Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

 Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Feb. 4, 2018      Dr. Roger L. Ray, pastor

click here to see the video 

“Forgiving and being reconciled to our enemies or our loved ones are not about pretending that things are other than they are. It is not about patting one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth. It could even sometimes make things worse. It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.”
― Desmond Tutu 

              

(start with only the first 20 seconds of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcAhZ5JzYJY&t=92s

David Foster Wallace begins his now famous commencement speech with this wonderful illustration suggesting that if we could talk to fish, we might discover that fish have never given a moment’s thought to water. They live in it, eat and sleep in, reproduce and die in it but something that is entirely pervasive in our environment rarely becomes something that we are aware of at all.

Racism is like that. If White Privilege and Patriarchy is the water you were born in, lived in, went to school in and worked in, it is quite likely that you are blissfully unaware of either White Privilege or Patriarchy. You might argue that persons of color have always known a lot about racism and women have always known a lot about Patriarchy, but it may be just as true that most people who have grown up being repressed and discriminated against may also just accept it all as the water they swim in every day.

When my good friends, Scott and Nicole Fisk, went to see the movie “Hidden Figures” about 3 black women whose math skills led to the first successful manned space launch, Scott looked at Nicole and demanded to know, “Why have I never heard about this before?”

And for those of us who lived through that time in history, the point is rather more pronounced. A story about the advanced math skills of black women was counter to the cultural narrative about the assumed inferiority of both blacks and women so even though it was an important part of history, it never made it into our text books or our newspapers.

And just as a sidebar, let me add this observation: Every time you have heard the media referred to as the “liberal media” or schools have been accused of having a liberal bias, let me just go on the record right now as calling BS on that propaganda. The media and school text book publishers are decidedly on the white/male/pro-corporate/pro-war bandwagon and any exception to that prejudice is rare and usually accidental. Patriarchy and racism is just the water we swim in.

A few months ago, David Ketchum observed in our Sunday morning class that all of the books we had read together had been written by white people. That was not a consciously intentional prejudice, but it is the way that it has worked out. The books that have come to our attention have been authored by white people. Chris Crass writes in his wonderful collection of essays, Towards Collective Liberation, that “this is how white supremacy operates: whiteness is universalized as the norm of what is. It does not require a conscious decision to have thoughts that are racist, as it is racism that shapes the structure of our thought. …. White supremacy is the tide that directs the flow of our thoughts. It does not require us to go out of our way to be racist. It just requires that we go with the flow of dominate ideology.” (p 131)

You don’t have to choose to be racist. The cultural myth, especially in America, is that everything of interest throughout history has been done by white westerners. Explorers, inventors, statesmen and philosophers were all white. We presume that the world is essentially a white culture only seasoned with the diversity of people of color.

The great American “land of opportunity” suggests that poor northern European settlers forged a great nation out of North America and made themselves wealthy and powerful. The truth is that American wealth depended entirely on the genocide of tens of millions of Native Americans whose developed farm land, roads, and structures we stole, and the uncompensated labor of black Africans we enslaved.

Please indulge me a bit longer quote from Chris Crass’ book:

The United States was created by the wealthy class to maximize private power and wealth through exploitation of the vast majority’s labor and oppression of the vast majority’s humanity. Wealth and power have been and are taken from the majority through slavery, genocide, colonization, indentured servitude, low-paying/high-profit making jobs, and unpaid reproductive labor in the home and community.

         Racism enables economic exploitation that drives down wages and drives up the cost of living, healthcare, education, and the basic needs that more and more people are unable to meet. Racism erodes safety and health for the people of color it targets, and then works on the rest of us. Racism causes environmental crisis that impact communities of color first and worst, and are changing life as we know it for all of us.

Segregated schools and segregated neighborhoods and segregated churches have served the interests keeping minorities and the exploited poor from ever forming bonds that would allow them to organize and resist this economic and cultural exploitation. Even after integration, please note the repeated prejudiced lessons about inter-racial dating and marriage.

Note the systematic removal of black men from neighborhoods and families through incarceration and unemployment that has kept black families locked into repeating cycles of multi-generational poverty.

Black people have always known about police brutality and excessive policing of black communities but it was not until they saw the grainy video of the arrest and beating of Rodney King https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Coui65pO2E in 1991 that many white people got their first exposure to the fact of police brutality.

The four police officers who were clearly videoed using excessive force and actually assaulting King were put on trial and all four were acquitted which sparked a riot in 1992 that resulted in the deaths of 63 people and more than 2000 were injured. The riots continued until the governor sent in the National Guard to restore order.

Over all of the violence and chaos, Rodney King was heard plaintively asking, “Why can’t we all just get along?”  It is actually a good question and part of the answer can be seen in how things don’t change much. The four officers charged with brutality against King were acquitted in 1992 and in almost every high profile case of subsequent beatings, shootings, and wrongful deaths, the police are almost never found guilty of a crime.

Six Baltimore police involved in the killing of Freddie Gray, three were acquitted and charges were dropped against the other three.

Sandra Bland dies in a Texas jail, all charges dropped.

Samuel DuBose, killed in Cincinnati… two mistrials and then the charges were dropped. 

 Philando Castile killed in Minnesota, charges against the officer were dropped.

And, of course, in Missouri’s own high-profile case, the officer who shot the unarmed teen, Michael Brown, was ruled to have acted in self-defense when he shot him six times when he was several yards away.

Why can’t we all get along? Maybe because the end of African slavery just became mass incarceration, prison labor, impoverished schools, and unemployment. Maybe because desegregation just became economic segregation. And maybe because equal treatment under the law has never never never actually happened.

Racism is so much the water we swim in that it has been difficult for us to be aware of how bad it has been. We begin to take some steps in the right direction and then we take a step back . . . sometimes several steps back.

The church I grew up in, the movie theater just off the square in Glasgow, KY both had balconies that were there so that black people could come to church and to the movies. They couldn’t sit with white people but they could at least be in the same room. During the civil rights movement, the backlash was such that it became unheard of for black people to attend a white church or go to the movie theater where the white kids went.

Martin Luther King, Jr. called 11 o’clock on Sunday morning the most segregated hour in America. He said that more than 50 years ago and it is not a lot different now, is it? We elected the first black president in 2008 and eight years later we elected the most openly racist president in living memory. Where police violence against black people was nearly invisible to white folks 30 years ago, the advent of video cameras and smart phones has given us irrefutable evidence that we were wrong about this stuff all along, but the court system still acts like it can’t see the evidence right in front of their lying eyes.

A half a century ago President Lyndon B. Johnson said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

The ruling wealthy elites have tried to keep poor whites and minorities from organizing or even intermarrying. They feed prejudice and fear to keep us weak.

I do think that we have made some great strides in the anti-racist evolution of our country but progress has been too slow and we are nowhere near where we should be yet. But we cannot be defeated by the fact that we have not yet arrived at the land of freedom and equality. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.”

It falls on us to convince our generation that Black Lives Matter. That inequality in our court system, inadequacy in our schools, discrimination in hiring, promotions, awards in movies and music, just impoverishes all of us. There wouldn’t be an America without the Revolutionary War units filled with Native Americans and Black soldiers. America wouldn’t have survived WWII if Mexico had not sent 2 million workers to grow food and provide free labor while our soldiers were at war and our workers were engaged in military manufacturing, and a half a million Latinos also served in the military.

Our racial diversity is not our problem, it is our strength, our resource for having become the most inventive and industrious nation in the world. The only reason that there is still so much poverty, incarceration, unemployment, and poor education among minority groups is because of the racist environment that has taught us not to notice and to passively accept it.

The day has come when relying upon the ignorance of the masses will no longer work. We will speak up. We will educate. And then we will organize. And then, we will ascend!