We Can't Resist What We Refuse To Acknowledge

This week both Charlottesville and Albemarle High Schools were the target of online threats.  Parents were notified that the schools were taking precautions to keep our kids safe.  A spokeswoman for the city schools, "acknowledge[d] and condemn[ed] the fact that this threat was racially charged."  "Racially charged" does not begin to capture the truly heinous nature of the threat.

I submitted the following letter to the editor's of our local paper, The Daily Progress:

Whenever someone says, “Black Lives Matter!” you hear, “shouldn’t that be ‘all lives matter’?”  Yes … void of any context.  Yet we do not live in a world that is void of context.  This is a world where black and brown lives have regularly been, and are still, treated as mattering far less than the lives of those who identify as white.  “Race-neutral” and “color blind” ideals obscure the very real inequities still present in our so-called “post-racial” nation.  Yet simply choosing to pretend there is no monster under the bed doesn’t mean there is no monster.  It just allows me to feel safe beneath my covers, while allowing the monster unfettered freedom to do as it likes.

Parents were recently alerted to an online threat made against Charlottesville High School.  School officials wanted to assure all of us that they and the police took seriously their responsibility to keep all of our children safe.  What they did not want us all to know was that this wasn’t a threat of random violence, but violence directed specifically at children of color.  The anonymous poster was very specific, describing their intent as “ethnic cleansing,” using ugly racial slurs to describe the African American and Latinx students who would be their targets.  “If you white … you better stay home,” the post said. 

What was gained by the “whitewashing” of this pointedly racial threat?  Only the comfort of white folk in Charlottesville who want to keep saying that “all children matter,” so we can continue refusing to recognize the ugly reality that some of our children are treated as if they matter more.  Meanwhile, those African American and Latinx students and their families are left wondering if anyone really cares that they were the ones being threated, and only because of the color of their skin.  When those of us who are white refuse to affirm the racist nature of such a threat, we also refuse to affirm the importance of those who were being threatened.  That’s why we need to keep saying, “black lives matter” … until they do.

Rev. Erik Walker Wikstrom

The signs outside and inside the congregation I serve have been up for years, and I hope will remain up until they are no longer needed reminders.

P.S. -- I am pleased to report that The Daily Progress is now reporting that arrests have been made in both cases, and are noting that the threat in the Charlottesville High case described "ethnic cleansing."  I believe that the point of my letter remains valid and worth saying.

Return to No Person Evil for Evil

I carry a collection of photographs on this iPad.  Some are of my kids.  (141, actually … pictures, not kids!)  Just edging them out – at 156 pictures – is a collection I call “icons.”  These are images of people – real and imaginary – who in one way or another inspire me.  I’ve got Barack Obama, and Duncan McLeod (of the clan McLeod).  There’s Gandhi and Tich Nhat Hanh, a baby meditating, Ged (from the Earthsea Trilogy), Nellie Bly, Santa Claus, and an icon from the Church of St.John Coltrane.  Two of my favorites were taken during the first and only, extremely brief, meeting of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
 

I’m going to pause here for a moment and give you a spoiler (so if you don’t want to know how the sermon ends, plug your ears).  Okay.  Here goes:  I don’t know the answer.  I have to admit that I find this one insoluble.  I’m going to have to leave this one in your hands and hearts to find the answer that makes the most sense to you, and for you.

So … (you can take our fingers out of your ears now) … back to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.  These men are iconic figures in the struggle for civil rights in the 1950s and 60s, and they were seen then, and often still seen, as polar opposites.  One is held up as the embodiment of non-violent resistance; the other is remembered as wanting equality for African Americans “by any means necessary.”

Since for the majority of liberal King is by far the more familiar figure, I want to share some quotes from Malcolm X.

We are peaceful people, we are loving people. We love everybody who loves us. But we don’t love anybody who doesn’t love us. We’re nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us. But we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent with us.

[…]

I don’t think when a [person] is being criminally treated, that some criminal has the right to tell that [person] what tactics to use to get the criminal off [their] back. When a criminal starts misusing me, I’m going to use whatever necessary to get that criminal off my back.

And the injustice that has been inflicted on Negros in this country by Uncle Sam is criminal…

*********

I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American [black's] problem just to avoid violence.

************

[Our goal is] to bring about the complete independence of people of African descent here in the Western Hemisphere, and first here in the United States, and bring about the freedom of these people by any means necessary. 

That's our motto. We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary. We don't feel that in 1964, living in a country that is supposedly based upon freedom, and supposedly the leader of the free world, we don't think that we should have to sit around and wait for some segregationist congressmen and senators and a President from Texas in Washington, D. C., to make up their minds that our people are due now some degree of civil rights. No, we want it now or we don't think anybody should have it.

***********

We want freedom now, but we're not going to get it saying 'We Shall Overcome.' We've got to fight to overcome.

Not quite the rhetoric that white liberals were raised on.  We’re more used to the words of Dr. King, which we quote at least around the third Monday in January – (though often out of context).  Malcolm X’s words were not a call to join in the realization of a dream; they were the fiery demand to wake up from a nightmare.

Most weeks we end our worship with the same words of benediction:  “Go out into the world in peace.  Have courage.  Return to no person evil for evil.”  And I want to stop there.  Return to no person evil for evil.  Return to no person evil for evil.

On Saturday, May 14^th, a crowd of about 100 people gathered at the feet of the statue of Robert E. Lee in what was then called Lee Park.  They had torches, and made their white nationalist worldview and agenda quite clear:  “All white lives matter,” “You will not replace us,” and the Nazi-era slogan, “blood and soil.”  The next night a group of several hundred people gathered in the same place, holding candles and singing.

On the evening of Thursday, June 1^st, there was a direct confrontation in front of Millers on the downtown mall, where Jason Kessler and some of his alt-right cohorts were eating.  There was in-your-face yelling; there was, by some accounts, physical contact.  Acouple of weeks later Kessler was on the mall again, this time “introducing” to Charlottesville the group the Proud Boys, and again there was direct engagement – violent by all accounts, even if the violence was only verbal.

This coming Saturday, from 3:00 – 4:00, members of the Loyal Order of the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan will be holdinga rally in Justice Park, what was formerly known as Jackson Park.  And the question on many minds is, “what will our response be?”   Candles and singing, or angry altercations?  What should our response be?

And here’s where we reach the “I honestly don’t know” part of the sermon.  I was raised to value nonviolence.  I was raised to respond to hatred with love.  I was raised to believe that there is good in every person, no matter how crusted over it might be.  I was raised to try to follow the path of reason, and reasonableness. So I am with those who say that there should be no confrontation, no engagement on the 8^th.  I understand and agree with those who say that everybody should just stay home; that we should make the klan’s visit to Charlottesville as disappointing as can be; that we just leave them there, by themselves, to “shout their hate to the trees.”

I also understand and agree with those who say that there should be a presence; that there needs to be a demonstration of another way; that there needs to be a witness; and that this presence should be non-confrontational, with no engagement whatsoever.  (There’s been a request sent out that those who feel that they must go to the park should wear all black – to counter the klan’s white robes – and stand in silence, arms linked encircling the klan but with our backs toward them.)

Yet there are others who are saying that there needs to be confrontation, and if it’s loud and aggressive -- even if it’s violent -- it’s necessary.  Things are bad, things are really bad, and things have been bad for far too long – there needs to be a change now.  This struggle isn’t one of philosophy; it’s one of life and death.  Literally life and death.  There simply isn’t time for singing,  Returning to one of those quotes from Malcolm X, “I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American [black's] problem just to avoid violence”

So what are we to do?  I don’t know.  As I said at the beginning, I have to leave this in your hands and hearts.  I know that I will take the nonviolent approach; I know that I will be trying to respond to hatred with love; I know that I will seek, with every fiber of my being, to return to o person evil for evil.

Yet I will also not condemn those who see the need for another approach, who see this struggle as needing a solution by any means necessary.  I have come to believe that there is no one way to respond, and that perhaps all of them have a place.

There is a story told of a time in early 1965, while King was jailed in Selma, Alabama, Malcolm traveled to Selma, where he had a private meeting with Coretta Scott King. “I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult,” he assured Coretta. “I really did come thinking that I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King”

I cannot tell you what to do; I cannot tell you how to respond.  I have come to believe that there may well need to be a whole variety of responses, including violence.  But I cannot tell you how you should respond.  I can tell you that you have to respond.  And I can tell you that we ought to be intentional about that response.

If you decided to stay home, to stay away, to keep your Saturday “business as usual,” that’s fine.  But don’t do it unmindfully.  Make it a choice.  Make it a response.

If you decide to respond in a non-violent, non-confrontational way, that’s fine.  But please be intentional in that choice.

And if you feel you need to respond through direct, confrontational engagement – even violence – I cannot tell you that that’s not fine, too. But please, please do so as a conscious choice, and not merely an emotional acting out.

I cannot tell you how to respond, but I can tell you that you must respond.  Each of us must respond.  Our Unitarian Universalist faith demands it, as does our humanity.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

The Charlottesville Clergy Collective is hosting a number of events -- before, during, and after the klan's rally.  Their website outlines these, as well as listing many of the other events that are happening around the city on the 8th.   

 

Eruptions

This morning I submitted the following letter to my local paper The Daily Progress.  In July I wrote a post which expanded on this theme

Protests “erupted” in Charlotte, North Carolina, CNN reported.  The protest was in response to the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, but that’s not what caused the violence.  “Eruption” seems an apt description.  Volcanoes and geysers erupt because the pressure beneath them has built to a level which can no longer be contained.  So, too, when violence “erupts.”

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote::

"Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

In the one hundred and forty-one years since, those “ten thousand recollections” have not dimmed, nor have those “new provocations” ceased.

I do not condone violence.  Rather, I abhor it.  Yet I can understand it.  It is not a surprise to me when it erupts.  How can it not?  All of that heat and pressure has to find an outlet.

Two quotations have been echoing in my mind these last few days.  Both are from Malcolm X;  both are, I believe, quite relevant.

“I don’t favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I’m also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people.” “We are peaceful people, we are loving people. We love everybody who loves us. But we don’t love anybody who doesn’t love us. We’re nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us. But we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent with us.”

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Ten thousand recollections ...

This morning while I was walking the dog, my neighbor stopped his bike ride to tell me that he appreciated my letter to the editor that the paper printed a couple of days ago.  Brian was born and raised in South Africa (he is White) and he said that since the shooting in Dallas he has been thinking of a line from Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country.  (He called it required reading in South Africa.)  As he remembers it, the old priest says something to the effect of, "I'm afraid that by the time the Whites start loving, the Blacks will have started hating."  (I looked it up.  The actual quote is, "I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we are turned to hating," and it is spoken by the character the Rev. Theophilus Msimangu.)  I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we are turned to hating.

The congregation I serve is named after the third President of the United States -- Thomas Jefferson.  We're located in Charlottesville, in the shadow of Monticello and literally up the road from the University of Virginia.  The presence of "Mr. Jefferson" is still felt in places, so it makes sense that when our congregation was formed it would be named for him.  He did, after all, write the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, was one of the so-called "Founding Fathers" of the nation, and was draftsman of the Declaration of Independence with its stirring words about liberty and freedom.  (He also said some very nice things about Unitarianism, such that for a long time he was claimed as "one of our own." We now somewhat sheepishly acknowledge that he maintained membership in the local Episcopal church throughout his life.)

He also wrote other things, though.  His Notes on the State of Virginia contains some deeply racist thoughts about "the Black race," which he considered fundamentally and irredeemably inferior.  An argument could be -- has been -- made that he was just a person of his time, his thinking conditioned by the thinking of his day just as our is now.  Yet Jefferson's views on the inherent differences he saw between Whites and Blacks was not universally held.  Even in his day he could have thought differently.

The link I make between Cry the Beloved Country and the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson is that he, too, recognized the likelihood that the treatment endured by enslaved people at the hands of their enslavers would most likely lead to an explosion of violent rage.  In explaining his position that freed Blacks should not be allowed to continue to live in Virginia he wrote:

"It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies when they leave?  Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

One hundred and forty-one years ago Jefferson predicted that "deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; [and] new provocations ..." could predictably lead to the development an unquenchable anger, hatred, that would no doubt end in violence.  In those one hundred and forty-one years since those "ten thousand recollections" have not dimmed, and the "new provocations" have not ceased.

Do I think that our country's ongoing history of racism will end in "extermination"?  I don't.  I have too much hope and faith in the power of Love for that.  But when folks like me who have been raised to think of ourselves as White wonder what all the anger is about ...  Well ... I think we ask because we just don't want to look at the truth before our eyes.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Note:  the image is a composite of a well-known portrait of Jefferson, with that of Isaac Granger Jefferson, one of the enslaved workers at Monticello.

Here's what we know ...

While the facts in yesterday's shooting in San Bernadino are still being compiled and assessed, there are some things we do know:

1. In the United States, guns kill more people than AIDS, illegal drug overdoses, wars, and terrorism combined!
2. Among the so-called "developed nations" the United States has more people killed by guns by far than any other.
3. The guns used in yesterday's shootings -- and apparently in the vast majority of these mass shootings -- were obtained legally.
4. In many states, you have to register in advance to vote, sometimes by as much as 30 days. Under federal law, you can buy a gun on the day you decide you want one.
5. Federal law limits the amount pseudoephedrine (antihistamine) you can buy in a month.  Federal law says nothing about how many guns you can purchase in one transaction.  [Thanks to MSNBC for these last two examples.]

Do you feel stunned and powerless?  Is this overwhelming?  As I wrote yesterday, "There is a violence present in our society that should disgust us.  And we must choose whether that disgust will make us numb or make us act."  Here's something you can do:

You can call your Representative and Senators (there are 2 of them) and tell them that you cannot understand how they could possibly be against universal background checks and at least preventing peple who are on the Terrorist Watch List from purchasing guns.  (The Capitol Hotline is 202-224-3121; or you can reach out directly to those who are supposed to represent you.

I'll leave you with this final thought. On November 9th Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted, "3,400:  Americans who have killed by terrorists since 2001.  3,400:  Americans who have been killed by household guns since five weeks ago."

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Riots or Uprisings ...

In 1784 Thomas Jefferson published his Notes on the Sate of Virginia.  In his chapter on slavery he proposes that slaves should be emancipated and then put on boats and sent back to Africa.  He rhetorically asks himself "Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave?"  He then answers himself with these words:

"Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

Take a moment to read that again.  Isn't this what we're seeing in Baltimore, and Seattle, and Chicago, and Ferguson?  "Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites" coming up against "the thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained," along with "new provocations"?

Malcolm X said:

"If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, that's not progress.  If you pull it all the way, that's not progress.  The progress comes from healing the wound that the blow made.  They haven't begun to pull the knife out, much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there."

Some are beginning to say that we should really think of these "riots" as "uprisings."  Angry people, with "the thousand recollections of the injuries they have sustained [along with] new provocation," are responding not just to any particular specific instance of injustice, but to all they have endured and continue to endure.  Some are responding with control and strategy; others with unbridled rage run rampant.

I've also seen on the Internet this summation of the situation:  Black people are literally saying "Stop killing us!"  And there are people saying "But ..."  I can't imagine -- as a white person I really can't imagine -- how that feels.  But I can't imagine that it doesn't count as a "new provocation."

So what are we to do?  I guess that depends on who we mean by "we."  On April 29th, Salon.com published Julia Blount's article (originally posted on her FaceBook page) "Dear white FaceBook friends:  I need you to respect what Black America is feeling right now."  We -- and by this I mean white Americans -- could begin by reading things like this.  The Unitarian Universalist blogger Kenny Wiley has written some wonderful things on his blog "A Full Day."  (His perspective, by the way, is that of an African American Unitarian Universalist millennial male.)  For a brutally honest big picture view of the background to what's happening pick up Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow:  mass incarceration in the age of color blindness.

Better than -- or, perhaps, in addition to -- reading is talking with people.  Again, to the primarily white folk who read this blog, talk with people of color you know.  And maybe better than "talk to" would be "listen to."  Listen to what they are thinking and feeling about all of this.  (And by "this" I don't mean just Baltimore, nor even just issues of police violence and the inequities of our justice system.  I mean anything having to do with the ways people of color and whites are treated differently from one another -- that thing called "systemic racism.")

If you don't know any people of color, you could talk with other white people.  But don't allow the conversation to fall into easy assumptions.  Question and, then, question again.  Challenge -- both the person with whom you're talking and yourself -- to see things from outside of your experiences of "normal."  Try to imagine the issues from as many different perspectives as you can.  Push yourselves to try to make sense of the things you can't understand and defend things you disagree with.  Broaden your perspective.

If you don't have people of color in your life with whom you can talk about these things ... ask yourself, "Why?"  See if there are things in the way you're living your life that are keeping you from making connections with African Americans, Latino & Latina Americans, Asian Americans (which, of course, encompasses a widely dispirit group of folks!).  Look for ways to begin putting yourself into situations where you can meet folks who don't look like, think like, you.  Tread lightly here, naturally.  You certainly don't want to create a single, token, "Black Friend."  Nor do you want to too soon assume the intimacy and trust that talking about race-related issues with someone of a different race requires.

For a moment I'm going to directly address Unitarian Universalists;  If you're a FaceBook user you might want to check out UUs Resisting New Jim Crow & Mass Incarceration, and Allies for Racial Equity.  (Consider joining that later one!)  For all of us: are you yet a member of the NAACP or the National Urban League?  Things to think about ...

Is what we're seeing in Baltimore and elsewhere a case of "riots" or is it an "uprising"?  I think the answer to that will rest mostly on our -- white -- shoulders.  Our brothers and sisters of color are giving voice to their outrage, their grief, their anger, and their exhaustion.  If it is to be more than that -- if it is to be a full-bodied, long-lasting assault on "the way things are," then it's going to take the involvement of those who most benefit from "the way things are."  As this blog puts it so well:  racism is a white problem.  But maybe, just maybe, we can come together not just to calm this violence but to eradicate its root cause and, so, avoid Jefferson's predicted, "convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

RevWik

eyes wide(er) open

I recently read two descriptions of African American experience that really caught my attention:

"Their blackness alone was license enough to line them up against walls, to menace them with guns, to search them roughly, beat them, and rob them of every vestige of dignity."

And,

"A black man could be walking down the road, minding his own business, and his life could suddenly change by meeting a white man or a group of white men or boys who on a whim decided to have some fun with a Negro."

Was I reading a blog post written since the events in Ferguson, Missouri once again brought a conversation about race to the national consciousness?  Not exactly.

The first was written by the historian Joel Williamson in his book The Crucible of Race; the second passage is found in Dr. James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree.  Neither author is referring to the realities of 2014.  Instead, they're writing about the realities of the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries.  Notice anything about their descriptions?

Much of white America has absolutely no idea how different our experiences and those of people of color in this country have been.  Absolutely no idea!  Oh, yes, we  know that slavery was bad, and that segregation was hard, but look at the strides we've made since then!  There's even a black man in the White House!  And didn't Martin Luther King dream of a day when color wouldn't matter?

No.  He didn't.  He dreamed of a day when people wouldn't be "judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."  That he said.  But he never said that we should all become "colorblind" (as if such a thing were possible).  He never said that at all.

Much of white America has absolutely no idea how different the America we live in is from the America that people of color know.  Why can't "they" just put it all behind them?  Really?  Why can't "they" just move on from the past and stop blaming race for all of "their" problems?  You've heard this, right?  I mean, you've heard people saying this for real.  No jokes.  Hell, you and I may have said it at one time or another, too.  (Or, at least, thought it.)  But anyone who says -- or even thinks -- such a thing has absolutely no idea what we're talking about.  No idea at all.

Let's take lynching -- the subject of the book by Dr. Cone that I've just started reading recently.  No one likes to talk about it much, but most liberal/progressive folk will say, if asked, that it was a terrible thing.  We'd all agree with that, right?  And we'd all agree that such an awful aberration should be left behind in the past.

By one count, at least, from 1882-1968 there were 4,743 lynchings in the United States.  3,446 -- 72.7% -- were of black (mostly) men.  It might surprise some to know that not all lynchings were of black people -- 1,297 white people were also lynched.  It's worth noting, of course, that "Many of the whites lynched were lynched for helping the black or being anti lynching ..." (according to the site Lynching Statistics for 1882-1968.)

So ... it was bad.  right?  But much of white America has absolutely no idea how bad.  Did you know that some of the reasons people were lynched included being homeless, injuring livestock, looking "suspicious," and even for skipping rocks!  (A word of warning, if you follow the preceding link you'll come to a site with "10 Outrageous Reasons Black People Were Lynched in America."  The images are graphic and disturbing.)  Just as today, black Americans knew that for absolutely no reason at all they might not come home at the end of the day.  "Their blackness alone was license enough ..."  Dr. Cone notes that the threat of lynching was almost more intimidating than the lynchings themselves.  

But oh how horrific those lynchings were.  Crowds gathered.  Families gathered.  Mom, dad, and the kids would spread out the picnic blanket and make a day of it.  Photos were snapped with people standing near the corpse like fisherman stand proudly with the marlin they'd just caught.  Portable printing operations were set up so that postcards could be made on the spot.  Sometimes the day, time, and place had been advertised; crowds of up to 15,000 -- that's fifteen thousand -- people came out.  How do you "get over" something like that?

A lot of this I knew.  You may have, too.  In a not-too-graphic way it's touched on in history class.  I'd even heard about the crowds.  But there's so much that I didn't know.  So much that I had no idea about.  I didn't know that many of these lynching victims were also burned, and often burned alive.  I didn't know that people from the crowd were invited to cut off body parts to take home as souvenirs.  And that this torture could go on for hours before the hanging itself.  How does anyone "move on" from experiences like these?

Especially -- especially -- because these experiences have not been left in the past.  In August -- August of this year -- a 17-year old boy was found dead, hanging from a swing set.  His death was pronounced a suicide, but the FBI is now investigating because there are elements to the story that don't quite add up.  The last lynching may not have been in 1968.

African Americans who might be reading this post are probably now thinking to themselves, the last lynching may not have been in 1968?  May not?  Is this guy serious?  And they'd be right.  Because in the final analysis lynching was never so much about a particular technique for murdering someone, but about sending a particular message by doing so.  And that message was not hard to decipher -- black lives don't matter.  Black women and men are not the equals of white women and men.  And they never will be.  Don't even try; don't get any crazy ideas about equality or anything like that.

In Dr. Cone's book he draws the obvious -- though largely unexplored -- parallel between crucifixion and the practice of lynching.  He quotes Paula Frederickson from her book Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews:

Crucifixion was a Roman form of public service announcement:  Do not engage in sedition as this person has, or your fate will be similar.  The point of the exercise was not the death of the offender as such, but getting the attention of those watching.  Crucifixion first and foremost is addressed to an audience.

The same is true of lynching.  And it can be argued that the same is true today of the phenomenon of police violence toward people of color.  Yes.  Of course there are times when lethal force is required, and police are working in an incredibly tense environment.  All of that is true.  Yet it is also unarguably true that when the use of deadly force is 21 times more likely when an African American man is on the receiving end, something else is at work.

Michelle Alexander argues quite persuasively in her book The New Jim Crow:  Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness that America's "war on drugs" is, at heart, a new expression of the same impulse that fueled segregation.  If you haven't read her book -- read it.  And then look for the parallels between then and now.  As William Faulkner famously said, "The past is never dead.  It's not even past."

My eyes continue to be more widely open.  I know -- I am afraid -- that they will need to be even more open still.  There is so much that I don't yet know, but that doesn't mean it's not part of the discussion.

Pax tecum,

RevWik