“How to be an Ally When Black Lives Matter”, Sermon audio presented by Rev. John Cullinan on September 20, 2015. At this year’s General Assembly, the youth caucus led a charge to get congregations to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Their Action of Immediate Witness was passed by the GA with an overwhelming majority. This week, an exploration of why Black Lives Matter matters even in a predominantly white community such as our own, and why it may the most urgent moral issue of the current time.
The stories are all too frequent, all too terrible.
Trayvon Martin, age 17, shot to death by vigilante who felt there was “just something off” about the young man.
Renisha McBride, age 19, shot to death on the doorstep of a home in an unfamiliar neighborhood when she sought help after a car accident. The homeowner did not hesitate to shoot right after opening his door.
Tamir Rice, age 12, shot to death by a police officer without warning or provocation, because it was feared he had a gun.
Sandra Bland, age 28, tased and manhandled during what was supposed to be a minor traffic stop, and later dead in jail under still questionable circumstances.
To date, only the killer of Renisha McBride has been tried and convicted of murder. Trayvon’s killer was infamously acquitted. The police responsible for the deaths of Tamir Rice and Sandra Bland are still “under investigation.”
There’s a story we like to tell ourselves as a nation, at least among those of us in the dominant culture. The story says that when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, that this nation had, in outlawing much of Jim Crow in the south, effectively repaired and eliminated nearly three centuries of racial hatred and discrimination in this country. The marches had worked, the deaths of protestors had not been in vain, and Dr. King’s dream had finally come true.
It is a story that’s told every January when we trot out the sanitized version of Martin Luther King for his birthday – the version that ignores his righteous anger and the work for the poor of all races he still felt he had left to do. It is a story that’s told whenever a white man like myself says without any trace of irony or insincerity that he “doesn’t see race.” (Yes, Stephen Colbert is being satirical when he says it on TV).
But, that story – the story that racism died with Jim Crow – is a myth and it glosses over some hard truths. The truth is that the landmark legislation of the mid-60s was a promise for the future and not a death warrant for the systemic racism of that time. It was a promise that needed to be fulfilled in the minds and hearts of people over the span of the years that followed.
It is a promise that still remains unfulfilled. I would say, in fact, that we have reneged on that promise. For in the decades that have followed, we moved quickly and rather deftly from an era of segregation to the era of incarceration – an era that sees African-Americans making up 13% of the population of the country and yet somehow nearly 50% of the population of this country’s prisons; an era where more white youth than black traffic in drugs, but more black youth are jailed for the crime.
From this shift, a new myth has arisen – the myth that there is something inherently wrong and possibly criminal in the heart of black culture in America, that black men (and young black men in particular) are thugs at heart.
Somewhere between these two myths – between the myth of a racially harmonious nation and the myth of the natural born thug – there arises a blindness to the crisis that presses upon the margins of society. A crisis that will see one in three black men inside a prison in their lifetime. A crisis that sees black people killed by the police at a rate nearly three times that of whites. A crisis that strips away the basic humanity of our black brothers and sisters (and abrogates our own in the process).
A crisis that is a direct cause of the[...]
