A new employee—who was white—walked into the bakery where Jabari Jones worked. They introduced themselves.
“Jabari? Are you American?” The new employee asked.
“Yeaaaaaaa.” (tentatively), Jones, who is African American, responded.
“Well, it’s just that your name is [so] esoteric!”
Jones writes: “I’ve been called lots of things because of my name, but never “esoteric.” Its … frustrating to be othered in this way. I keep telling myself that it has nothing to do with me. …it’s just another day of being Black in America….
“Jabari” means fearless in Swahili and Arabic; also bringer of comfort…. “
“I am a spiritual warrior. …so it’s important for me to plunge deep into my discomfort…. What is this pain, this anger, and what is at the heart of it? An insecurity; a sense that I do not belong here.
‘Not belonging here’ is a story I have inherited, an American inheritance. I was born and raised here, yet to some I will always be from ‘somewhere else.’ I am a free person born into an unfree place. When I feel that unfreedom imposed on me, it gets under my skin, like a violent force of forgetfulness.”
A “violent force of forgetfulness.”
What is this pain, this anger? Jabari asks himself. And he focuses inward and discovers an insecurity…an internalized remnant of the culture of white supremacy. He discovers a fear that the culture is right…that he does not belong, that he will always be an “other,” a stranger in his own land.
The micro-aggression (Are you American?) invites him to forget his inherent worth and dignity…that is our language…forget that he does belong here… forget his value and the beauty of his name.
He is “a free person” born into an unfree place.
One of the ironies is that the words of that new employee are also born of forgetfulness…forgetfulness of how his privilege was constructed and how his ability to feel innocent is sustained.
Both are victims of that violent forgetfulness.
I believe that most of you who are here this morning are nodding in agreement…that most of you, regardless of your racial identity, have learned something about micro-aggressions, something about internalized oppression.
I believe that most of you also already know the information about the huge gap in wealth and income between Black and Brown…and White Americans…the gaps in health care…the differences in policing…
A sermon about that information is not what we need.
If you are not nodding your head…if you still question those differences or believe those outcomes are the “fault” of Black and Brown people…if you can’t see how a simple question could be experienced as an assault…
You are still very welcome here. Just know that I am going to assume some shared understandings.
Because the sermon I have for you goes further…further into the “why” these different outcomes persist and, even, what we might do about them.
To begin…Is America an unfree place? How could the “land of free” be an unfree place?
How could the dominant American narrative, the story of our nation’s founding and identity…of colonists confronting the most powerful empire in the world to establish freedom and democracy in this new land…how could that story result in a nation that is “unfree?”
The answer, according to the 1619 Project, is that we have been committing educational malpractice by telling only that version of our national story.
Originally a special issue of the NY Times Magazine in 2019, The 1619 Project spells out, in detail, how slavery was the foundation on which this country was built. I would add the theft of the land from native peoples as the other source of our success.
1619, more than 150 years before Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all [men] are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights…”
1619, 400 hundred years ago, the first Africans were sold as slaves into the colonies. By the time of our revolution for freedom, more than 500,000 kidnapped Africans and their children were owned as property by white colonists…in every colony.
By the time of the Civil War, the 4 million enslaved persons…owned in perpetuity…had a market value greater than all of the factories and all of the railroads in the country. The wealth of the US was in Black bodies.
The 1619 Project details that history but also the history of how slavery and the legalized anti-Black racism that followed it for another hundred years were the foundations of the remarkable economic success of this nation. How every major institution, from the banking system to the health care system…had racism baked into it…from the beginning.
The project argues that the mean-spiritedness of American capitalism derives from its founding…on the plantation. That Wall Street and our financial institutions began with the mortgaging of Black bodies. That even the reason for the American Revolution was tied to the British decision to end the slave trade and the fear that slavery would be ended in the colonies by the king. ??
Academic critique of the Project has centered on that last claim… that our revolution took place primarily to maintain slavery. The project’s editor, Hannah Nicole-Jones, has stepped that claim back…at bit…the maintenance of slavery was not the only reason for our revolution, just one of the most important. Historians seem hard-pressed to deny it.
Our national narrative of innocence has made it difficult to name and therefore to address the on-going shape of the structures and policies that have insured inequality for Black and Brown people. Our national narrative has been a “violent force of forgetfulness.”
From Ta Nehisi Coates: “Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”
I want to put this in religious terms. If we cannot know the truth of the harm in our history…if we cannot confess it…then we cannot repent from the on-going violence of the structures we have inherited…
And without truth, there can be no reconciliation.
Until we can know and name the truth, we remain spiritually stuck.
We don’t speak much of confession or repentance in the liberal church. Those terms remind us of the edifice of religious practice built around individual sinfulness.
Can a society confess? Can a society repent?
We need to move from imagining the problem as simply individual ill-will, as individual prejudice…which needs individual attention…
And confront our collective responsibility…a structural and an on-going sinfulness, if you will…a sinfulness for which we, collectively, need to be accountable.
To try to make this plain, I am going to take one structural, one policy area and dive a bit deeper.
“A vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates white and black America,” writes Trymaine Lee in the 1619 Project. Let’s look at that wealth gap.
I have to use a few numbers…not too many I promise. Today the net wealth of the average white family is 10 times that of the average black family. A ten-fold difference. Is that the fault of Black families?
So… in the beginning, when slavery ended, the promised 40 acres and a mule never materialized. Reparations were paid…but to the former slave owners for the loss of their property. And the modest gains of Lincoln’s reconstruction were brutally reversed by segregationist President Andrew Johnson who followed him and proclaimed: “This is a country for white men, and, by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”
Then, in the Jim Crow era, when modest black wealth was created, it was most often destroyed. Some of you have heard of the Tulsa “race riot” of 1921. It was an attack on what was called Black Wall Street. Airplanes were used to bomb the black district. 35 square blocks of businesses and all the homes were reduced to rubble by the white mob. There has never been an accurate count of the dead.
There are many other examples.
“The post-Reconstruction plundering of black wealth was not just a product of spontaneous violence, but etched in law and public policy.” I’m quoted the 1619 Project now. This is important. Because slavery and Reconstruction feel distant…long ago.. How could we, today, be responsible for those decisions when none of us were even alive then?
But the public policies bring the harm forward. Again from the Project:
“Through the first half of the 20th century, the federal government actively excluded black people from government wealth building programs. …both Social Security and the minimum wage excluded agricultural and domestic workers…most black workers. In 1933 the Federal Home Loan Corporation excluded black neighborhoods…which were deemed hazardous… from government secured home loans. Those neighborhoods were colored red on the federal maps…redlining was an initiative of the federal government not the banks.
And then the GI Bill, following WWII, offered more than just college tuition, it propelled hundreds of thousands of white families into home ownership and wealth creation. Though blacks were not explicitly excluded, the VA adopted the prior federal redlining practices and maps. The VA guaranteed bank loans only to developers who would not sell to black families.
I could go on. Redlining did not end in the 1960’s. Restrictive covenants in housing contracts. Urban renewal in the 1970’s and 80’s. Racist realty practices and now gentrification continue the harm. This is not ancient history.
The wealth gap was caused by our national…our intentional…our collective policy.
Isabel Wilkerson, in her new book, Caste, uses the metaphor of a homeowner who inherits a house that is beautiful on the outside but filled with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures in the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with the national home we have inherited. We did not erect the uneven pillars or install the cracked joists, but they are ours to deal with now and the on-going harm they do.
So how do we deal with this?
Again, individual culpability and individual attitudes are also important topics. But we are talking now about structural and systematic harm.
Because it was our government that created the harm, it is our government that needs to confess and our government that needs to repent and our government that needs to lead the repair.
And there is precedent. Our government finally confessed that the Japanese internment during WWII was racist and wrong…and financial reparations were made to those survivors. The amounts were modest. But the precedent was established.
The apology needs to come from “we the people.” So, too, the reparations.
Reparations. Another loaded word…
Some of you may know that there is a bill moving through the House, HR40, calling for a study of the need for and possible approaches to reparations for slavery and its aftermath.
The specifics are tricky…I grant you. Who would get paid? What about successful black folks…what about Ophrah? How about the native communities? Latinx folks?
It is complex and since it involves acknowledging the harm done….that narrative of innocence has to be complexified.
There are models emerging that seem to make sense. Let me tell you Evanston, IL. Evanston is a suburb north of Chicago. When the Black population of Evanston began growing in about 1900, the white citizens (I’m quoting the Chicago Tribune) revived “the old scheme of a town for Negroes.”
The Fifth Ward, where 95% of the Black population lived was redlined…rated “hazardous, home to an undesirable population” and tagged for “disinvestment”…no schools would be built, no parks, no libraries, no grocery stores.
By the 1960’s Evanston was one of the most segregated cities in the US. And it still is. The federal government was suing realtorsfor their racist practices just a few years ago.
But Evanston, in 2019, created the nation’s first ever government funded reparations program. What does it look like? $25,000 grants to eligible black homebuyers, along with additional funds to assist Black homeowners in completing renovations. It was launched with a $10 million fund resourced from a new municipal tax on cannabis.
What might this look like here in Portland. Could we do the same thing?
Could we at least begin by providing financial restitution to the families displaced by imminent domain to clear room for an expansion of Emmanuel Hospital…and expansion that never took place…the land standing vacant for 40 years. Those families whose homes were taken, who were promised replacement homes…but to this day have never received them. First Church has been offering our support to these long displaced neighbors…. Couldn’t Portland start with finally fulfilling those broken promises and then dream bigger?
The questions involved here are legion. How can you quantify the value of lives lived in bondage…and the impact of that over generations…or education not available, or mortgages not given…of all the wealth made literally on the backs of Black and Brown people in this nation? How do you quantify it?
Would a couple of trillion dollars be enough or at least be a start? Our last President just gave out over a trillion dollars of tax reductions for our wealthiest citizens and most successful corporations. Should we look at a similar amount to pay toward our moral debts?
But, as a religious matter…as an ethical matter…the case for acknowledging that harm…the on-going harm…the case for our society confessing…that case seems hard to deny.
If you travel in Germany and visit almost any public space, you will be confronted with a memorial, a reminder of the holocaust. Here in the US, we are still fighting about taking down the monuments to the traitors who caused our most deadly war…in defense of slavery.
It could be so different and we could be telling such a different story in this “land of the free.”
Wouldn’t we…this gathering of diverse peoples called America…wouldn’t we be healthier in spirit if we told the truth about our past…rather than insisting on our innocence…told the truth about our past and made even modest gestures toward repair.
The specifics…we can argue about the specifics of what this might look like…and we should…
From Amanda Forman:
…being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it’s the past we step into
and how we repair it….
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
But wouldn’t we be a healthier people with a more hopeful future if we told the truth and put behind us that violent force of forgetfulness…if we had the courage, if we were brave enough to begin again…in love.
Topics: Wholeness