Letters to the American church from Christians around the world.
Cover Story
Daniel José Camacho 5-31-2019
Mike McQuade
I'M HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS of the growing obsession with genetic ancestry tests. 23andMe. AncestryDNA. People can now scrape their inner cheek with a swab, mail it to a company for $99, and brag to you about a cultural or racial epiphany they’ve had based on being 4.7 percent of something. Who knows how this personal genetic information might be used. I suspect these companies respect people’s privacy as much as Facebook does. I’ve heard that governments and police departments are already using this information to track people.
And yet, I would be lying if I said I haven’t thought about purchasing a DNA kit for myself. Yes, I know that such tests provide limited and potentially misleading information. Yes, I understand that they fuel problematic framings of race that tie race to genetics when race is actually something socially and politically constructed. But I’m still curious!
I don’t know if I will ever take a test. I ask myself: Should I be contributing to this system? Could I convince Sojourners to pay for my test if I were to write an article about it, thus shifting some of the ethical burden away from me as an individual?
Will Young 4-24-2019
STEVE KLAWONN, pastor of Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Evansdale, Iowa, was near the end of a seven-year church redesign when he scoured the internet for new church furniture—with no promising leads.
“Needless to say, church furniture prices tend to be pretty high,” he said.
In a climate where church attendance is declining and houses of worship are looking for creative ways to stay in operation, solid wood pulpits and lecterns are expensive investments. In nearby Humbolt, family-owned Gunder Church Furniture sells a winged pulpit for $1,546; a matching lectern goes for $1,078. Klawonn liked the idea of choosing an in-state manufacturer, but affordability was key.
Randy Woodley 3-21-2019
Illustration by Merisha Sequoia Lemmer
CHANGE YOUR LENSES, please. Okay, maybe you can’t simply change lenses right now, but would you at least notice the lenses you are currently wearing? If you are like, say, 99.9 percent of us in the U.S., you have been influenced by a very particular set of perspectives that interpret life from an Enlightenment-bound Western worldview.
All of our lenses have various perspectival tints, but Western worldviews seem to have several in common, including the foundational influence of Platonic dualism, inherited from the Greeks. This particular influence absolutizes the realm of the abstract (spirit, soul, mind) and reduces the importance of the concrete realm (earth, body, material), disengaging them from one another. In dualistic thinking, we are no longer an existing whole.
Western worldviews tend to have other related assumptions—such as hierarchy, extrinsic categorization, individualism, patriarchy, utopianism, racism, triumphalism, religious intolerance, greed, and anthropocentrism. But the influence of dualism empowers these other concerns.
What difference would it make if life were viewed instead as a fundamental whole, if the earth itself were seen as spiritual? And how would such a worldview square with Jesus’ approach to such matters?
John Thornton Jr. 2-22-2019
“JOHN, THERE'S, UH, A GUY YOU NEED TO COME SEE see in the sanctuary. I think he’s angry or upset or something.” Hearing these words on a Sunday morning while I sat in my office preparing for worship meant one thing: Someone needed money. One of the hazards (or opportunities) of working in a downtown church was that the steeple and columns out front signaled to people that they should drop in when they needed a few dollars. I became the go-to minister on staff to greet these visitors.
I heard the man before I saw him. His sobs were audible over the only other noise in the space, the women arranging flowers for our 10:30 a.m. service. He was seated in the next-to-last row of the opulent sanctuary built in 1924. White and in his 40s, the man looked put-together but sweaty, his denim jacket well-worn. I introduced myself, told him I was glad he’d come to our church that morning, and asked if there was anything I could do for him. The man—I’ll call him James—told a familiar story: He’d arrived from out of town, didn’t know anyone in Winston-Salem, and was currently living at a shelter down the street. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m desperate,” he said at a volume that caught the attention of the flower arrangers. “I need some money for a bus pass and I’ve got to find work. I don’t know why God would do this to me.”
“This,” he said pointing to the piece of paper in his hand, “this is all I want. How can I get this?” He was holding a flyer for our discontinued financial literacy class. I told him we no longer offered the class and didn’t have any funds available for assistance.
I drive a car, go on vacation, and eat at restaurants with friends. I have health insurance, a bank account, and a job. I knew I ought to help the man, but I didn’t. Our church’s policies around requests of this kind required more oversight than I could give at that moment, and my mind drifted to the other duties I had that morning. I invited him to stay for worship and told him if he came back later in the week, I might be able to refer him to some agencies that could help.
James stayed for the service, sobbing quietly on occasion. In the months that followed, I saw him around downtown, but never again in the sanctuary. I felt disappointed for failing to offer help, for getting caught between conviction and institutional responsibility. As someone who works in ministry, often with poor people, I’ve learned to live with that feeling to get through my work. Yet I don’t want to make peace with that feeling; doing so would be giving up too easily.
Tom Roberts 1-23-2019
Photo: Composite/Reuters
TIMOTHY BUSCH IS A WEALTHY MAN with big ambitions. His version of the prosperity gospel, Catholic in content and on steroids, is a hybrid of traditionalist pieties wrapped in American-style excess and positioned most conspicuously in service of free market capitalism.
Busch’s organization, the Napa Institute, and its corresponding foundation are among the most prominent of a growing number of right-wing Catholic nonprofits with political motivations. Such groups, some more extreme than others and all on the right to far-right side of the political and ecclesial spectrum, have in recent years muscled in on territory that previously was the largely unchallenged domain of the nation’s powerful Catholic bishops.
What Busch calls “in-your-face Catholicism” is often expressed amid multicourse meals followed by wine and cigar receptions, private cocktail parties for the especially privileged, traditional Catholic devotionals, Mass said in Latin for those so inclined, “patriotic rosary” sessions that include readings from George Washington and Robert E. Lee, and the occasional break for a round of golf.
Busch’s Catholic Right brand of American libertarianism aligns with some far-right leaders based in Italy who oppose Pope Francis and appear interested in joining forces to fashion an alternative to official Catholic leadership structures, which in this country means the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
Last summer, the Napa Institute sponsored a birthday soiree at the Rome residence of Cardinal James Harvey, a far-right American cleric. There, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, a German philanthropist-turned-conservative Catholic, rubbed shoulders with American arch-traditionalist Cardinal Raymond Burke, who, according to The New York Times , “ate birthday cake in the shape of a red cardinal’s hat, held champagne in one glass and blessed seminarians with the other, and watched fireworks light up the sky in his honor.”
Princess Gloria also introduced German Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, fired by Pope Francis from his position as the church’s doctrinal watchdog, to Steve Bannon. Bannon subsequently invited Müller to Bannon’s Washington headquarters, better known as the “Breitbart Embassy,” according to The Times. All done under the watchful eye of Timothy Busch.
Da’Shawn Mosley 12-19-2018
IF I WERE MURDERED TODAY—say, shot and killed while walking unarmed through a residential area, wearing my hoodie—and my murderer weren’t arrested by dawn, my family would make one phone call. To Benjamin Crump.
This has become the African-American family emergency plan—set in motion when the “hurricane” is a white person with a gun. Call Benjamin Crump.
This is what Trayvon Martin’s family did in 2012 when they realized the criminal justice system would not punish the man who killed Trayvon. They called the lawyer who once stood on the steps of a courthouse where two white men had just been acquitted of beating to death a 14-year-old boy and said: “You kill a dog, you go to jail. You kill a little black boy, and nothing happens.” They called the attorney who, time and time again, tries to make something happen. They called Benjamin Crump.
In Trayvon’s case, Crump, one of the best-known civil rights attorneys practicing today, thought at first that something would happen without his help—since the only thing Martin had in his possession when George Zimmerman shot and killed him was a can of fruit juice and a bag of Skittles. When Crump realized there was a strong possibility that justice would not be served, he came face-to-face with what he calls “a test from God.”
“Nobody was watching this call between me and this brokenhearted father, save God,” Crump told Sojourners in a phone interview in October. “And I believe God was testing me to see if I was going to answer the bell, use the blessings and education and all the other things [God] has given me to be a blessing to the least of these. I stepped out on faith to do the right thing. And God took over from there.”
Gaymon Bennett 11-20-2018
ON JAN 9, 2007, STEVE JOBS stepped onto a stage in San Francisco, his trademark black mock-turtleneck blending with the shadowed backdrop, his clipped hair and lean countenance offering a monk-like silhouette against the screen.
Jobs stepped forward and raised his arms. And there it was, almost inconspicuous in the palm of his hand. “Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone ... here it is ... the iPhone.” Naming a new god.
At the time, no one consciously believed that smartphones, the internet of things, or ubiquitous computing would save us. Yet, as the encyclical Laudato Si points out about technocracies: No one has to actually believe they’re gods. They become gods when we start investing our hope and identity in them.
And here we are. We live as if the connections provided by digital technologies are vital—and indeed we have made them so.
A decade after the first iPhone, environmental engineer Braden Allenby was asked whether, one day, humans would be wired directly into the internet. “Look at any city street,” he replied. “At least half the people are looking at their phones. We’re already integrated into networks beyond our physical environment.” Heads bowed, praying to strange new gods.
It began as allure: more accessible music, easier communication, maps and directions. Then it slid toward addiction: picking up the phone in the morning, like a first cigarette of the day. And now, dependence: Our lives are synced, our habits surveilled, our data monetized, and the world goes ’round. Our little intimacies power a vast machinery.
All in the name of improving our lives.
Da’Shawn Mosley, Teresa P. Mateus 10-24-2018
WHEN TERESA P. MATEUS attended gatherings on Christian contemplative spirituality, she often didn’t see herself reflected in the spiritual practices “centered in whiteness” that she found emphasized there. She yearned for spiritual resources that drew on the experiences of people of color—and out of that yearning, the Mystic Soul Project was born.
Mateus is a graduate of the New York University School of Clinical Social Work and the Living School at the Center for Action and Contemplation and author (under the name Teresa B. Pasquale) of two books on recovery after trauma, including Sacred Wounds: A Path to Healing from Spiritual Trauma. Da’Shawn Mosley, assistant editor of Sojourners, spoke with Mateus in August about how the Mystic Soul Project brings healing and spiritual nourishment to people on the margins.
Da’Shawn Mosley: Tell us about the Mystic Soul Project.
Teresa P. Mateus: Our basic mission is activism, mysticism, and healing centered around the life experiences of people of color. We create space for conversations, relationship building, practices, and other programming that have a people-of-color perspective and allow many to reclaim ancestral practices that have been abandoned or erased by Western traditions.
Carol Anderson 9-25-2018
WHAT DOES ELECTION-RIGGING LOOK LIKE? Often, on its face, it looks quite benign.
Take Ohio. The official elections website of Ohio’s secretary of state proclaims that “all eligible Ohioans have equal access to one of the best elections systems in the country.”
But “equal access” isn’t always what it appears.
Ohio provides only one polling station per county for early voting—which on the surface gives the impression that the system is fair and equitable. But—and here’s the rub—the counties are fundamentally different. For instance, Pickaway County, just south of Columbus, has fewer than 60,000 residents. Hamilton County, where Cincinnati is located, has a population of more than 800,000 people. But each county only has one early-voting station.
The results have been predictable—and have not been race-neutral. In the 2012 presidential election, there were no lines to vote early in Pickaway County, which is 94.5 percent white. But Hamilton County, with its 206,000 African-American residents, had a line that stretched a quarter mile. According to UrbanCincy.com, voters in Cincinnati reported wait times of more than four hours, and other urban areas, such as Cleveland and Columbus, faced similar obstacles. (Comparable delays occurred in 2016.) The Republican Party chair for Columbus’ county defended the long waits, telling the Columbus Dispatch, “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African American—voter turnout machine.”
Unfortunately, Ohio is not alone. According to a report in Mother Jones titled “Even Without Voter ID Laws, Minority Voters Face More Hurdles to Casting Ballots,” African Americans across the country waited about twice as long to vote as did white people in the 2012 election—and the trends are getting worse, not better. A study by the Brennan Center for Justice found a strong correlation between precincts with significant minority populations and polling places that have a shortage of resources, such as voting machines and poll workers—and these are big factors in long voting lines, which tend to depress voter turnout. In South Carolina, the study found, areas with the longest waits had more than twice the percentage of African-American voters than the state as a whole.
Erecting obstacles to voting—for some
Restrictions on early voting aren’t the only obstacles and inconveniences put in place in recent years. For instance, an official in Randolph County, Ga., recently proposed closing seven of the nine polling places in the county, which happens to be majority black. For many of the county’s residents, that would mean the nearest polling place would be as much as 10 miles away. For every tenth of a mile that a polling place is moved from an African-American community, the black voter turnout goes down by .5 percent, especially in poor areas where transportation options are limited. Making polling places less accessible depresses the black turnout rate. (After an outcry, Randolph County backed off its plans to eliminate polling places for the 2018 midterms.)
The “consolidation” (read: closing) of polling places isn’t limited to Georgia. After the Shelby County v. Holder decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that gutted the Voting Rights Act, jurisdictions that used to have to go under preclearance—places that were required to have their voting changes okayed by the Department of Justice because of their problematic histories of racial discrimination—had 868 fewer polling places in the 2016 election than they did before the court’s ruling.
David Keck, Helena M. Hansson 7-30-2018
WE LEARN AT a young age that sports depend on fairness. A shared commitment to some degree of justice is required if any game is to continue. Kids playing baseball in a sandlot must agree about whether the ball was fair or foul, or the game falls apart. We complain about bad calls from referees because unjust decisions from officials invalidate the game. Despite numerous abuses, sports have the potential to instill deeply formative commitments to justice.
Although there are terrible examples of abusive coaches, most coaches instill their players with respect for rules, officials, and the opponent, encouraging selfless teamwork and giving more playing time to those working harder in practice. Studies show that athletic performance improves when athletes perceive coaches to be fair. And this formative influence can last for decades: NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar credits his former college coach, John Wooden, for providing the guidance that led Abdul-Jabbar to become a successful basketball player and lifelong justice advocate. “Coach Wooden taught me a lot about basketball through his words,” writes Abdul-Jabbar. “But more important, his example as a man of unbending moral strength taught me how to be the man I wanted to be—and needed to be.”
Bradford William Davis 7-23-2018
Editors’ note: This article appeared in Sojourners magazine in 2018. In 2020, a Washington Post article by Will Hobson raised concerns about some of Bennet Omalu’s conclusions on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Ongoing research suggests that CTE is a risk for NFL players, but the rate and severity of the brain disease among football players is still being studied.
DR. BENNET OMALU is well-acquainted with gruesome deaths. “Some people wake up in the morning, put on their suits, go to offices, and to do things associated with life, with living. But me,” Omalu says from behind the office desk in his Sacramento-area home, “I dress up, I go to work to do things associated with the greatest weaknesses of [humanity].”
A forensic pathologist and neuropathologist who earned degrees in his native Nigeria and in various schools across the U.S., Omalu was most recently in the news for performing an independent autopsy on Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man killed in his own backyard. Omalu’s work confirmed that Clark was shot in the back six times by Sacramento police.
Omalu is best known, however, for the startling discovery he made after performing an autopsy on former NFL player Mike Webster. As chronicled in the 2015 film Concussion, with Will Smith starring as Omalu, the then-medical examiner in Pittsburgh found Webster had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head—the kind of blows to the head you ought to expect when playing tackle football.
But despite his daily proximity to death, Omalu, a committed Catholic, has nothing but gratitude. “I am blessed because I encounter death every day ... I came to the world naked, cold, and lonely, and I will leave the world alone, cold, and lonely,” he explains. “When you realize that, you begin to think of powers, realities, dimensions that are beyond you.”
Omalu is precise and careful with his words. When he says, “I let the Spirit of God percolate into my being,” I half expect to hear his celestial brew bubble. “Everything I do, I do through the eyes of faith.”
Omalu doesn’t seem to be exaggerating; his Christian beliefs and morals permeate his outlook on everything. Early in our conversation, he asks if I’m a Christian writer, and I try to say I’m more like a Christian who writes, but Omalu isn’t one to thread the needle between competing postmodern definitions of Christian vocation. The Bible on his desk is as important to him as any medical textbook—and based on its proximity to his laptop, he might use the Bible more often.
And it’s with this same precision that Omalu offers an uncompromising assessment of the sport running U.S. recreational life each Saturday and Sunday (plus Monday nights on ESPN, Fridays if you’re in high school, and it’s even trying to make Thursdays a thing) for about six months out of the year.
Julienne Gage 6-25-2018
LESS THAN 100 YEARS AGO, the introduction of air conditioning made Miami one of the most desirable tourist destinations in America. Today, with a metro area population of nearly 3 million, it’s an even bigger cosmopolitan hot spot, with residents of all socioeconomic backgrounds vying for land in a sea of traffic and, to some degree, rising tides.
Like most of America’s urban centers, Miami is facing widespread gentrification. Plagued by limited public transportation and a desire to work and play in artsy urban districts, increasing numbers of affluent and middle-class residents have been moving inland, pushing immigrants, minorities, and the working class far into the suburbs or beyond county lines.
Climate change, according to some community activists, is exacerbating this phenomenon. In fact, it could soon make Miami a major U.S. focal point for climate justice.
Historically, being on the teal-colored ocean or bay was a priority for the privileged, so the poor were relegated to the interior—with black people specifically being subject to redlining and segregation—removed from much of what gave Miami the nickname “Magic City.” But on average, Miami is only about six and a half feet above sea level, so as the climate warms and tides rise, some investors and renters are moving inland, searching for higher ground in historically black neighborhoods such as Overtown, Liberty City, and Little Haiti. It’s a phenomenon local activist Valencia Gunder refers to as “climate gentrification.”
Gunder, 33, grew up in Liberty City, popularized by the Oscar-winning 2016 film Moonlight, which speaks to the juxtaposed joys and struggles of black Miami. This northwest neighborhood was built in the 1930s to alleviate population density in downtown Miami’s Overtown, one of the only neighborhoods for people of color during segregation. It accommodated middle-class African Americans with modest single-family homes and yards. Over the years, endemic poverty and racism would take its toll, as would South Florida’s tumultuous drug wars of the 1980s and 1990s. But Gunder says Liberty City still had a lot of perks.
The Editors 5-30-2018
NEO-NAZIS AND WHITE SUPREMACISTS are marching again. Counterprotesters are opposing and disrupting. Where do Christians stand? In April, Sojourners senior associate editor Rose Marie Berger launched this question on social media: Is it okay for a Christian to punch a Nazi? A lively conversation followed, eventually generating nearly 100 replies—and about as many different understandings (and misunderstandings) of Christian nonviolence. Excerpts from the conversation below are edited and used with permission. —The Editors
Rose: Is it okay for a Christian to punch a Nazi? Discuss.
Maureen: Last time I checked it is not okay to punch anyone, no matter who you are. Right?
Nate: Yes. Pacifism doesn’t work against genocide. You have to have an opponent who can feel shame. Nazis call for the extinction of my people and have proven they are willing to try and carry that out.
Rose: Is pacifism the same as organized unarmed resistance?
Nate: In my head it has the same results against Nazis. Nazis are my only punching exception.
Larry: Ask Dietrich Bonhoeffer ...
Nate: Show me where Bonhoeffer succeeded in stopping the Nazis. I’ll wait.
Larry: He didn’t, but he didn’t resist passively.
Korla: Choosing to accept death for yourself is substantially different from choosing to accept it for other people, particularly from a position where you’re incredibly low on the list of targets. That’s cowardly and colonial.
Andrew Klager 5-30-2018
Illustration by Craig Frazier
"NONVIOLENCE" EVOKES IMAGES of well-known protests—Gandhi’s Salt March, Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington—and conveniently flimsy stereotypes: anarchist hippies, utopian peaceniks, futile protesters. The reality is more complex.
Christian nonviolence adds the further complexity of a shockingly irregular king who was enthroned on a Roman cross. If secular nonviolence seems naive, Christian nonviolence is downright scandalous.
What counts as violence?
Violence is any action that undermines the dignity of another human being, whether direct, structural, or institutional. This can be emotional, psychological, spiritual, or physical abuse; actions that dehumanize the Other; forms of injustice, oppression, or marginalization; and war, genocide, mob violence, and armed insurrection. But violence is not the same as conflict. Conflict provides the space to air grievances and expose injustice; nonviolence entails ending conflict by eroding its causes without succumbing to the allure of violence. Nonviolence requires “the willingness to face conflict head on, to resolve it, and to make it a link in the chain of a new process,” explained Pope Francis.
Does nonviolence mean passive withdrawal from conflict?
Practitioners of nonviolence do not withdraw from conflict; they face it with courage and creativity. A call to alleviate injustice propels practitioners of nonviolence from the sidelines to active solidarity with and participation in the struggles for human dignity. This intentional involvement provides practitioners front-row engagement with injustice, oppression, and exploitation that undercuts any naiveté about the challenges our world faces.
How do we engage with conflict nonviolently?
When we think about nonviolence, we often picture mass demonstrations, acts of civil disobedience, labor strikes, boycotts, and other forms of noncooperation—modes of engagement that burrow into our collective consciousness by their deliberate desire to get our attention.
But the tools of nonviolence also include a broad range of strategic and collaborative initiatives, customized to particular violent conflicts: problem-solving workshops that provide a shared space for grassroots actors, middle-range community leaders, and high-level officials to address real needs and grievances; shared actions between enemy factions to encourage humanization and mutual personal investment in addressing the root causes of violent conflict; disruptive measures that include intercepting arms transfers and cutting off financial resources that fund extremist violence; trauma healing and restorative justice initiatives that promote transformation and reconciliation; and development projects that address physical needs to create the conditions that build relationships and discourage conflict.
Jim Wallis 4-25-2018
WHERE MUST we start as Christians and faithful churches after such a devastating election that brings the most dangerous man to the White House that we have seen in our lifetimes?
First, many people are terribly afraid, because they are from groups who were attacked and targeted in the campaign by the new president-elect. We must take those attacks seriously by reaching out in solidarity and protection to those who are now most vulnerable—undocumented immigrants, black and brown Americans, Muslims, women of all races, and LGBTQ folks. Members of these groups have already experienced ugly incidents of hate and violence, including increased harassment, vandalism, and even assaults on children and others in the wake of the election results. If I read my scriptures right, those are the people that Christians and other people of good conscience should now turn to in solidarity and support. That is what Christians are supposed to do: Support the poor, the vulnerable, and those under attack.
Second, we must make it very clear that honest and prophetic truth-telling about race in America will be needed as never before in our time, especially from white Christians. The fact that a majority of white Americans, at every level of class and gender, voted for a candidate who ran on racial and gender bigotry is even more distressing when we see that a majority of white Christians voted just like other white voters. And it is revealing that those who say this election was not about race are white, while Christians of color see race at the center of it. Repentance by white Christians in America will require the replacement of the white identity politics that dominated this election with faith identity politics.
One of the saddest aspects of the election for me is the fact that most white evangelicals voted for a man whose life has embodied the most sinful and shameful worship of money, sex, and power and who represents the very worst of what American culture has become.
Gregg Brekke 4-25-2018
Credit: Greg Brekke
THE STANDING ROCK Sioux Nation has actively opposed the construction of an oil pipeline intended to cross the Missouri River adjacent to their land since learning of the planned route in 2014. Joined first by Native American tribes from across the country, and more recently by others including military veterans and clergy, the “water protectors” scored a major victory in December when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers denied permits for the construction of the river crossing and, as we went to press, began examining the environmental impact of alternative routes. —The Editors
A thin layer of smoke from dozens of campfires hung low in the air over the Oceti Sakowin camp the morning of Nov. 3. More than 500 faith leaders had assembled at the camp’s sacred fire in solidarity with water protectors who have held vigil on the shores of North Dakota’s Cannonball River since April.
Rev. John Floberg, supervising priest of the Episcopal churches on the North Dakota side of Standing Rock, led the gathered clergy encircling the camp’s perpetual sacred fire in a ceremony of apology and repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery, the papal edict issued in 1493 granting Western colonizers the right of dominion over Indigenous peoples and lands.
Leaders from faith groups that officially have repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery—including Baptist, Episcopal, Lutheran, and Presbyterian—joined Floberg in the speakers’ area facing tribal elders, where they each read a portion of an adapted repudiation statement crafted by the World Council of Churches. Following the apology, copies of the Doctrine of Discovery were offered to the elders who were asked if they wanted to place the documents in the sacred fire. After conferring, one elder said, “This paper, these words, do not belong in a sacred fire.” They chose instead to burn the documents in vessels placed between faith leaders and tribal elders.
M.T. Dávila, Tobias Winright 4-25-2018
THIS TEXT SENT BY a relative at Standing Rock confirms the images we’ve been seeing from the Standing Rock demonstrations against the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota. On the evening of Nov. 20, local police with armored vehicles fired at water protectors and their allies with water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and percussion grenades; hundreds were injured and several taken to the hospital.
Once again we are at the crux of legitimate protests, private corporate interest, and the use of police and military force to address the situation. Fall 2011 saw law enforcement dismantling Occupy Wall Street encampments throughout the nation, while various Black Lives Matter demonstrations from Ferguson to Baltimore have faced similar confrontation by law enforcement. In all these cases, law enforcement prioritized protection of private property.
This fall, the Morton County sheriff’s department in North Dakota put its muscle behind the companies building the Dakota Access pipeline. The relationship between the use of force for the establishment of order and corporate interests being represented by the government is a tangled and messy system that has been vividly on display at Standing Rock.
The ongoing militarization of the government’s responses to protests over the past five years raises the question of whether there is a legitimate role for law enforcement, including the National Guard, that does not violate the just war criterion of excessive and disproportionate force.
A number of law enforcement programs and districts are having success through the establishment of de-escalation training and principles in their ranks. By putting in place strategies that de-escalate the need for force, either from the protesters or law enforcement, space is opened for negotiations and resolution.
Military force should in no way, shape, or form be used for the protection of corporate interests, particularly over the well-being of persons. The primary goal of law enforcement in these situations ought to be de-escalation as peacekeeping for the sake of avoiding excessive and disproportionate force and for the protection of the dignity and integrity of all involved.
Marcia Good 4-25-2018
BrooklynScribe / Shutterstock, Inc.
“The walls are the publishers of the poor.” —Eduardo Galeano
She had a simple assignment. Walk into the botánica, buy something small, and at minimum exchange greetings with Doña Victoria, the owner who knew she would be seeing random students from DePaul University in Chicago, where I teach, coming in during the week.
But the student sat outside on a bench, pretending to text instead. Why? She admitted that she hesitated going in “for reasons I’m not very proud of”—there were four people on the street, all of them older than her and speaking Spanish, a language she didn’t understand. Three of them had tattoos and piercings. Was she encroaching on their neighborhood? Would that be considered offensive?
When you feel scared and intimidated, what do you do next? She busied herself in her phone until she thought they were gone, and then entered the store.
Later, she wrote:
So I went in, only to discover they were inside as well. I quietly went to look at candles, hoping no one would talk to me. However, the lady I wrote about to the class—the mother who had come to ask Doña Victoria for a prayer of protection for her son, the woman who helped me pick out a candle and patiently answer all of my questions—was the same woman I had avoided outside of the store. She was so willing to help a complete stranger who was so obviously not from the area that I felt incredibly guilty for judging based on her appearance.
Even though I am well aware this entire story sounds like something out of one of those “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books for preteens that teach lessons of cultural acceptance, volunteering for good, creating lasting friendships, etc., everything is completely true and the significance is only becoming apparent as I reflect back. I witnessed the blessing of candles for long-lasting love and safety from violence that day. I also walked away with a unique experience and new impression of Humboldt Park. No other neighborhood that I visited welcomed a complete stranger with such open arms.
Jim Wallis 4-25-2018
Image via Alexandru Nika/Shutterstock.com
EARLIER THIS YEAR I heard Rev. William Barber of the Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina use the phrase “Mr. James Crow, Esq.”
Since hearing the phrase, I have been reflecting on the revised and updated name for Jim Crow, the comprehensive and brutal system of racial segregation, discrimination, and terrorist violence against black lives and bodies—explicit in the U.S. South, and often implicit in the North, throughout the 20th century.
I have been thinking about this new and more-sophisticated Mr. James Crow, wearing a white shirt and a tie instead of a white sheet and a hood and inhabiting the back rooms in state legislatures and corporate offices instead of rural backwoods lynching sites.
I’ve also been thinking about Mr. Crow’s strategy for the 2016 election and the years ahead.
Mr. James Crow’s biggest concern now is the transformational demographic shifts occurring in the United States, which by 2040 or so will see a significant milestone: For the first time, the U.S. will no longer be a white-majority nation and, instead, will be made up of a majority of minorities. That’s one of the most important facts in American political life today. This fundamental demographic shift in racial and cultural identity is underneath almost everything in U.S. politics—including the presidential election.
So with a suit instead of a sheet, how does Mr. James Crow, Esq., enact his strategy? And what are the servants of Mr. Crow saying to one another?
THIS NEW VERSION of Jim Crow has a clear, systematic strategy to protect white supremacy and promote racial segregation, discrimination, and even violence. He knows that even he, with all his power, can’t prevent the racial demographics of America from evolving. But he thinks he can obstruct and delay the changes that new racial demographics will bring to American life and politics. In apartheid South Africa, we saw that even when a racial group is in the minority, it can wield the power to oppress other races and protect its own supremacy.
Mr. James Crow’s five-part strategy includes: