Where is Jesus? A wandering post with many thoughts.
Art by Kenya Joy Ford
I’ve been writing thoughts down, bits and pieces of this post for the last week, and finally I’m just collecting it all here.
There are so many people writing about the protests and many of them are better writers and more qualified. I’ll link to a few pieces and thoughts at the end of this post, but I know that sometimes when big stuff is happening, you need to hear how your friends feel about it. And I am your friend.
Part 1.
I feel so hopeful.
I have been reading responses to current happenings and I know that in some ways, unrest and kerfuffle can feel disheartening. It could feel like America, or even the world, is divided. Or there is just a lot of grief because some people are now losing the world you thought you knew. (This is an ongoing process.)
But the truth is that the world has the opportunity to be more united than it ever has been—united against injustice for people with black and brown skin.
For too long, we as white people have been like the prophets and priests in Jeremiah who
“dress the wound of my people
as though it were not serious.
‘Peace, peace,’ they say,
when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14)
And yet, we are waking up. What a beautiful thing this is. It feels pretty late for waking up, but it is still beautiful.
Around the world, tens of thousands of people are marching to protest the loss of Black lives. The fact that Black lives matter shouldn’t need to be said, but it does, because the opposite is said with our actions and laws, housing rules and healthcare systems, school to prison pipelines and brutal police policies.
If a person is murdered and the murderer goes free, and this happens again and again, and this person is Black, and he or she is unarmed, and the white world largely ignores it… one should conclude that in this society, Black lives are cheap and disposable.
“We were murdered so often, I started believing Black bodies made better fertilizer.” Darnell Lamont Walker
Let’s not let ourselves be distracted by the way every single voice is now clamoring to be heard. A beautiful thing is happening. More people, more Black people and more white people, more people of every race have turned out to protest for Black lives than ever before in history. And it has spread around the world, and in other countries, awareness of racial injustice is increasing. Because of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and this specific moment.
This is a beautiful, sharp, fierce thing.
This is holy and beautiful. Jesus is right in the center of this.
I’ve been reading through the gospels over the last year, intentionally thinking about Jesus speaking truth to power.
Jesus incarnated and gave up his God-power to be a man from a small region that wasn’t highly regarded in his (occupied) nation. So every time when I read about moments when he is getting fiery about injustice, or telling teachers and leaders that they are a brood of snakes—rather than picturing him as the triumphant God-man, I picture him with his back against the wall.
I picture him as the one not being deterred by the intimidation of power.
I picture him with a ring of angry, powerful people around him. He gave up his power. That meant that the teachers and leaders of the synagogue could appeal to Pilate to crucify him. Jesus didn’t have that same power in his society. He had a rather protest-y vibe about him.
“And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away.” Luke 4: 28
“So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.” John 8: 59
He was a man speaking and acting truth, then running until he knew it was his time to go, and they caught him and killed him.
A beautiful thing is happening. We are taking the side of Jesus. Theologians and Christian workers call this God’s preferential option for the poor. In the Bible, when you see those who are oppressed or hard pressed, you find God among them. Again and again and again and again. When you see the powerful, God is challenging them. Again and again and again and again.
Part 2
We need to focus. The systems that have made it possible for inequality to exist on this level in 2020 won’t go away easily. This thing could be hijacked. Already it seems to be a new white supremicist trend to kneel on each others’ necks. Why? Hate, I guess?
Any group of thousands of gathered people will have different desires, backgrounds, priorities, and agendas. In this case, those speaking out about human rights for Black people, the ones organizing the protests, have an agenda. They have a specific group of demands as well as protocols for their protests. Arrest the officers who shot Breonna Taylor in her bed at night. Stop choke holds. Make police officers accountable to intervene when they see something wrong. Why? Because this is the way law works in America.
This desire for justice is at the heart and soul of these protests. There are thousands upon thousands of people marching for this, and Black people have been asking for equality for a long time.
Let’s just think about that for a minute.
For so many hundreds of years, Black people have borne the burden of fighting for their own humanity. I deserve the right to a trial, to a lawyer, to the justice system available to all. I deserve to live well. I deserve to live without fear. How utterly exhausting and demoralizing that must be. At the heart of systemic racism is the idea that one race needs to dominate another. That we need to make sure this happens our way. That we have our privilege for a reason.
I have the privilege of sleeping in my bed at night without being killed by police in my own country.
This is actually a basic human right.
It has been a long time that Black People in America have been asking for basic human rights.
A week ago, I asked Chinua how he was feeling. I have seen him engage a hundred people in discussions about race—offering thoughts, wisdom, gentle pushes in response to questions or misguided statements. This includes my own naïveté and the things I think I know about how it goes. Living with Chinua is like living with a well of wisdom.
“It’s not my first rodeo,” he said in response to my question.
It is not.
Chinua and his brother Ethagbhe lived in Long Beach in 1992, with their mother, Andrea Ford. She was a journalist for the L.A. Times covering the riots which occurred in the wake of the acquittal of officers who brutalized Rodney King on camera. Her team won a Pulitzer Prize for that coverage. She died in 1999, before I could meet her. I wish I could have met her.
The other day, I watched an old video where Chinua’s mother spoke on a panel about media coverage. The panel was held in 1992 and dealt with whether the news coverage of the riots had been fair to the Korean and African-American communities in L.A. (And, a sidenote here, the panel was composed of eight people on the topic of whether the Times fairly covered the minority communities during the riots, and she was the only Black reporter on the panel. Also she was fierce. I am proud that she is my daughter’s grandmother.)
She spoke about the lack of response she had from her editors when she wanted to cover police brutality a year before the Rodney King video. She mentioned that the riots had been brewing for a while, that they happened after a lot of violence against Black people at the hands of police, and she said there were four police shootings in one department alone in the month prior to the Rodney King hearing. The people thought they would get justice because of the Rodney King tape. Finally there would be justice.
There was no conviction for the police then. Denial. Distraction. No justice. The people protested then, eighteen years ago, and some of them burned things down, or looted stores.
“One of the biggest obstacles we have to making the kind of change we need is denial,” she said. You may be seeing a lot of denial now. I know I am. I’m in multiple conversations where people ask for more evidence, more stats, something to prove what millions of people know to be true.
Black people have been waiting a long time.
In 1992, people referenced the riots of the 60’s as something to compare them to. James Baldwin wrote about the unrest of the 60’s often, and in the article, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” he writes that the setting was inequality, lack of any kind of good prospects, and police brutality. He writes of how he was called in every year to speak to white people in charge of New York City about whether it was likely that the people would revolt. And he would reply that if they remained in these conditions, without protection, freedom, and the ability to live and breathe and be where they chose without threat of harm, then yes, they were “sitting on a powderkeg.”
Regarding immense police brutality that could be provoked for any reason at any time, impossible to get away from, he wrote, “This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.”
Black people have been waiting a long time. I listened to this speech by Jesse Williams at the BET awards in 2016, and one thing he said is that essentially Black people are often targeted for being too free. When I heard this, I thought immediately about arrests (often violent or fatal) made because of phone calls to the police by white people. He was dancing. He was birding. They were loud. He was playing with a toy gun. He was wearing a hoodie. Too free. Lord help us.
And I cannot for the life of me understand why everyone cannot not see that Jesus is in this. The awakening right now is the breath of God, fiery in its pursuit of justice for the oppressed, severe in its loving demand that white people pay attention.
In his work, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, James Cone examines the failure of theologians to see the fellowship of the crucified Jesus and the tortured lynched black men and women of the South, and the ability of black artists “to see what Christian theologians and ministers would not.” “In short,” he says, “they lacked imagination of the most crucial and moral kind.” White churches in the south stood by or joined in with lynching.
There is fellowship now, too. Jesus was killed by power. Most likely from not being able to breathe. Many crucifixion deaths came about by asphyxiation. I think, by bearing the words and care for Black lives, we are walking beside Jesus, to call for freedom for all. This is a long journey, actually, because in order for Black people to be free enough to dance without threatening anyone, we need to truly examine the systems and inner bias that makes that look like a threat.
Part 3
It has been a long, long time.
We need to focus.
It is abusive and paternalistic to address the explosive outcome of the thing we have perpetuated, rather than the evils that have brought it about.
Black Lives Matter. It should be such a simple, universal cry.
These uprisings are a reaction. If we say the unlawful, unpunished stealing of life from a very specific group of people is not worth this kind of reaction, we are not listening. First there were protests. Then looting and destruction happened. Then the protests continued, and people from different denominations, religions, and world views joined together to say one thing.
One more thing. Please let’s never again weaponize Martin Luther King Jr against his own people. Do not be deceived into thinking that power hated him less for being non-violent. White men beat him. White men put him in jail. In the end, they killed him. Do not quote his words to try to undermine the cause he fought for. Yes he was non-violent (as are most of the protesters) but his very existence stirred up violence in others. He used his body to be free, and that freedom challenged those who didn’t want him to be free. We may call it a peaceful protest but the people we see in those black and white videos, wearing suits, singing and marching were no less threatening to white people in power then than people in the streets are now.
I am feeling so hopeful for true unity. And yet I feel scared, as well. I feel scared because Black people declaring their own freedom seems to bring the ugliest out of other parts of society— more denial, white supremacist groups. It could tilt sideways so easily.
And yet, is a time of great shift, full of grief and beauty, sorrow and hope. I am so glad that a life of following Jesus has space for confession and repentance, for lament and forgiveness. It’s all right there, we can fall on our knees and ask to be unmade, so that God can make us again. To let go of the idea that as white people we have had the same experience as Black people, and accept that is has been grievously different and it has to change. This is true unity.
Here are some great videos or posts that I have seen around the Internet.
Whose Grief? Our Grief. by Saeed Jones
The Game is Rigged by Kimberly Jones -powerful! (language)
A thread on the Black on Black crime argument by Michael Harriot (also language)
A mini-essay on contrition and Willy Brandt by Guy Raz
Four officers, no weapons, no charges- A story of a First Nations community in the Yukon
There are so many more. I will share them as I find them. Love you all.
~ Rae