Giving Thanks in a Thankless World

Giving Thanks in a Thankless World David Ketchum November 28, 2021

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Thanksgiving is a conflicted holiday for many of us. Despite the sacred civic myth that has grown up around it, Thanksgiving as the USA has come to celebrate it has roots in colonial violence and hides a much more complicated history. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/thanksgiving-myth-and-what-we-should-be-teaching-kids-180973655/ )  But in 1863, Abraham Lincoln was not as interested in historical accuracy, or in reckoning with the nation’s colonial violence, as he was in creating a unifying national holiday amid the terrors of the American Civil War. Over the centuries, our collective avoidance has perpetuated a lot of harm that we are hopefully beginning to address. There are, after all, good reasons why many Native communities call it “Thanks-taking.” 

    The conflict comes when people (not me) have fond memories of Thanksgiving and genuinely enjoy the traditions and gatherings. Having just passed through another year of civic myths, televised parades, football games, and comprehensive coverage of Black Friday sales, it’s probably a good moment to reconnect with that kernel of goodness in Thanksgiving. That is, gratitude is truly essential to our health, both personally and socially, and practicing gratitude is something we can all do to make life better for ourselves, others, and the earth. 

Gratitude and Our Missed Connections

Back in 2013, a survey of more than 2,000 people in the United States revealed one of the real challenges of cultivating gratitude. (https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_grateful_are_americans ) First, there was overwhelming agreement that gratitude is a great trait. Over 90% agreed that gratitude was good and made life better (“grateful people are more fulfilled, lead richer lives, and are more likely to have friends”). 93% thought that a grateful boss is more successful. Over 95% affirmed that parents should make teaching gratitude a priority. And only 1% believed gratitude is unnecessary.

If you think this would make gratitude easier for everyone, though, you’d be wrong. While 92% said their gratitude has been steady or increasing, they don’t believe the same about others: “only 19 percent selected the option that most people today are ‘more likely to have an attitude of gratitude than 10 or 20 years ago.’” In other words, people are convinced that they are grateful, and their gratitude is increasing, but that they are the exceptions. The rest of the world is getting less grateful; “60 percent thought that people are less likely to express gratitude today than 100 year ago.” (ibid) The fact that so many people had this conception – that I am grateful, but you are not – shows that we have a sizable gap between experiencing, expressing, and receiving gratitude. 

This isn’t a new problem. In the Buddhist tradition, for example, we find the Buddha observing that – 

“these two people are hard to find in the world. Which two? The one who is first to do a kindness, and the one who is grateful for a kindness done and feels obligated to repay it. These two people are hard to find in the world.” ("Dullabha Sutta: Hard to Find," translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an02/an02.119.than.html )

That was about 2,500 years ago, but it holds up well today. It also points out two pathways for us to cultivate if we want to make ourselves and our communities better, healthier, and happier. First, we can be kind, the type of people that others are grateful to know and be around. And second, we can be the type of people who recognize kindness, feel grateful, and know how to express and experience that gratitude. 

The first topic is something we talk about a lot, from working on getting free from injustice, to helping one another when we’re in need, to cultivating mindful compassion in our daily lives and more. But this second set of skills – knowing how to feel and express gratitude – is just as essential, especially in a world with so much injustice. I’m not suggesting that gratitude will make everything better, but gratitude can help us maintain our well-being amid the difficulties and challenges, so we can keep working together to make another world possible. 

The Negativity Bias

Most of you who have been involved in social change movements know exactly what I am talking about. I have watched so many people come and go from our movements and communities over the years. Many of us become involved out of a sense of outrage and anger, which is natural enough, but usually not sustainable. We encounter so much suffering in ourselves and in the world, and we want to make a difference. All too often, though, we burn out, experience compassion fatigue, or even lash out against one another. The exhaustion and conflicts tear our relationships and movements apart. 

         I remember one mediation case between two people who began as best friends working on important human rights issues. Over time, the extreme pressures of their work put pressure on their relationship. They both started building resentments for one another. Every action or inaction was proof that the other didn’t care or was attempting to undermine them, and they began treating each other accordingly. By the time they sought mediation, their friendship was destroyed, and they were seeking to responsibly dissolve their organizational commitments and go their separate ways. In a short year, they had gone from inseparable friends to this, requesting a shuttle mediation where I moved from floor to floor so they would not risk seeing each other face to face. It was heartbreaking for both of them; their friendship was a casualty of their wonderfully important but excruciatingly stressful work. 

In an evolutionary context, one of the factors that contributes to these experiences is an inclination called the negativity bias. Despite its dreary sounding name, it has been essential in keeping our species alive. As I’ve pointed out before: 

“Our ancestors needed to eat enough to stay alive, and stay alive long enough to reproduce. So an important part of our affect system focuses on what things we label as pleasant and desirable – the ‘I like that and I want more of it’ parts of our brains. We like things that feel and taste good, or put us in a position to get more of what we want. Yet as essential as these things are to the survival of the species, a creature can’t do them if it is dead. So our affect systems also let us know when we are likely to be in danger and need to protect ourselves. When a threat arises, all the other stuff can be put on hold. We label some aspect of our experience as unpleasant, disgusting, or dangerous and we take action – the ‘I hate that and want to get away from it’ part of our brains. This reaction needed to be strong and urgent. If we manage to survive, we can look for more food or mates tomorrow. But if we die, that’s the end.” (https://www.welcomingpath.com/2018/10/to-suffer-is-not-enough-negativity-bias.html )

This reality meant that we needed to amplify our awareness of negative experiences. It’s no fun, but, from an evolutionary perspective, we can afford to miss out on recognizing a positive experience. Most of the time, it just makes us lonely and grumpy. However, we only have to miss noticing one fatal danger, and it’s all over. So we evolved to be extra alert to anything that could be a threat. The upside of this bias is that we can use it to learn how to have healthy boundaries, functional mistrust, and strong commitments to justice and equity. But there is also this potential for us to become unhappy, resentful, cynical, exhausted, and on the edge of despair. In a world that is overflowing with injustice, it takes intentional work to bring about a healthy balance in our lives.

The 5:1 Ratio

That balance appears to fall in a roughly five to one ratio. In the 1970s, John Gottman and Robert Levenson began a longitudinal study with couples, analyzing their interviews and then predicting which couples would stay together, and which would not. Their predictions were over 90% accurate, based on what came to be called “the magic ratio” of five positive interactions to every one negative interaction. (https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-magic-relationship-ratio-according-science/ ) Similarly, in the 1990s, Betty Hart and Todd Risley documented that children who experienced five positive experiences to every one negative experience with their caregivers were more likely to thrive. (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/191383/lifeskills-by-virginia-williams-phd-and-redford-williams-md/9780812931969 ) 

I’ll admit to being a little skeptical of some aspects of these studies, especially with a few of the limitations in terms of class analysis in Hart and Risley’s original research and more especially in popular applications of it. (https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/06/the-long-contentious-history-of-the-word-gap-study/562850/ ) There is also the question of how we judge an impact. At least for me, the weight of my experiences is not uniform; some interactions and relationships are more impactful than others. But the ratio doesn’t have to be exact in order to be useful. It rings true and helps me reflect on how to care for myself and others. It is a handy way of remembering that, in our world of constant and chronic stressors, it takes intentional effort to maintain relational wellbeing. 

The 5:1 ratio gives us another mindfulness practice. If there are unhealthy patterns in a relationship, those need to be addressed. But if you notice resentment or irritation growing in an otherwise healthy relationship, see if you can also notice a corresponding shift in that ratio of positive to negative experiences. It may be that you can restore the resilience and bring that ratio into balance by savoring the positive aspects and sharing some gratitude. And even in relationships that need work, getting in touch with gratitude can provide energy and compassion to help you through the process. As Dennis Rivers has put it, “It is the ongoing expression of gratitude and appreciation that makes a relationship strong enough to accommodate differences and disagreements when they come along." (https://newconversations.net/sevenchallenges.pdf )

The Three Skills

Returning to the study on gratitude, call to mind the popular conception that ‘I am grateful, but you are not.’ That gap is where we practice, taking concrete steps to enjoy feeling grateful and sharing it with others. It’s a skill that feels so obvious that we seldom take the time to reflect on the three sets of skills involved: 1) recognizing and savoring positive feelings when our needs are met; 2) expressing thanks in ways that connect; and 3) opening up and receiving thanks from others. All three are essential. If I don’t notice, if I rush by a feeling of gratitude, I lose the chance to express it. If I struggle to say thank you, or say it in a way that another person doesn’t recognize, that’s another missed opportunity. (Perhaps the most common occurrence of this is when we assume someone else has said thank you, so that we don’t need to do so.) And then there is our reluctance to receive thanks. Sometimes, we hesitate because we don’t want to come across as arrogant. Sometimes, we don’t want to get pushed into making other commitments. Sometimes, we are just feeling awkward and uncertain how to respond. Not knowing what to do, we miss yet another opportunity.

I realize that the first skill, savoring the positive feelings when our needs are met, sounds very obvious. But there’s a catch. There are so many difficult, painful, unjust, oppressive things in the world, and that negativity bias keeps drawing our minds to those things. And for good reason; we want to be aware of them, so that we can be part of the change. But all that attention means that we can easily miss the many wonderful and lifegiving experiences and relationships. We might not even notice when our needs are being met, because our anxiety, anger, despair, or ambition crowds them out. 

And for those of us who grew up in a harmful religious tradition that we no longer practice, it doesn’t help that many of the ways we learned to experience and express appreciation are ruined by those experiences. In many cases, I’ve seen people drop those practices without replacing them with anything else. I completely support and celebrate our freedom from habits and rituals that harmed us, but I also want to encourage us to find new ways to, for lack of a better term, “count our blessings.” I’ll share two examples that have worked well for me, the Five Contemplations from the Plum Village tradition of Buddhism. This is a way of expressing gratitude before I eat a meal: 

“This food is the gift of the whole universe – the earth, the sky, and much hard work. May we eat in mindfulness so as to nourish our gratitude. May we transform our unskillful states of mind and learn to eat with moderation. May we take only foods that nourish us and prevent illness. We accept this food to realize the path of understanding, love, and joy.” (Adapted by the Still Water Mindfulness Practice Center, https://www.stillwatermpc.org/dharma-topics/the-five-contemplations-as-a-daily-practice/ )

And for many years, we’d have a family gratitude practice we called “Touching the Wonders.” We’d begin by enjoying the sound of a bell, then singing a mindfulness song together, and then sharing about things we’d experienced that day that had brought us joy. It was inspired by a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh that remains embedded in my heart: “Life is filled with suffering, but it is also filled with many wonders, like the blue sky, the sunshine, the eyes of a baby. To suffer is not enough. We must also be in touch with the wonders of life.” (https://www.awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=168 )

These kinds of practices have the benefit of training my mind to pay attention and feel grateful when my needs are being met. They also interrupt the constant encroaching of the difficult and unjust. This makes it easier to get in touch with the world we are creating, one that can heal and transform those injustices. This practice of recognizing and savoring the feeling of gratitude is a foundational one, too, because it changes how I express gratitude. I want to say thank you out of this sense of wellbeing and joy; I want to share that wellbeing with others.

We all have our favorite ways of saying thank you: words, cards, gifts, time spent together, or a hug. It may also be giving a helping hand, perhaps running an errand for someone to say thank you. We all also have our favorite ways of receiving thanks. It’s helpful to recognize that sometimes, we may be saying thank you in a way that another person doesn’t recognize, and vice versa. In important relationships, it’s good to take the time to learn how to say thank you to each other in ways that connect. Just as we learn to savor those moments when your needs are met, we can also learn to savor our healthy relationships. 

With Grateful Hearts

I began by acknowledging the violent history of Thanksgiving and the accountability offered by Indigenous peoples to honestly address that history and its impacts. One of the ways we can honor that call is to listen to and learn from Indigenous peoples, including on ways to build gratitude and generosity into our cultures. Ruth Hopkins, a Dakota/Lakota Sioux writer, biologist, and tribal attorney, wrote – 

“Generosity and gratitude are so revered that the most powerful among us are not those who hoard wealth. Rather, they are those who give the most to others, especially to those who need it most. … Giving thanks is a common theme in our ceremonies and prayer songs too, and honouring Mother Earth and the abundance she provides us with is a key part of our culture. / This is what Thanksgiving could be, but in order for that to happen, we must recognise the truth of the holiday’s revolting colonial origins. … Acknowledging our shared history can help put an end to vicious destructive cycles meant to fill spiritual emptiness, and replace it with grateful hearts that will bring families and communities together, united in purpose, giving thanks for nature’s bounty. Then, not only will our bodies be nourished, but our souls will be too.” (https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/11/27/giving-thanks-the-indigenous-way )

This is a vision worthy of celebration and overflowing with life. And in case I have not said it recently, I’ll say it now: thank you for being part of this change: ending destructive cycles; healing and nourishing bodies and souls; and cultivating grateful, joyful hearts. Thank you for being part of our shared efforts to make this world a more just, compassionate, and joyful place. 

The Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

Indigenous Peoples of the Americas    Nov. 21, 2021    Dr. Roger Ray

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Howard Zinn, A Peoples’ History of the United States (p. 9)

To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves – unwittingly – to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress… that is still with us.

 

For several years I taught a course in Western Religions for a couple of our local colleges. In one of those colleges, the textbooks were predetermined by the dean, and I faced an online text I had not seen before. My course covered  Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

I thought the text was a tad simplistic but the students and I coasted along through its descriptions of the ancient Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, which influenced the development of the other three major western religions. Judaism’s history is more complex, but I found that I could live with the textbook’s basic overview.  

 

But when it started describing what Christians believe, I found myself objecting to almost every line. In fact, its flatfooted assertion that Christians believe that their Bible is the inspired word of God, that Jesus was the divine Son of God. That Jesus accomplished salvation for believers on the cross, saving adherents from an eternity in hell and delivering them to everlasting reward in heaven . . . I just kept objecting:  some Christians believe those things, but many would find such beliefs to be archaic or at least metaphorical. 

 

You wouldn’t find any top tier seminary teaching students that any of those things should be taken literally. Progressive Christians have always tried to describe their religion more in the practices of love, compassion, forgiveness, charity, and community, and not very much at all about orthodox beliefs but, the textbook version of the religion in which I grew up, seemed to me, to be a caricature, an insult, honestly, a gross distortion of my own faith history. 

 

The Christian religion is 2000 years old and the basic divisions of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant hardly begins to account for the differences among the 2 billion people grouped into one or more of the 45,000 different divisions of Christians. I personally now identify as a Unitarian, more to give myself separation from my Christian neighbors than to cut myself off from the roots of my education and experience. I understand that I was teaching a 200 level undergraduate course, but what this book said about Christianity would give my students more to unlearn than it gave them to learn, which made me wonder about what it had to say about the other major religions of the west, some of which are much older and some of which have even more sharp divisions within them than Christianity does. Was I just less familiar with those traditions and therefore it was easier for me to misrepresent them?

 

This month, and especially this week, we are asked to spend some time focusing on the history and heritage of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. As a pastor and as a professor of world religions, I have come to realize that most of what modern Americans have to say about indigenous peoples, especially when they say something like “native American spirituality,” is almost always misleading if not cartoonish . . . not so much ancient wisdom from our first nations as it is silly platitudes that “I think I heard somewhere,” if not wisdom cracked fresh out of our fortune cookies at the local cashew chicken joint. 

 

The indigenous communities have been on these continents for between 12,000 and 15,000 years. They were here when these lands were still inhabited by wooly mammoths and the prehistoric cousins of both camels and horses. How can we speak of a singular “spirituality” among Indian nations that had been here 10,000 years before Zoroaster, Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad were even born? 

 

We assume that they migrated across the land bridge that existed in that time between what is now Siberia and Alaska, but they didn’t all come at one time, and they didn’t all come from one place. Over time, groups settled near the Artic circle and 

others spread across North and Central America, making their way out to the Caribbean islands and down to the far reaches of South America. 

 

These hundreds of different tribes evolved from hunter-gatherer societies towards more agrarian communities at about the same time that the people of Europe and Africa were also evolving towards agricultural tribes. Some of nations of South America developed a written language and a shockingly accurate calendar, replete with sophisticated awareness of astronomy. Northern tribes did not develop written languages that we are aware of, but they certainly did develop very complex societies with different kinds of hunting, fishing, farming, weaving, pottery, and architecture. 

While there had been brief Norse visitors to North America, the fifteenth century arrival of Christopher Columbus found what westerners described as “stone age” societies living here. That is a rather unfair description because the whole stone age, copper, bronze, and iron distinctions were European. Those categories do not really work in the New World.

 

Indigenous nations had made some jewelry out of the scarce softer metals, gold and silver, but they had not mined or manufactured copper, bronze, or iron. The prehistoric horses that once roamed North America had become extinct. They had no pack animals in the north. The indigenous tribes of the 15^th century did not use the wheel, they did not have glass, or steel. 

 

In fact, although Columbus never set foot on the mainland of the Americas, the first tribes he did encounter in the Caribbean did not only not know about Native American spirituality, they did not seem to have any religion at all. This is a very important point for us all to let soak in. Our romanticized representations of Native American spirituality are, to put it lightly, almost entirely wrong. 

 

The first Indigenous that Europeans encountered seemed, as reported in the diaries of Columbus’ crew, to be beautiful, peaceful, and generous people who had their own social rules about family, marriage, ownership of property, and work which were not at all like the more violent, greedy, and, admittedly, kind of “rapey” culture of their European visitors. While we know of religious rituals and beliefs among Indigenous communities on the mainland, we need to recognize that they differed broadly from one another and that not all Indigenous nations had anything that we would call a religion or spirituality at all. 

 

Theirs was not a primitive culture that was just discovered by European civilized Christians who then dominated and converted them. It was not an inferior culture replaced by a superior one, in fact, you could argue that the islanders had the superior culture, they just didn’t have swords or metal knives or guns. 

 

Columbus had promised his royal sponsors gold and silver. Finding little by way of precious metals in the new world, Columbus, and his successors, began to capture Indigenous peoples as slaves, many of whom were children, taken back to Europe both for labor and as sex slaves. 

 

Those who remained, were enslaved to work for agricultural products that had value in Europe. So began a genocide that continued for most of the next three hundred years. 

 

The introduction of African slaves began to replace the labor of Indigenous peoples who had been almost entirely wiped out. 

Much of what we know of this era is from the records and observations made by the Spanish priest, las Casas, who lived on the island that is now home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He claimed that in the first 20 years of Spanish rule on that island, that more than 3 million of the Indians had been killed or worked to death. 

 

Please consider this: Looking at our own history, many theoretical scientists have warned that, though we suspect that intelligent life does exist in many places in the universe, we shouldn’t get too excited about the prospects of meeting them. Firstly, if they have the technology to travel faster than the speed of light, something that seems to be totally impossible to imagine, then they would probably view us in much the way that Columbus viewed the natives he encountered in the Caribbean. Civilizations have a way of exploiting those which it finds to be vulnerable. We might be more interesting to them as a food source or for sport than we would for conversation. Europeans arrived in the Americas with guns and swords like aliens looking for gold and silver, and finding very little of that, we took humans to exploit for wealth and, admittedly, sex.

 

At the time of our much mythologized “first Thanksgiving” among English immigrants to the New World, there may have been between 50 and 100 million Indigenous people living in the Americas, probably around 25 million in what is now the United States. They tremendously outnumbered the English but, as William Bradford recorded in his history written as events unfolded, the English avoided encountering the warriors of the Pequot Indians, who would have outnumbered them and likely defeated them. 

 

They chose instead to destroy their will to fight by attacking the villages when the warriors were not present, killing women and children. As one historian of the era observed, the Indians were terrified and learned three lessons from the Pequot Wars: that the English will break any promise when it is to their advantage, and the English would show no morals or mercy in how they fought, and finally that their weapons made them impossible to defeat. Ironically, the white Europeans called the Native Americans, “savages,” but the savagery they later exhibited, they learned from the white invaders.

The western movement was complicated and there were tribes that fought back but, within a century from the first Thanksgiving, 90% of the Indigenous population was gone. My own family settled in southern Kentucky in the late 1700’s and two hundred years later, when I walked across freshly plowed fiends on the family farm, it was not difficult to find evidence of the Indian population that had been there for hundreds of years before:

As you can see, once introduced to the bow and arrow, natives replaced their flint spears with delicately made arrow heads, some smaller than a quarter, an amazing tribute to how quickly native cultures adapted to the innovations that came from their interactions with European settlers. And, yes, I have looked into donating my small collection to a museum in Kentucky but since you can still pick up thousands of these flint points all over the state, they are nearly worthless to museums. These are probably between three and six hundred years old and, as native history goes, that is just a flash in the pan. 

 

The maps we see of where tribes lived in North America are almost as bogus as the shaman who try to tell us about Native American spirituality. They present boundaries of Native tribes in way you might look at a map of modern Europe but you have to know that the map of Europe has been constantly changing over the past 10,000 years just as the map of the Americas evolved and continues to evolve. 

This is impossible to do accurately but these academic maps give us some impression of the placement of different cultures at the time when Columbus arrived in the Americas and when the English began to settle on the east coast three centuries later. 

 

The tribes moved; some moved a lot. Their numbers would grow and diminish. At the time my family arrived in Kentucky, there were still Cherokee, Chickasaw, Shawnee, Yuchi, Mosopelea, and several other tribes. The name “Cherokee” comes to mean almost the same thing as “Indian” to many of us. The origins of the Cherokee were probably on the east coast, and they moved west to escape the violent encounters they had with white Europeans. Those that did try to remain in ancestorial lands were eventually removed, most famously by Andrew Jackson’s “Indian Removal Act” which we now typically reference only as “the trail of tears.”

 

Still, in spite of how many people talk about it, of the 60,000 Indigenous people moved to Oklahoma in the Trail of Tears, 15,000 were Cherokee and of that number, more than 4000 died along the way. With each forced relocation, we simultaneously erased Indigenous history, culture, religion, and rituals and even the names of tribes and languages are now lost to us. 

 

When I have taught Western Religion courses, I show my students how the form of Judaism that existed prior to the Babylonian exile of the 5^th century before the common era, bears almost no similarity to the Judaism that came after. Judaism emerged as a combination of ancient Hebrew stories and very Zoroastrian beliefs in heaven, hell, angels, and, believe it or not, Judaism was transformed from polytheism to a kind of monotheism, not by Moses but by Zoroastrian priests. But don’t tell that to your evangelical relatives at the Thanksgiving table this week.

 

The religions of the Indigenous tribes evolved quickly in light of the devastation of their numbers by European diseases and weapons. Some of the best known native authors writing about Indigenous spirituality are people who actually grew up in Catholic boarding schools and their views on Native spirituality show an awful lot of signs of being influenced by Catholic mythology. Frankly, it is hard to know who to believe as the most acclaimed academic books on native history disagree with one another broadly. 

 

At a bare minimum, what I am asking of everyone in my audience who grew up in North America, is that we need to interrogate our own beliefs about the Indigenous cultures of this stolen land. This isn’t about guilt, and it isn’t about trying to re-write history. It is about accepting that most of the impressions we have from our childhood educations about the Indigenous is full of balloon juice and the beginning of honoring these people’s culture is to stop repeating silly lies and even romantic imaginary histories.

 

We need to apply more of a Critical Race Theory approach to our understanding of native culture. But, still, there are things that can be said about their culture, if not their spirituality, that should be sobering for us. For example, as historian Gary Nash observed about the Iroquois: they had no police, jails, court system, no judges or juries. They managed crime through community intervention. Which was easier to do since there was no income gap between the rich and the poor and most property was community owned. You realize, I’m sure, that most of our police, jails, and courts exist to protect the “haves” from the “have nots.”

 

Appreciating Indigenous culture first means that we have to stop looking down on them as if they were inferior to European culture. They were different, and in terms of technology they were several steps behind Europe but in terms of family, decency, compassion, and justice, they were arguably way ahead of my tribe. So, with open minds and sincere curiosity, let’s set aside the stereotypes and prejudices, and try to make some real progress in understanding the diversity of America in the 21^stcentury by understanding where we all came from. 

 

The Violence at Our Borders

David Ketchum 

November 14, 2021 

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Necoclí is a small town on Columbia’s Caribbean coast, known mostly for, as one travel headline put it, “Crabs, coconuts and volcano swimming.” When Tom Heyden wrote that column in 2011, he could focus on how “the town’s charm relies on its surrounding natural beauty, which provides visitors with the opportunity to relax and soak up the sun.” His descriptions include gorging “yourself on sweet, juicy mangos,” crabbing, and walking to the local volcano, where you can jump “straight into the murky, muddy crater of the volcano. … The feeling is truly bizarre as you half-float, half-sink in the midst of this active volcano, toying with the squelchy, infirm floor beneath you.” (https://colombiareports.com/Necoclí-crabs-coconuts-and-volcano-swimming/ )

“No Choice But to Keep On Going”

It sounds idyllic and delightful, and I very much wished that this was all we could say about the lovely town of Necoclí. But I would guess that, if you have heard of Necoclí at all, it is not because of the juicy mangos or volcano swimming. Beyond sunny beaches perfect for napping in a hammock, the roads that take you there also take you as close as you can get to Panama, where refugees seeking asylum in the USA must cross a dangerous stretch of jungle known as the Darién Gap.  

But that is a risk that has been increasingly worth taking for thousands of Haitians, after waves of tragedies: centuries of economic and social injustice, compounded by natural disasters, the pandemic, and political violence and unrest. As a result, more than 70,000 people this year alone have decided that crossing the Darién Gap is the best option they have. Last September, Necoclí’s mayor, Jorge Tobon, reported that between 1,000 to 1,500 migrants were arriving every day, while only 500 were allowed to leave to cross the gulf and migrate to Panama, “due to the recent agreement between the countries.” As the backlog grew, “more than 14,000 migrants” were stuck in Necoclí. 

Once you can leave, the challenges awaiting in the jungle range from steep terrain to dangerous animals. Astrid Suarez, reporting for the Associated Press, described one group’s experience: 

“They descended a steep hill and waded across a river where the water reached waist level. The current was strong and the sound of the water drowned out the voices of migrants and guides. As they headed into the rainforest many of the migrants became exhausted and started to leave some of their belongings behind to carry less weight. / Wedding portraits, jackets and jeans were strewn along the trail.” (https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-health-colombia-forests-united-states-c9179be12e415f4b36145f0f29470e3b)

Diseases also abound, especially “foot funguses, gastrointestinal problems and respiratory infections.” As Suarez reported, “Children have reportedly died in the jungle, and some pregnant women have given birth. Migrants say they have seen skulls and cadavers along the routes that cross the Darien.” Despite all of this, the greatest dangers come from other humans, often in the form of trafficking, banditry, and sexual assault. As a refugee named Lafleur put it, “Fear is always with us, ... . But we have no choice but to keep on going.” (ibid) 

“On the Verge of Explosion” 

Of course, successfully reaching the US border, by whatever route, does not mean your troubles are over. Last month, shocking evidence of the mistreatment of Haitian refugees by the US Border Patrol at the international bridge in Del Rio were in the news. Officers on horseback chased down and lassoed refugees, screamed obscenities, and otherwise abused asylum seekers in ways that evoked the USA’s ongoing and terrifying history of anti-Black violence. (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/09/border-patrol-horseback-haitian-migrants-del-rio.html ) The cruelty was so blatant that human rights experts with the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner “condemned the United States of America’s recent and ongoing systematic mass deportation of Haitian migrants and refugees, and cautioned that such collective expulsions violate international law.” (https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=27694&LangID=E) The Department of Homeland Security temporarily suspended the horse patrol and promised to “investigate the incidents and take disciplinary actions if warranted.” Still, deportations continued at an increased rate, using “Title 42, a public health authority that authorizes the quick removal of migrants and denies them a chance to seek asylum.” (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-border-patrol-horseback-units-del-rio-texas/ )  

Revolus, one of the refugees deported to Haiti, spoke to NPR in October. After describing the harrowing experiences his family suffered, compounded by the shock of being refused asylum, he said: 

"After all the decades of U.S. meddling in Haiti's affairs, I truly believed I'd be allowed to apply for asylum at the border … . We never thought we would end up back in Haiti. … Haiti is like a war zone right now… . Shootings are rampant, people are being killed for small things. It's not a livable country. It's very dangerous." (https://www.npr.org/2021/10/16/1043458530/haitians--u-s-asylum--racist )

The New York Times painted a similar picture: “After years enduring hunger, poverty and daily power cuts, Haitians say their country, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, is in the worst state they have seen, with the government unable to provide the most basic services.” Kidnapping became so common that schools started shutting down and students organized fundraisers to ransom their classmates. Controversies over when the president’s five year term would end, combined with efforts to change the nation’s constitution in order to expand presidential powers, left Haiti, in the words of Catholic bishops, “on the verge of explosion.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/world/americas/haiti-protests-President-Jovenel-Mois.html ) In July, President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated. (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-57762246 ) In August, Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake that left over 2,200 dead; 12,200 injured; and at least 650,000 in need of assistance of some kind. And even as covid risks increased in the wake of the tragedy, Haiti also had to deal with the damage or destruction of 66 health facilities in the quake. (https://reliefweb.int/report/haiti/2021-haiti-earthquake-situation-report-1-september-1-2021 )  

“A Global System of Migrant Incarceration”

    I still believe in the basic capacity of human goodness, so witnessing cruel treatment of people asking for help forces me to ask: how could anyone respond to such suffering by anything but compassion? What makes it possible to respond to people seeking safety and a better life with lassos, obscenities, harsh treatment, and deportation? As Revolus knew, the United States has a long history of imposing its political and economic will on Haiti, robbing the nation of self-determination and social stability and helping create the conditions that plague Haiti today. (https://theconversation.com/assassinations-and-invasions-how-the-us-and-france-shaped-haitis-long-history-of-political-turmoil-164269 ) Moreover, US policies on Haiti have normalized mistreatment of Haitian refugees while setting the precedent for expanded immigrant detention. Professor Carl Lindskoog, author of Detain and Punish, has shown that “Policies were specifically designed to deter Haitians from coming in. These policies became the prototype for what became a global system of migrant incarceration.” (https://www.vox.com/22689472/haitian-migrants-asylum-history-violence ) 

    In the 1970s, working class Haitians began coming by boat to the USA to make asylum claims. The United States was already in the midst of a racist backlash to the civil rights movement, and Black Haitian migrants received similar treatment. Lindskoog explained that: 

“The Carter administration introduced something called the Haitian Program — a punishing set of policies designed to deter Haitians from coming in. And if they were already here, it tried to keep them out of the mainstream population. That meant putting them in detention facilities and local jails, basically denying them carte blanche their asylum claims and just sending them back.” (ibid)

Legal challenges would overturn the Haitian Program, but the Carter administration circumvented the judgement. The Reagan administration went further, introducing “a new Haitian detention program and the policy of interdiction, in which Coast Guard cutters would intercept boats of Haitian asylum seekers before they could even reach land and send them back, often to violence and death in Haiti.” This went on for decades, and its legacy continues in the recent stories in our headlines and in the statistics that have documented continued anti-Haitian and anti-Black violence against immigrants. For example, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES) documented that, during 2020, “the share of Haitian families in detention increased to an alarming 44% of the total. In fact, the U.S. has consistently detained more Haitian families in 2020 than any other nationality.” (https://www.raicestexas.org/2020/07/22/black-immigrant-lives-are-under-attack/ )

Moreover, anti-Haitian detention helped set the precedent for mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. According to the Global Detention Project, “The United States operates the world’s largest immigration detention system. On any given day, it can have upwards of 50,000 non-citizens in detention,” spread over 200 facilities. (https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/countries/americas/united-states#country-report ) 

“A Reasonable Distance” 

Most people I speak with about border issues are not aware of how extensive and expansive border patrols are in the USA, including warrantless searches “within a reasonable distance from any external boundary of the United States.” As the ACLU explains, the federal government defines that reasonable distance as 100 air miles. Combined with other federal regulations and laws, the result is that: 

“Two-thirds of the U.S. population, or about 200 million people, reside within this expanded border region, according to the 2010 census. Most of the 10 largest cities in the U.S., such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, fall in this region. Some states, like Florida, lie entirely within this border band so their entire populations are impacted.” (https://www.aclutx.org/en/know-your-rights/border-pocket-guide )

Officers create immigration checkpoints, board buses and trains to demand documents, and pull over motorists. And with such a large area to patrol, the Customs and Border Protection agency has become the largest law enforcement agency in the United States, with nearly 20,000 agents. It is also, as Ansdrea Flores and Shaw Drake documented for the ACLU, “the largest law enforcement air force in the world — roughly equivalent to the size of Brazil’s entire combat air force — including fleets of planes, helicopters, and Predator drones.” Its rapid growth over the last 20 years has been matched with growing violence: 

“At least 102 people have died as a result of encounters with Border Patrol in the last decade. Six of these deaths were caused by Border Patrol agents shooting across the border into Mexico — murders met with complete impunity. The agency also lacks basic accountability practices: No agent has ever been convicted of criminal wrongdoing while on duty, despite deaths in custody and uses of excessive, deadly force. Border Patrol agents engage in criminal activities outside their official duties at five times the rate of other law enforcement agencies’ officials. The agency’s discipline system is broken and agency leadership has not weeded out corrupt agents. As James Tomsheck, CBP’s former internal affairs chief, described the agency’s culture: It ‘goes out of its way to evade legal restraints’ and is ‘clearly engineered to interfere with [oversight] efforts to hold the Border Patrol accountable.’” (https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/border-patrol-violently-assaults-civil-rights-and-liberties/ )

A “Legacy of Racism”

This lack of accountability grew from the Border Patrol’s xenophobic and racist roots. In a special report by the American Immigration Council, Katy Murdza and Walter Ewing wrote that: 

“The racial animus of U.S. immigration policy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century formed the foundation for the agency. Federal laws banning Asian immigration were followed by the national origins quota system, which prioritized northern and western Europeans over the rest of the world. While not included in the original quotas, Mexicans, who previously could travel freely across the U.S.-Mexico border, began to experience increasing restrictions in the 1920s. / Congress created the Border Patrol in 1924 to patrol the northern and southern borders between ports of entry. Many officers came from organizations with a history of racial violence and brutality, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Texas Rangers, carrying over the culture of a racist ‘brotherhood’ into the new agency.” (https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/sites/default/files/research/the_legacy_of_racism_within_the_u.s._border_patrol.pdf )

Those connections keep resurfacing in reports of “racial slurs, sexual comments, and other offensive language.” Lawsuits have shown that the Border Patrol uses racial profiling and has “maintained connections to the white supremacist movement and the paramilitary SWAT-style Border Patrol Tactical Unit,” which has also been “deployed to crack down on protests of police brutality against Black people.” Like other law enforcement agencies, the Border Patrol has been increasingly militarized since the 1980s. Then, in 1994, the government began a program of “prevention through deterrence,” which aimed to decrease unlawful entry into the USA by making it “so dangerous as to discourage people from trying.” After the 9/11 attacks, the Border Patrol was made part of the Department of Homeland Security, which expanded the agency and accelerated its militarization. The end result has been the creation of an agency that perpetuates:

“violence in the form of killing, sexual assault, excessive force, and verbal degradation—all with impunity. Despite these problems, the Border Patrol has lowered hiring standards to pursue rapid staff expansion. The Border Patrol often perpetrates violence through less direct means, including medical abuse and neglect, inhumane custody conditions, and family separation.” (ibid) 

Border Violence and the Violence of Borders

My best understanding of our collective cruelty is that the inevitability of borders and, with them, the inevitability of their violence, has become so normalized that we accept them without question. We are trained to believe that violent borders are the price of domestic and economic security. Collectively, we turn the other way when people are mistreated at our borders, and we avoid learning both the reasons people take these risks or the possibilities of living another way. It is easier to look away from, or to dehumanize, the millions of people who suffer. 

Reece Jones, in Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move, demonstrated that borders help “establish a legal means for controlling resources and excluding others from these spaces,” with the result that “almost all of the land in the world is claimed” in this way today. It is tempting to believe that these borders, or at least these kinds of borders, have “existed eternally,” but the reality is that the system we take for granted today is relatively recent. Jones points out that - 

 “even the oldest political borders are only a few hundred years old; most are only a few decades old. They are not the result of a transparent sorting of historical peoples into their own territories. Instead, borders are an efficient system for maintaining political control of an area through agreements and documents that are backed up with the threat of violence. … They changed the relationship between people and the environment by redefining land and oceans as closed areas of ownership that can be exploited for economic gain, not common spaces to be shared and conserved.” (117)

These borders are real and have real impacts, but they are not objective or neutral. Their history, along with their psychosocial meanings, reflect, among other things, the injustice of colonial violence. This context also helps us understand conditions that must be addressed if we want to live in healthy, safe, and regenerative communities. We can help do this work, beginning with becoming increasingly aware of this violent history and how it has become embedded in our nation’s policies, institutions, and practices. Murdza and Ewing concluded that “Revamping the agency will involve fundamentally reshaping how Border Patrol agents view themselves in relation to the different communities and groups of people they encounter along the border.” (https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/sites/default/files/research/the_legacy_of_racism_within_the_u.s._border_patrol.pdf )  

    And this applies to all of us, especially us White folx. Better understanding helps us notice the social norms that fuel the injustice. We can think deeply about, and act courageously, in favor of honoring our shared humanity and our relationship to the earth. We can help move the broader culture toward transforming how our society thinks about and experiences relationships across differences. As John Washington wrote, 

“What we ultimately fear, what we ultimately hate, is, so often, an outward manifestation of our own action or inaction. … Waiting for the government to offer to share its roof, or to implement any positive change, will be waiting too long. Meanwhile, … we should open our churches, temples, mosques, schools, and homes. We should build communities that are willing and able to receive those in need, not merely incarcerate or expel them.” (https://www.versobooks.com/books/3171-the-dispossessed )

What this looks like will be particular to where we live, but it is something we can do, and that must be done. The world overflows with possibilities for happiness, and there is enough for us all. If we are willing, we can face our fears, dismantle injustice, and make a place where everyone can be safely and joyfully at home.  

“The Roots of Racism” (Missing White Woman Syndrome)

“The Roots of Racism” (Missing White Woman Syndrome)         Nov. 7, 2021    Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

DYLAN STABLEFORD     September 22, 2021, for Yahoo News

In Wyoming, where Petito went missing, at least 710 Indigenous people vanished between 2011 and 2020, according to the state’s Missing & Murdered Indigenous Persons Task Force. Of those, 466 were Indigenous women. A corresponding study by the University of Wyoming’s Wyoming Survey & Analysis Center found that just 18 percent of Indigenous women who were reported missing received newspaper media coverage.

 

In a casual conversation with a young female friend, with a certain ominous tone in her voice, she asked me, “Have you been following the case of Gabby Petito?” 

The honest answer was that I had been trying very hard not to follow the case of the missing, rather angelic looking 22 year old; the blond, blue eyed, petite young woman who was smiling out at the world through nearly constant news coverage for several days. The woman who asked me about it was sincere and visibly shaken by it. She is a petite, blond, blue eyed, young single mom, making her way through the world on her own but living in an apartment around some kind of scary people and she has had boyfriends over the years who had some rather frightening bad habits. So, I realize that she has some very real fear that is being constantly stoked by the coverage of Gabby Petito’s disappearance and murder, apparently, at the hands of a bad boyfriend.

The case of Gabby Petito is horrifying. Her story is sad and heart wrenching and a cautionary tale to vulnerable women everywhere…. But then, the cases of Elizabeth Smart, JonBenet Ramsey, Laci Peterson, and Natalie Holloway, were also horrifying. 

In this country of 350 million people, more than 250,000 women go missing every year, most of them are younger than 21. Of course, as many if not more men go missing every year as well. Some are abducted, some are murdered, but they are all people and arguably, people who are as important as Laci Peterson, JonBene Ramsey, Natalie Holloway, Elizabeth Smart, or Gabbi Petito. I don’t want to take anything away from the trauma and grief experienced by their families in each of these cases, but when journalists who are women of color start to complain about the “Missing white woman syndrome,” we all need to acknowledge that the media simply does not treat missing people of color the same way that they treat young white women.

 

In Wyoming, where Petito's body was found, at least 710 Indigenous people, mostly women and girls, vanished from 2011 to 2020, according to a report by 

Wyoming's Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Task Force. Native American women are abducted at a rate 10 times as high as white women and yet, we almost never hear about it and no one knows their names.

 

My daughter is of Korean birth and, thankfully, race has not played a big part in her life. Having come to the United States when she was only 4 months old, she does not speak English with a foreign accent, and she is remarkably beautiful. So, in almost every setting, her race has not been an issue. However, I know that as I stand here today, there are between 50 and 100 Korean women who have been trafficked into the sex trade, right here in this small city.

A network of massage parlors and brothels circulate tens of thousands of Korean women around the country, keeping them from learning English or forming lasting friendships. The police know where they are and almost never do anything about it. However, if these women were abducted, blond, blue eyed, English speakers, all of these sex shops would be closed down before nightfall today. 

 

The whole point of the Black Lives Matter movement has not been to say that Black Lives Matter more than white lives, or Native American lives, or Latina lives, because there has never been in time in America when white lives did not obviously matter. The emphatic statement that Black Lives Matter is asserting is that black people are also people, that their lives matter just as much…. But you couldn’t tell it from the news coverage. 

 

I don’t want for this to become a “hair on fire” message today. I understand that the news media has a very real obligation to inform the public about what is going on and the cases of each of the white women I have mentioned were certainly newsworthy. But I also recognize that our news agencies are all in a capitalist competition with one another and so, when they consider what stories to tell, which stories to repeat and follow up on, day after day, they tend to pick the ones that the most people will find interesting.

 

In that sense, the media can become something like a snake eating its own tail. The media creates concern about beautiful young white women through repetition of stories about beautiful young white women and then they become obligated to report on the next missing beautiful young white woman. 

I moved here in 1991. At that time, the demographics of Springfield, Missouri was almost a racial plenum with only 1% black, 2% Asian, and 97% white. My daughter was only 2 years old at the time and I was determined to make being Korean totally normal in my house, so I ordered Korean garments, coloring books, music, videos, and toys because I didn’t want for her to grow up with blond Barbies being the image of “normal” in her young mind because, if there is anyone abnormal and deformed, it has to be the traditional blond Barbie. 

 

However, at that time, parents of young children shopped at ToysRUs for Christmas and birthday presents and while they had lots of white dolls, and several choices of black dolls, in Springfield, at that time, Asians outnumbered blacks, 2 to 1 but because race in America has often been portrayed as the divide between blacks and whites, the second largest racial minority in town was not a part of the conscious awareness of even the people who are trying to make money selling stuff to doting parents. As I pointed out to the store manager at the time, 100% of these dolls are made in Asia, it seems like there should be a few on the shelves that looked Asian. Thankfully, he agreed and made sure to stock a selection that represented the growing diversity of our city in the years that followed.

 

Over the years, as David and I have mapped out our sermon outlines for the months that follow, one of the issues that we keep coming back to is how can we, as a society, pull racism out of our culture by the roots? Why does it persist? After the genocide of Native Americans in the 17^th and 18^thcenturies and three hundred years of African slave trade, after all of the miserable examples of Jim Crow laws, red lining, school segregation, and the very public work of the Civil Rights movement, how is it in 2021 we are still trying to undo the assumption that white lives matter more than black lives, or that Native Americans, Latinos and Latinas, and Asians are all a part of what makes America, America? 

 

I love the song from the Broadway musical, South Pacific, that so artistically states that “you’ve got to be carefully taught” racism. Sean has sung it for us several times:

You've got to be taught To hate and fear,

You've got to be taught From year to year,

It's got to be drummed In your dear little ear

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid

Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,

You've got to be carefully taught.

 

 

Sadly, however, I must beg to differ. Because, in truth, racism is taught by just absorbing it from the culture. We are programmed by what we see on TV, who we see on billboards and in magazines. It becomes the unconscious assumption of everyone who reads the news that who is important, and who really matters, are the people we see in the news, the movies, on TV shows, and on stage. 

 

Admittedly, we do still have people among us who are actively teaching racism. You can see them in the news daily in the school board meetings where people are decrying Critical Race Theory, by which they mean, any history lesson that includes accurate information about the American genocide of Indigenous tribes or the abuses of African slavery or the inscription of captured Chinese labor.

 

It doesn’t take an Archie Bunker type, spewing racial prejudice on a daily basis to pass racism on to a new generation. Racism is like a self-perpetuating machine that just keeps cranking out new generations of racists until we make the conscious decision to start balancing the news, advertisements, and TV sitcom characters. 

 

As hard as people like me worked to break down the prejudices most church people had towards gay and lesbian folks, I know that it was characters on sitcoms and talks shows who were gay that really did the groundbreaking work of changing the way that people thought about gay people, just as the same sorts of shows began to change the way that white people thought about black people and, for that matter, how they thought about Jews, through drama and comedy. But that was a deliberate choice, networks decided to take a chance on using their platform to aid the public in opening their eyes to issues of race and sexual orientation, using laughter to dispel hatred.

 

Having openly gay sitcom characters and talk show hosts were not the only elements of the social change we have seen over the past decades, but it was a part of it. Just like asking news networks to treat people of color as being as important as white people will be a part of changing how young people of color value themselves. And, honestly, it really isn’t just about race. You never hear the media getting all pumped up about a missing person who is not attractive. They never cry about a missing fat person or an older person who is poor. 

 

Obviously, they can’t cover everyone equally, but they can diversify their coverage and help to pull racism out of our culture by the roots so that we don’t keep raising new generations of racists. 

 

So I implore you to be patient when people of color or people in marginalized groups push back against the majority culture. It doesn’t always feel good. 

 

I kept up the demanding pace of writing a newspaper article every week for years, which, along with writing sermons and teaching classes, doesn’t always give you enough time for research and editing. I remember writing a piece advocating for the rights of the trans community but in my essay, I used the word “transgendered,” and a very angry trans person called me to let me know how uninformed and misguided I was. He explained, becoming trans is never a past tense event. We are all in the process of change and becoming. When you say “transgendered” you make it sound like it was a singular event that happened one day in the past.

 

I am certain that my response was not nearly as diplomatic as it would be if I were confronted about the same issue today. Language does matter. Changing words, images, characters in a play, or faces in the news, can change the way we think. Though I think it is all too easy for liberal to attack their sympathizers and supporters, the truth is that the critic on the phone was teaching me, even if I didn’t feel like being taught at that moment. 

 

It is true enough that none of us ever change unless we are uncomfortable. When we are happy with the status quo, we don’t do much soul searching and we don’t expend the energy to grow and change. 

When we are being asked to be aware of police killings of unarmed black men, when we are told of hundreds of missing Indigenous women, or even when we are being asked to change the name of sports teams that either glorify the Crusades or exploit Indigenous tribes, if that makes us uncomfortable, we should slow down and ask ourselves if we are uncomfortable because someone is discovering which rock our racism has been hiding under. 

Being uncomfortable may mean that you are being presented with an opportunity to learn something, to grow, to become more of that “better person” we have told ourselves we wanted to be. I am suggesting that we all let go of our defensiveness about a too comfortable status quo and to welcome the challenges hidden in our progress towards a time when racism will be a part of our past. We are not there yet, so defending the status quo is not a good idea. We can envision a world without racism and that is where we want to live, so don’t grow tired to thinking new thoughts and letting go of old prejudices and privilege. We are literally tearing ourselves free of the prejudices that defined our past to live in a newly free way that will make us all free.