White immigrants came to this country, and still do, with white skin, the biggest asset possible in a country where whiteness still has tremendous value. It makes no sense to tell black folk to do what white immigrants did to become successful.
My friends, if whiteness matters, slavery does too. The legacy of inequality is both formal and informal, both a matter of law and a matter of social convention. European immigrants certainly faced their own barriers to assimilation. But neither the government nor our society used its legal and political power to stop immigrant success the way America did to stop black folk for nearly three centuries.
Black immigrants often have a leg up on American blacks as well. They have arrived from societies where they enjoyed equality without regard to color. Thus they arrive with great assets, skills, and experiences, allowing them to compete in the American marketplace. These black immigrants faced no color barriers to human capital like those we face in America. Neither can we discount the exotic appeal of foreign blackness. Many white folk find it far more attractive to deal with a black person from the Caribbean or Africa than American blacks. Foreign blacks lack the common history of oppression that binds black Americans together. That difference is a big one for white folk. You don’t feel the sort of pressure of history when you encounter many of those immigrant blacks. Neither do you feel the sort of white racial guilt you may experience in the presence of American blacks. If you do a good enough job of reading up on the black experience, you can fight those arguments in your own circles.
Beloved, you can also range far beyond your circles and visit black folk in schools, jails, and churches. My friends, you should identify a school that you, or your office, or your company, or your peers, might adopt. And then visit that school to share—your insight, resources, or expertise, or just your affirming, concerned presence. Become a mentor and offer career advice to older kids. Offer a word of encouragement to younger kids, too, especially through school counselors who know that black kids must see folk being what they one day wish to become—engineers, lawyers, architects, construction workers, and, yes, firefighters and cops.
You should visit jails and prisons too. I make frequent trips to see my brother in prison, and I also visit other jails and prisons throughout the country. It is an eye-opener. There is a pipeline, my friends, one that runs from classroom to jail, from the playground to the prison. When you visit the incarcerated you’ll see how utterly decent most of these men and women are, how they got a bad deal because they were poor with no one to advocate for them.
Visiting a black church is just good for your soul. The best black churches do many of the things that religious folk should be doing if they are concerned about the poor and lost. They set up credit unions for their members. They offer housing for the elderly and the financially strapped. They offer counseling sessions for the mentally beleaguered. They offer ministries to the incarcerated that pay attention as well to the prison industrial complex. Of course when you visit on a Sunday morning, you’ll hear the magnificent music of our choirs, the thunderous ways they sing out the joy and wring out the blues by proclaiming faith in God through song. It is contagious.
And you will hear some of the best preaching that the good Lord has ever unleashed on human ears. Many of these ministers are rock stars among the black faithful, and it is here where we benefit from their gifts, giving hope and inspiration to their congregations and leading and loving a people on the precipice of social chaos and urban despair, especially in a time of black-and-blue crisis. The best of them include Freddy Haynes at Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas; Lance Watson of St. Paul Baptist in Richmond, Virginia; Alyn Waller at Enon Tabernacle Baptist in Philadelphia; Gina Stewart at Christ Missionary Baptist Church in Memphis; Marcus Cosby at Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church in Houston; Rudolph McKissick at Bethel Baptist Institutional Church in Jacksonville; Otis Moss, III, at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago; Jawanza Colvin at Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland; Calvin O. Butts, III, at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York; W. Franklyn Richardson at Grace Baptist in Mt. Vernon, New York; Cynthia Hale at Ray of Hope Christian Church in Atlanta; Vashti McKenzie, the first female elected as bishop in the AME church, serving the state of Texas; and Howard-John Wesley of Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia. They tell the truth about black pain and offer abundant inspiration and hope.
Beloved, all of what I have said should lead you to empathy. It sounds simple, but its benefits are profound. Whiteness must shed its posture of competence, its will to omniscience, its belief in its goodness and purity, and then walk a mile or two in the boots of blackness. The siege of hate will not end until white folk imagine themselves as black folk—vulnerable despite our virtues. If enough of you, one by one, exercises your civic imagination, and puts yourself in the shoes of your black brothers and sisters, you might develop a democratic impatience for injustice, for the cruel disregard of black life, for the careless indifference to our plight.
Empathy must be cultivated. The practice of empathy means taking a moment to imagine how you might behave if you were in our positions. Do not tell us how we should act if we were you; imagine how you would act if you were us. Imagine living in a society where your white skin marks you for disgust, hate, and fear. Imagine that for many moments. Only when you see black folk as we are, and imagine yourselves as we have to live our lives, only then will the suffering stop, the hurt cease, the pain go away.
VII.
Offering Plate
Besides the crime which consists in violating the law . . . there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation from him that has done it: and any other person, who finds it just, may also join with him that is injured, and assist him in recovering from the offender so much as may make satisfaction for the harm he has suffered.
—John Locke
Beloved, I was proud to be a member of the Georgetown University faculty in September 2016. Nearly two centuries after the nation’s most prominent Jesuit priests sold 272 enslaved human beings to salvage their university’s financial future, I sat in Gaston Hall as Georgetown president John DeGioia announced plans to atone for the past. DeGioia said that day that he would offer a formal apology on behalf of the university, establish an institute to study slavery, and erect a public memorial to the slaves who labored to sustain Georgetown, including those men, women, and children—the youngest a two-month-old baby—whose sale in 1838 saved the school. And now, nearly two centuries later, I, an ordained Baptist minister, was the highest-ranking black professor at a Catholic institution that once trafficked in human flesh.
My friends, my pride was tempered by profound grief and anger that any school should rest on the uncompensated labor of folk whose only sin was their skin. It violates every tenet of serious scholarship. It offends every fiber of my being as a black man, as a descendant of enslaved folk in this country.
After DeGioia made his announcement that day, a remarkable thing occurred: history spoke up for itself. Several direct descendants of “the 272,” as the enslaved were called, rose to greet the audience and make a statement. They had not been invited to attend, much less expected to speak. But, beloved, the Spirit sometimes moves in mysterious ways.
One of the group members read a prepared document that eloquently expressed their appreciation for Georgetown’s efforts to address slavery and its consequences in the present. There was huge applause. And then came off-the-cuff remarks from one of the descendants that were just as powerful, just as affecting. His group, he said, was the face of the suffering endured by their enslaved ancestors. “And our attitude is, ‘nothing about us without us.’” He argued that reconciliation couldn’t possibly start off by alienating the very descendants
of the 272 enslaved the school was honoring. He said they were not seeking reparations, but a partnership to heal the nation’s racism.
Beloved, truth is rarely neat. It is often messy. Black truth in white America is especially inconvenient, often not on the program, yet insisting to be heard. To his credit DeGioia showed no hint of defensiveness. He embraced the spirit of partnership that had been extended. DeGioia knows this gesture of atonement is only a start. He knows that offering preferential status in the admissions process to the descendants of the enslaved is just a beginning. Next comes more substantive reckoning with the moral and political consequences of what was done on our hallowed academic ground two centuries ago. The descendant said he wasn’t asking for reparations. But, beloved, if we in this nation are to live up to the demands of justice, we should.
VIII.
Prelude to Service
In the early hours of Nov. 9, 2016, the winner of the presidential election was declared . . . All around were the unmistakable signs of normalization in progress. So many were falling into line without being pushed. It was happening at tremendous speed, like a contagion . . . Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it or describe it as something else. This is not a process that began a week or month or year ago. It did not begin with drone assassinations, or with the war on Iraq. Evil has always been here. But now it has taken on a totalitarian tone.
—Teju Cole
What gives me so much pause, and makes me feel so badly, [is] that the country is willing to be that intolerant and not understand the empathy that’s necessary to understand other groups’ situations. I’m a rich, white guy. And I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it. I couldn’t imagine being a Muslim right now, or a woman, or an African-American, a Hispanic, a handicapped person, and how disenfranchised they might feel. And for anyone in those groups that voted for [Trump], it’s just beyond my comprehension how they ignored all that.
— Gregg Popovich
Beloved, the deed has been done. We have—since that “we” must contain, by virtue of our system of government, if not the will, then at least the implied consent, of even the people who opposed with all their souls the choice you made—elected Donald J. Trump as president of the United States of America. Please take measure of every phrase in that sentence. Donald J. Trump, the man who unjustly called into question the citizenship of Barack Obama, our first black president. The man who gave consolation to a gnarled federation of bigots. The man who lent his considerable indignity to berating Muslims, Mexicans, black folk, the other-abled, women, and so many other vulnerable populations. This man has now become the world’s most powerful man because he is president of the United States of America, the most powerful nation in history. For millions this is nothing short of a nightmare, or perhaps more accurately, a whitemare.
The election of President Trump was all about whiteness. How whiteness is ingeniously adaptable to a gross variety of circumstances. How it is at once capable of exulting in privilege while proclaiming it is the least privileged of identities. How it is able to hide in plain sight while detesting every other identity that doesn’t, and can’t, conform to its imperative to invisibility. And how it howls in primal pain at being forgotten while it rushes to spitefully forget and erase all suffering that isn’t its own. You will deny it, of course. Already many of those who once bitterly denounced what President Trump stood for have, in startling reversal of their previous positions, embraced the possibility of his goodness, or, at least, his fitful utility, a trend that will no doubt continue into the future.
My friends, the mistake we often make is to believe that whiteness is only prejudice, that it is only bigotry, that it is only racism, that it is only the cry of hate. That is only partly true. The other part of whiteness is the delusion that it can supply every need that our country has. Both of these impulses suffocate the vitality of democracy. Beloved, Donald Trump is what we are left with when whiteness drains the body politic of crucial self-awareness and we stiffen into a moral corpse.
When the defenders of whiteness proclaim that it is not whiteness that was at stake in electing Trump, but, instead, the ache of poverty and class, what they mostly always fail to mention is that millions of black and brown folk are poor, or working class, too. It is only the white lower and middle classes whose silent suffering is portrayed as having got a president elected. As important as their economic vulnerability is, it is not the major engine of their disgust; rather it is the fury of whiteness unleashed, of whiteness unbounded, of whiteness made, not less white, but even whiter by its class rage, a rage that oddly leaves aside solidarity with millions of other hurting souls whose only reason for exclusion is their color.
Beloved, when the defenders of whiteness argue that the white folk who supported candidate Trump were not magnetized by his miserably shining hatefulness toward so many “others,” they defy the physics of race and the algorithm of bigotry. There is a fairly easy calculus to racism: if it increases, rather than decreases, the force, energy, and structure of racial antagonism, then it is racist, no matter the intent or conscious aim of its perpetrator.
Many white folk, including the wealthy, and the surprising numbers of women who voted for him, whether they can admit it or not, were attracted to candidate Trump, not because he wasn’t President Obama, which is a reasonable political choice, but because he wasn’t the black man who had taken their country. “Make America Great Again” is hardly coded, and not primarily, or merely, a brilliantly deceptive campaign slogan, but a sturdy credo, and the gist of faith in whiteness. To “Make America Great Again” is in truth to make America white again. Some might argue that that can’t possibly be the case. After all, America twice elected Obama to the presidency. Yet we fail to see that a majority of white folk never liked Obama and never wanted him as their president. They never invited him, metaphorically, into their homes. The majority of white folk just got outvoted twice.
Beloved, a massive white rebellion was fomented in our midst, a rebellion driven by resentment of a black man in charge, resentment, too, of the widely perceived, yet grossly exaggerated, black benefit under Obama—that black folk got an unfair leg up, all because, finally, for the first time in 220 years, a black man darkened the Oval Office. It is hard to overstate just how poisonous Obama was believed to be in the precincts of a spurning, rebutting whiteness, a whiteness that measured the seconds until he would no longer be in that white house, in our, or rather, their, White House. Millions of whites couldn’t wait to return power to the white hands from which it had been cruelly snatched for eight years, couldn’t wait to celebrate the victory of the most brazenly white man to claim the presidency since Andrew Johnson.
Beloved, there is a truth to Trump’s election that many of you refuse to see: too many white folk are willing to imperil the ship of state because they lust for revenge. It is, in truth, wevenge, the unrepentant mutiny of a rogue white crew. They seem willing to cast aside a seasoned leader because of her gender, and her connection to the previous captain. Instead, they have embraced a fatally inexperienced skipper who threatens to wreck the vaunted vessel of government in the rocky waters of political ignorance.
Whether he wishes to be or not, Donald Trump is the epitome, not only of white innocence and white privilege, but of white power, white rage, and, yes, even of white supremacy.
The greatly stepped-up harassment of people of color, and Muslims, and immigrants in the wake of Trump’s election points to the sea change in our naked tolerance for such assaults, in the permission granted to diabolical forces that rob us even more of comity and support of the commonweal.
Donald Trump harms our nation’s positive racial future.
Yet, beloved, there remains, after all, the blackness that is prophecy, the blackness that is inexplicable hope in the face of savage hopelessness. The great b
lack prophet and mystic Howard Thurman says it best.
At the time when the slaves in America were without any excuse for hope and they could see nothing before them but the long interminable cotton rows and the fierce sun and the lash of the overseer, what did they do? They declared that God was not through. They said, “We cannot be prisoners of this event. We must not scale down the horizon of our hopes and our dreams and our yearnings to the level of the event of our lives.” So they lived through their tragic moment until at last they came out on the other side, saluting the fulfillment of their hopes and their faith.
Beloved, if the enslaved could nurture, on the vine of their desperate deficiency of democracy, the spiritual and moral fruit that fed our civilization, then surely we can name and resist demagoguery; we can protest, and somehow defeat, the forces that threaten the soul of our nation. To not try, to give up on the possibility that we can make a difference, can make the difference, is to give up on our past, on our complicated, difficult, but victorious past. Donald Trump is not our final, or ultimate, problem. The problem is, instead, allowing hopelessness to steal our joyful triumph before we work hard enough to achieve it.
IX.
Closing Prayer
Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.
—Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Oh God, the hour is dark. The suffering is great. But we will not give up. We will not surrender.
We will not surrender because we have endured the lash of spite and the whip of hate on our backs.
We will not surrender because we know that faith is greater than fear, good triumphant over evil, love more noble than hate.
We will not surrender because our mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers, too, believed in you, believed in us, believed that no obstacle put in their way could stop them. They believed that the grace you gave them for their journeys would outlast any challenge to their hearts and minds.
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