As I have read this week of the suspicious death of Billey Joe Johnson, the haunting refrain from Sweet Honey in the Rock's "Ella's Song" has echoed in my head:
"We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes
Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons
Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers' sons ..."
There is no national outcry over the death of this young man. Perhaps we think it is a story too old to still be news: and yet, if our hearts do not break, and are not outraged, something in us has died, too. We need to hear Bernice Johnson Reagon's words, written to commemorate civil rights freedom-worker Ella Baker, and live into them.
The young Mr. Johnson was a football star in Mississippi, according to a story in Mississippi's Sun Herald, "a tailback who rushed for more than 4,000 yards in his three-year high school career. A national recruiting service said Johnson had scholarship offers from Alabama, Arkansas, Auburn, LSU and others.
"'He was one of the kids that was out front," Al Jones, the high school's head football coach, said Monday. "It's hard to believe. I was getting ready to take him to a banquet that day. All of sudden you go from that to this tragedy.'"
The tragedy is that Mr. Johnson is dead of gunshot wounds. The story of how he came to die is not yet clear. Official reports record a traffic stop of Mr. Johnson for running a stop sign. As the deputy, Joe Sullivan, returned to his car to run a license check, he reports having heard a gunshot, whereupon he "found Johnson lying on the ground on the driver's side of the teen's vehicle."
The official report asserts a self-inflicted gunshot, either suicide or accidental.
Family and friends are outraged, disbelieving a young man with everything going for him would do such a thing. Family members add disturbing details, reported by longtime civil rights activist Ruby Sales of SpiritHouse in Washington, D.C., who visited Mississippi this week.
Following the traffic stop and its tragic ending, police held Billey Joe Johnson's body for more than seven hours, not allowing his parents to "see or identify their son's body. The parents waited all day, hoping and pleading to see their son. Over and over, the sheriff denied their requests, although they permitted the high school coach and school superintendent, Barbara Massey, to identify the body." Police subsequently took Billey Joe Johnson's body to Jackson, Mississippi, for an autopsy, "without seeking or receiving the permission or approval of the parents," according to Sales.
The parents were not allowed to see their son's body until three days later; the father reports "they butchered Billey's body like a pig."
The family and community of Billey Joe Johnson want answers; they are working with the NAACP to obtain a second autopsy.
If the death of this black mother's son matters to you, you can write to the sheriff of George County, Mississippi (Garry Welford) and/or the District Attorney (Tony Lawrence) and let them know that you are watching to see how justice is done.
Sheriff Garry Welford
George County Sheriff’s Office
4263 Highway 26 W
Lucedale, MS 39452
Tony Lawrence
Jackson County District Attorney
P.O. Box 998
Pascagoula, MS 39568
Billey Joe Johnson will be buried December 20, 2008.
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Comfort, Comfort O My People
We all have ideas about what President-elect Obama needs to focus on. I think he'll need our help, specifically with bringing down some mountains. And providing comfort. More on that below.
It's the Economy. With bubbles bursting in the housing, auto and stock markets, multiple sectors of the economy are melting down as if there was no "there" there. Representatives of both the companies and those who used to work for them (or are about to lose jobs) are all clamoring for help, and quickly. The magic of "first 100 days" is invoked repeatedly, and -- given the failure of confidence in the current administration -- Obama has had to move quickly to begin providing answers and describing plans.
Of course, the list does not end there, although the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Ford do seem to be getting more attention than we do.
It's Health Care. Health care reforms are on the horizon; even the insurance companies are pitching their own proposals, perhaps recognizing that the brokenness of the system cannot be plastered over so easily as in years past. I don't think health care will get fixed during Obama's term; probably not even a second one. It's obscene that 50 million people in the US have no health insurance; what's worse is knowing -- as a sandwich generation daughter/mom/graduate student -- that neither private insurance nor government programs like Medicare have figured out how to keep from wasting the time and money of consumers, marketers, and bureaucracies. And meanwhile, we get sick and put off care until we get sicker and the bills are higher ... and somebody is profiting from this madness. Profiting in ways that do not make us or the system healthier.
Don't forget immigration. The San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com) reminds us in a December 7, 2008 editorial that "Obama needs to remember immigration reform." The lead paragraph states: "On Jan. 20, President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress will have their hands full with two wars and the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. It will be easy to overlook a problem that received relatively little attention during the presidential campaign: the need to develop an immigration policy that acknowledges the reality that our economy depends on immigrant workers - far more than current law allows - and the presence of an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants whose precarious status needs to be resolved."
It's Racial Justice. More than 75 percent of women ages 18-29 say President-elect Barack Obama should make civil rights and racial justice top priorities, according to a survey by the YWCA. When I first read that statistic, I thought that was a high figure, and I realized my cynicism was showing. Perhaps it is because the YWCA's stated mission includes racial equality ... but I don't think the questionnaire was limited to YWCA members.
I have some questions. What does "civil rights and racial justice" mean today? Can it be described with a clarity compelling enough to get past the typical responses of "Civil rights got done in the '60s" or "We just elected a black president. Isn't that enough racial justice for anyone?"
I was curious enough to check with the Y's own press release, which stated:
"The representative phone survey, 'What Women Want: A National Survey of Priorities and Concerns,' conducted on behalf of YWCA USA by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI), included interviews with 1,000 women aged 18-70 between October 28 and November 2, 2008. The findings reveal that significantly more Generation Y women (18-29) than older women (30-70) say that the new administration needs to make several domestic issues 'top priority' in the first year, including healthcare reform (87% v. 76%), quality and cost
of education (85% v. 76%), the housing crisis (83% v. 69%) and HIV/AIDS (66% v. 45%). The findings also show that more than seven in ten (77%) Gen Y women say that civil rights and racial justice should be a 'top priority' for the first year of the new administration, compared with 54 percent of women aged 30-70. Gen Y women are similarly more worried about personal experiences with discrimination; half (50%) of these younger women say that racism or discrimination based on ethnicity or religion will be a 'major obstacle' to the progress
of women like them over the next decade, compared with only 31 percent of older women."
Then I wondered about the racial makeup of the women surveyed; the instrument description said 534 of those surveyed identified as white (non-Hispanic) and 451 identified as non-white; 368 of these women identified as Black. (A link to the .pdf of the report can be found at www.ywca.org.)
Looking in more detail at the survey instrument revealed a lot of consensus among women of all races surveyed: 92% agreed the financial crisis needed resolution; 87% highlighted health care reform; 85% were concerned with the quality and cost of education; 83% mentioned the housing crisis; 77 % spoke about racial justice, and 66% spotlighted HIV/AIDS. On none of these issues did responses shift significantly based on race.
That doesn't mean we are in a post-racial society. It means that when you get down to the real issues affecting our quality of life, we are all affected by (if not to the same degree) and concerned about the same things. We have a lot of common ground on which to meet and work together.
William Julius Wilson saw this same thing, 25 years ago. In his book The Bridge Across the Racial Divide, he highlighted both the great commonalities among interests expressed across racial groups -- good jobs, education, family, religion, law enforcement, civic responsibility -- as well as the tendency of divisive politics to scapegoat particular people groups and prevent cross-racial coalitions from forming.
Some make the classist assertion that racism most rears its head among lower-class whites, the NASCAR Bubba crowd. Two facts are worth noting here. One is that systemic racism is hurtful to people of color on a much greater scale, and that is perpetrated by people with more organizational power: the 78% of the managerial/professional class who are white, the 87% of CEOs who are white, the nearly 100% of legislators who are white, the 78% of HR managers, education administrators, medical/health service managers, business and financial operations people, architects and engineers who are white ... plus the 88% of lawyers who are white, the 83% of magistrates who are white, the 79% of teachers who are white, the 76% of health-care practitioners who are white, the 80% of dentists who are white, the 75% of pharmacists and 72% of physicians who are white. (Statistics courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007)
(If you got tired of reading "who are white," guess how it feels to be a person of color running up against all that white power everywhere you go.)
Here's the second thing, about that perception that it's lower-class whites' racism that is the problem. What lower-class whites are actually concerned about, according to the findings of theologian Tex Sample, are "the centrality of family, religion, cooperation, commitment to family, school and church, respectability and moral living." Sounds familiar. Sounds a lot like Wilson found as the concerns of people across all racial groups.
So, what's my point here?
That we have a remarkable and widespread consistency of viewpoint and values: we all know what we need, and we all need pretty much the same stuff. The problem is, a very few of us have plenty of all those things -- health care, education, jobs, housing, ability to care for family and community -- but many of us do not have enough, and way too many of us have no good prospects for getting enough.
Which brings me to Advent. And mountains. And comfort.
As I mentioned in my last post, I am missing church, badly. And during the season of Advent -- roughly the four weeks leading up to Christmas -- I miss it even worse. I miss the purple, the candles, the music. The words about hope, peace, joy, love. So I've been having a DIY Advent, looking at the texts, thinking about them, writing my reflections to my long-distance beloved instead of preaching to a congregation or leading a class or reflection group.
This week's texts include some old favorites. First there's Isaiah 40, where Isaiah tells us God wants us to comfort God's people. The voice of the prophet says "In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken."
That's a different kind of public works project ... but we can relate to it. I hope. Many of us do feel we are in a wilderness, having lost our former security (maybe it wasn't that secure ...). But in the midst of that wilderness, we are called to work: to prepare the way of the Lord. Valleys shall be lifted up, and mountains brought low. Is it too far a stretch to see that preparing the way of the Lord means filling in the economic troughs with the mountains of capital accumulated elsewhere? If we as a people -- with our shared values and needs -- could agree to a great leveling, would the glory of the Lord be revealed? Who is it, anyway, that poo-poohs the notion of moving hoarded wealth into productive use? Who tells us "that's socialism, and socialism is baaaaad." Maybe in this day of financial implosions and incredulous revelations we don't believe those voices anymore. Maybe we can see those voices as mouthpieces of a very few benefiting at great cost to a great many.
Isaiah goes on ... We are to cry out, "Here is your God!" because we see God coming, with might, with reward, with recompense, to feed the flock, to gather up the lambs in a loving embrace, and to gently lead the mothers. God is bringing a reward, and recompense: a young pregnant teenager saw that God coming, according to Luke 1:52-53, and her song has lifted weary hearts for millenia. "[God] has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; [God] has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty."
Then there's Psalm 85, which tells us "Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky. The Lord will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase. Righteousness will go before him, and will make a path for his steps."
There it is again: righteousness makes a path for God to come to us ... a righteousness that is intimate with peace ... rooted in a faithfulness that springs up, wrapped in steadfast love. All this movement -- love is a dance, and our need to be whole is all the invitation we need.
No one person can dance this dance alone: not Jesus in the past, not Christ in the present, not Martin Luther King or Barack Obama, not you and not me.
I know that full well, remembering the drums of Advents past, pounding out the beat to a favorite old hymn: Comfort, comfort O my people ...
That comfort will not come until we muster the will to give it to each other: by filling in the hole of debt we owe peoples we enslaved in the past and exploit today, by making good on the promises of our commonwealth, by pulling down the mountains of wealth stored up, by learning that enough is enough, and more than enough is unjust.
It's the Economy. With bubbles bursting in the housing, auto and stock markets, multiple sectors of the economy are melting down as if there was no "there" there. Representatives of both the companies and those who used to work for them (or are about to lose jobs) are all clamoring for help, and quickly. The magic of "first 100 days" is invoked repeatedly, and -- given the failure of confidence in the current administration -- Obama has had to move quickly to begin providing answers and describing plans.
Of course, the list does not end there, although the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Ford do seem to be getting more attention than we do.
It's Health Care. Health care reforms are on the horizon; even the insurance companies are pitching their own proposals, perhaps recognizing that the brokenness of the system cannot be plastered over so easily as in years past. I don't think health care will get fixed during Obama's term; probably not even a second one. It's obscene that 50 million people in the US have no health insurance; what's worse is knowing -- as a sandwich generation daughter/mom/graduate student -- that neither private insurance nor government programs like Medicare have figured out how to keep from wasting the time and money of consumers, marketers, and bureaucracies. And meanwhile, we get sick and put off care until we get sicker and the bills are higher ... and somebody is profiting from this madness. Profiting in ways that do not make us or the system healthier.
Don't forget immigration. The San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com) reminds us in a December 7, 2008 editorial that "Obama needs to remember immigration reform." The lead paragraph states: "On Jan. 20, President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress will have their hands full with two wars and the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. It will be easy to overlook a problem that received relatively little attention during the presidential campaign: the need to develop an immigration policy that acknowledges the reality that our economy depends on immigrant workers - far more than current law allows - and the presence of an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants whose precarious status needs to be resolved."
It's Racial Justice. More than 75 percent of women ages 18-29 say President-elect Barack Obama should make civil rights and racial justice top priorities, according to a survey by the YWCA. When I first read that statistic, I thought that was a high figure, and I realized my cynicism was showing. Perhaps it is because the YWCA's stated mission includes racial equality ... but I don't think the questionnaire was limited to YWCA members.
I have some questions. What does "civil rights and racial justice" mean today? Can it be described with a clarity compelling enough to get past the typical responses of "Civil rights got done in the '60s" or "We just elected a black president. Isn't that enough racial justice for anyone?"
I was curious enough to check with the Y's own press release, which stated:
"The representative phone survey, 'What Women Want: A National Survey of Priorities and Concerns,' conducted on behalf of YWCA USA by Princeton Survey Research Associates International (PSRAI), included interviews with 1,000 women aged 18-70 between October 28 and November 2, 2008. The findings reveal that significantly more Generation Y women (18-29) than older women (30-70) say that the new administration needs to make several domestic issues 'top priority' in the first year, including healthcare reform (87% v. 76%), quality and cost
of education (85% v. 76%), the housing crisis (83% v. 69%) and HIV/AIDS (66% v. 45%). The findings also show that more than seven in ten (77%) Gen Y women say that civil rights and racial justice should be a 'top priority' for the first year of the new administration, compared with 54 percent of women aged 30-70. Gen Y women are similarly more worried about personal experiences with discrimination; half (50%) of these younger women say that racism or discrimination based on ethnicity or religion will be a 'major obstacle' to the progress
of women like them over the next decade, compared with only 31 percent of older women."
Then I wondered about the racial makeup of the women surveyed; the instrument description said 534 of those surveyed identified as white (non-Hispanic) and 451 identified as non-white; 368 of these women identified as Black. (A link to the .pdf of the report can be found at www.ywca.org.)
Looking in more detail at the survey instrument revealed a lot of consensus among women of all races surveyed: 92% agreed the financial crisis needed resolution; 87% highlighted health care reform; 85% were concerned with the quality and cost of education; 83% mentioned the housing crisis; 77 % spoke about racial justice, and 66% spotlighted HIV/AIDS. On none of these issues did responses shift significantly based on race.
That doesn't mean we are in a post-racial society. It means that when you get down to the real issues affecting our quality of life, we are all affected by (if not to the same degree) and concerned about the same things. We have a lot of common ground on which to meet and work together.
William Julius Wilson saw this same thing, 25 years ago. In his book The Bridge Across the Racial Divide, he highlighted both the great commonalities among interests expressed across racial groups -- good jobs, education, family, religion, law enforcement, civic responsibility -- as well as the tendency of divisive politics to scapegoat particular people groups and prevent cross-racial coalitions from forming.
Some make the classist assertion that racism most rears its head among lower-class whites, the NASCAR Bubba crowd. Two facts are worth noting here. One is that systemic racism is hurtful to people of color on a much greater scale, and that is perpetrated by people with more organizational power: the 78% of the managerial/professional class who are white, the 87% of CEOs who are white, the nearly 100% of legislators who are white, the 78% of HR managers, education administrators, medical/health service managers, business and financial operations people, architects and engineers who are white ... plus the 88% of lawyers who are white, the 83% of magistrates who are white, the 79% of teachers who are white, the 76% of health-care practitioners who are white, the 80% of dentists who are white, the 75% of pharmacists and 72% of physicians who are white. (Statistics courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007)
(If you got tired of reading "who are white," guess how it feels to be a person of color running up against all that white power everywhere you go.)
Here's the second thing, about that perception that it's lower-class whites' racism that is the problem. What lower-class whites are actually concerned about, according to the findings of theologian Tex Sample, are "the centrality of family, religion, cooperation, commitment to family, school and church, respectability and moral living." Sounds familiar. Sounds a lot like Wilson found as the concerns of people across all racial groups.
So, what's my point here?
That we have a remarkable and widespread consistency of viewpoint and values: we all know what we need, and we all need pretty much the same stuff. The problem is, a very few of us have plenty of all those things -- health care, education, jobs, housing, ability to care for family and community -- but many of us do not have enough, and way too many of us have no good prospects for getting enough.
Which brings me to Advent. And mountains. And comfort.
As I mentioned in my last post, I am missing church, badly. And during the season of Advent -- roughly the four weeks leading up to Christmas -- I miss it even worse. I miss the purple, the candles, the music. The words about hope, peace, joy, love. So I've been having a DIY Advent, looking at the texts, thinking about them, writing my reflections to my long-distance beloved instead of preaching to a congregation or leading a class or reflection group.
This week's texts include some old favorites. First there's Isaiah 40, where Isaiah tells us God wants us to comfort God's people. The voice of the prophet says "In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken."
That's a different kind of public works project ... but we can relate to it. I hope. Many of us do feel we are in a wilderness, having lost our former security (maybe it wasn't that secure ...). But in the midst of that wilderness, we are called to work: to prepare the way of the Lord. Valleys shall be lifted up, and mountains brought low. Is it too far a stretch to see that preparing the way of the Lord means filling in the economic troughs with the mountains of capital accumulated elsewhere? If we as a people -- with our shared values and needs -- could agree to a great leveling, would the glory of the Lord be revealed? Who is it, anyway, that poo-poohs the notion of moving hoarded wealth into productive use? Who tells us "that's socialism, and socialism is baaaaad." Maybe in this day of financial implosions and incredulous revelations we don't believe those voices anymore. Maybe we can see those voices as mouthpieces of a very few benefiting at great cost to a great many.
Isaiah goes on ... We are to cry out, "Here is your God!" because we see God coming, with might, with reward, with recompense, to feed the flock, to gather up the lambs in a loving embrace, and to gently lead the mothers. God is bringing a reward, and recompense: a young pregnant teenager saw that God coming, according to Luke 1:52-53, and her song has lifted weary hearts for millenia. "[God] has brought down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; [God] has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty."
Then there's Psalm 85, which tells us "Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky. The Lord will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase. Righteousness will go before him, and will make a path for his steps."
There it is again: righteousness makes a path for God to come to us ... a righteousness that is intimate with peace ... rooted in a faithfulness that springs up, wrapped in steadfast love. All this movement -- love is a dance, and our need to be whole is all the invitation we need.
No one person can dance this dance alone: not Jesus in the past, not Christ in the present, not Martin Luther King or Barack Obama, not you and not me.
I know that full well, remembering the drums of Advents past, pounding out the beat to a favorite old hymn: Comfort, comfort O my people ...
That comfort will not come until we muster the will to give it to each other: by filling in the hole of debt we owe peoples we enslaved in the past and exploit today, by making good on the promises of our commonwealth, by pulling down the mountains of wealth stored up, by learning that enough is enough, and more than enough is unjust.
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