The Road Through Racism & Torture

December 10th, 2014  |   

The crime of racism and segregation and prejudice…already in our society…but it was invisible until there was a catalyst for making it physical…It wasn’t our violence. It was the violence of the system that came to the surface.  James Lawson

Getting Out Into The Street  

Here’s a lesson I learned as a city-kid growing up at 5436 Jonquil Avenue, a row house in Baltimore, Maryland. Simply put: You want to know what’s going on in the neighborhood, get out into the street. A fire, local gossip, a fight, a celebration, you found out what was  “coming down.”

Call it what you will, a street, a road, a boulevard, an avenue, a highway, or an interstate, just get out there and see what’s happening. Get in the traffic.

Here in West Virginia, ears perk up when we hear “Country Roads,” the song John Denver made popular. A couple of weeks ago, I traveled on one of those curvy dirt country roads. They challenged my tires, warning them not to rotate more than 3 or 4 miles per hour. The reward, at the end of the road, was lunch with two gay men who are about to get married. Would you believe it, right here in West Virginia?

Driving home, I saw what we see a lot of here in rural West Virginia. Road kill. Dead animals struck down by vehicles. But there’s another kind of road kill in the news. 

Michael Brown, dead in the street, Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri. Eric Garner, dead in the street, Bay Street on Staten Island. Tamir Rice, dead on West Boulevard in Cleveland. Rumain Brisbon, shot dead on 25^th Avenue in Phoenix.

And so it goes, and so it goes. Mean streets, now being filled by people marching because they are sick and tired of the killing.  

Race, Sexual Orientation And One More Tag

Stop and think about it. A baby is tagged at birth with two “birth marks.” Each one of us is defined by gender and race. These tags then become the labels around which our lives are defined and judged. Never mind the fact that these pigeonholes involve serious complications and ambiguities.

I’ll not dig any deeper into this subject than to say being labeled simply male or female gets complicated when sexual orientation issues arise. A person who is gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or transgender stretches sexual categories in a way that becomes confusing to many people. Sexual gender becomes the pathway, often a rocky road, toward one’s sexual orientation.

Race is no easier. I am labeled Caucasian/white. My next-door neighbor is tagged Black/African American. Pretty simple, don’t you think? Hardly. I heard someone interviewed on television the other night say that some people forget that President Obama is “half white.” I couldn’t help but remember my childhood days when someone was labeled Negro if he or she had one drop of “black blood” in him or her. Half white, black blood?

I’ve no intention of saying that one’s race isn’t important, or doesn’t make any difference. It does. And to say that I don’t see color when I look at someone with a different hue than mine is absurd, a denial of what my eyes tell me. All of us live inside the racial tag given us at birth. There’s no escape, only the hope of liberation within the tag. We live inside the cultural history of people who share our skin shade, prejudices included.

Without being an anthropologist, biologist, or geneticist, I rely on my street smarts to understand that racial categories are socially constructed. They define a class-based hierarchy of power and privilege. They are used culturally and institutionally as markers for privilege and exclusion. Slavery and genocide have their roots in racial distinctions.

I have learned, over the years, that the major focal points for controversy, argument, and violence—political, theological, cultural, and personal—are centered around the two tags on our birth certificate—gender and race. But wait, I should not overlook one more tag—the economic strata in which we find ourselves.

Slavery And Capitalism

Harold E. Baptist, a history professor at Cornell University, and who grew up in Durham, North Carolina, has written a powerful and painfully insightful book about race. Entitled “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.” It contains the narratives of black people who tell the story of the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence in the late 18^th century.

This is a big book, with a weighty, repetitive theme that, like an ulcer, bleeds intermittently throughout the book. “The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear. Yet it is the truth.”

The forced migration, suffering, family dislocation, torture, and death of slaves was what made American capitalism blossom and flourish. Beneath the myths associated with the happy slave and the benevolent slave owner, and the heralding of the industrial revolution as the primary reason for the growth of the American economy, lies the nasty truth found in the cotton fields of our nation. Cotton, harvested by the blood, sweat and tears of migrating black slaves, is what fueled the economic prosperity of American capitalism.

“She is stout made, with a scar over one of her eyes, and much scarified on her back.” That’s how a newspaper advertisement depicted Mary, a slave, for sale in Kentucky, after she had run away across Virginia, and what is now West Virginia—land where I went to college, and where I now live, along Interstate 64.

Without the violence and torture of blacks, our nation would not have prospered. Capitalism continues to flourish on the backs of poor people. It’s on display in the poor Latino workforce that has crossed our southern border to do the work that creates wealth for our nation, and yet is forced to hide in the shadows of their own illegal status.

What hasn’t changed since plantation days is the ugly fact that it is the poor, mostly people of color, who fuel our economy, yet do not harvest the economic fruit of their labor. Black and brown go round and round, down and down, in a vortex that takes people of color into a plethora of unjust systems, like the criminal justice system.

The connection between poverty and race, criminal justice inequities and race, and a variety of health and welfare issues connected with race, are real issues that must be addressed. Much is said about the need for a conversation about race. That’s well and good, a start, but not well and good enough. Keeping young black people out of prison, and in the community with a job, mentored and morphed toward financial security, is imperative. Likewise, passing immigration reform for Latinos, major players in our economy but not recipients of their labor, must be accomplished.        

New York City Mayor, Bill de Blasio hit the nail directly on the head in his remarks in response to the Eric Garner jury decision. “We’re not just dealing with a problem in 2014, we’re not dealing with years of racism leading up to it, or decades of racism that have brought us to this day. This is how profound the crisis is.”  

African-Americans And Latinos Come To Mind

While working with the Latino population in Georgetown, Delaware, I got the news that law enforcement officers had raided a housing development outside of Bridgeport where Latinos live. Irony of ironies: Bridgeport, a port for people who have crossed the border in order to bridge the economic gap between the poverty of Mexico and Central America and jobs in the Delmarva Peninsula poultry industry.  

Doors had been broken down by a heavily armed police force. Property was ransacked. Women and children were left behind, as the men were carted off to jail. Having produced poultry for our nation, been underpaid and overworked, paid their taxes and Social Security, spent their hard-earned wages bolstering the local economy, they were then imprisoned, destined for deportation.

I think of the Africans who were sold into slavery so that the capitalist cotton-based economy in the United States could prosper and thrive. Wealth was generated for southerners and northerners alike, as black families were divided and sold like oxen and mules. I think of Fannie Lou Hamer, the daughter of a poor family of cotton field workers.

Fannie Lou Hamer, who became a civil rights leader, was arrested in 1963 in Winona, Mississippi at a segregated lunch counter while doing black voter registration. Taken to the jail she was tortured, abused sexually, and left with ongoing pain and kidney damage. After this horrible experience, Hamer later was able to say, “I’m never sure anymore when I leave home whether I’ll get back or not. Sometimes, it seems like, to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five-feet-four inches (her height) forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off.”

A Policeman Who Pulled The Trigger

It was a warm summer evening and people were gathering in an outside garden in a motel right in the heart of Rehoboth, Delaware, a popular summer beach town. It was a group of happy people, as people are when attending a wedding.

The beautiful bride had spent lots of working sessions with me, designing a proposal to fund the creation of a clinic for the large Latino community in the area. On the basis of our work together, she asked me to perform the wedding ceremony next to the pool.

Prior to the wedding, I spent a good many hours in their home doing the counseling with them. The groom was a policeman in the county. I found him to be a sensitive and thoughtful man, thoroughly in love with his soon-to-be bride.

A number of months after the wedding, I visited their home again. This time a huge dark cloud hung over their lives. He had shot and killed a man caught in a robbery. On administrative leave, he was an emotional wreck. His wife, like so many police spouses, lived with a daily concern, even fear that he would not come home due to some deadly confrontation. But here he was, home alive, but devastated over having killed someone.

Every time I hear about a cop shooting and killing someone, I remember this man. In my mind I liken him to veterans who have killed one or more people and have come home diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Men who have been taught to kill, do just that, and then have to live with the fact that they have killed someone.

Yes, I recognize that some men, who, by their own testimony, say they come to enjoy killing the “bad guys.” But this man, who took a vow to love his wife until death would separate them, continues to remain in my mind when I think about the psychic damage caused by pulling a trigger and killing someone. And, so too, the damage done to the families of those who have been killed.

Don’t get me wrong; I have certainly seen how the policing portion of the criminal justice system—where the copper police badge hits the street—operates in a racist manner. And I try not to forget, when I expect and demand change in the system, that the violent and unjust behavior is reflective of the all too familiar and widely held racist beliefs held by our society. The cop becomes the alter ego of the racism and violence that lies beneath the “liberty and justice for all” veneer of our national life together.

The overwhelming numbers of people that are filling streets all over the country demanding changes in the criminal justice system, which involves police practices, encourage me. People in the street trump couch-potato apathy and cynical and fearful huddle-at-home behavior.

I am hopeful that my city will develop a program where citizens are allowed to ride with police, particularly in nighttime hours, so that we can see what goes on in the streets, what the police face, during the time when our citizenry is either going about its business or sleeping. Getting out into the streets, out in the traffic, is what it’s all about.

Meet The Browns—Michael & Vicki & John

Tucked away in a file in my basement are the letters from Vicki Brown, sent to me over 40 years ago. The paper has yellowed and the file smells like a long time ago. Maybe so, but I still remember this young black woman who sought me out for conversation when I was the pastor at Trinity Church in Martinsburg, West Virginia.

 Vicki often stopped by my office just to talk. Sometimes, before the early morning Sunday worship, she would show up for conversation. She wrote poetry and seemed proud to show it to me for my approval. I always gave it.  She had a gift for weaving words in a beautiful way.

I saw Vicki on the street many times. She lived close to the church in a neighborhood where black people still had outhouses. Then she disappeared from sight. When I heard that she had been arrested, I drove down the road to visit her in Charles Town. Her dank, dark, dismal cell was located in the very site that John Brown had been held and tried prior to being executed for his role in the attack on Harper’s Ferry.

Vicki was arrested in a tavern just outside of nearby Shepherdstown. She had been living with a white man who, by her own definition, loved her and was like a father to her child. In the tavern, he convinced her to purchase for him a tab of LSD from someone there. When she gave him the LSD, he arrested her. Unbeknownst to Vicki, her live-in, under-the-covers-lover, was an undercover policeman.

I attended Vicki’s trial with a parishioner, the wife of a local dentist. Held in that historic courthouse, it was a difficult day. A white prosecutor, a white police officer testifying against Vicki, a white jury, a whitewashed procedure from start to finish, the verdict was guilty, and Vicki was ushered off to prison for having sold a tab of LSD.

My friend, stunned, turned toward me and spoke, as the courtroom emptied. “That’s what you get when you are a woman and black.”

Racism And Torture

While attention is being given to racism and the killing of black people in the streets, we get the news about our nation’s involvement with torture, in what we call the “War on Terrorism.” Both involve violence. Both lift up legal as well as moral and ethical issues. The conversation about both these issues—racism and torture—cannot be avoided if we have any hope for reconciliation and peace between our desire for justice and our propensity toward violence. Law and order on the streets of our nation is a serious concern. Likewise, national and international law is a serious matter.

The long-awaited Senate Torture Report has now been released.  “American Exceptionalism,” that self-righteously narcissistic description of our nation, will come under scrutiny. The thought that we might be like any other nation, even the people we label “terrorists” will be a threatening thought to some of us.

In a 1630 sermon, John Winthrop told the Massachusetts Bay colonists: “We must always consider that we shall be a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us.” Winthrop was right. At this moment in our history as a nation, the eyes of people everywhere are watching to see how we deal with the issues of race and torture. 

If we are going to have conversation about police shooting black people in the name of law and order, then we must, also, have conversation about our practice of torturing people, under the guise of national security. No changes will not take place around racism, or the way we wage war, unless we get the facts about the violence done on our behalf in our nation’s streets, and in those murky places where torture is practiced.

If Fannie Lou Hamer were alive, I feel certain that she would call our attention to the connection between racism and torture. She was an expert on the subject. She bore the marks on her black body that give vivid testimony to the convergence of racism and torture.

In this season, when Hanukkah and Christmas unite people around light and peace, perhaps the Prophet Isaiah, a figure for Jews and Christians, might inspire us. “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” Of course—a road that leads straight to truth, a destination for peace and justice.

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