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.

We Should Refuse to be Comforted

I have been asked by several people, now, if I would be willing to share the words I spoke at the prayer service at the First Baptist Church on Main Street in Charlottesville on June 22nd, 2015.  The service was a response to the tragic murder of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charlotte, S.C.  I had preached on the subject the day before, and was honored to have the opportunity to address the truly diverse crowd that gathered at First Baptist that night.


I serve a congregation that is named after Thomas Jefferson, a man who in many ways embodies the reality of America -- he talked a good game about freedom but was, himself, unable to live up to those ideals.  From that context, I offer these words:

From the book of Jeremiah, hear these words:  "A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more."  I read ablog post this afternoon by the Reverend Jennifer Bailey, an itinerant AME minister and founder of the FaithMatters Network, and she reminded me of these words:  "A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more."

Refusing to be comforted!  Refusing.  That means to me that she'd been  encouraged to be comforted, invited to be comforted, no doubt pushed, and pulled, and prodded toward being comforted. But she refused. She refused.

I don't know about you but when I'm in the vicinity of someone who is in mourning with great weeping I want to comfort them. I want to help them to feel better. I want to help them to see the big picture, to remember the context, to think about the plan. I want to help them feel hope.

But I'll tell you a secret:  as much as I want to be somehow comforting for them, I'm also wanting to do it for me because it's uncomfortable to be around great weeping. It's disconcerting. Distressing. Disturbing.  So the people around Rachel wanted to comfort her at least in part so that they wouldn't have to feel uncomfortable.  Rarely does the one who's feeling comfortable wants to be made to feel uncomfortable. But Rachel refused to be comforted.

She refused to be comforted, and maybe so should we. I know that the purpose of tonight is to bring us together -- to bring  us together so that we can heal, to bring us together to reclaim hope, to bring us together so we might comfort one another in our grief, and our anger, and our despair.  But while I think that the coming together is good, even necessary, this is not the time to come together in healing.  We should come together to demand that things change, We should come together to demand the end of these atrocities!   We  should come together and refuse to make others comfortable when we are grieving, grieving that so many of God's children, so many children of life itself, have been slaughtered for no other reason than being black in a country that can't live up to its ideals.  This has got to end, and I refuse to be comforted until it has.

Do you remember Dr. King saying there were some things to which he was, and always would be, maladjusted?  Do you remember that he called on us all to form -- and you gotta love this name -- the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment?  Now that is a reason to come together! That is a group I would stand with, and sit with, and march with, and, yes, fight with, and mourn with, and weep with, and be with .. just as we are doing this evening. 

That's what I had to say that night.  And that's what I'd say today.

Pax tecum,

RevWik