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The Talk Revisited April 26, 2020 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
New York Times June 5,
2019
His genius embraced the first visions of modern computing and
produced seminal insights into what became known as “artificial intelligence.”
As one of the most influential code breakers of World War II, his cryptology
yielded intelligence believed to have hastened the Allied victory.
But, at his
death several years later, much of his secretive wartime accomplishments
remained classified, far from public view in a nation seized by the security
concerns of the Cold War. Instead, by the narrow standards of his day, his
reputation was sullied.
On June 7,
1954, Alan Turing, a British mathematician who has since been acknowledged as
one the most innovative and powerful thinkers of the 20th century — sometimes
called the progenitor of modern computing — died as a criminal, having been
convicted under Victorian laws as a homosexual and forced to endure chemical
castration. Britain didn’t take its first steps toward decriminalizing homosexuality
until 1967.
Only in 2009 did the government apologize for
his treatment.
If you have heard me preach very
often, you will have likely heard me say that “prejudice becomes its own
logic.” Forty years ago, when reporters finally got the nerve to raise the
issue with the Regan administration that a great deal of what he said in his
public speeches was comprised primarily of balloon juice, his administration
coined the too precious response that the president had simply “mis-spoke.” Which
boiled down to, “tell any lie you want in public and in private some aid will
wave it off as some kind of oratory stumble.”
Forty years later, we
have Trump aid, Kellyanne Conway with a new phrase. When confronted with
Trump’s outrageous lies, she says that he is offering “alternative facts.”
Now, admittedly, that
phrase was so insulting to the media that it was only used once but you know
that it is an assumption that lives on in the minds of many Americans. It falls
under the heading of, “My uninformed opinion is just as good as your well
researched conclusions formed through critical thinking.”
It
is not a uniquely American problem, as I will get to in a few minutes, nor is
it a novel modern issue. For instance, the white European settlers who came to
the Americas, quickly concluded that the natives who had saved them from
starvation and introduced them to indigenous crops, were savages whose lives
could be dispatched at whim. However, no one less than our
brilliant founding father, Ben Franklin noted that while many white folks
decided to go live with the Indians, it was rare for an Indian to decide to live
around white folks.
Benjamin
Franklin wrote, “When an Indian child
has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our
customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with
them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” You might think that a factual observation like that might
have begun to challenge the prejudice that settlers had towards Native
Americans, but open warfare continued for another century and prejudice around
native reservations remains to this day. All of which makes me wonder, “who are
the savages?”
Of course, we have talked a lot about the early American
practice of enslaving Africans, but it should be noted, that while it was a
common practice there were those, even in the earliest days, who objected to
slavery on moral grounds. Ben Franklin was a slave owner himself, but he
brought the young and impoverished journalist, Thomas Paine, to America and
shortly thereafter, Paine published an anonymous article condemning slavery,
before the Revolutionary War began. This is longish but worth hearing. He said:
Our
Traders in MEN (an unnatural commodity!) must know the wickedness of the
SLAVE-TRADE, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their own hearts:
and such as shun and stiffle all these, wilfully sacrifice Conscience, and the
character of integrity to that golden idol.
The Managers the Trade themselves, and others testify, that
many of these African nations inhabit fertile countries, are industrious
farmers, enjoy plenty, and lived quietly, averse to war, before the Europeans
debauched them with liquors, and bribing them against one another; and that
these inoffensive people are brought into slavery, by stealing them, tempting
Kings to sell subjects, which they can have no right to do, and hiring one
tribe to war against another, in order to catch prisoners. By such wicked and
inhuman ways the English are said to enslave towards one hundred thousand
yearly; of which thirty thousand are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in
the first year; besides all that are slain in the unnatural ways excited to
take them. So much innocent blood have the managers and supporters of this
inhuman trade to answer for to the common Lord of all!
The logic of the moral nightmare
that was African slavery was known, published, and broadly discussed before our
nation was founded, and yet, our first president, George Washington had more
than 300 slaves at Mt. Vernon, and Thomas Jefferson had more than 600 at
Monticello.
In fact, a dozen of our first
presidents were slave owners, including Ulysses Grant who led the Union armies
during the Civil War. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Van
Buren, Harrison, Polk, Tyler, Johnson, and Grant were all, at least at one
time, slave owners.
If
you are seeing a nauseatingly redundant theme in that set of photographs,
spoiler alert, there are no surprises in the next hundred years of photos.
Abolitionist
ideology was more than available to all of these great, intelligent, and
powerful people, all of whom committed what you have heard me call, “application
bias.” That is, “it may be generally true, but it doesn’t apply to me.” Or,
“well, you have your opinion and I have mine.” Prejudice, as I have said, has
its own logic.
Most
western countries ended slavery at the ballot box through civil reparations and
moral decision making. The USA did it at the point of a bayonet with the
deadliest, per capita, war of our history. It was obvious to anyone who cared
to think about it that slavery was wrong, but it took a bloody civil war to make
the change.
What has been talked about less often
was that as the African slave trade was dying off, the old slave ships simply
went east and became what were known as “Coolie” ships, bringing captured Asian
labor to the new world. As we were being forced to awaken to the cruel and morally
intolerable enslavement of Africans, Asians were introduced as a new racial
group who didn’t speak English and could be treated like farm animals. In fact,
the term “Shanghaied” came into being as these ship captains often told people
in poor rural areas that they had lucrative jobs waiting for them in Shanghai,
only to find themselves years later in slave camps in America building our railroad
system. 
Though Lincoln officially outlawed
the coolie trade at about the same time as African slaves were liberated,
still, history shows that 9 out of 10 laborers who built our trans-continental
railroad system were Asians.
Prejudice
is, as I have said, its own logic. It defies reason, evidence, education, and
information. We pass from the 19th century into the 20th
and encounter the explosion of anti-Semitic prejudice, not just in Germany but
throughout Russia, Europe, and to no small degree in America.
While
the Holocaust is the macro “big” picture of that era, I want to bring this
conversation down to just one person who was a major player in the war that
brought the holocaust to an end. We began with a wisdom lesson taken from a New
York Times article that was published last year about Alan Turing, a British mathematician
and one of the originators of the earliest computers, who was portrayed
brilliantly by Benedict Cumberbatch in the 2014 movie, The Imitation Game . . . which is
germane to nothing other than the fact that I like to talk about Benedict
Cumberbatch.
If the world were a more just place, on anyone’s
short list of those who were crucial to winning World War II, Turing would be
listed with Einstein and Oppenheimer, but even though he was the one who broke
the German enigma code and set up the necessary math and engineering for the
invention of the computer, Turing was ignored in most historical accounts
because he was a homosexual.
And, in fact, in 1952, he was put on trial in
Great Britain under the charge of being a homosexual. It may well be that we
would not have won World War II without his genius. Hitler may have succeeded
in global domination. However, this brilliant hero was put on trial by our
British cousins for being gay and he was given a choice, either go to prison or
accept chemical castration through medication. What he chose instead was
suicide.
This was not ancient Athens condemning Socrates to
death. This was not even 18th century France sending Voltaire into
exile. This is mid 20th Century England, within the memory of many
of you, condemning one of history’s greatest geniuses for the crime of being
gay. It took the United Kingdom just over 55 years to apologize for that
miscarriage of justice in 2009. . . . waiting until everyone involved was dead.
Still, right up into recent history, we have only
gradually granted legal marriage status to same sex marriages, starting in 2000
in the Netherlands, 2003 in Belgium, 2005 in Canada and Spain, South Africa in
2006, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland in 2008, 2009 and 2010, England in 2013 and
the USA finally arrived at sanity in 2015.
Prejudice dies slowly.
It resists reason and ethical debate. Which
is why some people still listen to blow-hards like Rush Limbaugh complaining
that gay marriage might undermine the spiritual sanctity of any one of his four
marriages. That is some hard core, undiluted hypocrisy right there. Taking
moral advice from Rush Limbaugh is like taking medical advice from Donald Trump
. . . three known fatalities this week. . . and that was before he suggested
injecting disinfectants!
And though we have made progress, we should not confuse
progress with success. We would say that the genocide against Native Americans
is buried in history but let me tell you sometime about my visit to the
Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota where, it doesn’t look like
that prejudice has died. And yes, we ended slavery, integrated schools, and
even elected a black president but don’t
kid yourself, racial prejudice against black and brown people in America is
anything but over, and, in fact, I fear that our prison population may ethically
rival 19th century slavery for its injustice and cruelty.
Anti-Semitism is better but certainly not over.
Gay rights have come a long way but the prejudice has not ended or we wouldn’t
have so many people in prominent pulpits and elected officials who are still
pretending to be straight, Mike Pence, but who am I to speculate
about that?
Prejudice often lives side by side with burgeoning acceptance and change. My
daughter’s peer group
never missed an installment of RuPaul’s drag race but at the same time, of the
nearly thirty transgender Americans who were murdered last year, most were
black trans women.
The Human Rights
Commission lists six more killed in the first three months of this year, mostly
during our coronavirus lockdown.
Prejudice survives on two
things: the fear of people who are different from us, as if any one of us gets
to define normal and insist that everyone be like us…and ignorance, the refusal
to learn, grow, and understand that being Native American, Black, Latinx, Jewish,
Gay or Trans is not a reason for fear or hatred or, for that matter, any of
your business.
I’m kind of waiting for
the day when I can buy a rubber stamp that just says, “none-ya-business” and
when I see a form that asks for my race, I just stamp it
And when it asks for my
gender, once again, I can say,
It not that my race or
gender is difficult to spot. It is not that I am hiding something or keeping a
secret, it isn’t even that I have anything to apologize for in my race and
gender other than the outrageous moral blindness found in my peer group which includes
the first 43 presidents of the United States. . . don’t think about that too
long.
We had an old joke when I was a
philosophy major in college. A philosopher and his wife go to the hospital to
have their first child. After the wife gives birth, she looks up at her husband
and asks, “Is it a boy or a girl?” And the philosopher answers “Yes.” Which was hilarious to us in the 1970’s when
gender was a binary universe so far as our prejudices go, now, the philosopher
would need to update that response to , “Yes, or no, or maybe, of some of both,
or it depends.” But in many such matters, what you need to accept is, just keep
calm and remember that it is none of your business.
Hating trans people for being trans
makes no more sense that hating blacks for being black, Asians for being Asian,
Jews for being Jewish, or hating gay people for being gay.
And remember, no matter how far we
have come, no matter how much prejudice we have defeated, expelled, erased, or
put to bed, we all still have some work to do, as this sign outside of a snow-covered
Swedish coffee shop illustrates:
Because they welcome all colors, all
sexes, all orientations, all religions, all cultures, all abilities, all ages,
all sizes, except the Danish.
So, we have our work cut out for us.
