Christians – especially those of you who are white, asian-american, in my particular church family, my wider church family, or all those who are often in a position of protection and relative privilege when it comes to law enforcement in our country – I am writing this to you. I believe most of us are trying to sort through what is happening in MO and our nation with the best of intentions, hoping to clearly see the facts and get down to what is fair and right and true. And I get this work, and at some level acknowledge sifting through the details may be helpful. But because so much more is going on right now, and I believe that we need to be in this together at a deeper level as the church, and because I’ve been asked why this is such a big deal – I want to point us in another place.
As a pastor, mother, human being – I am sickened by what our country is now experiencing in the wake of the #FergusonDecision to not indict Officer Darren Wilson. And I am not right now interested in going through the ME reports, the angle of bullets, or the witness reports – I am not even interested in parsing out how it happens that an extraordinary pre-trial through the grand jury went down that resulted in not even indicting an officer that killed an unarmed teenager in the street.
I want to jump right to the main point.
Our country’s systems are broken. Our law enforcement and legal system have an accepted, if not intentional, level of life-robbing violence against the African-American community that is abhorrent, biblically offensive, and should be illegal. The fact that we have to even keep reminding people that #BlackLivesMatter is proof enough; we have to name that a particular part of our population are indeed human, that their pain and suffering and very lives have worth. There is sadly a long list of names, examples, cases, and facts – lives taken – that we could go through to underscore this point.
Think of what happens when we have a friend or family member close to us experience a tragedy. We pray when we hear that a friend is diagnosed with a terminal disease. We mobilize, and rightly so, when someone close to us suffers, or when someone in our local church body dies. We jump up, we make meals, we send cards, we visit, we sometimes even yell at the doctor or help manage crazy family members who are bothering the grieving friend – whatever it takes, right? When we love someone, when we feel their pain, then we engage; when we are close enough to hear and understand their loss – we step up.
As a prophetic leader and pastor I serve with, Rev.Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil, preached this summer, the tragedy of Ferguson is a family matter for the Christian Church. Ferguson is a close-to-our-proximity-so-sit-up-and-pay-attention reality for anyone in the body of Christ. Oftentimes we who are not being directly pressed and grieving can forget, or turn away, or choose to not do the work to understand – but let’s be very clear about this truth. Many in the black church tradition see the narrative playing out between Michael Brown and all the other systems (Officer Wilson, the police handling Ferguson protestors afterwards, the grand jury, the lawyers, the press, the national guard, the online media, etc.), representing their own stories and the ongoing history of blackness in the US writ painfully large. It is about this one unarmed teenager and his family’s pain, and it is also about so much more. It is about the deadly responses of law enforcement in this particular case and it is about all the other times black lives have been lost, from Selma to Montgomery to Cicero to LA. It is about the language chosen and power doled out and the protection granted and withheld to Officer Wilson, protestors, kids, and the community – and it is about every other time, for literally hundreds of years, that black life does not seem to be as worthy of protection and is instead a threat, a problem, the other, the outsider – or even, much too often, expendable.
It is not uncommon, as I hope we all already recognize and lament, to have African-American men in particular seen as threats in the US – whether in the eyes of individual citizens, movie scripts, housing authorities, job interviewers, mall security guards, and yes – to the police. Understanding the long, grotesque history of taking black lives in the US and somehow not caring, not grieving, not being held accountable – and then having the systems that claim law and order and power and decency not be outraged – is far too palatable, far too explainable and debatable with reasonable facts and figures. While every particular case has complex and often debatable realities to it, like militarized police forces and heat of the moment decisions and eye witness accounts, which of course all do matter – that is no longer what is really at stake right now in Ferguson. It is this long history, this very real, painful, deplorable truth of our country that we still today have to remind each other – black lives matter. How we see facts, how we hear witnesses, how we protect or rush to understand or cover or reveal, it is all woven around our racial biases and fears and senses of what is normal, understandable, defensible, fearful. There is no way to extract the reality of how black life is seen, and not seen, as valuable from the Michael Brown case. And yes, of course, all lives matter – but the truth is historically, all lives, and all deaths, have not mattered equally, which is why we have to name the truth still today. This has been clearly shown throughout our nation’s foundations and layered history that stole land and killed indigenous people, imported slave labor, sent prostitutes to the mines, invaded and subjugated, blocked immigration, and then made even black Americans who had served with their lives in the arms forces use separate but equal drinking fountains, mortgage applications, and schools up until just a generation ago. . . .
It is too much. And every time it happens, every time a black life is taken that could have been prevented – a mother shrieks from deep within her womb. Do not let the heartbreaking reality that we hear about black lives being taken so often let us ever forget, that everyone has a mother or father, sister or brother, who would do anything for them, and for whom that life ending almost takes their own in the process. Every time a long-winded, obfuscated, non-responsible explanation is given of why this or that life was ok to end, entire communities bend over in horror and nausea. Children are crushed and expectations buried. Siblings attend funerals and lose their sense of family, forever. Schools have a missing seat and the future has a missing leader, teacher, parent, or prophet. Grandmothers pray and weep and mourn. Churches wail and lament and march and stand alongside those in the dark grief and pain. And we – if we are in the Body of Christ – we should
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