The Pineapple Story
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Resurrection – Myth or Reality, Part II: The Witness of Paul
http://johnshelbyspong.com/
The first writer of what later came to be called the New Testament was a well-educated Jew from Tarsus in Asia Minor. His name was Paul, although there is a later tradition that suggested that his original name was Saul and that the change from Saul to Paul was symbolic of the change in his life from being a highly-disciplined member of the Jewish religious elite to being a follower of Jesus. The adjective “Jewish” in that sentence is important because at this time in history, there was no such thing as Christianity or the Christian Church.
What we now call Christianity was still a minority movement within the synagogue itself called “The Followers of the Way.” These followers were also known by members of the Orthodox Party of Judaism as “revisionists.” That was a deliberately pejorative title. “Revisionists” in ecclesiastical circles means that they were “change agents” destabilizing the “True Faith.”
Paul began his rabbinic career as a strict adherent of the Torah. He said of his earlier life: “I advanced in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers” (Gal.1:14). These words are from what was probably his second epistle written about the year 52 CE.
Paul tells us in this same epistle of his days as a persecutor of the Christians and of how he sought to destroy this movement. Since one does not react in such overt and hostile ways toward a new set of ideas, unless one is fearful of those ideas, attracted to them or both, one wonders what the personal threat was that Christianity posed for him, but that speculation is beyond the scope of this column. Paul alludes to his conversion once again in Galatians with these words: “But when he, who had set me apart before I was born and had called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with flesh and blood, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away to Arabia; and again I returned to Damascus.” (Gal 1:15-17).
It is of interest to note that Paul never mentions the dramatic events of his conversion on the road to Damascus, of his supposed blindness or of the role a man named Ananias played in his conversion. These details are all part of the narrative written in the book of Acts some thirty or more years after Paul’s death. This fact makes the literal accuracy of the Damascus Road story highly suspect. It is a fact, however, that there was clearly a transition in this man’s life between being a persecutor of the Christians and a champion of them.
When did that change occur? It is hard to be certain. In Galatians Paul says that after his conversion experience, he went to Arabia for three years. Then he went up to Jerusalem to confer with Peter and James, the Lord’s brother. Next he went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia. He was clearly active in proclaiming Christ at this time for he notes that people said: “He who once persecuted us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy” (Gal. 1: 23). The final note that helps us date his life and career is that he says: “After fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus to lay before those who were ‘in repute,’ but ‘privately,’ the gospel that I preach among the Gentiles” (Gal. 1: 1, 2).
So there were at least seventeen years between Paul’s conversion and the writing of his early epistle to the Galatians. If the date of the crucifixion is fixed around the year 30 CE and the date of Paul’s conversion is fixed, as historian Adolf von Harnack has sought to do, no earlier than one and no later than six years after the crucifixion (I would place it on the early side of that spread), we begin to get some clarity about time and history, so Paul’s conversion is believed to have come somewhere between 31 and 36 CE, his time in Arabia would then be between 34 and 39 CE and his fourteen years in Syria and Cilicia would fall between the years between 48 and 53 CE. Since I Thessalonians is generally regarded as Paul’s first epistle and is normally dated about 51 CE and his second is Galatians dated about 52 CE, we find ourselves in the range of high probability.
So Paul’s convictions regarding Jesus being both “crucified” and “raised” are recorded and fixed inside the first generation of Christian believers. That is not enough time for myths to develop that would create the life of Jesus out of whole cloth, as some critics of Christianity try to maintain today. So we enter our study of Paul’s understanding of the resurrection with the confidence that he was describing something he believed was real. The assumption that something about the life of Jesus had broken open the power of death permeates almost every verse of the Pauline corpus, but he speaks about it quite specifically only in the epistle called I Corinthians, which scholars tend to date in or around the year 54 CE. We read it carefully for it precedes by almost a whole generation any of the narratives of Easter that appear in the later gospels. We also note the fact that Paul died five to ten years before the first gospel was written.
Paul was very spare with details, covering all the events of the end of Jesus’ life in a mere six verses (I Cor. 15:3-8). He introduces these verses with a clear claim to their accuracy. He is citing a recognized authority. Listen to his words first in regard to just the crucifixion: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures” (I Cor. 15:3). That is the totality of his description of the crucifixion. The phrase: “Christ died for our sins,” reveals that the crucifixion had by this time already been related to the liturgy of Yom Kippur, for the words “for our sins” are a direct quotation out of the Yom Kippur liturgy.
The crucifixion had thus already been invested with a theological purpose. It accomplished for us what the death of the “Lamb of God” in Yom Kippur accomplished. It opened to us a pathway into God. The blood of the Lamb, spread upon the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies in the Yom Kippur liturgy, made it possible for imperfect human beings to enter into the presence of God whether they were personally deserving or not. The blood of Jesus on the cross was thought to accomplish the same purpose. It is obvious that the death of Jesus had already been interpreted liturgically.
Paul also said that Jesus’ death was accomplished: “in accordance with the scriptures.” That means, that by this time, the death of Jesus had already been transformed from the tragedy it seemed at first to be into a triumph expressing the purpose of God in accordance with some of the messianic images. This interpretive framework was already in place before the year 54 when I Corinthians was written. Chief among those messianic images to which he referred were the ones found in the writings of II Isaiah (chapters 40-55) and II Zechariah (chapters 9-14). These were, quite obviously, the two most popular texts from the Hebrew Bible on to which the followers of Jesus leapt to assert that the death of Jesus was based upon the fulfillment of messianic expectations. Please note also that there is in Paul’s writing no mention of Judas Iscariot, Pilate, the two thieves or Barabbas. There are no details describing the crucifixion, no words said to have been spoken by Jesus from the cross, no darkness at noon and no interpretive details. All of that seems not yet to have been developed.
Paul then moved on to the burial which he covered in three words, “He was buried.” There was no tomb, no garden, no Temple guards and no Joseph of Arimathea. Paul was now ready to say his first words about resurrection. That too was quite spare. All Paul said was: “He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures” (I Cor. 15:4).
Note several things present in this text. First, the verb tense that Paul used is passive. Paul did not say Jesus rose, rather he said that Jesus “was raised.” Resurrection for Paul was not an action that Jesus did, it was an action that was done to him. The words, “he was raised” implied that some outside force operated on him. Paul will tell us later who that was. In his epistle to the Romans dated around 58 CE, Paul wrote that Jesus “was designated Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom 1:3, 4). God “designated him.” This is not Trinitarian language. God is clearly the designator, Jesus is the designated one. God raised him, Jesus did not rise. That is not a relationship of “co-equality.”
This means that the earliest account of the Easter moment in the Bible did not assert that Jesus himself conquered death. It said that God raised him from death. Does that mean that God raised him physically back into the life of time and space? Does that mean that resurrection in its first biblical narration was understood as the resuscitation of the deceased body? No, of course not! It suggested rather that God raised Jesus into the life of God. Resurrection for Paul was far more like the later story of the Ascension that it was about the resuscitation of a physically dead body.
How do we know that? All one has to do is to continue reading Paul’s words. Paul provides us next with a list of those to whom the raised Christ was said to have appeared. The Greek word that Paul used that we translate “appeared” was “ophthe.” Literally it meant “was made manifest to.” It was the same word chosen in 250 BCE by those who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, in what we today call the Septuagint, to describe God appearing to Moses in the burning bush. That is more like a visionary experience than it is one person seeing another person after a three-day absence. Later Paul will tell us more about where the raised Christ was seen and experienced. It is not the way the church has talked about Easter through the centuries. We will develop that idea next week as this series on what the New Testament actually says about the resurrection continues. So stay tuned.
Teacher And His Students Recreate 'Uptown Funk,' Get An A+ In Breakin' It Down
Thursday, May 21, 2015
How To Raise A Black Son In America
“Resurrection” A Reality or a Pious Dream? Part I
http://johnshelbyspong.com/
On Easter Sunday, a couple of weeks ago now, I was in my parish church, St. Peter’s in Morristown, New Jersey. I was not alone. Into that church, at one of its four Easter services, came about 300 % more people than we normally would have on a regular Sunday morning. I have no reason to think that the same thing was not experienced in other churches across the Christian world. Easter is the best attended day of worship in the entire Christian world. Have we ever wondered who these people are? Do we ever ask them what draws them, or what it is they are seeking? Have we ever wanted to know what they experience on that one great festival Sunday? Did their yearning to be in church on Easter Sunday express anything more than nostalgia? Were they really looking for life, hope and meaning? Do the churches of the Christian world use that Sunday to seek to answer the deeply human question posed best by the biblical character we call Job so many hundreds of years ago: “If a man (or a woman) dies, shall he (or she) live again?”
How many of our clergy sought to address that human anxiety in their Easter sermons? Do we, as a profession, still believe that the Christian Church can speak to the anxiety of mortality? Have Easter sermons become “word games” in which we substitute pious clichés for conviction? Has the word “resurrection” come to be nothing more than a symbol for a developing consciousness; something that speaks to our social needs or the human desire to find some way of transcending our very finite limits? Do we still grapple anywhere with the original meaning of Easter? Do we even know what that meaning is? By now are we not all well aware that the way we, who live inside the Christian church, have traditionally spoken of the resurrection of Jesus, is no longer believable?
Deceased bodies do not return to physical life on the third day after being buried! Can we imagine a brain, deprived of oxygen from Friday afternoon until the dawn of Sunday, being restarted? Can the process of physical decay ever really be reversed without time being made to run backward? Was the resurrection of Jesus ever a physical event? Was it ever the resuscitation of a deceased body? If it was not physical, can it still be real? Were the biblical stories of Jesus’ resurrection ever meant to be accounts of an objective event or were they always subjective visions? Apparitions? Hallucinations? Is the truth of Easter found in the supposition that maybe Jesus did not really die and actually “came to” in the grave only to escape it and to be seen literally by others? Is any of that possible? Is any of that believable? Is it some aspect of this hope, still deep in our finite natures, which draws us into Easter worship once a year? Are those hopes ever realized? The fact is that the Sunday after Easter is probably the most poorly attended Sunday of the church year. It is called “Low Sunday” for a good reason.
In the more liturgically-oriented churches of Christianity, Easter is not just a single day, but an entire season. Following the lead of Luke’s gospel, the season of Easter is designed to be celebrated and observed for forty days. Show me the congregation that takes this practice seriously. There are six Sundays in the Easter season. That season, called “the great forty days,” is supposed to be terminated by the experience, again only described in Luke, called the ascension. Ascension is then followed ten days later in the liturgical calendar by the celebration of Pentecost. It was as if the church knew that one day was not enough to explore so deep and intricate a subject as life beyond death. The fact is, however, that the message of Easter is never stretched much beyond the day itself.
In this column throughout the entire Easter season and even beyond it, I want to do better than that. I want to probe the biblical content that stands behind the packed houses of worship on Easter Sunday. I want to ask searching questions about that content. They are questions church people seem loath to face in a significant way. Is Easter real? Is it just a myth? Did something objective happen at Easter or have we allowed our imaginations and fantasies to run wild? Was Jesus literally raised from the dead in some tangible way? Or is resurrection just a figure of speech? Do we know the Bible’s Easter stories well enough to have an opinion?
Paul, for example, did not seem to think that resurrection was a physical thing at all, but he never seemed to find the words that enabled him to say what it was. Paul was the first person in the Bible to write about Easter, but his witness does not seem to be conclusive. Do any of us really know what he says?
Are any of us similarly aware that the first gospel to be written, Mark, never records a story of Jesus appearing after his crucifixion to anyone at any time? Are we aware that accounts of the raised Christ ever being seen do not enter the Christian tradition until the 9th decade? What does that mean? Are we aware that as the years went by between the event of the cross and the writing of the Easter stories, accounts of the resurrection grew more and more magical, more and more supernatural? If the resurrection is to be regarded by 21st century believers as a literal event that actually happened in time, in space and in history, why are the details surrounding the description of that event in the Bible so filled with contradictions?
Are we sufficiently aware of the biblical stories of the resurrection to know that they disagree on such basic questions as: Who went to the tomb? What did they see? Who was the first to discern Jesus as raised from the dead? Where were the disciples when Easter dawned on their consciousness? Do we realize that even that location is disputed in the gospels? How could the same resurrected body that walked through locked doors in one gospel also in that same gospel be probed physically by the hands of Thomas? How could a body that could materialize and then vanish into thin air still eat a physical meal in the village of Emmaus as another gospel asserts?
Can a body capable of appearing and disappearing also do such physical things as eating, drinking, talking, walking and interpreting scripture? Is the phrase “three days” a measure of time or is it a symbol? If it is a symbol, a symbol of what? Are we aware that no one saw the risen Jesus in Mark’s gospel; they only got a promise that they would see him in Galilee? Are we aware that Galilee was a seven to ten day journey from Jerusalem? What does “three days” mean in that scenario? Have we who claim to be Christians ever isolated the various narratives of the resurrection from one another and looked at them in the light of contemporary biblical scholarship? If not, why not? Are they not important? Is it possible that we are afraid that if we study them, we will no longer believe them? Pious clichés will never be a proper way to deal with profound questions.
I think that people come to church on Easter hoping to hear something convincing and real. They do not find it and so depart from church only to give it one more shot the next Easter. I want to do better than that in this column. So, next week I will begin a study of what the sources in the New Testament actually say about Easter. I will begin with what Paul said and believed about the meaning of Easter. I suspect the results will surprise you. In subsequent columns, I will look at what Mark said and at what Mark believed about Easter, then in turn at what Matthew, Luke and John said and believed about Easter. Finally, I will try to put the clues together and recreate the way Easter must have dawned in human history. I hope it will be revelatory and I hope it will carry you far beyond what you learned about Easter in your childhood Sunday school training or in your annual Easter visit to church in your adulthood.
Let me now prepare you for that study by asking you to embrace a clear distinction. An experience and the explanation of that experience are not the same. An experience is and can be timeless and eternal. An experience can open us to a transcendent dimension of reality that changes life. An explanation, which is required if that experience is to be shared, will, however, always wrap that experience inside time-bound and time-warped human words that can never be eternal. Words reflect the subjectivity of language, the level of knowledge available to the one explaining, the time that one lives in history and the meanings that one shares.
When knowledge changes, language shifts to reflect the new knowledge or else the explanation becomes recognized as mythological in nature. It is our experience that the sun always emerges in the east and sets in the west. The Egyptians once explained that by suggesting that Ra, the Sun God, drove his chariot across the heavens each day to survey all the world. We explain it today as the earth spinning in its elliptical orbit as it circles the sun every 365 1/4 days. Those two explanations are vastly different; the experience being explained, however, is identical. The problem with most religious systems is that we have literalized our explanations. Every explanation is finally inadequate and finite so every explanation is destined to die, the victim of expanded knowledge. If religion is made up of literalized explanations, religion will die.
The resurrection of Jesus was an experience. It obviously had power. It changed lives, it expanded the understanding of God and caused a new holy day to be born. That is considerable power. When that experience was explained, however, it entered time and space and those explanations became quite mortal. If we identify the experience with the explanations of that experience then the experience will die when the explanations die, as all explanations inevitably do. That is where we are today in relation to the story of Easter. Can we separate the experience of Easter from the dying explanations of antiquity? If we cannot, Christianity is doomed. If we can, Easter will mean something radically different from what we have believed. It will be a dangerous probe. I hope you are willing to join me in it.
How I Fell In Love With Quasars, Blazars And Our Incredible Universe
Thursday, May 14, 2015
The Hidden Reason For Poverty The World Needs To Address Now
An Evening of Beer and Theology — A Lutheran Experience
http://johnshelbyspong.com/
With this description, the Rev. Dawn Hutchings, pastor of Holy Cross Lutheran Church in New Market, Ontario, invited members of her congregation and any interested people in the community at large to join her at this congregation’s regular Monday night feature. This activity would not take place in the church, however, but in the second-floor Upper Room of a local pub known as The Crow’s Nest. This was the place, she announced, where people would be allowed to participate in a free and open discussion about theology over beer. It was, she said, a “Lutheran Experience.” In this discussion no questions would be illegitimate, no challenger would be out of bounds and no attempt to proselytize would occur. This gathering was to be a “come as you are” party, a “come no matter what you believe” occasion. It was one more way this remarkable pastor and this remarkable church sought to engage their community of some 85,000 people.
One does not expect to experience one of the most remarkable congregations I have ever met in a rather quiet community less than an hour north of Toronto in the center of Ontario. By most external measures, Holy Cross Church is not especially impressive. Its frame building looks more like a house than a church. This structure was originally built to be a “Kingdom Hall” for the Jehovah’s Witness tradition. When that enterprise folded, it was sold to a Montessori School and only later did the Lutherans buy it and turn it into a church. The entrance level is a large room that serves both as a sanctuary on Sunday and a gathering place for all church activities at other times. One room has been cut into this space to provide a small office for the pastor. On the lower levels are washrooms, a kitchen, additional rooms that house a day care center and storage space. The maximum numbers of worshipers this church can accommodate at one time is 85. The average Sunday attendance is normally about 55. Yet the smallness of their numbers has not limited the largeness of their vision.
The pastor and congregation of Holy Cross Church are self-consciously about the task of reinventing worship and recreating what it means to be the church. “Beer and Theology” on Monday nights throughout the program year in a local pub is only one facet of their corporate life. A series of lectures on “Rethinking Christianity” is another part of their offering to the community. I was there this fall to be the speaker at the first of this year’s series. There was a spirit of anticipation and preparation in the air and I had the sense that my presence was the result of a long period of preparation on the part of the congregation.
The format for these lectures included two presentations of about an hour each followed by another hour of questions and discussion. They were held in the church itself on a Saturday. A box lunch divided the four-hour day into two equal halves. With the capacity of their space limited, they refused to exceed the maximum number they could accommodate and so the class was closed when 85 people had signed up. To accommodate more people in their community and surrounding area, however, they also arranged for me to do a third lecture open to the public, held on Sunday night in the auditorium of a local school that could accommodate 500 people. That was a remarkable undertaking for this very small church to offer to its community, but the people in that area have learned to expect big things from these Lutherans.
On Sunday morning I was the guest preacher at their regular Sunday service, which gave me a great insight into their understanding of liturgy and worship. True to the traditions of the German Lutheran Church, music plays a large part in this congregation’s worship life. Singing is made easy by the fact that both the words and the music are printed in the bulletin so there is no searching through books to find the correct number. In the congregation there were also two male voices of superior and trained ability that made congregational singing a joy to hear.
One of these men studied opera and actually toured with an opera company and has recorded CDs on the market. He is a strong tenor and his CD that I have contains most of the familiar chestnuts that tenors regularly sing to the joy of their audiences. Only “O Danny Boy” is missing from his repertoire. The other man also studied voice and is a trained musician. He actually married his accompanist and she is today the musician who accompanies the congregation’s singing on the piano. An unvested choir of about six people presents an anthem each week. The words of the hymns are remarkably refreshing, filled as they are with hope and affirmation rather than the guilt, sin, fear and references to the cleansing blood of Jesus that seems to mark so much of Christian hymnody. The music with which this congregation’s Sunday worship opened when I was there set a mood of expectation. Beginning the service, we sang:
“Longing for light, we wait in darkness
Looking for truth, we turn to you.
Make us your own, your holy people
Light for the world to see.”
The hymn continued for five verses in which the themes of peace and hope for a troubled world were heard and a desire was expressed that they might become “bread broken for others until all are fed.” The refrain proclaimed the prayer that Christ might shine in their hearts, shine through the darkness, and concluded with the petition that Christ “might shine in this church gathered today.” I thought about other hymns I have endured recently that pronounced me “a wretch” and called me “vile” and spoke of “blood from the veins of Jesus” that might cleanse me of my sins. The contrast was refreshing.
Another hymn that we sang defined God, not theistically as a supernatural, miracle-working deity who lived above the sky, but as the “Oneness” we seek, the “life that is part of us,” and as the “love and the joy that makes us whole.” It was a joy to be enveloped in those words.
When we came to the “affirmation of faith” it was not the convoluted words of the fourth century Nicene Creed that seeks to build security fences to keep out heresy, but was something the people of the congregation worked on to define their faith in words they could understand. Yet it still contained all of the marks of historic Christianity, including references to God as creator; Christ as the Incarnation of love to whom his disciples responded, “My Lord and my God;” and as the Holy Spirit who was defined quite biblically as breath, the wind of God, the giver of life and as holy wisdom. It was, however, open, affirming and joyously proclaimed. “We are a community of faith,” this affirmation began, and then what their faith meant was spelled out: We share a vision of God, whose spirit is love.
We search for the meaning of God in our experience. We share a vision of Jesus, who “forgave those who crucified him,” who in the “mystery of the resurrection continues to live even more profoundly through the ages,” and who calls us to be reconciled with the whole of creation. The congregation acknowledged that the Holy Spirit bids them “to cry out for justice for the powerless and oppressed and to see the presence of God in every created thing.” Their creed concluded with these words: “We reach out to one another for strength beyond our own. This is our community. This is our faith.” I found myself inspired and enfolded as I repeated these words.
When the time came for the prayers, the phrase “Lord have mercy” was mercifully absent. That phrase is little more than the petition of a beggar before the righteous judge, and it serves to relate the worshiper to an authoritarian God who does little more than fill worshippers with a sense of guilt and failure. The response of the people in these prayers on that particular Sunday was the ringing affirmation “Let it be so!” They prayed to let the beauty of creation inspire them to walk lightly upon the earth, so that they might be empowered to end to greed, violence and war. They prayed that they might embody the gifts of eternal life and seek justice for all, that wholeness might be their goal and that they might walk in the ways of love. I was almost shouting “Let it be so!” when the prayers ended in the sharing of the peace.
The Communion table was open. No external barriers were erected. No one said this sacrament is for the baptized only, the confirmed only, Catholics only, Christians only. It was open to all who were hungry for what God means. The Lord’s Prayer was sung in such a way as the constant refrain was heard, “Let the will of God be done on earth as in heaven.” The communion hymn announced that God is in our questions as well as in our answers and that the sacrament draws those who are many throughout the world into one bread and one body gathered for the sake of the world.
The closing hymn was the prayer of St. Francis, “Make me the channel of your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love.” The traditional God who is so often located above the sky in our liturgies was now located inside the worshipers who were to be the channels through which the love of God engaged history. Obviously the one presiding over the Eucharist faced the people, for that is where God is to be found. God’s dwelling place was not “up there” or “out there,” but in the midst of the people.
I left that church elated, refreshed, committed and filled with joy. My life had been affirmed and I had been stretched to a new level of humanity. I was no longer a “miserable offender” who was not worthy “to gather up the crumbs” from the divine altar. It would almost be worth it to commute to Holy Cross Lutheran Church in New Market, Ontario, to attend worship each Sunday. There I got a vision of what a church is supposed to be.
How We Unearthed The Spinosaurus
Thursday, May 07, 2015
Why We Need To Rethink Capitalism
Prejudice: An American Reality and an American Tragedy
http://johnshelbyspong.com/
It is time that we as a nation stop pretending and face the facts as they are. The evidence is overwhelming. Despite concentrated efforts to perfume intolerance under code words like “states’ rights,” “voter fraud,” “conservative values” and even “religious freedom,” this country is still caught in a web of ancient prejudices. In our public behavior we are infected with massive amounts of racism, sexism and homophobia.
Of these three culturally debilitating evils, the oldest one, racism, is still the most pervasive, the most obvious and the most entrenched. Yes, it is shocking to hear that charge stated so blatantly. It will cause many to react with defensive anger, to issue talking points to counter the pain of reality, which will be only one more sign of its presence. It will challenge the stream of national propaganda that we are fed daily and that we so deeply want to believe about “American Exceptionalism,” about being “a city on a hill,” about being a society based on “law and order” and even about this nation being the “last great hope of the world.”
The fact is that there is some truth in all of these slogans, but the grain of truth present is not sufficient to repress the obvious data that buffets our idealism almost daily with stories of behavior that destroys the beauty of our national dreams. Racism, sexism and homophobia still infect too large a portion of our population. What we like to think of as “the ideal America” seems to be a reality only among those who are white, male and heterosexual.
Police brutality and police engaged in racial profiling are real. They are not just the complaints of that segment of our population who, out of their poverty and rejection by the majority society, are thought to require stricter policing. The accuracy of these charges has now been documented in frank and uncomfortable ways that seem to confront us with stunning regularity, revealing patterns of deep-seated prejudice. Look at the evidence.
An unarmed black teenager is shot and killed in Florida by a self-appointed vigilante because this young man “was not supposed to be in that neighborhood.” The killer is then found innocent by a jury.
A black man, selling contraband cigarettes on Staten Island, is subdued by police. He is killed in the process of being arrested. His last words were, “I can’t breathe.” The policeman, who was white, and who murdered him by a choke hold, was not even indicted.
An unarmed black man was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white policemen, who claimed self-defense. Once again, the white power structure of that community and state investigated the killing, but no indictment was ever issued. No trial in which witnesses had to testify under oath to determine their truthfulness, was ever held. A later federal investigation into police and district attorney policies in Ferguson, Missouri, documented widespread discrimination against people of color; institutional racism was in full practice.
A South Carolina white policeman shot in the back and killed an unarmed black man. The policeman claimed that the black man tried to steal his Taser gun. It was to be a “self-defense” claim. That claim was thwarted, however, by an observer, armed only with the camera in his cell phone, who photographed the murder with chilling objectivity. Faced with this data, the state of South Carolina charged the policeman with murder. We wonder if that would have happened if no film footage had been available. The “righteous indignation” of the state’s highest elected officials was almost amusing, given the history of their past racial insensitivities.
Film footage of an all-white Oklahoma University fraternity party revealed that its members were singing a song about “niggers” and saying “ain’t no nigger gonna be in this fraternity.” Their rhetoric included references to lynching: “hang him on a lamp post.” Faced with this film, widely dispersed on the Internet, Oklahoma University and State officials reacted quickly. The fraternity was closed. Its members were expelled from the university. The leader of the fraternity publicly apologized, but most of us know that this party was not untypical of fraternity racial attitudes across the nation.
These incidents, like many others that could be cited, reveal just how easy racism is to practice and how very deep and yet still close to the surface it is. Even to have racial abuse captured on film is not itself always the path to conviction and justice.
The story of Rodney King and the Los Angeles Police make that very clear.
People suggest that these things are just the activities of a few insensitive and unreconstructed racists, who still infect the nation. The data, however, reflect otherwise as political appeals to racism are consistently used to win elections.
In the 1988 Presidential contest between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, the campaign turned on an emotional, racially-tinged commercial about a paroled prisoner named Willie Horton. Michael Dukakis had approved the recommendation of the parole board for his release. The fact that Dukakis was also a member of the ACLU, an organization dedicated to minority rights, was made to suggest that he was “soft on crime,” i.e. black crime. The appeal to America’s racism was clear and effective. It turned that campaign around.
In 2006, Robert Corker, the mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee, was running for the United States Senate against a black Democrat, Harold Ford, who was serving in the House of Representatives. Mayor Corker ran ads depicting a white woman seeking to seduce the black congressman, an appeal to latent racial prejudice. Senator Corker rode that ad to a close victory.
In 2008, a black senator from Illinois won the presidency of the United States only to be forced to endure a constant barrage of challenges as to his legitimacy. All were tinged with racism. He is not “one of us.” He was really “born in Kenya.” He is “channeling his African father’s anti-colonialism” said Newt Gingrich. “He really does not love America” said Rudy Giuliani. “He is not a true American” said Sarah Palin.
Racism was so clearly present under what were advertised as “patriotic claims.”
In 2013, the Supreme Court decided by a 5-4 majority that racism was no longer a problem in America and it struck down the provision to keep states with a bad racial voter oppression histories under federal surveillance, which was a part of the Voting Rights Law of 1965.
Immediately, in every state from Texas to Pennsylvania, where that state had both a Republican governor and Republican control of both houses of the state legislature, laws were passed designed to make minority voting more difficult. Racism was now being used to gain political advantage. One Pennsylvania legislator stated boldly that these new voting laws were designed to “guarantee a Romney victory” in that state. Does anyone in this nation today really think that the chronic shortage of voting machines in the black voting districts of Florida, causing people to have to wait in line for hours to cast their votes, is an accident and not a policy?
Victims of systemic prejudice are easy to identify. One only has to look at the disparity in income between blacks and whites, between men and women, at the hiring and firing rates for every minority and even at gerrymandered congressional districts. The political battle over immigration also reflects a deep racial bias. No one wants to build a wall between Canada and the US. Is that because we think of Canadians as white?
“Illegal immigrant” is a pejorative code word. American big business hires these “illegal immigrants” by the thousands every year to harvest American crops. They also keep the hotel industry solvent. Illegal aliens are paid low wages and given no benefits, while wealthy politicians call for them to “self-deport,” by cutting off any aid they might receive to make their lives safe and secure.
The attempt by our overwhelmingly white male, political power structures to close family planning clinics, to make abortion almost impossible to achieve for the poor and even to limit access to birth control is also part of our latent sexism, being justified by little more than pious religious claims, frequently uttered by those for whom church is a non-existent part of their lives. Someone said that if men could have babies, abortion would be a sacrament!
When states seek to pass laws that allow discrimination in the public market place against homosexual couples in order to protect the religiously endorsed convictions of certain voters, is not that blatant homophobia? To have these laws endorsed by politicians seeking the presidency of this nation means that these candidates are convinced that an appeal to homophobia still has political cachet. No appeal to racism, sexism or homophobia would work unless those prejudices were not still in the core of this nation’s corporate psyche. These are not tangential matters.
The time for perfuming racism, sexism and homophobia with pious clichés has surely passed, but they go on and on and on. We, as a nation, are publicly embarrassed time after time when we have to face how overt our corporate prejudices are. We deny its reality, we seek to offer a rational defense when none exists, and we play carefully crafted word games to salve our consciences There is, however, no way that we can finally avoid the truth.
Racism, sexism and homophobia are symptoms of a sickness within America that needs to be faced with honesty. Spades need to be called spades. The tactics of prejudice in our politics needs to be identified. Its pious covers need to be ripped off; its hatred exposed. The hope of America as a functioning democracy is at stake and I for one am sick and tired of having my Christian faith used as a cover for the prejudices that are still so deep within us. The fact is that racist politics still work and they reveal so clearly that the values by which this nation lives are quite different from the values by which we claim to live. The time has come to face that fact with honesty.
Takaharu Tezuka: The Best Kindergarten You’ve Ever Seen
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