#Justice

A Powerful Afternoon with Justice Alan Page

America, Justice, Politics, sports, , , , , ,

img_9329.jpgOn Wednesday I had the pleasure of going to hear NFL Hall of Famer and honorable Justice Alan Page speak about race, justice, and equality at the Minneapolis Central Library. The lecture was billed as being about Colin Kaepernick and the flood of National Anthem protests that followed his lead in the NFL. This is an issue about which I’ve had great interest, so I was anxious to hear what someone like Alan Page had to say about it. It seemed to me that Hall of Fame football player of color who also happened to be a State Supreme Court Justice might have the perspective on this that we really need. I’ve never been so pleasantly disappointed in my life.

Justice Page opened by saying (and I’m paraphrasing), “I know many of you came to hear today to hear what I have to say about Colin Kaepernick and the National Anthem protests, but you may be disappointed to hear that I don’t really have much of an opinion on it because I find it to be the reddest of red herrings out there”. Page went into detail about how it is that a phenomenon like the Kaepernick protest almost always pivots away from conversations about the real and more important issue of justice and equality. While he’s right, I still find the Kaepernick protest an interesting and fruitful topic, but Page’s point did clearly point out a real problem in America today; more specifically white America.

Much of what Page had to say was not new to me since I’ve been studying the concepts of privilege, oppression, and justice over the last year, but that by no means gets me off any hook. As I sat and listened to him carefully and thoroughly outline the ways in which slavery has real and present effects on our culture today, it dawned on me just how unwilling white America really is to have this conversation. I was only willing to have it a year ago when it was forced on me in Seminary.

This unwillingness to have this conversation for real became evident to me that very same day as Page’s lecture, when I found myself in mild Twitter battle with someone I don’t know about the importance of white Americans getting educated on these concepts based off a Tweet of mine that MPR retweeted while Kerri Miller’s midmorning show was having the real conversation. And guess what happened? It didn’t take long before we were no longer Tweeting about race, power, privilege, and oppression, but were breaking down the Democratic nomination in 2016.

And this is how it goes in White America. When the conversation of race comes our way, we find ways to pivot out of it. In August of 2016, Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the National Anthem of a preseason game, because he felt he couldn’t stand for a nation where black people are disproportionately incarcerated and killed by law enforcement. It didn’t take long before no one was talking about race, privilege, and systems of oppression because we quickly pivoted to talking about the military, free speech, and the importance of the flag. Alan Page was 100% right that Kaepernick has become the reddest of red herrings. As long as we keep talking about him, we don’t have to actually talk about race.

Thursday began Black History Month. I remember taking time in school every year when I was a kid during the month of February to learn about the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King. I am grateful to have grown up in a school system, where learning these things was a priority. However, they didn’t go far enough. It seems to me that much of what we learn about when it comes to the Civil Rights Movement is also a red herring. Or at least a pacifier. It teaches us enough to let us see that the plight of black and brown bodies have been hard in this country, but the teaching largely keeps the conversation in the past, pacifies white guilt, and calls little to nothing out of us.

And what’s worse is I never learned until a year ago that this thing we say we all want, called justice and equality will (and must) cost something from people like me. This is why we refuse to have the real conversation about the realities of power, privilege, and oppression. I simply do not have the space and time to outline the details of this here, and it’s not exactly my point in writing this anyway.

What is my point? It’s to say this: Fellow white folk… We’ve got some deep learning and listening to do. Just start there- shutting up to listen and learn. Let in the troubling words and ideas that are brought forth by people of color, and stop deflecting and pivoting away from them. You don’t have to like what Colin Kaepernick did. You are allowed even to be offended by it. But watch and listen. It’s high time we started listening. Really listening. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, yes it’s frightening, and yes, it may even throw you into a bit of an internal crisis like it has me beginning a year ago. We have a lot to learn. We have a lot to listen to. And I’m not going to sugar coat it, we also have a lot to lose- a lot that we must lose if we want true justice and equality.

Thank you, Justice Page, for speaking the truth. Thank you for steering me away from the red herrings.

Our White Rubble

America, church, Current Events, Justice, ,

My heart is heavy today. Very heavy. As I said in worship yesterday, this all began for me when I was 8 or 9 and my mom wouldn’t let me watch The Dukes of Hazzard- not because of Daisy Duke’s “daisy dukes”- but because of the General Lee and its glorious roof. I didn’t get it. It came back to me in 1991 when the video of Rodney King being assaulted by police offers was released. I got it a little more, but not entirely. Then it seemed to disappear as it was buried in a period where black Americans were imprisoned at a rate never before seen in humanity. It came back to white America in 2014 with the murder Michael Brown, and since then we’ve been in an ugly, endless, futile struggle.

It seems that about every 6-12 months something happens that takes root in our news cycle and we find ourselves in these odd social media debates around race in America. It happened again this weekend. We had actual Nazi flags being flown alongside confederate ones, as wannabe-nazis and KKK members joined forces with torches to march for the preservation of the statue of a military leader who fought to preserve slavery . It’s kind of mind boggling when you think about it.

What this stuff doesn’t take long to lead to among we progressives is a social media pissing contest to see who is the most enlightened. And while we do that, the racists, white supremacists, nazis, and grand wizards celebrate with a can of Schlitz in one hand, and a torch in the other, while progressives eat their own.

I took the bait. So my heart is heavy.brick-white-wall-1468830718LdH

I’m a cis-gender, straight, white, male, Christian pastor. I’m trying to find my way through actually doing something about privilege, white supremacy, and equality. I’m
deeply concerned about the systemic racism that is alive and well in our world and which continues to marginalize and oppress people of color. And I’m trying to do what I can as a faith/community leader to move my sphere of influence to work for a better, more whole, and equal world. And here’s my confession:

I have no idea what I’m doing. But here’s what else: I don’t know if anyone does.

My heart is heavy because all we seem able to do is lash out on the Twitter and Facebook machines about how horrible it is. And it is. And while limousine liberals like myself duke it our for social media king-of-the-hill, nothing changes. It’s not getting better. And I think part of why it’s not getting better is that we seem to be more concerned with rhetoric than we do actual change. We want to hear white supremacy condemned, and we seem to be satisfied with that.

White supremacy needs to be condemned, but if we want actual change in our culture, we’re going to have to do a lot more than preach and post on social media. This is going to take hard work that goes to the soul of whiteness. We don’t get off the hook because we preached about it Sunday. We don’t get off the hook because we called out those who didn’t. We don’t get off the hook because a black friend liked or shared what we had to say. I don’t get off the hook for writing a blog. We’ve got hard work to do. We need to get into our respective white communities and start to have the hard conversations, rather than surrounding ourselves in our echo chambers that make us feel better ourselves. And we need to be supporting and resourcing one another along the way.

My heart is heavy, because here we are again, arguing it out with people we don’t know, most of whom probably want the same end, but rather than helping each other, we’re eat each other along the way. Meanwhile white America will continue dreaming, marginalized and oppressed people will still get harmed as they are buried more deeply in our white rubble, and the Nazis and white supremacists will continue to prop up a 300 year old system that protects their (and my) privilege and power. So my heart is heavy.

It’s very heavy today. The cycle seems endless. Unless those of us who truly do want equality stop tearing each other down, and start helping one another in the fight, we will lose. Or rather, people not like me will lose. Because that’s who always loses.

Something is Wrong.

Current Events, Uncategorized, Wonderings, , , ,

justice-387213_960_720Last night I turned on the “news” to get caught up on happenings in the world and in particular the Alton Sterling story (I put “news” quotes because that’s where what’s on the TV belongs these days). My heart sank as I watched reports on yet another black man shot and killed by law enforcement. It was only moments later when I began to see reports about the Philando Castile shooting in Falcon Heights. Grief, sorrow and quite honestly depression sank in. I woke up this morning and it did feel like a new day. The sorrow continues. I don’t know what to do anymore. Something is wrong in our culture and we seem to be utterly unwilling to address it.

I, myself, have been pretty quiet about it, because I think this is really complicated stuff. I will continue to hold that being a law enforcement officer is a difficult, dangerous, and frightening job. We can’t ignore that, and I think very few actually are ignoring it. But what else is true, and which we seem to be unable to confess, is that being a black male in this culture is just as, if not more, difficult, dangerous, and scary. For some reason we are unable and unwilling to admit this.

Story after story after story of black men being killed by police officers have come our way, and every time we find a reason to defend to the killing, all the while the stats continue to prove that something is out of balance. The image we use for justice is a scale, and we do so, because these scales speak to balance. If justice is out of balance, there is no justice. The reality that we must let in (and by “we” I mean primarily suburban white America) is that something is out of balance, and if we truly want justice, something will have to change to tip the scales.

Like I said, I don’t know what to do anymore. All I know to do is write and speak, but I just don’t think that’s enough anymore. This problem is bigger than story and rhetoric. We have a problem in our judicial and law enforcement systems, and we will not get anywhere until we come to grips with that. This does not mean that our judicial and law enforcement systems are entirely and wholly bad or evil, but it does mean that there is a problem. And it’s not a new problem. It goes way back. My first awakening to it was the Rodney King case, but it goes even further back than that. It’s been buried for a long time, but suddenly these things called smart phones are exposing it, and yet we still turn away and blindly defend the establishment.

For the third time, I don’t know what to do. But one cry I have heard from the black community is a plea for people in the white community to speak up. So this is me, a white guy, asking all of us to step back, take a look at the numbers and simply confess that something is out of balance and that we need to do something about it. We have to stop this “yeah, but…” response, and we have to start to listen to the cries. We have to stop picking apart the details of every story and begin to look at the big picture of out of balance scales of justice. We have to stop using an out of balance judicial system to tell us what justice is. That’s like using a broken speedometer to prove I’m not speeding. Something is wrong, and we have to look at it.

Truthfully, I think the embedded racism in our culture that we want to deny is exposed in our refusal to admit that there’s a problem, that the scales of justice are out of balance. I implore all of us to wonder and reflect on why we are so unwilling to admit this. Try to put down the defenses and simply wonder, reflect, and if you are of the praying persuasion, pray about it.

Something is wrong. It just is. So let’s stop denying and let’s start listening. Just start with that, and see where it takes you. We must listen to and hear the cries.