We Have to Dismantle White Supremacy Before We Can Forgive

By Rev. Leah C.K. Lewis
July 8, 2015

Shortly after the murders of the Mother Emanuel 9 in Charleston, our nation began a “conversation” about forgiveness. Nadine Collier, Ethel Lance’s daughter, forgave her mother’s murderer in what seemed like mere hours of the shooting. This stunning act of forgiveness provided us with a point of reflection. Then, at the terrorist’s bond hearing, Myra Thompson’s grandson, Anthony Thompson, conveyed his forgiveness. Christopher Singleton and his sister Camryn similarly forgave this same man who murdered their mother, the Reverend Sharonda Coleman-Singleton. Truly, Ms. Collier, Mr. Thompson, and the Singletons displayed tremendous dignity and resolve.

I take absolutely no exception with the actions of Ms. Collier, Mr. Thompson, and the young Singletons. They lost members of their families. Forgiveness rightly became a very personal Ebenezer—a stone of help—for the family members and close friends of the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney, Reverend Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Reverend Singleton, Reverend Daniel Simmons, Sr., Tywanza Sanders, Ms. Thompson, Susie Jackson, Cynthia Hurd, and Ms. Lance. The bereaved more than any of us need a reminder of God’s very present aid in times of pain and peril.

Then opinions expressed by Dr. Stacey Patton in The Washington Post further drove the debate. Dr. Patton advocates that African Americans no longer accommodate white guilt, gaze, imposition, and fetish by readily granting forgiveness especially publically in the midst of our anguish. This seems reasonable to me.

As tends to be the case when conventional “wisdom”—such as the virtue of forgiveness—is presumed under attack, pundits strike reflexively. Many who addressed Dr. Patton through the fiber optics of the Internet or television with counter-commentary seemed to not have gleaned her argument or refused it outright. Old habits die hard, even when those habits are detrimental.

Black—and usually Christian—forgiveness given freely, publicly, and without demand for recourse and redress of injury is exceedingly problematic in our communal quest for justice—personal and social. African Americans historically have been conditioned to humble ourselves at the altar of white supremacy. This must stop.

In order to bend the arc of the moral universe toward our equitable and humane treatment, African Americans must stop kowtowing and being complicit in our own dehumanization and subjugation. As victims of terror, we have absolutely nothing to be contrite about.

The Church, of which I am currently a part, must stop teaching a faux-narrative that makes weaklings out of believers. Narratives that focus on forgiveness, but not on self-actualization, the development and use of power, and offender accountability fail to produce the type of happy, healthy, whole practitioners that the Gospel intends. Our focus ought to be in developing and cultivating good old fashion power. Yes, power is a paradigm promoted by Jesus Christ, that Northeast African Palestinian Jew.

St. Mark 5:21-43 provides insight into the principles that I espouse. In this pericope, the woman with the twelve-year issue of blood (hemorrhaging) and Jarius, the synagogue leader, use self-determination to gain healing and wholeness—the woman for herself and Jarius for his twelve-year-old daughter. Jesus Christ, the Messiah, felt his “power” go out of him when the woman pressing through the crowd touched the hem of his garment. She then stood up whole. Her issue resolved. With a mere vocal command, “Talitha cum,” (Aramaic for “Little girl, get up!”) Jesus healed the child.

In both cases, embodied illnesses were overcome through accessing and using power. Too often African Americans give away power by publicly forgiving actors in racist, imperial systems perpetuated by the myth of white supremacy. Internalized oppression is a disease. Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, as conceptualized by Dr. Joy DeGruy, is an illness.

We must acknowledge that when media engages forgiveness it becomes spectacle. Spectacle is cheap, tawdry, and a tool of the oppressor. Willingly participating in the theatrics of forgiveness going forward ought to be viewed as fostering socio-political sickness and a capitulation to a imperfect, self-defeating theology.

It seems like every fifty years or so, this nation cycles back to address the recurring implications of man-made racial inequality. In the Judeo-Christian tradition fifty years is supposed to represent the year of Jubilee—a year of celebration and a year in which debts are dismissed and jubilance had. We, African Americans, continue to miss the mark. Why? In part, because we fail to give life to the power we contain. Sadly, the very religion so many of us purport to love is a tremendous source of our impotence.

If a critical mass of African Americans operate in our power, like flag-removing Bree Newsome, the oppressive culture of the United States has no other option but to change for the better. We have the power to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice. We have the power to bend the arc of the moral universe toward equality.

Without question, forgiveness gained privately, for one’s own sake and the sake of our families and our community is a positive development in the healing process. This is a strength, which cannot be abused.

We, the African American people and our allies, gained nine martyrs for the all-important cause of overcoming the pox of racism. Without question, millions mourn the untimely and unnatural deaths of the Mother Emanuel 9. Deaths that like so many others were brought on by the U.S. legacy of unwarranted hatred; unbridled ignorance and violence enacted by intellectually and spiritually impaired whites directed toward African Americans indiscriminately. We too, need to rely on those things that bring comfort, hope, and a sense of stability and safety.

For many of us forgiveness is not that thing. Our martyrs slain have given us perspective. For those of us who are clear on the struggle and what is required to end white supremacy and its impositions, we know that forgiveness was, and remains, a necessary luxury for those in close proximity to loss of family, fellow church members and other loved ones.

For everyone else, media-covered forgiveness becomes a crutch that hinders the work before us. For those of us who are not at the epicenter of tragedy, we have one responsibility. It is accountability. We have an obligation to the deceased, the bereaved, our ancestors, ourselves, and future generations to hold the supporters of white supremacy and white privilege accountable.

For us, forgiveness takes on cosmic or metaphysical proportions. It is not interpersonal or immediate. Forgiveness for the masses must be withheld until the hydra headed monster of white supremacy and privilege breathes its last breath. Until white Americans confess their sins and those of their foreparents, remove every Southern Cross from public spaces, confront their intra-ethnic group members who are violators, ratify laws that rectify systemic disadvantages and oppressions based upon color and class, overturn injustices, apologize, and pay reparations, forgiveness ought not be articulated. Tall order, I know, but as Dr. Cornel West said on CNN shortly after the massacre, “Forgiveness is a process, not an utterance.” So, too is reconciliation.

Even for those who have personal relationships to victims of hate crimes and race-based terrorism, to articulate forgiveness too soon and publically is to increase the risk of being misused and potentially made complicit in one’s own oppression. It would benefit our pursuit of justice, equity, and right treatment to withhold public forgiveness and absolution. While for our own sakes we ought not harbor bitterness, we must be resolute in our determination to overcome. Public forgiveness for us is not a starting point, but a culminating event. Our grand bestowal of forgiveness must wait for the type of pervasive, earthly, and supernatural resolution—the end of white supremacy—so poignantly imagined by the Negro Poet Laureate Paul Laurence Dunbar in his 1913 poem Dawn:

“An angel, robed in spotless whiteBent down to kiss the sleeping Night. Night woke to blush; the spite was gone. Men saw the blush and called it Dawn.”

Leah C.K. Lewis, J.D., M.Div., D.Min., (ABD), is an ordained Baptist minister with standing in the United Church of Christ. She currently serves a Lutheran congregation. An author and literary activist, she has completed her dissertation on sex and sexuality in the African American Baptist Church and a manuscript on legal, religious, and political rhetoric pertinent to “race.” Follow her @HumanStriving, SoundCloud.com/Reverend-Leah-CK-Lewis, and http:www.facebook.com/The.Reverend.Leah.CK.Lewis. #BlackLivesMatter #StayWoke #HumanStriving #RighteousvRacist

http://www.forharriet.com/2015/07/we-have-to-dismantle-white-supremacy.html#axzz3fGaxMKma

The Hypocrisy of U.S. Christianity in the Era of Open Season on Black Lives

By Rev. Leah C.K. Lewis
June 18, 2015

The domestic terrorism unleashed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Mother Emanuel) last night in Charleston, South Carolina, “the Holy City,” starkly displays the hypocrisy of U.S. Christianity. According to the Pew Research Center, 70.6% of U.S. citizens identify as Christian. If in fact, nearly two-thirds of the people of this country who purport to be disciples of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, stood for LOVE there is no way in hell that the murder and oppression of African Americans would be anywhere near acceptable and well-tolerated.

Neither would the practice of White Supremacy and its systemic implications. Mentally ill or not, Dylann Storm Roof, the shooter, was no doubt bolstered and made brazen by hatred. A core element of the ideology of white supremacy is manufacturing animosity against an entire group—people of African descent—which is exceedingly illogical and immoral.

Where is the Church’s moral outrage regarding the attacks against Americans of African descent? Where is the Church’s righteous indignation? Where are the Church’s prophets, priests, and servant leaders of every ethnicity decrying the murders of innocent people of a darker hue? Why is not every congregation exercising civil disobedience and political power to end what seems to be open season on African Americans? Why has there not been an overwhelming demand that justice roll down like thunder as called forth by the Prophet Amos? All of these actions should have taken place long before nine precious souls, including Pastor and State Senator Clementa Pinckney, made their transitions from labor to reward—sadly at the hands of a gunman perpetrating a hate crime.

As a Christian, you cannot be anything but a hypocrite, which God despises, if you are not wholly invested in social justice, love, charity, and righteousness. If in fact our country were Christian in character, we would care for everyone. We would ensure justice for everyone. We would value and affirm everyone, educate everyone, and ensure social dynamics that would allow everyone to thrive without prejudice, bias, and the specter of police brutality and mass incarceration (God bless the soul of Kalief Browder). 

This pretty picture of caring, compassion, and provision that I just painted is what love looks like. Love is not callous, indifferent, silent, cruel, unjust, tyrannical, despotic, or repressive. But racism, bigotry, prejudice, xenophobia, oppression, and relative practices are. These vile, petty things are incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

If you cannot love your sisters and brothers—your fellow members of the human race—who you can see, you cannot love the God, whom you cannot see. This is the word of God found in 1 John 4:20. Such would represent spiritual, theological, philosophical, intellectual, and social dissonance. In a word: hypocrisy.

For a point of emphasis let me note, the historical Jesus Christ was a Northeast African Palestinian Jew. Therefore, he was not one of pale skin, with blond hair or blue eyes. Want to talk about cultural appropriation? Talk about representations of Jesus, the man, as possessing a European phenotype. If that is your Jesus, you are as misinformed about Jesus’s ethnicity as Rachel Dolezal is about her own ethnicity and heritage.

In Mark 8:29 (and Matthew 16:15), Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” That question still has resonance today.

Reza Aslan, scholar and author, asserts that it is okay to envision and appropriate Christ as reflective of one’s own ethnicity. Possibly, but the Revelation of St. John describes Jesus, the Risen Savior, as having feet of burnt bronze and white wooly hair.

Even so, to assert that the historical Jesus, the embodiment of your supposed Savior, is anything but a Northeast African Palestinian Jew and of dark skin, you are wrong. Should you hold on to this mischaracterization of Jesus you would become a liar, and again, a hypocrite. Why is the historical Jesus’s ethnicity important? Because this is the physical personhood of the transcendental Being you purport to adore, worship, and hold sacred. How can this be when you despise black bodies? How can this be if you deny who Jesus really was? How can this be when you do not love black people?

Europe knows that Jesus was an African and even venerates the Black Madonna to this day. Add yet another layer to U.S. hypocrisy.

Without question, the failure of the 21st century Church to rise up in mass against the contemporary rash of police brutality and manifest xenophobia and oppression against African Americans is beyond problematic. It is sinful.

I must ask, how is the murder of the bible study attendees at Mother Emmanuel at the hands of a hate-based terrorist any different from the murders of unarmed, innocent African American women, children, and men at the hands of wanton law enforcement officers who have annihilated lives, and violated citizens’ human and legal rights? Context of course, yet, the value of each life lost is unequivocally equal: each is invaluable. 

Black Lives Matter, perhaps none more that Jesus Christ who bore the sins of the world. An appreciation of Jesus in his Africanness holds the liberative opportunity that racists, bigots, xenophobes, and white supremacists so desperately need. This fallacious notion of a white embodied deity has supported the enterprise of the ideology of white supremacy to humanity’s detriment. It has created the type of psychosis that has bred cold-blooded hatred of African peoples worldwide.

To see Jesus as his African self can help whites that have been socialized to fear and hate people of African descent. Jesus, the Northeast African Palestinian Jew could help dispel the sociopathology that has been imposed on some white people. This denigrating psychological and intellectual mindset has put African Americans at grave risk of danger yet again in America, the supposed Sweet Land of Liberty.

Christians must stand on the proclamation that #BlackLivesMatter or else your religion is indeed lost, even dead. Apathy and hypocrisy have killed it.

Leah C.K. Lewis, J.D., M.Div., D.Min., (ABD), is an ordained Baptist minister, who has standing in the United Church of Christ and serves a Lutheran congregation. She is also councilwoman, author, animation producer, and literary activist. She recently completed her dissertation on sex and sexuality in the African American Baptist Church and a manuscript on legal, religious, and political rhetoric pertinent to “race.” Follow her @HumanStriving and on SoundCloud.com/Reverend-Leah-CK-Lewis. #BlackLivesMatter #StayWoke #HumanStriving #RighteousvRacist

http://www.forharriet.com/2015/06/the-hypocrisy-of-us-christianity-in-era.html#axzz3dRUOSmiI

A Case of Emergency: How 911 Became a Weapon Used Against Black Folks

By Rev. Leah C.K. Lewis

June 15, 2015

I actually remember learning about 911 as a little girl. It seemed like some sort of rite of passage because of its weight and gravity. Calling 911 was a very serious matter and not something to do unless circumstances warranted the attention of the police, fire department, or emergency medical services. Dialing those three little numbers demanded sobriety—and it still does.

As the media continues to highlight cases of police brutality, I have been captivated by how 911 calls initiated the events that eventually led the deaths of Black men, women, and children. Particularly, Tanisha Anderson, a mentally ill woman; Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland; and John Crawford III in Beaver Creek, Ohio outside of Dayton.

Recently, I read an article by Shannon Nasah-Miller, Ph.D., in which she describes an incident where her 15-month-old daughter fell off a stuffed lion rocker eighteen inches to the floor while she and her wife supervised. During thrift shopping at Goodwill, her precious daughter was instructed to get off the lion and in typical childish defiance, baby girl went limp in full tantrum mode. As a result of this scene, unbeknownst to the child’s mothers, someone called 911 seeking unneeded medical attention for the toddler. As is typical, police arrived along with the ambulance, and a conversation ensued between an officer and one of the moms. Thankfully, the matter did not escalate into anything violent, but it easily could have.

Then there last weekend’s occurrence at the Craig Ranch subdivision in McKinney, Texas, where video shows overzealous police officer Eric Casebolt running amok, pulling a gun on teens, only corralling the youth of color and manhandling Dajerria Becton, a teenage girl in a bikini. In this case, officers were called to attend to a well populated end-of-school cook-out hosted by Tatiana Rhodes, a resident of Craig Ranch, after two adult white women and one man allegedly engaged African American teenagers with racial slurs and ignorant, lowbrow dialogue (“go back to your Section 8 housing”). A woman named “Kate” is accused of actually slapping Tatiana in the face.

Reminiscent of the Jim Crow era, there is the appearance that callers utilized 911, desirous of a “whites only pool,” as a means to extract the children of color from the recreational facility and the subdivision. One video shows the confrontation involving two aggressive white women, one white man, Tatiana, and her friends. Police were called, ten units total, and an unhinged Officer Casebolt confronts the young people who appeared a mixture of calm, rational, concerned, confused, and fearful.

All the victims I have mentioned were African Americans (with the exception of those involved in McKinney, Texas where people of Mexican and Arab or Persian descent were also accosted).

In the case of Tanisha Anderson, her family called seeking aid. Because of Tanisha’s death, her family deeply, deeply regrets making that call. Presumptions have been made as to the ethnicity of the callers in the Tamir Rice and John Crawford case. It has been presumed by many that the callers in these two cases were also white.

In the extraordinary case of Charlene Cook, we know that the person who initiated that 911 call was a white woman. She was body-slammed by police in Barstow, California while eight months pregnant. This occurred at her second grader’s school after she and the caller had a disagreement and confrontation while in the drop-off line.

Our emergency notification system is becoming a method for executing mayhem and murder in the lives of African Americans. The travesty is further exasperated because there are no consequences for callers who set off the chain of events that lead to the deaths, assaults, and general violations of people’s rights, where the human subject of the call proves to be innocent of the allegations or concerns enumerated by callers.

John Crawford was standing in a Walmart, on a phone, holding a toy BB gun sold by Walmart. Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun in a playground. Charlene Cook was standing at her child’s elementary school and merely refused to give officers her name all while they acknowledged that no crime had been committed. Shannon Nasah-Miller’s fifteen-month-old daughter fell off a toy eighteen inches to the ground. Dajerria Becton was not part of the instigating confrontation in McKinney. Tatiana Rhodes, for goodness sake, simply wanted to have a celebratory cookout in her residential community.

Tanisha Anderson’s family, like so many others of mentally ill people called for aid, not destruction. She was agitated and unarmed. Even so, there was distress. Calls pertaining to mentally disturbed men, women, and children merit a response from specially trained police officers and EMS workers.

There is a part of me that remembers the rhetoric and propaganda of “Officer Friendly.” There remains the knowledge that some good officers do in fact exist. So, when we perceive danger, it is reasonable to seek the aid of police. Yet, we must acknowledge that whenever police are called to a scene, the potential for escalation exists. Where police are, there are guns, tasers, and other weapons. This is a precarious combination. If possible, calling law enforcement should be a last resort.

To be frank, African Americans are tremendously reluctant to call for police assistance due to our understandably uneasy history with law enforcement. African Americans know the history of the slave patrols called “paddy rollers.” Officially, it was U.S. Marshalls that enforced the indignity of the Fugitive Slave Act. Every generation of African Americans can cite examples of police brutality. There is literally no era in American history where African Americans have been able to live peacefully without some major violations of human rights, dignity, civility, or sanctity. From the imposition of slavery and Jim Crow, to the destruction of thriving all-African American communities and economies like Greenwood, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Rosewood, Florida. From the brutal murder of Emmett Till, to the framing of fourteen-year-old George Stinney and his execution for a crime he did not commit, and the plethora of contemporary abuses, African Americans are extremely hesitant to call upon the first-line executors of a legal system that has yet to grant us the basis of justice we ought to be afforded as citizens.

For the greater part of its existence, law enforcement in the United States only served the interest of whites, particularly those who were wealthy or land-owning. Their financial and social interest was, and remains, the sanctity that law enforcement generally seeks to maintain. Today, pernicious whites utilize this historical advantage to terrorized African Americans, other people of color, and poor whites who have also been disenfranchised. They use 911 as a means to exercise white privilege in a manner that exploits taxpayer dollars. Mean-spirited and devilish people of all ethnicities employ 911 to invoke danger, as opposed to stopping or preventing danger. Such a practice is egregious, especially where innocent people are harmed.

Policy-makers must develop protocols and legislators must institute laws that stem the tide of abuse, should the assault on African American lives persist due to ridiculous and unwarranted calls to 911. I already hear the chorus of, “Better safe than sorry.” And, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of a cure.” I agree, but #BlackLivesMatter more than these adages ever will.

Leah C.K. Lewis, J.D., M.Div., D.Min., (ABD), is a minister, councilwoman, author, animation producer, and literary activist. She recently completed her dissertation on sex and sexuality in the African American Baptist Church and a manuscript on legal, religious, and political rhetoric pertinent to “race.” Follow her @HumanStriving and on SoundCloud.com/Reverend-Leah-CK-Lewis. #BlackLivesMatter #StayWoke #HumanStriving #RighteousvRacist

http://www.forharriet.com/2015/06/a-case-of-emergency-how-911-became.html#ixzz3dKwDY1wX