Tag / American History

by Michael

Jesmyn Ward on Returning Home

I fantasize about living in that fabled America. And then I remember that one cannot escape an infinite room. Moving across a few state lines is not going to help me escape this place that tells me I am less. The racist, misogynistic sentiment I encounter every day in Mississippi is the same belief that put in place the economic and social caste systems that allowed America to become America. It is the bedrock beneath the soil. Racial violence and subjugation happen on the streets of St. Louis, on the sidewalks of New York City and in the BART stations of Oakland. I breathe. I remain. I remember…

Read the full article at Time.

by Michael

Reading Lynched: The Power of Memory in a Culture of Terror

It’s as important to record reflections about my reading of Lynched as it is my own context for having read the book. I’ll start with my context because it sets the stage for my critical appreciation and my eventual scholarly appropriation of Dr. Sims’s work.

First, I’ve spent the last ten weeks reading and writing in the areas of Black and Womanist Theologies and African American Political Theology, and while those terms can be expansive in what they cover academically, it’s important to state those two courses as broad but immediate readying agents in my thinking about what happens in this book about Black people living in and in response to a culture of lynching. The book could easily be on the syllabi for either course. A Womanist scholar, Sims adds to the collective a historical reading of a time that’s not seen enough in the United States of American history.

Lynched is worth reading if for nothing other than its relevance to issues that many Black people are still facing around policing, community engagement, race, and political discourse. It’s relevant because as people we continue to be subjected to explicit legalized and legally authorized brutality in the form of newly designed lynching strategies, including police who still participate in the heartless, legally indefensible murder of Black bodies, while being shielded by and in some cases lauded by the governing bodies in place to protect citizens. I intend that as a theological comment even if it can be read from a particularly psychological, sociological, or ethical point of view. Lynching and living in response to it is a theological matter. As so is the support of persons who do the lynching of Black persons.

Second, aside from my current reading list, like every Black person in this country, I’ve spent the last several years participating to varying degrees in the anguish, contentment, alarm, prayerfulness, silence, and soul-bruising nature of this environment leading to our deaths. I say “our” in order to point to the corporate nature of how the long list of boys, girls, women, and men who have died as absolutely unwilling participants in the culture of lynching that pervades this country. I, like every other Black person, am recipient of the chronic, even if unseen, pain that comes from being Black and being alive, being Black and loving, being Black and wondering, being Black and hoping, being Black and quitting, being Black and fighting, being Black and parenting, being Black and serving, being Black and leading, being Black and going to the barbershop, being Black and grocery shopping for my family, being Black and driving through the suburbs, being Black and watching women clutch their purses at the sight of me, being Black and opening my empty hands when I see the police so that they see there’s nothing in them, being Black and holding my beautiful boys as much as I can while being Black.

Coming to this reading while Black was like coming to the notes of an aunt who wrote important things down, things that she said over and over while I was small but that she knew I’d listen to differently when the milk was no longer behind my ears. I’ve told you about the book already, though from a decidedly current and autobiographical sketch. That’s part of the power and beauty of a book like Lynched. It anchors you, if you’re Black, in a part of your story that you know intimately and may not be able to explicate.

That said, Dr. Sims pursued a project to conduct an oral history of experiences of lynching, inviting and meeting 50 persons from Virginia, South Carolina, New Jersey, Nebraska, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, California, Pennsylvania, and Alabama. Participants in her project were at least 70 years old, and she was interested in learning why people did or didn’t discuss lynching; how a culture of lynching influenced their understanding of justice or faith; and what those participants wanted future generations to know.

As she sets out onto this psychologically taxing and uplifting quest, Sims makes early notes about the ways participants first responded. People were cool to respond to church announcements promoting her study. She wondered about this and said that silence served purposes for Black elders. For some, silence was an expression of fear. For others, silence served to preserve life. The fear was not always acknowledged; it was subconscious and underneath the quiet of Black people. Fear motivated the silence as did life preservation.

In terms of preservation, when lynching wasn’t discussed and silence kept, Dr. Sims approached people directly in churches for instance, knowing that they were old enough and that their church was involved with justice long enough, so that there would be some story to tell. Those folks wouldn’t approach her always, she said, and that was to engage in any number of “countercultural techniques” like mentoring students, teaching literacy to adults, providing scholarships, and promoting arts rather than to deal directly with the bruising subject of lynching. There are those “public and private responses to moral issues” that Sims puts forward from her interviews (8).

Her stake is about the immense value of language, and stories in particular as a form of language, and its use “to minimize the gravity of lynching and the countless lives forever disrupted as a result of this practice” (16). What a comment! There is gravity. There is the impact upon countless lives. There is the longstanding word forever that names the existential disruption. There is the sad reference of the fitting word practice that captures it all. My sense from Sims is that it is uncommon to talk about lynchings, how they were publicized, how lynchings were cultural events paraded as spectacles which were government-sanctioned in order to produce terror in Black people and in Black communities and to assuage white communities by virtue of those communities’ uses of this perverted, brutal mechanism even while those white (people in) communities were community leaders like police, pastors, and politicians. The book gives insight into how hard it is to discuss this culture and why Black folks do and don’t jump into the conversation. And why whites don’t either.

For Sims, “These oral histories can serve as entry points to provide the human community another frame of reference from which to examine diverse ways in which notions of civility frame narratives that offer insights about these individuals’ human capacity to make a conscious decision to go into their interior archives and determine for themselves, if, or how, they will give voice to a truth that reflects their lived reality” (33). These are contexualized analyses and constructed “alternative responses” by the people who experienced these remembered atrocities turned “cultural symbols and their embedded meanings” (66).

Throughout my reading I came to basic questions about inspecting images offered in media and education and mining the relationship between images and symbols which are those deep, abiding, hardly changeable understandings of Black people. The symbols emerge after the use and spread of images over centuries. It’s hard to see lynching as both legally wrong and morally unacceptable when centuries teach you that Black people are worthy of death, even public, gruesome government-supported death. These are character questions and cultural questions. They are critical issues that make you, whoever you are, turn and ask what you really believe about people.

This is a book about remembering rightly. It faces the direction of remembering parts of history that are not seen or not regarded and about courage that isn’t either. One main attribute that Sims lifts is “an ethic of resilient resistance” and her oral histories enact “an ability to name and respond to evil in a manner that challenges practices that are neither just nor fair” (124). In summarizing the histories as an ethic, she promotes a truer reading of what happened and what happens during lynchings. Sims offers an alternative to naming silence or speech as resilient acts of resistance against the culture of lynching.

She also includes material about how Black folk are a people just as engaged in an “ethic of forgiveness,” an ethic that can’t be held without the aforementioned resistance. After all, how can Black folk forgive without also resisting the brutal murders bringing up the need for such forgiveness? Who would suggest the need to forgive without a prior acknowledgment of the God-made flesh and humanity of the murdered? It’s important that both are in the book and that forgiveness is after the former. Also, Sims makes all the interviews public. Look into her notes to find the wide trail to them.

In terms of my critique, I don’t think Sims goes far enough with her employment of the liturgical review of baptism. It’s clear that she’s leaning toward the historical and that she wants to respect her interviewees while not forcing a theological reading upon their work. I think she wants their words to shine rather than her interpretation of them. Still, I think she could have added a chapter to work out her own theological renderings of the interviews. She hints at this, of course, saying “the act of remembering is symbolized as a ritual of baptism—not a literal baptism by water, but a symbolic immersion that plunged and invited me to journey with participants into repressed, suppressed, reconfigured, and ritualized memories as they remembered lynching and a culture of lynching…” (5). Sims’s work is a social-cultural-religious approach to these primary narratives as sources of discovery and meaning. These narratives are gifts that Sims gives us, grants us access to, and it’s important that others come along to work with these narratives as they’re presented. I don’t fault Sims for her not dealing for pointedly with theological matters. I respect what she’s set out to do. She’s left more to be done, rather for her next works or for those of us picking up this book and living with it in our memories.

If you read this book and find it interesting to your soul; if you read it and you want to step into similar reads, I’d commend James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree, M. Shawn Copeland’s Enfleshing Freedom, Kelly Brown Douglas’s Stand Your Ground and Terrance Johnson’s Tragic Soul-Life. These are not fun reads. Like Lynched, they are important, sobering theological works that help ground us further in the basic reality of Blackness that is faced with both uncertainty and deep certainty.

Those books, like Lynched, will remind you of what Howard Thurman called the “place for the singing of angels.” He was writing into our memories the way Thurman does about the truths recognized over and over. In Deep is the Hunger, Thurman described what is underneath these kinds of works. “Despite all the crassness of life, despite all the hardness of life, despite all the harsh discords of life, life is saved by the singing of angels” (p. 92). That’s the kind of spirit underneath the oral histories of Sims’s project. Her interviews possess the spoken words, the hard-won melodies, and the unshakeable echoes of Black people who in the face of their own harsh discords decided to speak and to sing. May the Listener of our prayers encourage us to keep speaking, to keep singing, and to keep listening to our beautiful selves. And may in that collective chorus, we move toward transformation.

by Michael

Dr. Carla Hayden’s Swearing In

This happened last month, and there are so many things I love about this. To see Dr. Carla Hayden in this beautiful space, to imagine her walking through the long underground passageway, to know that she’ll be inspiring and leading us to read… This is a tad long but you need to see Dr. Hayden’s video explaining her vision even while you hear the words of every other person in the ceremony. Paul Ryan even discusses Jefferson’s way of cataloging his library, which is a treat to visit in the LOC if you can visit.

by Michael

National Museum of African American History & Culture

Also, see a related interview by Anita Little at Religious Dispatch on Religion and Resistance. She speaks with the DC curator of the Center for the Study of African American Religion, Rev. Yolanda Pierce. That new center is housed in the NMAAHC. My favorite part of the interview is here–all this lovely stuff about the ancestors and symbolism–when Rev. Pierce discusses President Obama’s part in ringing a 500-pound church bell. This is fascinating to see this wonderful treasure open:

As a gesture, as a symbol, it is so powerful. The bell is tangible, it’s this huge thing that’s traveled to the seat of power, Washington, D.C. It came from this community of enslaved people who could have never imagined in their lifetime an African American president or an African American museum in our nation’s capital. It’s no small thing, we are at the evening of President Obama’s presidency.

A lot of the people coming on opening day are coming partially to say goodbye to President Obama in what will be one of his last public acts as president.

For me personally, it makes me think of the spirits of the ancestors, all the men and women who never lived to see this moment, all of our ancestors who died en route to the United States and whose bones now litter the Atlantic Ocean. The resounding clang of that bell as it reaches the heavens will remind me of those who could not be present.

The RD piece is here.

by Michael

“While We Are Still Making Progress”

by Malte BaumanI was gifted with the opportunity to read Racial Realities and Post-Racial Dreams when Dr. Julius Bailey asked me to review his book. It was a kind invitation, one that I am grateful to get.

This book is many things. Primarily a historical, political, and philosophical treatment of this country’s ethic, it explains the moving parts of politics, justice, civil rights, and philosophical discourse as they gather together and furnish this democracy with promise or poison. The book is history and also a glimpse into the future. Bailey writes as a concerned and prophetic scholar.

As I prepare this review, I think of the ways prophets were known in the first testament of the Bible. Prophets told the truth. They spoke forth what the community knew and what the community didn’t know. Prophets talked history and what the people of God already understood as God’s word which had been delivered through the vessels of graced hands and blessed mouths. And prophets also talked about the future and pushed the people to see a new, unknown tomorrow which was, always, a work of faith.

Prophetic work is faith work. Dr. Bailey works at his faith in that sense as he writes a compelling, interesting, and informative book about the history and future of the United States of America. He pulls up a chair for us and walks us through the perennial questions about our country and its unfulfilled promises, its strain to be an exceptional nation, and its insecure moral footing. He invites us to careful examination of those things said most loudly (which are usually the least true) relative to our country’s moral arc that has bent back from justice.

“While we are still making progress, we have lost the path (and especially the togetherness that characterized our first steps on it), and we have become more and more lost, unsure of the future.” Despite the troubling material he serves us, Bailey still has hope. And he offers his plan for locating and electing leaders with hope, with ethical strength, with generosity, and with moral courage.

He mines the current political and legal realities in Black and non-Black communities, holding out a convincing application of social-psychological theory and the clear ways our frames of reference are developed so as to prevent us from seeing. He moves through the double standards of politics and civil discourse. He talks fundamental attribution error and its relation to racism and white privilege.

He writes swiftly and clearly, “White privilege blinds those who would claim that Black America is its own worst enemy.” He continues, knowing that his truth is the truth and installs his rendition of the rise of President Barack Obama, contextualizing Mr. Obama’s campaign and victories, and noting the key agreements between those political achievements and the longer narrative of all those earlier (and all those future) acts of reclamation and recovery in previous times.

His book is a reflection of the exact and ever-present power of white privilege, the absence of non-white privilege, and the corresponding injustice that results. His book addresses these things in the slow, careful way a good teacher would and with the loving embrace of a brother and friend. He serves to us an explanation of the fear in us as a collective people and how religious views contribute since religion is a hot, undeniable area where change is most needed and most difficult. Early on he says what feels like a summary and an echo of his spirit throughout:

“Until an essential humanness replaces the hierarchized core of our racial discourse, we will continue to dehumanize the dark-skinned in both word and deed. Until the roots of structural racism are uprooted and an egalitarian worldview is planted in its place, the financial poverty of America’s inner cities will remain a reflection of the moral poverty in our nation.”

by Trent YarnellAnd he states such things carefully while, at the same time, challenging us to hold a “horizontal integration of the mission.” Bailey sounds like a pastor and professor, activist and contemplative. He sounds concerned and moved by love. He was hard to read–because his truths were, simply, true–and completely invitational at the same time.

The four central chapters cover in deft, artful ways topics that anyone interested in justice should sit with, including racism, xenophobia, poverty, and income inequality. Bailey speaks to the spirit while illuminating the mind. He teaches through his writing.

Tracing Civil Rights and Jim Crow, he explains what the Voting Rights Act was and how it was done true damage by the recent rule of the US Supreme Court. He takes you to school without making you feel like you missed out on the previous week’s homework.

He inspires you, hurts you, and challenges you. He tells it the way it should be told: decide what you believe about freedom and determine if those things should be offered to others.

That is the spirit of his invitation around economics and income, work and jobs. I get the sense that Bailey is dancing to the music of economics and political theory and history and morality. Of course morality is the cooler, distant term for spirituality.

There is a bottom to Dr. Bailey and though I read of portions of it, I can tell that his center is on display as he highlights moral decline in the United States. He writes of our need for a spiritual revolution even if it is not religiously based. It is a challenge and a call. It is necessary and for our own good, as well as a road we have often missed.

“But, so often, those who cause the most hurt are those who are meant to represent love, caring, and respect for the wholeness of persons. Churches and schools are beacons of light in communities, yet our churches denounce gay, transgendered, and queer parishioners in favor of pedantic adherence to an old exegesis of scripture, while our inner-city schools arrest students before counseling them, remove them before reviving them.”

His tone is not one that is easily dismissed. Even if your theory differs from him; even where your reading of the same historical moments generate a different conclusion; even if your political vision diverges from the biblical images he calls upon to color his perspective; you cannot dismiss his enduring sentiment and its corresponding energy. You have to contend with Julius Bailey’s love. And any good teacher would be pleased with that contention.

by Michael

“Uncomplicated Conditioning and Deep-Down Knowing”

Perhaps I am a cynic, but my uncomplicated conditioning and my deep-down knowing about the ubiquity of racism remind me that the invisibility of a symbol is not the same as the absence of racist hate.  I have had numerous interactions with white folk in nice suits, who would turn their nose up at a “redneck” racist, who share the same views but don’t literally wear it like an ornament around their neck.  It’s 2015, it is not okay to wear your racism on your sleeve (or your t-shirt), but that doesn’t mean it is not still carried around.  And that is what worries me.  Deep-seated, hidden, structural, institutionalized racism is just as (if not more) dangerous as out in the open racism because we don’t always recognize it or see it coming.

…In a moment when some faith seems to dictate that some black folk need to forgive (and forget) while some white folk stubbornly hold on to a flag and revisionist version of history that condones their racism and insistence for white supremacy, we have a lot more to worry about than whether or not the rebel flag will live on.  What we know for sure is that nine churchgoers who went to study the bible last week won’t.

Racial oppression doesn’t occur in a vacuum so it cannot be neatly or conveniently taken down (or away) without the residue, implications, consequences and permanent scars of its existence, and neither can the confederate flag.

Go read the rest here.

Thank you, my sister, scholar, teacher, proclaimer of truth, Dr. Robin Boylorn.