate memorial to the cemetery built by a Confederate earthen fort where, in fact, my parents are now laid to rest. And, I suggested that they do this as a municipal decision rather than waiting for the embarrassment of having it pulled down in a riot.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but other than a couple of Glasgow residents who sent me private messages of appreciation, a couple of hundred people in that small town rose up tell me to mind my own business, and to insist that the statue was about history and not about racism. One lady called me to conduct an exorcism over the phone.

Several others tried to tell me how to be a pastor and a few, not to subtly, impugned my intelligence. They did so with such bad grammar and so many misspellings that it kept Mark Rowland busy for a couple of days trying to correct them all.

I’m indebted to my friend, Dan Goodwin, for pointing out that there are no historical statues in public places in Germany of Adolph Hitler. So, I shared with my hometown critics these observations:

A monument on government property is not there for historical purposes. It is there to show honor. Note that Germany does not have any public statues of Hitler, even though Hitler was historically important. What he represented was extreme violence against Jews, gays, the disabled, and Gypsies. So they don't "honor" him though they certainly remember him. Similarly, we do not have statues of King George in our public places.

Our war for Independence is certainly important to our history but we do not honor the head of the state we were fighting against.

The Confederacy declared war on the USA, specifically to, as William Thompson, the designer of the Confederate flag, wrote at the time: As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race.

For those of you who are concerned about forgetting our history, I have a some good news for you in a single word: books. There is a library in Glasgow, I used to go there every week. You will find many examples of books there. 

Further, as Confederate monuments are concerned; most were erected long after the war. The one in Glasgow went up in 1905, forty years after the end of the Civil War. At that point, it was clearly a secessionist sympathizing tip of the hat to the KKK more than it was mourning the deaths of those who died two generations before. Most of the monuments in the news these days were erected in direct response to the Civil Rights movement and school desegregation decisions from the SCOTUS. The whole devotion to the Confederate flag came into existence as a white backlash against the Civil Rights movement.

Now, let me be clear about this, I would not typically give a lot of time and energy to symbols but I have to admit that they have grown in importance in my mind since they appear to function something like the kitchen light in a roach infested apartment.

When you suggest removing tributes to traitors out of places of honor, you find out how much sympathy there is for traitors in a community.

These people are not history buffs, they are people who harbor racist sentiments that even they may not have been aware of until the statues became a matter of controversy. My dad didn’t articulate racist feelings about Asians until one became his granddaughter.

Most of us who were gathered in the now demolished Ramada Convention center that Tuesday night in November of 2008 to celebrate the election of Barack Obama had tears in our eyes because we really believed that racism in America was virtually over.

We were wrong…. Obama was the ultimate kitchen light in a roach infested apartment. Electing our first black president did not herald the end of racism in our nation but rather it revealed how strong racism still is.

No matter how much of the opposition to Obama was portrayed as partisan politics, such defensive claims could hardly mask what it really was. Racism has a peculiar stench that is hard to miss.

Progressives have been ebullient this weekend about the departure of the Brietbart racist ideologue, Steve Bannon, from the White House staff.

As you can easily see from our wisdom lesson today, taken from the Huffington Post, Bannon was no casual college fraternity Nazi. He was a devoted reader, writer, and promoter of anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-black racist propaganda. From one 60 something Harvard educated white guy to another, let me just say that Steve Bannon represented the lowest rung of the moral ladder in our nation and you need not hold your breath waiting to see a statue of him being erected at Harvard or even any sewage treatment plant anywhere in our nation.

Still, I believe it would be foolish to assume that his departure amounts to a re-baptism of Donald Trump’s conscience. Long before Trump ever met Bannon, his father was arrested at a KKK rally.

Trump spent nearly $100,000 on newspaper ads calling for the execution of the Central Park Five

and reiterated his desire to see these young men of color executed even after DNA evidence had proven them to be innocent of their previous rape convictions.

Trump was in trouble years ago for discriminatory housing practices, and, of course, no one can forget that Trump literally entered politics with his outrageous claims that Obama was not a legitimate president because he was born outside of the United States.

Of course, John McCain was born in Panama 30 years earlier and no one ever doubted his citizenship because, if you are born to an American citizen, you are a natural born American citizen… everyone knows that, except if you are a head to toe racist who cannot accept that any black man can legitimately be the President of the United States.

Steve Bannon was not infecting Donald Trump with racism. He was writing racist ideology into policy and speeches but it wasn’t like Trump needed to be converted to the cause. Trump ran on racism and prejudice. His very first campaign message was a racist screed against Mexicans and Muslims and he rode that apocalyptic horse into the White House.

It is a horrible and shameful thing that an unthinking racist, plagued by malignant inferiority complex has managed to become the President of the United States but as a pastor I have to point out that even though he lost the majority vote, he did get many millions of votes, and even after all of this horrifying racist stuff has come out of the oval office, more than 60% of Republicans still support him.

Now, I realize that there are many Republican elected officials who are also shocked by his evident racism but they are trying to overlook that flaw because they hope that they can use him to get tax cuts for the super wealthy and to take health care away from 20 million poor and middle class Americans… and that is their best claim to a moral high ground.

But I cannot escape the probability that just as the election of Barack Obama revealed the hidden racist strains in America, the election of Donald Trump was a triumph of resurgent racism in America. Even though those who voted for Trump do not want to wear that mantle, the apparent, at least unconscious belief, is that a racist President gives some legitimacy to the racist inclinations buried deep within those who voted for him.

We see the worst of it from those who now participate in Nazi rallies but the root of it goes deep into the hearts of those who would shudder at the suggestion that they voted for him because he is a racist.

Still, I will say this: Those who try to defend themselves by insisting that they are not racist even when they very plainly are have this going for them… they don’t want to be racists.

Their denial betrays their awareness that their racism is something they are ashamed of and do not want to own and that is a hopeful thing. Here is my pastoral invitation, rather than denying your racism, repent of it. Don’t pretend you really believed the absurd claims that Trump was going to bring back coal jobs and protect you from terrorism. Acknowledge that his racist rhetoric called out to your id, he appealed to the fear in your brain stem, and you gave vent to your lower nature.

If you don’t want to be a racist, then start trying to seriously root it out of yourself and out of our nation. President Obama was never famous for his use of Twitter but this week one of his tweets became the most popular in the history of Twitter when he quoted Nelson Mandela, who said,

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

My friends, if love is our religion, I gotta tell you that it looks like the fields are ripe for an evangelism harvest…. We have a whole lot of converting work to do.

“Getting the Healthcare We Want”   August 6, 2017

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO 

Roger Ray, pastor          Noam Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream, p. 139

“…Gilens took about 1,700 policy decisions, and compared them with public attitudes, and closely correlated with corporate interests. Elsewhere he showed that about 70 percent of the population has no influence on policy – they might as well be in some other country. And as you go up the income and wealth level, the impact on public policy is greater – the rich essentially get what they want.”

      

Some of our listeners in Great Britain have lately been asking me to come back for another lecture tour. Our friend in the Progressive movement in the U.K., John Churcher, has been raising the same issue with me. I am flattered to be asked and I would love to go but there is a problem.

When I went in 2015, I had just published Progressive Faith and Practice which is a book about religion. I had a briefcase full of lectures that were as relevant in England as they were here. But my last book, Progressive Conversations, was a compilation of my ethics columns printed in the Springfield News-Leader. The topics addressed in those 100 essays were almost exclusively American problems. And the book we are working on now, America Will be Great When, will be even more specifically American.

Great Britain doesn’t have over-crowded prisons, a death penalty, or a radical rejection of immigrants. Europe is suffering from the income gap that is killing off the middle class in America. Iceland put corrupt bankers in prison rather than bailing them out and allowing them to reward themselves for wrecking the world’s economy with multi-million dollar bonuses. No other western democracy has anything like the gun problem that we have in the USA.  And, every western democracy is done with viewing illness as a business opportunity.

Noam Chomsky’s most recent book speaks at length about the loss of democracy in America as capitalist interests continue to shift power away from the people in favor of corporations. The length and expense of our political campaigns turns the real power of government over to those who can make the largest contributions.

We do have a problem with gullible voters being persuaded to vote against their own best interests but we have a more frightening reality of a basic erosion of democracy that just allows moneyed interests to make decisions that serve themselves without even consulting voters.

There are three times as many pharmaceutical lobbyists on Capital Hill as there are members of Congress and the Senate. They ghost write ridiculous laws that prevent Medicare from being able to negotiate for better drug prices in spite of the fact that the US government is the largest single customer that big pharma has. You can buy American made pharmaceuticals in Canada or Mexico for a fraction of what we pay in the U.S. because their governments are not operated by corporations.

I appreciate our international listeners sticking with us but you can almost feel them gloating a bit. As much as you can find people who complain about their national health services in the U.K. or Canada, you have never seen any nation anywhere in the world that had universal healthcare that decided to scrap it and go to an insane system like ours with for profit insurance companies, hospitals, private practices, and inflated prescription drug prices.

Say what you will about the weaknesses or rationing of services elsewhere, no one looks at America and says, “We should do what they are doing.”

Our Healthcare industry is still nervously balanced on a precipice with a Congress that has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act more than 60 times and is now impotently wanting to actually repeal it now that they are indisputably in power but they just can’t agree on how deep to shove the knife into the heart of their voters.

We spend more on our healthcare in the USA than any other country and yet we leave millions out of the system entirely and a whole lot of us who are in it get very poor care and inexcusably bad outcomes. Conservatives publicly say that they don’t want the government in healthcare but they know, or at least they should know, that the government already pays for more than half of all of the healthcare in the country. Of course, most medical expenses occur near the end of life but when you add Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration together, you already have more than half of the country covered.

The plea for universal healthcare is not some impossible dream that is unattainable. The system is already in place and a mere change in the age requirements would cut our out of pocket healthcare expenses immediately. A whole lot of insurance executives would have to learn to live without billions in bonuses but we could do a canned food drive to keep them from starving in their beach home mansions.

As Bernie Sanders has says, the age of 65 for Medicare eligibility was not handed down from God. We could even stage it in over a period of a few years to give the system time to wean itself off its addiction to the money in your bank account.

A few months ago, Donald Trump was making excuses for why he had not been able to repeal and replace Obamacare on his first day in office as he had repeatedly promised to do. He said, “Who knew that healthcare was so complicated?” Well, in a way we all knew that but it is only complicated if you insist on protecting the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Once you can embrace the idea that has already been institutionalized in every other western democracy that illness is a problem to be solved and not an opportunity to exploit a person in the most vulnerable moment to clean out their bank account.

Look guys, I know that I often sound more like a political candidate giving a stump speech than I do a pastor delivering a sermon… these are dark days when you have to turn to the church to find a rational perspective on economics and public policy but that is where we live these days. But I do want to say a pastoral word to you today:

The oldest of the gospels in the New Testament is Mark. Mark starts off like a shot, with no flowery poetry and no embarrassing birth myths. Mark tells us that Jesus was baptized, called some disciples, and went straight to a synagogue to preach and the first thing he encountered, his first day to go to a church, was a demon.

I get that this is an ancient document with some seriously out of date assumptions but if we just let Mark tell his story, Jesus goes to this community church and a demon starts shouting. When I first seriously read that passage when I was in seminary, I wondered, how long had that demon been there before Jesus showed up? How many years had that demon been comfortably in attendance at worship services and no one ever noticed that it was a demon?

Folks, we get comfortable with the evil we know. I grew up in the segregated south. Monday through Friday, I went to a school with all white kids and it never even dawned on me that there was another school for black kids in my home town. I had never seen it. It was never mentioned. It was off in some neighborhood where we never went and I didn’t know anything about it.

I worked on the surrounding farm with black kids. I knew their names and so far as I knew, we were friends. It just never occurred to me that they were not in my school, not in my barber shop, and certainly not in my Sunday School classes. It was not until schools were integrated by the force of the Supreme Court that I had even known about the demon I had accepted for so many years.

You can say the same thing about indentured servanthood, slavery, child labor, human trafficking, and a host of other truly evil aspects of society. We live with homelessness, we accept that millions are uninsured, we let young lives go to waste for want of education because their parents can’t pay for it, and we are not evil people.

We never wanted Walmart to sell slave produced goods. We didn’t want our shoes to be made by children in S. Korea or our iPhones to be made by slaves in China. But we do want everyday discount prices, cheap shoes, and really neat new technology. We have just always lived in a world full of demons and we come to accept that they are part of the landscape. We tune out those who want to change the world because the world just is what it has always been.

The point of writing this book for thinking Americans and to make the rest of the world feel smug and self-righteous….the reason why I will be trying to get myself booked into as many pulpits around the country as I can over the next few months… if I may say it this way… is to cast out demons… and if not to cast them out, to at least reveal them for what they are.

Germany doesn’t have tuition free education because they are better people than we are. Brits don’t have universal health care because they are more compassionate than we are. The Nordic states do not have sane drug laws and restorative justice systems because they are more spiritual than we are. They just woke up to their demons before we did and now it is time for America to turn on the lights, open our eyes, and wake up.