Where is my outrage?

I need to confess something ... something that I'm ashamed of.  Shame is, I know, a word that's out of vogue these days, yet I can't think of anything more appropriate.  "Guilt" is something different, and "embarrassed" doesn't come close.

Yesterday on my Facebook feed I saw a piece that had been posted three months ago on imgur.  It consisted of two things -- a letter purported to be from a first-year law student, written anonymously, complaining about a professor having worn a Black Lives Matter t-shirt on campus.  "We are here to learn the law," the letter says.  "We do not spend three years of our lives and tens of thousands of dollars to subjected to indoctrination or personal opinions of our professors."

The second half of the post is claimed to be the professor's response.  (I'm describing it this way because it is, after all, the internet where I came across this and it's so hard to know if things are, indeed, what they appear to be.)  "I am accepting the invitation in your memo, and the opportunity created by its content, to teach you."  The professor goes on to say that he will present his response into two parts:  "Part 1 addresses the substantive and analytical lessons that can be learned from the memo.  Part 2 addresses the lessons about writing that can be learned from the memo."

It is brilliant.  The tone is brilliant.   The content is brilliant.  He articulates answers to the challenges made by so many folks who have been raised to think of themselves as white to the Black Lives Matter movement.  One example:  his first section is a series of naming the unspoken premises behind statements in the student's letter and, then, his critique of them.

Premise:  History doesn't matter.  Therefore sequences of cause and effect can be ignored (or inverted).

Critique:  To assert that the Black Lives Matter movement is about violence against the police is to ignore (and invert) the causal reality that the movement arose as an effect of police violence.  Yes, the movement is about violence, in that it is about the subject of violence, but it is not about violent retaliation against the violence it is about.  It is a tragic fact that rage as a consequence of racial injustice sometimes gets enacted as violence (although not nearly as often as we might expect, given the long-standing causes of that rage).  We can all lament the fact that violence begets violence.  But we can't even do that if we ignore that violence that has done, and is doing, the begetting.

Brilliant, right?  Clear.  Cogent.  I was so impressed that I immediately knew I would be re-posting the link, and referring to professor's arguments often.

So what am I ashamed of?  That I was enjoying it.  That I was reveling in this professor's ability to take apart the student's arguments -- which echo the arguments so many of us hear far too often, even from well-meaning people we know.  He said, more clearly that I ever will, what needs to be said.  And I was loving it.

But where is my outrage?  Where is my anger that these things need to be said at all?  How can I be enjoying something that was born out of such a painful, literally life-and-death reality?  There are real people lying dead on real streets ... and real mourning of real families and friends ... and real fear in the hearts of real people.  This is not a rhetorical exercise.  And the only reason I can sit back and enjoy with clarity (and, let's face it, the cleverness) of this professor's response is because I can sit back, because as a person who has been raised to think of myself as white I am removed from the reality that gives birth to the need for a movement such as Black Lives Matter.

I am the adoptive father of two sons of color.  The brown skin of one will no doubt at some point bring him into direct contact with this reality; the white skin of the other will no doubt shield him.  Yet however close to home this comes to me, what I realized this morning as I reflected on my response to the exchange between this professor and student is that I can sit back.  That I am sitting back more than I was aware of.

Of that, I am ashamed.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

There Needs to be a Fire

This past Friday I wrote about how I was touched by the lyrics of a Bob Marley song, especially the way it is interpreted by the international musicians who came together under the auspices of the Playing for Change project.  I noted how Marley's song, "War" caused me to reflect on the idea, the ideal of "colorblindness."  Today I'm talking about how the Peter Gabriel song "Biko" feeds into my understanding of the Black Lives Matter / All Lives Matter discussion.

The song is about Steven Biko, the South African anti-apartheid activist about whom Nelson Mandela said, "they had to kill him to prolong the life of apartheid."  There's a stanza in the song that has always struck me powerfully:

When I try to sleep at night, I can only dream in red;
the outside world is black and white, with only one color dead.

When I hear people who say that we should come together not under the banner "#BlackLivesMatter" but, rather, "All Lives Matter," these words often come to mind.  As a person who sees himself as white, and who is seen by others as white, I am part of a group that has a very limited view of what life in the United States is like.  The problem -- a problem -- is that we assume that what we see as the way things are is the way things are for everybody.  Because of this, we often think that anybody for whom things aren't like this is doing something wrong -- they're not working hard enough, or they're sitting around waiting for handouts, or their anger over things past is getting in their way today, or that they get something out of their "victim" status and don't want that to change.

The reality, though, is that the way we folks who are seen to be white is decidedly not the way it is for people of color generally.  And people of color are soon going to be the majority of people in our country.  We nonetheless should not lose sight of the fact that apartheid was the law of the land in South Africa in spite of the fact that Blacks made up the vast majority of people in the country.  It's not the numbers, it's the access to power.  (But I digress.)

While it is certainly not true that African Americans (and other people of color) are the only ones who suffer, or are the only ones arrested for crimes or killed by the police, it is absolutely true that the preponderance of people who do are not people who others would see as white.  This is a fact that has been, and is still, virtually invisible to the "mainstream" view of life in United States.  And many, many people in that "mainstream" see the stories on the news giving major crime a black face and think that there's something wrong in the African American community.  The reality is that there's a systemic problem in our country's core that has intentionally (and quite successfully, I might add) created conditions within communities of color that are just right for the growth of this "problem."

So while I go to sleep at night and dream in technicolor, I fully believe that there are people of color who "can only dream in red," and who wake up to a world when more often than not it's people who look like them who are ending up dead.

But I see some hope.  I'm a preacher, so hope is something of an occupational hazard.  (Or gift.)  What I see is that for whatever reason(s) conditions are such that more and more of us who understand ourselves as white are having our eyes opened to this "other" reality that has long gone unseen among us.  More and more folks are seeing this "other" truth about our society and are coming to the conclusion that things absolutely have to change.

So there's this other stanza in "Biko" that speaks to me:

You can blow out a candle, but you can't put out a fire.
Once the flames begin to catch, the wind will blow it higher.

May it be so, and may that fire be a cleansing fire that burns all that must be destroyed if the world so many of us dream of has any hope of growing.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Resistance … Then and Now

This is the sermon I preached at the  Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist on Sunday, January 3rd, 2016.  It is not the sermon that had been advertised, nor the one I'd worked on with the lay worship weavers.  Instead, as I said in the introduction, "this sermon simply appeared unbidden.  But if you want to keep the Muses happy, you preach what they tell you."  As always, you can listen to it as well.

In 1963 the United States was in the midst of a cultural and moral crisis.   In one of our principle founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, our own Thomas Jefferson had written, “all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”  Today, not only would we change the gender specific language of the original, but we’ve found another way of saying essentially the same thing – people will resist change until the thing that needs changing hurts worse than the pain involved in making the change.  Because, after all, as each of us knows all too well from our own experiences, change is never easy and rarely entirely pleasant.

In 1963 the United States was in the midst of a cultural and moral crisis – African Americans had declared, in numbers and vehemence as never before as far as I know – that the system of racism being perpetrated was no longer sufferable.  African Americans were saying that they were no longer disposed to suffer this evil any longer, and they demanded that its form be abolished.  1963 was the year that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said that the time had come for our country to make good on the promissory note it had written when it had declared that “all men are created equal.”

It’s interesting -- the version of the Declaration that was ratified by Congress is not the one Jefferson had first written.  The biggest difference is a rather long condemnation in the original draft of the British slave trade, but I find an interesting change to the very first line, one which, if adopted, would have made the link between the Civil Rights movement and the vision of our founders even more resonant.  Instead of the, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another …” that we’re familiar with, Jefferson had written, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained …”  During the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s African Americans were declaring that it had become necessary to “advance from that subordination in which they had hitherto remained.”  The evil of racism was no longer sufferable and it was necessary that it be abolished.

As I said, in 1963 the United States was in the midst of a cultural and moral crisis.  In a very real sense a new American Revolution was underway and for our purposes this morning it provides us an entrée for looking at the idea, and the experience, of resistance.  That’s the theme we’ll be exploring this month – the question of what it means to be a people of resistance – and the Civil Rights movement demonstrates at least two different kinds of resistance.

First, perhaps most obviously, there were those who were rising up against, who were actively resisting, the systems of racist segregation – resisting both those institutions and individuals that passively profited by it as well as those that actively promoted it.  Then, of course, there were those who were resisting this resistance.

I keep coming back to 1963 because of two events that took place that year.  On September 15^th some people in Birmingham, Alabama decided to make a show of just how strong their resistance to this racial revolution was.  We’ve come to call this event the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing -- it destroyed a good part of the building, injured 22 people, and killed four little girls – girls who were about the ages my boys are today.  

As a response to this atrocity – which the Rev. Dr. King called, “one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity” – the called minister here, the Rev. Walter Royal Jones, draped the outside of the church in black crepe.  Roy Jones had been the head of the  UUA Commission on Race and Religion, so folks here should have known what they were getting, but maybe they thought that his having only been here for three months would have muted his more radical impulses.  But when he took it upon himself to make this public statement of solidarity, the Board quickly asked him to take it down.  

Although I imagine that few of us would ask him to do so today, we should not be too quick to judge them. No doubt there were some who were resisting his ministerial authority to take such an action on his own; and those who resisted putting the congregation into such an uncomfortable and perhaps even dangerous position; and those whose resistance grew from the notion that the Civil Rights movement was moving too fast; and, maybe, even those who resisted the idea that change was really necessary – one can be disposed to suffer evils for quite a long time when those evils are being committed against somebody else.

Jump to June of this year, when there was another act of violent resistance to the still overdue payment of our nation’s promissory note.  Much like the four men with the dynamite in Birmingham over 50 years ago, when Dylan Roof walked into the Emanuel African American Methodist Episcopal Church he was acting in resistance to the still ongoing efforts for the full recognition of African Americans as Americans -- hell, the full recognition of people of color as humans.  His action was part of a long line of violent resistance against any effort by Black Americans and their allies to strive to “advance from that subordination in which they have long hitherto remained.”  

In response to this atrocity I preached a sermon several of you told me was the sermon you’d waited four years to hear.  (See link below -- "From Not Again to Never Again.")  I also posted this Black Lives Matter sign behind me, and while I don’t want anyone to infer that I think of myself in Roy Jones’s league I’d simply note that this act, too, has met with considerable resistance and that I’ve also been asked to take down this very visual signal of commitment to the cause of racial justice.

Before addressing this resistance I want to tell you a brief story:

Many years ago, when I was a member of our congregation in Waltham, Massachusetts I was present on the Sunday when it’s Lead Minister – a friend and mentor – delivered a sermon on the need for comprehensive gun control in response to the proposed opening of a gun shop just a few blocks from the church’s building.  As he stepped into the pulpit to preach he took of his robe, saying that he was too upset, too angry, to step into that sacred space, that pulpit, as the Rev. Edwin Lane, M.Div. D.Min.  Instead, he wanted to be clear that it was just Ed who was talking to us.  It was a powerful moment.

I say this because I am not taking my robe off this morning, because I do not stand here now as just Wik.  Five years ago you called me to serve this congregation as its Lead Minister, to provide vision and direction and to preach and teach the truth as I understand it.  

This is the truth as I understand it:  we are, today, in the midst of a cultural and moral crisis the like of which we have not seen since the time of the Civil Rights struggles of the 50s and 60s.  The cancer that is racism has been eating away at our body politic since the first Africans dragged to this continent landed in Jamestown in 1619.  (One hundred years or so earlier if we remember the slave trade to Puerto Rico.)  And we – and I’m using that first person plural pronoun because I am a White American talking, now, primarily to other White Americans – we are seeing it with more heartbreaking clarity that many of us are used to.  And it makes us uncomfortable.  We don’t want to believe that things can be as bad as we are now increasingly unable to deny that they are.  We’d rather believe that we live in a world of colorblindness that is post-racial.  It hurts, having to face the reality that it is still important, still necessary, to affirm that Black lives matter.  It’s painful.  It’s deeply and profoundly disturbing.  

So we resist having to look at it.  That’s only natural.  After all, “all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”  And as I said earlier, it is far easier to be so disposed when the evils are directly affecting someone else and I remain relative … safe.  

Saying what I’m seeing, most of us – most White people in the U.S. today – are resisting acknowledging how truly evil the manifestations of racism are, and we resist the truth that until it is eradicated, until it is abolished completely and absolutely, we, ourselves, are suffering.  Many of us, maybe even most of us, resist the assertion that the reality we know is, in many ways, a fairy tale and is definitely and demonstrably not the reality of, soon, a majority of U.S. citizens.  And we so want to believe that if racism still exists it is in the thoughts and actions of a few mean spirited people that we resist acknowledging that the dangerous differences between White America and the America of people of color are systemic, built into the institutions and structures that support our entire society – education, employment, housing, food distribution, marketing, entertainment … even religion.

This resistance takes many forms, many of them completely unconscious.  And this morning, still robed, I say that one of the ways we do this is to insist on our “right” to a safe space of solace, away from the trials and troubles of the world.  One of the ways we do this – one of the ways we support and perpetuate the ongoing systems of racial injustice and oppression – is through our insistence that we are entitled to sanctuary.  You and I, we can close our eyes for an hour or so; I can choose when and where to confront racism and its devastating effects.  And because we can, we believe that it is our right to do so.  So we resist seeing that this freedom not to see is part of our White privilege, and our willingness to create sanctuaries in which to harbor ourselves in safe haven is part of the problem.

So … our question for the month is “What does it mean to be a people of resistance?”  Being a people of resistance means that our Unitarian Universalist faith demands of us that we resist the temptation to take advantage of our privilege (and again, I am using that first person plural pronoun intentionally).  Being a people of resistance means that we must resist the inclination to see problems like racism – that don’t usually affect us tremendously personally – as something “over there” happening to “those people.”  Even those of us who have Black family members and Black friends most often do not fully embrace racism as our problem.  But it must be our problem.  Thinking otherwise simply perpetuates the status quo even as we work to change it.

I do understand that not everyone will agree with what I’ve said here.  I know that some will continue to find the presence of this "garish" black and yellow sign on humble poster board to be an unnecessary and unwelcome reminder, in our sacred sanctuary, of the cruelty and unfairness of the country, the world, we live in.  I know that it is and will always be disturbing and distressful to many of you.  I know that there are some who will be angry as long as that sign stays up here, and I assume that there are those who will be upset enough to leave.  

I know these things, and so I remind you this morning that neither my ordination to the ministry nor your call and installation of me to the office I hold here makes the demand of me that I keep everyone happy and keep everyone here.  Quite the contrary.  “Preach the truth in love” is a command to say what I see in the world as kindly and caringly as I can, but not for a minute to falter from preaching that truth in order to keep the peace or for my own personal gain of your acceptance or appreciation. 

In fact, it’s often been said that the deepest calling of the professional ministry is to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”  That is what I have been charged to do.  Our charge, as a people of resistance, is to recognize just how often we put ourselves in the wrong category.  This sign is an affliction to many here; I do understand that.  Yet know, too, that its presence here, in the sacred sanctuary and safe haven of a community that could choose to close its eyes and heart, is a great comfort, as well as a sign of hope, to many whom racism afflicts each and every minute of every day with no possibility of sanctuary or respite.  A friend said to me of our sign, “I just can’t overemphasize the power of that sign in a UU sanctuary….it means safety, warmth, love, commitment to hard uncomfortable work that must be done for us all to be free…..as a person of color, it makes the space a true sanctuary.”  

That is my message for this morning.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

If you'd like to read other sermons and blog posts I've written pertaining to racism, here are a few.  (You can also search for "racism" to find more)

• “From Not Again to Never Again” sermon following the shooting in Charleston, SC in which I announced my decision to hang the BlackLivesMatter sign.
•  “When Horrors Come Home,” sermon on the 50^th anniversary of the Birmingham bombings.
•  “To Wake or Not To Wake” post in response to Ta-Nahesi Coates’s book Between the World Me
• “In Memoriam; In Hope” post on the one-year anniversary of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO
• “We Should Refuse To Be Comforted,” words spoken at the interfaith prayer vigil following the Charleston shooting
• My post from a week or so ago in response to the lack of indictment in the case of the shooting of Tamir Rice.

From everydayracism:

Emmett Till & Tamir Rice: Two innocent black kids murdered 59 years apart.
Both juries refused to even indict, let alone convict, white criminals who were clearly witnessed committing the crimes.

I just read a powerful op-ed piece by Charles Blow -- "Tamir Rice and the Value of Life" -- from last January's New York Times.  This post is an expansion of the response I published to Facebook:


My younger son turns 12 in two days. Tamir Rice could have been him ... except, of course, that he's white. Actually, he is biracial but he takes after his Irish birth mother so completely that, as he used to say, his "brown skin is on the inside."  To look at him is to see a wee lad from the Emerald Isle.  But he belies the notion of clear and strict racial categories, like his older brother who's brown skin is "on the outside" (for him it's his white skin "on the inside").  White ... Black ... those divisions don't hold up too well in a world as multi-hued as ours.  And yet ... And yet it took a police officer less than 2 seconds to decide that this brown-skinned boy was enough of a threat that he felt justified in shooting him, and perhaps even worse, he felt justified in rendering him no aid as if this little boy was disposable.  And why?  Because he was Black, and we have been conditioned as a society to see Black men as more dangerous than White men.  Study after study after study demonstrates the reality of implicit bias -- the unconscious attitudes that, "affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner."  You do not have to be consciously racist to have these unconscious attitudes shape your behavior.  As they most certainly did in the minds of Officer Timothy Loehmann and his partner Frank Garmback on that November afternoon.

Do you want to know why people are shouting "Black Lives Matter" rather than the more universal "All Lives Matter"?

If Tamir had been white, the uproar of outrage at the shooting, the callous treatment, and, now, the lack of indictment of the officers involved would be deafening.  But it's not.  And it's not because those who are shouting the loudest are as easy for white America to dismiss as was the life of this little boy. It is so easy for us -- white Americans -- to nestle down all snug in those safe places we create for ourselves -- those sanctuaries, both literal and metaphorical -- in which we can cocoon ourselves and listen only to our own reality.

We -- again, White Americans -- must make ourselves uncomfortable, disturbed, or, in Dr. Kings memorable word, maladjusted.  We must refuse to let ourselves be lulled into a safe and contented sleep that is, by its very nature, both a symptom and a cause of the problem.  We White Americans can turn off the ugliness of racism.  We have the freedom to set it aside, to insist on our "right" to a little peace and quiet.  This is a luxury and a privilege not, as we so often describe it, and entitlement.

To my White friends ... what can we do ... what can you do ... to keep yourself uncomfortable?  What can you do to keep the cancer of systemic racism in your face all the time?  These are not rhetorical questions, they are a real call to action.  A call for you, whoever you are reading this, to do something to make this struggle as real for you, as important for you, as necessary for you as it is for the family of Tamir Rice ... and the families of all those whose lives are very much uncomfortable, and unsafe, each and every day.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

In Memoriam; In Hope

It was one year ago today that an 18-year old young man and his friend were walking down the middle of a quiet street that weaves through apartment buildings and one-story homes.  He had been a credit shy of graduating with his class, but had just completed the necessary work and had been awarded his diploma about a week before.  He was scheduled to begin studying at a technical college a few days later.  Everything changed when a police cruise stopped that Saturday afternoon and told the young men to get onto the sidewalk.  What happened in the next 90 seconds is still a matter of contentious debate.

The official version of events -- the version that led a Grand Jury to decide not to indict the Officer involved -- is that one of the young men struggled with the Officer through his car window, trying to get his gun.  This led to the officer's gun being discharged, the two young men turning and running, and the Officer leaving his vehicle and giving chase.  After a moment the fleeing men stopped and turned toward the officer who then, in fear for his own safety, fired his gun multiple times.  Six bullets struck the young man, fatally wounding him.  Less than 90 seconds after Officer Daren Wilson first encountered Michael Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson on Canfield Drive that Saturday, Brown lay dead.

Many of the elements of this official narrative continue to be in dispute.  The initial altercation may have been instigated by the way Officer Wilson first ordered the young men out of the road and onto the sidewalk.  The first acts of physical aggression may also have been on the Officer's part, and there are those who maintain that Michael Brown's hands were in the air in an obvious stance of surrender when he was shot.  

What cannot be disputed is the local and national response to these events.  In many ways the killing of Michael Brown -- an unarmed Black teenager -- at the hands of a White police officer catapulted the subject of the killing of young Black men into the national consciousness in a way that few things had.  Throughout the country protests sprang up -- some with elements of violent rioting; most with calm determination.  Even this became part of the discussion:  Why was the eruption of group violence in Black communities almost invariably called a "riot" when mass violence in white communities -- the turning over and setting on fire of automobiles by mobs of fans after a sporting event, for example -- were usually not?

The #BlackLivesMatter movement, which had begun after the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012, took on a new visibility and a new intensity.  For many White Americans the shooting of Michael Brown created a new-found awareness of the issue of the murder of Black men (and women, and children) at the hands of the (often White) police.  And while this particular case is what sparked the conversation, in many ways it's details are not what's most important.  Certainly, for the sake of justice it matters precisely what happened that Saturday morning in 2014.  The Grand Jury's determination not to indict Daren Wilson is not the same thing as a a verdict of innocence and as long as there are unresolved questions there will be no peace for Michael Brown's family and friends.

In terms of the larger issues of the killing of young Black men at rates that far exceed any rational explanation, the specifics of the events of that day become somewhat less important.  That's because the issue from that perspective really isn't whether or not Officer Wilson was justified in shooting Michael Brown.  What matters most is that Michael Brown joins a long list of other men and boys:

Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Akai Gurley, Aura Rain Rosser, Tanisha Anderson, Roshad McIntosh, Darrien Hunt, Ezell Ford, Omar Abrego,  Kajieme Powell, Vonderitt D. Meyers, Jr., John Crawford III, Cary Ball Jr., Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart, Eula Love, Amadu Diallo, Oscar Grant, Patrick Dorismond, Malice Green, Tyisha Miller, Sean Bell, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Margaret LaVerne Mitchell ... 

I'd originally collected those names for a blogpost I wrote back in December of 2014, and as I said then,  the list could go on ... and on ... and on.  And you'll notice that not all of those on the list are men and boys.  The rallying cry has been "Black Lives Matter" rather than "Black Male Lives Matter" because this systemic  and systematic devaluing of Black lives does not really favor one gender identity over another.  Yes, Black men (and boys) are killed and incarcerated at extraordinarily out-of-proportion rates, yet Black women, too, and Black transgender folk certainly face this too.

And it's important to remember that the devaluing of Black lives is not a new phenomena.  To this list we could add the names:  Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Lamar Smith, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Virgil Ware, Jimmy Lee Jackson and so many others who were killed during the so-called Civil Rights Era of the 1950s and 60s.  (The Southern Law Poverty Center has a website dedicated to "Civil Rights Martyrs.")   We could add the nearly 4,000 Black men and women who were lynched between roughly the late 1880s and the late 1960s. (A recent study reported that the number exceeded previous estimates.)  And then there are the estimated 2 million Africans who died during the Middle Passage, and all of the enslaved Africans who died on these shores since those first 20 Africans were brought to Jamestown in 1619.

It might not seem that these earlier incidents have anything to do with those going on right now.  (It's probably easier to think this if you're White than if you're Black.)  Yet none of this could have happened -- not then, not now -- if the lives of people of color were valued as much in this country as the lives of White people.  Let that sink in.  The "black lives matter" movement is really not a response to the recent examples of young Black men being killed by police.  Rather, it is a response to centuries -- hundreds of years! -- of evidence and lived experience. 

It is most certainly true that all lives matter.  When Walter Palmer shot and killed Cecile the lion in Zimbabwe recently, the national and international outrage was intense and instantaneous. Non-human life matters.  All lives matter.  Yes.  Yet at this moment in history there appears to be a crack forming in the shell of blindness which surrounds those who are part of of the dominant culture.  We -- straight, white, cisgender men of a certain socio-economic position -- are used to having our experiences, our reality, projected back to us as reality.  Our history, our lives, are the norm, and it is possible to go through one's whole life without ever quite understanding -- or even considering -- that other people's lives might be very different.

Yet today the mainstream media reports seemingly every week about the killings of one young Black man after another.  Over and again people of color tell their stories of living a far more danger-filled life than most White people could even imagine.  And it seems -- just maybe -- that a crack is appearing in that shell of blindness.  After Grand Juries declined to bring indictments in the killings of either Michael Brown or Eric Garner, a hashtag appeared -- #CrimingWhileWhite.  White people were understanding that the experiences they'd had with law enforcement officials were vastly different than those people of color have on a daily basis.  People were getting it.

50 years ago White America was shocked to see images of police with fire hoses and German Shepherds viciously attacking peaceful Black protestors.  The Civil Rights movement changed -- not immediately, but ineradicably.  Perhaps the events of the past year will create a similar shift.

Pax tecum,

RevWik


Update:  One sharp-eyed reader noted that while the lists of names I cited included a fair number of women and boys, much of the text referred to violence against Black men.  I had intended by their inclusion in the lists to be clear that this is not a gender-limited problem, yet it appears I was not as clear as I'd hoped.  I have, then, gently edited this piece since it's original posting.