"REMORSE, ANGER AND ACTION"

REMORSE, ANGER, ACTION

            These are some of my reactions to the events of this past week – pipe bombs mailed out, two African-Americans killed by a white supremacist in Kentucky, eleven people shot to death in a Pittsburgh synagogue, the latter ironically named “Tree of Life.”  I am remorseful that it has come to this, that white supremacy has felt emboldened to crawl out from its pit of iniquity and not just speak hatred and racism and anti-Semitism ad sexism, but to act them out in public also.  As a white man, I need to remember that many people in this country live this every day – my white male privilege has kept me shielded from much of these kinds of events.  This past week was not one of those shielding weeks.

            Second, I am angry that my white brothers feel the need to kill and maim and terrorize the “other.”  I am angry that this kind of action is part of the bone marrow of United States history.  What we saw this past week was nothing new – it grew out of the deep reservoir of white supremacy that is in our American DNA.  I’m also angry that our President not only calls this up – he stokes it and revels in it.  His base is reacting to his sermon on white supremacy, just like a call and response.  Though I pray every day that the President will change, I can’t imagine that he will.  He seems to live for this kind of stuff, and his very self-image seems to depend on his having an enemy.   The slaughter in Tree of Life Synagogue is only the latest manifestation of this deep sickness of white supremacy.  And, oh, the guns!  The guns!  How our manhood depends on them!   As the prophet Ezekiel put it:  “the parents have eaten bitter grapes, the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

            The third reaction is the call to action.  We can no longer wonder what is wrong with President Trump.  We must no longer wonder why the Republican Party is so captured by his white supremacy.  We must no longer wonder if there is anything that we can do.  Yes, we must take action.   The midterm election ends in 8 days, so it you have not voted, go do it tomorrow.  Get your friends to do it.  Get your colleagues and friends to do it.  There are simply no more excuses, no more chances.  It’s either stymie Trump and his white supremacists or risk becoming Nazi Germany.  

            After you vote, go get involved somewhere in the political realm.  By “political,” I don’t mean choosing a political party, although that would be fine.  I mean for us to get involved in discerning and changing how power is distributed and used in this country – that’s what “political” means.   I’m committing to working on getting the cannon removed in the Decatur square that celebrates “the Indian wars of 1836.”  Yes, that is the beginning of the Trail of Tears, ordered by a Presbyterian, Democratic President Andrew Jackson.   I’m also going to join a court watch program somewhere in order to be a presence and hopefully a mitigator of the Mass Incarceration program arm of white supremacy.  These may not be your places of engagement, but I hope that you will find some.   All of our lives, especially those lives on the margins – all of our lives depend upon our choices over the next few weeks.  Just remember – RAA – remorse, anger, action. 

"ON VOTING"

“ON VOTING”

            Caroline and I are in Louisville, attending an anti-white supremacy, anti-racism gathering sponsored by our Presbyterian denomination PCUSA, whose headquarters are in Louisville.  I won’t have time to write this week’s blog, but I am posting, with Susan’s permission, our daughter’s fine FaceBook post in 2014 about my mother and her commitment to voting.  I must confess here that I violated our family commitment to voting in my very first year of eligibility in 1968.  I had worked hard for Eugene McCarthy and felt like he was cheated out of the Democratic party’s nomination for President.  So, in my bitterness, I joined many other young, white people in refusing to vote for anyone so that we could protest the corruption of the system.  Does this sound familiar for 2016?  In 1968, I wrote in my friend David Billings’ name for president rather than holding my nose and voting for Hubert Humphrey.  The result was a narrow victory for Richard Nixon.  Nixon’s victory began the long, white male reaction to the civil rights movement and to the women’s movement, which has now culminated (I hope) in the election of Donald Trump.  I chastised myself greatly after that, and I have voted in every election since then.  Here is Susan’s post about my mother and the importance of voting.  As you read it, remember the power that we voters have in our hands, and please don’t be an ass like me and skip voting this fall.

            “Since we are still near Day of the Dead, here is a Voting Day story about my grandma, Mary Stroupe, who died almost exactly 10 years ago: after working for many years as a hairdresser and beautician in Helena, Arkansas, and raising my father as a single mother in the 1950s and 60s, she retired from being a practitioner to teaching at the local community college. The majority of her students were black--men and women who were working toward their beauticians' licenses. My grandma was a product of her time--raised in an entrenched and (to her) unnoticeable segregation that firmly defined which races of people were worth more than others. My father was also raised in this system, but as he came of age, his mind was transformed toward justice, and my grandma, because of her own intelligence, her devotion to my father, and a friendship with a black woman who was her peer and fellow teacher at the community college (Jessie Weston) began to change as well. Grandma was insanely stubborn: a trait which allowed her to be a single mother, and a trait which also served her students in community who would rather conserve the ways of fearful separation than become vulnerable to change. 

            On every election day, my grandma would only let in students who brought proof that they had voted before coming to class. In her early years of doing this, she had students come in saying they were being prevented from voting by election officials. The story goes that Grandma stopped class and led all of her students and her five-feet-on-a-good-day self over to the polling place, demanding of the men blocking the door that her students be let in to vote, as was their constitutional right. They relented, and her students voted.

            So I have my sticker, and I think of my grandma. I also think of my great-grandmother on my mom's side, whom I never knew, but am told that although she did not support women getting the vote in 1920, after the amendment was passed, she voted in every election until her death in 1979. We don't take enfranchisement lightly in this family.”

"THE OPPOSITE OF POVERTY IS NOT WEALTH...."

“THE OPPOSITE OF POVERTY IS NOT WEALTH…”

            Caroline and I are on a trip to visit our long-time friends, David Billings and Margery Freeman, in McComb, Mississippi, traveling through Alabama.  Though these were not states when the Constitution was adopted, this is the land of the original “originalists.”  One of the central dynamics of the Constitution was to preserve privileged, white male power.  There is no mention of the rights of women.  African-Americans and Native Americans are deemed to be only 60 % human.

            I thought about this a lot as we visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery.  They are the work of the Equal Justice Initiative and are powerful testimony to the past and current injustice and inequities in American history.   The National Memorial is an artistic rendering of the terror and power of lynching in American history.  Sculptures hang down, representing people lynched.  The initial sculptures are by counties, and there is seemingly no pattern to them.  I kept wanting to put them by states, but it was chaotic and unpatterned.  It took me awhile to allow the art to penetrate my senses.  The purpose of these initial pieces of art is to give us a feeling of chaos, of terror, of inability to know when or where the next lynching is coming.  It is a reminder that for those classified as “black” in US history, lynching is always on the table, no matter the locale, no matter the time, no matter the economic status.  

            I was looking for one particular sculpture, that of Phillips County, Arkansas – my home county.  There, in and around Elaine, Arkansas, over 230 African-American people were lynched in two days’ time, in 1919, the largest number of African-Americans killed in lynchings in US history.  On the second turn, I found it, and it was depressing and sobering and angering and defeating.  Some of my forebears were in on that.  They may not have participated in it.  In fact, I am assuming that they did not, but I do not know.  I never knew the magnitude of the executions, and I never thought to ask my mother or other relatives – it was taboo.  Yet, whether they pulled the triggers or not, they supported it.  Difficult stuff.

            After the initial round of sculptures, we finally came to the state groupings, and there were many more in Arkansas counties than I had previously thought.  For some reason (actually I know the reason), I thought the lynchings were confined to the Deep South east of the Mississippi River and to the River Delta on the Arkansas side where I grew up.  After that, the staff invited us to climb the small incline to view all the monuments.  The purpose of the viewing was to allow the spirits of those people who were lynched to cry out to the perpetrators, and it was a powerful time to listen to the voices.

            Next we went to the Legacy Museum, which proclaimed to us that lynching was still with us, that it had now evolved to DWB, police brutality, mass incarceration, skewed income tax tables and deductions, red-lining, destabilizing of the public school system, and many other forms of the racism that has informed our national heritage since its beginnings.   I was struck by many things in this exhibit – one was the jars of dirt collected from some of the known sights of lynchings.  Another was an announcement in the Hattiesburg paper in June, 1915, that John Hartfield would be lynched the next day – no spontaneous anger here, but rather an announcement of a murder to come.  Many brought picnics to watch, and many sold picture postcards afterward – almost 10,000 people gathered to watch a man murdered.  So, for those who feel that our national love of violence is a new thing, please hear that it is in our marrow and DNA.

            Bryan Stevenson, the person behind these profound exhibits put it this way:  “The opposite of poverty is not wealth.  The opposite of poverty is justice.”  Wherever we are, whatever we are, let us recall these words.  Let us recall the idea of equity and equality that is part of our national heritage, an idea that so often loses out to racism and sexism and materialism.   We have three weeks left to make some small movement back towards equity and equality -  please, please vote, and make sure that your friends, colleagues and neighbors vote.   

 Because this is what looms over us:  for those who think that this is only ancient history, please note that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh join Alioto and Thomas as “originalists” on the Supreme Court, with Roberts now being the swing vote.  That is a scary thought!

            The voices of the people who have been lynched - and who will be lynched – now cry out to us.  Let us hear and act in behalf of their humanity and of our own.  It won’t end with the election, of course, but it will be a start back towards justice. 

"A REAL MAN"

“A REAL MAN”

            Last week I looked at Courageous Mary and her taking some ownership of her sexuality in the Biblical accounts of the birth of Jesus.  As courageous as she was in Luke 1, she still faced the death penalty because she was pregnant by someone other than her fiancé.  Her fate remained in the hands of the patriarchy, of the toxic masculinity system.  Indeed, her fate rested in the hands of one man, her fiancé Joseph.  In this past weekend’s re-affirmation of toxic masculinity in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to be a Supreme Court justice, let us look at what the Bible tells us about a real man, a non-toxic man.

            We do not have a Biblical account of Mary’s telling Joseph about her being pregnant by someone other than him, and her telling him that the “someone” is not a human being.  Here, Joseph enters the story – not in Luke, interestingly enough.  For Joseph’s point of view, we must turn to Matthew’s Gospel.  Matthew has given us a clue that he may not be totally bound to male domination, because in his genealogy of Jesus, he breaks with patriarchy and lists five women in the genealogy.  And, from the patriarchal point of view, these five women are troublesome – a woman who learns how to survive in the patriarchal world (Tamar), an enterprising and independent businesswoman, (Rahab), a foreign immigrant (Ruth), a woman forced to commit adultery by King David (unnamed in Matthew and called “the wife of Uriah” –Bathsheba was her name), and this courageous young woman named Mary. 

            Joseph comes to present his case, as did Brett Kavanaugh.  Whereas Kavanaugh brought all the signs of toxic masculinity to the table – belligerence, accusations, resentment, threats – Joseph does not.  Make no mistake – Joseph belongs to patriarchy, but his momma and his daddy (and God) have taught him a different slant.  Rather than putting his male resentment at the center, as is his right under patriarchy, he chooses not to call Mary before the elders in order to stone her to death.  He decides to divorce her and “dismiss her quietly.”  “Dismiss her quietly” is the liberal term for the death penalty in slow motion – Mary, disgraced because she sought a bit of control over her sexuality, will likely hit the streets and earn money any way that she can. 

            In Matthew’s account, Joseph is able to present authentic masculinity, not toxic masculinity, to Courageous Mary.   He is able to do this because he was open to perceiving God’s vision for him and for Courageous Mary and for the baby he would claim as his own, Black Jesus.  An angel (unnamed) appears to him in a dream and tells him that rather than dismissing Mary quietly in the realm of toxic masculinity, he should move from the center of life to the margins of life to join Courageous Mary and his child-to-be.  Joseph is a dreamer – he’ll have two more life-saving visions in Matthew (sounding like another dreamer named Joseph in the Hebrew Scriptures).  Perhaps this search for visions is what saves him from the toxic masculinity of Brett Kavanaugh and many others – he could “see” further and deeper than many of us.  So he takes a chance on love and says “yes” to Courageous Mary and to God.  He moves with Mary to the margins, but he uses his masculine power to protect her, not attack her.  Protect her from the elders, protect her from the death penalty, protect her from the government soldiers who search for her baby to kill him. 

            Wonder where black Jesus got his authentic, non-toxic masculinity?  From Courageous Mary, and now from a real man named Joseph.  Want to know what a real man looks like?  Don’t look at Brett Kavanaugh or Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell or Lindsay Graham – they are distortions of masculinity, toxic men.  Look at Joseph and at Jesus, and look at others.  I’m hoping that you know some in your life, real men who are nurturing, loving, protecting, willing to be at the margins of patriarchy.  The next step?  Thank the real men in your life, and then plan to vote for candidates on November 6 who are courageous like Mary and Joseph.  We need them in leadership so badly right now!

"COURAGEOUS WOMEN AND REAL MEN"

“COURAGEOUS WOMEN AND REAL MEN”

            As we wait on the FBI report on Brett Kavanaugh’s suitability as a Supreme Court justice,  I’ve been wondering what Courageous Mary (also known in the church as the Virgin Mary) thought about the Senate confirmation hearing of September 27, where Dr. Christine Blasy Ford gave powerful testimony about being sexually assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.  I was struck by the fact that so many commentators thought that she made a credible and compelling case – what did they expect her to do?  It sounds as if the underlying assumption was that she would not be credible, and she amazed people when she was.   So, we should pause right here to emphasize the context in which she testified – the assumption is that women will not make credible witnesses when they give such testimony.   That is a sad but true fact that the Trump era understands better than we progressives do:  women will not be believed.  I give thanks to Dr. Ford whose testimony was so powerful – even the white, male patriarchal Republicans were afraid of her!  That’s why Kavanaugh was so vociferous in his testimony – patriarchy had been exposed, and he (and we white males) are not accustomed to being held accountable by women and people of color.

            I mention Courageous Mary because in the birth stories surrounding Jesus, sexuality is at the center.  We often skip over that part, but in both Matthew and Luke, sexual behavior takes center stage.  This week we’ll look at Mary’s story and next week at Joseph’s story in this land of patriarchy and toxic masculinity.  The young Mary faces difficult choices.  She already belongs to Joseph as his property.  Then, a male angel named Gabriel appears to her and asks (demands?) that she allow herself to become impregnated with the Messiah, become impregnated by the male God named Yahweh.  Right away, we are in scary territory.   A new male being wants in her ear (the Word?) or in her vagina to create a baby.  If she says “no,” will God destroy her?  If she says “yes,” then she faces the death penalty.   The decisions over how to be sexual in a patriarchal society are always difficult for women, as we see in these Gospel stories about the conception and birth of Jesus.   Mary chooses to allow herself to become pregnant by Yahweh, and in one way, it is a slap at toxic masculinity.  As Sojourner Truth put it so well 160 years ago, “where did your Christ come from?  God and a woman – man had nothing to do with it.”  Yet, it is like “Sophie’s Choice” – no real way out for Mary.  She still belongs to patriarchy, and it is no wonder that Margaret Atwood chose Mary’s words in Luke 1:38 (“I am the handmaiden of the Lord”) as the title for her book “The Handmaid’s Tale,” about the total patriarchal world that Trump/Grasley/Graham/Cruz/Kavanaugh, et al,  would like to see re-established. 

            In Luke’s account, Joseph is a non-actor in this sexual story until the second chapter.  After Mary agrees to become pregnant via God, she doesn’t go to Joseph – rather she goes to the sisterhood, to the community, for support.  She goes to her cousin Elizabeth, miraculously pregnant with John the Baptizer.  I say “miraculously” because in a patriarchal society, her lack of children is blamed on her, not on her husband Zechariah.  Her value in the patriarchal world, as in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” has gone up because she is pregnant.  Yet for all the toxic masculinity flowing through this story, the real miracle is that Mary finds strength with her sister, finds strength to be at the margins.   

     She has been at the margins all her life as a woman in a male-dominated world, but now she begins to perceive the possibility of life there – she even praises life at the margins, in a way that should shock all of us in middle and upper middle class American life:  “ the Mighty One has done great things for me….God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;  God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:49-53).  Right away we see what kinds of things that Mary will be teaching her son – Black Jesus’ emphasis on God’s preference for the poor and marginalized came via his momma, who came to be called the Virgin Mary, but should be called the Courageous Mary.   But, at this point in the story, it is not clear if Mary will have an opportunity to teach anything to her baby – she still faces the death penalty for becoming pregnant by someone other than her fiancé.  Courageous Mary (and so is Dr. Ford and so many others) is necessary, but so is non-toxic masculinity, and next week, we’ll look at that.