Obviously Bob Jones Jr. has taken a few detours in his sermon to explain that God may selectively allow the egregious sins of a purportedly Christian nation; that slavery wasn’t that bad; that Negro life in the South is actually great; that Martin Luther King Jr. is a propagandist with satanic motives; that he knows some lovely Chinese people; and that travel funding reparations have been readily available to former slaves all along. Still, the agenda behind this particular segregationist sermon is to defend his university’s racist admission practices. The title of the sermon is not really a question. The message—buried as it is in absurd flights of revisionist accounts of past and present race relations in the South—is specific and pointed. It is the mixing. Ever the thoughtful ally, the pastor makes sure to explain his intention to build a coloreds-only Bob Jones University. Separate, but, you know—separate.
“God never meant to have one race,” he proclaims assuredly. Interracial mixing must be prohibited at all costs, even the cost of equal education. Don’t even think about going to bed with a black woman, not on Bob Jones’s watch. “God never meant for America to be a melting pot to rub out the line between the nations. That was not God’s purpose.” (Bob Jones is permitted to say this, as it has been established that he and God are of one mind.) “I say it makes me sick!” he bellows, as if our very presence, our sheer proximity, scourges him with the physical force of a tumor or contagion. How dramatic—as if getting too close to us is a hazard to a white Christian body.
* * *
I have loved white men or boys in my life, and some may have loved me back, but to my core, I cannot and never did believe they could, fully. They wouldn’t end up with me, certainly. Neither of us could imagine me in the frames on the walls of their WASPy, or suburban, or midwestern homes. My high school boyfriend, who lasted such a short time and ended with such disdain that I do not even count him in my list of boyfriends (thereby clearing the list), was sat down by his father quickly after I entered the picture and warned about the troubling challenges we might face as an interracial couple—especially, he stressed, if we had children. Were we really prepared for this burden and difficulty? Was he sure this was worth it? It was 2004, and I was sixteen.
I always felt insufficient. I still do. I wasn’t aware of the psychological damage brought on by these early beliefs about my unlovability and inherent shortcomings until I realized how it haunted me with black men too. And women, and success, every glimpse of satisfaction and hope for desirability. Any relationship prospect, the prayer to be welcomed inside—I am not right, I will never be enough, I will never be the one. How could I not believe it, the hymn buzzing in my head? This shit adds up.
Another word for insufficiency is niggardly. Words are ductile and illuminating like that. It does not matter whether Bob Jones was aware of the damage he was doing as he railed against integration—and specifically, interracial dating and marriage, the evil blurring of racial boundaries. It doesn’t matter if he knew viewpoints like his would run me off, distrusting even God’s sense of benevolence. What is said is the message, and what is done is the message.
Employing another classic defense beloved by white people whom no one has asked to prove they aren’t racist, Bob Jones makes sure to underline the fact that “only a small percentage of southern people held slaves,” that “a great many people in the South in the old days did not believe in slavery.” I am always being reminded of good white people, being asked to state for the record that I don’t hate all white people. Here, I find the schism of thought between us and them. They are personalized where we are theoretical. They, as individuals, can be singled out as exceptions; they can be one of the good ones. They can be excused from any guilt or responsibility for African American plight if they themselves did not own slaves—and we are haunted by the facts, by the deeply fucked-up reality that our American consciousness stems from inequality, insufficiency. There are those who have—who have always been able to have—and those who barely have identities.
Bob Jones believes in justification over philosophy. I believe in questions—and, like Paul, growth. The possibility of restructuring one’s frame of mind, a sunny sliver of hope in a misguided world. Imagine being a spiritual leader who instructs only defense, and never creation. Who piously insists that our foremost responsibility to the world is not to flood it with more goodness, but resist and prohibit everything of it. Imagine being the sort of person who believes, unwaveringly, that the only good and pure world is an unchanged one.
It is somehow always about money, of course. It always comes back to this language. “The commercial aspect was dominant,” Bob Jones admits of the good Southern whites who did not believe (conceptually?) in slavery yet still participated. “People bought slaves and sold them.” There is no way to justify slavery, insists the preacher who has endeavored, sneakily, to do just that. It was wrong, but it happened; it was a slip-up, for which God found a way to “overrule” and make right. It wasn’t really their faults. “Some good people fell for it and went ahead with it,” he says, while calling proponents of integration satanic. Is not integration—including cohabitation, interracial sex, equal voting rights and blended education—a consequence, a natural and inevitable outcome of the finances of slavery? In every account I’ve heard, it was the slave owner who got in bed with the slave.
* * *
If we separate ourselves, draw up borders and differentiations, we can more easily profit off one another without guilt. If we never budge, if budging is an affront to our God, it’s easy to condemn immigration and integration; the disappearing lines of habitation; the sense of being invaded—interrupted. Do not let anything disturb you. In theory, it’s easy to fear the infiltrating swarms of people demanding to be counted as such. In practice, do we not rely on the unwelcome, the Other, for their crucial role in our comfortable, money-thirsty lifestyles?
Ever since my transformation on the slave ship—my unbecoming, my skin made retail—my worth has been measured in my contribution to the bottom line. My penance for invading the bounds of habitation is unending. In all mixed communities, I am asked to explain myself, to come to my defense. I am worth the trouble, I plead with every word, I make up for myself in value. It is always about spinning peoples into monies. Now, folded in to American society, technically free and reluctantly allowed a place, I am an unrented apartment, sitting there with no return. Bleeding money.
In Bob Jones’s America, I keep myself in check. I do not ask for more, I do not push my luck, I do not tempt men into corruption, I do not try to be someone I never can be. I never, ever, touch your sons—my acceptance depends on my aloneness, at the very least my innocuousness. Maybe in Bob Jones’s America, the only Africans left are only the model Christians, the preachers and missionaries and select service workers. Maybe in Bob Jones’s America, walls are everywhere—around the South, around California, around every city’s Chinatown, around every oversexualized African (American). In Bob Jones’s America, we know our place. We stay there.
In 2019, in every heart and every state, we are still trying to figure it out, or trying not to. Debating for years and centuries whether a kind of life even matters; if someone named alien or illegal can also be named a person; if there was justification; if there are enough borders; if God meant for any of this, these folks, to befall our nation of good people. I know there is no use in refuting—even with their own language and reasoning—what people like Bob Jones are committed to regarding as gospel, just as I know it is no use to ignore them. But I know this is what made me, and what haunts me, a black woman who cannot allow herself to be loved or wholly welcome. I want to dismiss this absurd, blasphemous sermon and everything it stands for, everything it defends. But now that I’ve read it, it all makes sense. I will always hear it and know that it is somewhere inside America, and that as an American, its words are inside me too, convincing my perspective to run, hide, or bow invisibly. Holiness means I need to disappear. This is what hums like an itch as I eat alone, in
a sea of color-matched pairs swimming around me. There is no place for me here, on the other side of a border I never knew was there.
Damn you, preacher. The only way to know and honor any kind of God is to see and praise every universe, to understand how they give each other breath. We, the immigrants and African Americans, we hybrids and interlopers, who have crossed the borders of habitation into the unknown, and willingly taken up the dark, brutal story of these United States: we have done nothing but love this nation, nothing but try desperately to make this nation love us. We have forgiven your trespasses, offered you grace and unconditional mercy. We have taken up your crosses. We have died for your sins.
CHURCH OF THE LUKUMI BABALU AYE V. CITY OF HIALEAH (1993)
In an era where Supreme Court decisions are highly polarized, in both 5–4 votes cast and in the eyes of the American electorate writ large, one may forget that the members of our nation’s highest court do at times find unanimous consensus. One such decision was Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah. The Supreme Court, led, ironically, by the Court’s perennial swing vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy, held that a law targeting a particular religion must satisfy “strict scrutiny” to pass constitutional muster. In other words, any law of this nature must be narrowly tailored and serve a compelling government interest to be constitutionally valid. The Court found that an ordinance by the city of Hialeah banning religious animal sacrifice did not meet those requirements, violating the First Amendment’s free exercise clause.
The juxtaposition of the Court’s holdings in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye and the recent Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018) highlights the complexity of the ACLU’s fight for civil rights and religious freedom. In Masterpiece Cakeshop, the Supreme Court cited Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye in its decision, holding that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, like the City of Hialeah, was unconstitutionally hostile toward a baker who refused to furnish a same-sex couple with a wedding cake based on his religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the Court implied that the decision was narrow, focusing on what they deemed to be the antireligious bias of some of the commissioners. The Court affirmed the “dignity” of gay people and couples and acknowledged their entitlement to protection against discrimination.
Some Gods Are Better Than Others
VICTOR LAVALLE
By now it’s a cliché to hear about the conversation between a black parent and child where the parent tells the child she’ll have to be ten times better—or a hundred times better—than her white peers if she wants to succeed in the United States. This has become a commonplace, damn near boilerplate, which is actually heartbreaking if you slow down and think about it. So let’s do that, shall we?
The underlying point of this parental wisdom, of course, is that the cards are stacked against the black or brown person in the workplace, in school, even in line at the supermarket. Your standard is different from someone else’s and, to make it worse, those other people won’t even acknowledge it. My wife and I see this in school interactions where our son and the other brown-skinned boys are singled out as problem kids. Meanwhile, their white male friends are described as “energetic” or “enthusiastic.” To use a sports analogy (please forgive me if you hate sports), the goalposts aren’t set at the same distance.
Again, this sounds like a cliché, a point so obvious that one risks making other people’s eyes roll. But something magical happens when you don’t simply take such a thing for granted, when you hammer home the thuddingly clear truth every time: people can’t ignore it if you keep reminding them. I suspect that’s what clichés are actually meant to do: to hide something in plain sight. It’s the kind of clever plan that would make a James Bond villain gasp with envy. This country doesn’t treat everyone equally? That’s, like, so obvious. Why do we even have to talk about it?
The Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye and Ernesto Pichardo v. the City of Hialeah came before the Supreme Court on November 4, 1992, and was decided on June 11, 1993. The facts of the case go like this: In April 1987, the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye leased a plot of land in Hialeah, Florida. There they planned to build a church. In theory this shouldn’t be a problem—America, land of religious liberty and all that—but the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye is part of the Santeria religion. You may begin to see the problem now.
Or maybe you don’t. I shouldn’t presume. To this day, many people’s idea of the Santeria faith comes from some throwback horror movie like The Believers or the 1988 horror movie The Serpent and the Rainbow or the 1987 horror movie Angel Heart. Sensing a pattern? (Not to mention that the last two are actually about Voodoo, or Hollywood voodoo, but people tend to mix up both Santeria and Voodoo into a general “bad” religion category.)
The point of most of those movies seems to be that the practitioners make soul-selling deals with evil forces, they often indulge in highly sexualized rituals, and they make bloody sacrifices of animals.
The first one of these is untrue, the second really a matter of perspective, and the last, unfortunately for the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, turns out to be true. Animal sacrifice is an aspect of the Santeria faith.
Which brings us to the town of Hialeah, Florida, and how the townsfolk reacted when the church leased a plot of land with the intention of building a church in the Santeria faith.
Hialeah went batshit.
This particular form of batshit came in the form of the Hialeah city council passing four ordinances aimed at the church and its practices. Two of them “forbade the offering of sacrifices, a sacrifice being defined as killing an animal unnecessarily in a public or private ritual or ceremony, and not for the sole purpose of sustenance.” The third ordinance forbade the keeping of animals intended for sacrifice. And the last “confined the slaughtering of animals to a slaughterhouse.”
Soon the American Civil Liberties Union represented the petitioners.
Now I have no doubt there are plenty of people who don’t see an issue here. The practice of animal sacrifice may seem cruel, downright evil, and any laws that banned the practice fall on the side of righteousness for those who sympathize. But you have to remember what I wrote about the goalposts, the changing of standards based on whom, exactly, one is evaluating. The ACLU joined the fight on behalf of the church because it simply wasn’t up to the Hialeah city council to decide which religion’s practices were deemed lawful and acceptable and which ones were, as they say, beyond the pale.
Pete Rivera, a Santeria high priest, was quoted in a USA Today article that focused on this case. Rivera “says the animals he sacrifices die more humanely than animals killed in slaughterhouses.” Anyone who has even casually learned about the conditions in American slaughterhouses would be hard-pressed to argue. And yet the Hialeah ordinances made sure to preserve the rights of slaughterhouse owners. There wasn’t even a clause about making sure those slaughterhouse deaths were handled with any care.
Another point made in an article in the spring 1993 issue of Reform Judaism underscored the hypocrisy: “There is no question that these ordinances do single out those who kill animals out of obedience to religious command, while not touching those who kill animals for any other reason—for food, scientific research, pest control, euthanasia for sick pets, animal population control, or hunting for sport. Can the government ever forbid for religious purposes an activity it freely permits for all kind of non-religious purposes?”
The answer to this question should be obvious, but those Hialeah ordinances were upheld in 1989 by a US district judge and, two years later, “a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of appeals unanimously affirmed this ruling.”
Talk about having to be one hundred times better than your peers! When I read about this case, I found myself reeling at the idea of how hard these judges must have contorted themselves to miss the intentional targeting of a specific religion.
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where, I’m happy to say, the nine just
ices unanimously called bullshit on those lower court judges and the wack-ass city council of Hialeah. They struck down the ordinances as clear violations of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment.
I’d like to point out that these nine judges were almost all appointed by Republican presidents: Reagan, Nixon, and Bush appointed seven of the nine justices. You had guys like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, no friends of Santeria I am sure, who still had to concede—or outright defend—the right of the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye to practice its faith as its adherents saw fit. Imagine that.
If I despair at anything in this case, it’s simply the layers of powerful people—a city council, a crew of judges—who were willing to overlook the obvious violation. Laws must be applied equally to all American citizens. Imagine having to go all the way to the Supreme Court to have such a basic right affirmed. So I feel sincere gratitude that a body like the ACLU stood to meet that challenge to individual freedom and fairness under the law. Without such support, the powerful always run rough over the powerless. Long may the friends of the powerless reign.
Ashe!
HURLEY V. IRISH-AMERICAN GAY, LESBIAN, AND BISEXUAL GROUP OF BOSTON (1995)
The celebrations that occur in Boston on March 17 carry with them a storied history dating back to the earliest days of the United States. The date represents not just the traditional feast of Saint Patrick, held close by Irish immigrants, but also the evacuation of royal troops from the city in 1776. Boston commemorates the day with a city holiday, the highlight of which is the Saint Patrick’s Day–Evacuation Day parade organized by the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council, known to draw as many as one million onlookers.
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