The Guilty Verdict: Bittersweet

The verdict is in; the former president has been found guilty of all 34 counts levied against him in the New York “hush money” trial.

I am glad for the guilty verdict, but my soul is not quieted. I am glad because this man has successfully eluded legal sanctions for his behavior over the years if what has been written about him is true, and has finally been held accountable. That is justice.

But my soul is uneasy. I find no comfort in the verdict because, in listening to this man, I have grown more disappointed in and disenchanted with the American system of government. The people in power have made a mockery of “the law” and the concept of “law and order.” They have supported disinformation and participated in the dissemination of disinformation. Although they talk about the United States Constitution, they are hell-bent, it seems, on dismantling and destroying it.

And if anyone was looking for a voice of morality to come from the church, more specifically the “Christians,” I am sure they are as disappointed as I am. The church – most especially white Evangelicals, but not exclusively so – has not only been silent when one would have thought it would speak up, but it has been painfully complicit in spreading the word that this man is the answer to the woes of our country. They see him as a savior, this man who is now a convicted felon, and many still plan to vote for him.

Their version and conception of Jesus have led them to believe that the former president has been picked by God to lead this nation. (https://apnews.com/article/trump-christian-evangelicals-conservatives-2024-election-43f25118c133170c77786daf316821c3#)

Even as I write that sentence, I shiver. I wonder how anyone who has read the story of Jesus can possibly believe that what the former president is doing is something of which Jesus would approve. How can anyone, who declares that he/she lives by the Bible, support what this man is doing? (https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2023/10/27/house-speaker-mike-johnson-evangelical/)

His followers do not care that he was accused of all that he was accused of in the hush money trial, and they are furious that he has been found guilty of those charges. They have made him the ultimate victim and they are not backing down or away. They are not concerned that he wants to be a dictator; in fact, many say that democracy has to end.

If he is re-elected, democracy will end and many will be happy.

We have all been “indoctrinated” with the American story – that this is a land where there is “liberty and justice for all,” that our system supports “one man, one vote,” and that this is the greatest experiment in democratic government that has ever been created.

But it is just that – indoctrination. There has never been “liberty and justice for all” because that was not the vision of the country’s founders. This country was conceived and designed to favor wealthy white men. Those in that group never believed that, according to Thomas Jefferson, “all men are created equal.” Jefferson’s lofty words placed him at odds with the wealthy, white men who had all the power and wanted to keep it, which was ironic because Jefferson never mean “all” men to include men who were not white. People of color were certainly not even considered when Jefferson wrote those words.

This country was all about money and power, from its beginning. The politicians and the clergypersons knew it. The state and the church leaned on and depended on each other for verification of their policies and ideologies. Jefferson’s words were not a consideration.

The church and its leaders fully bought into the idea that God created this country – or led them to create this country – to make it easier for men to make money. The politicians did not have to worry about opposition from the church! The beliefs of the two institutions became mortally intertwined, so that even today, religious leaders say and teach things like “Free market capitalism is God’s blueprint for growing a nation’s economy.”( https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/us-republicans-and-fallacy-biblical-capitalism). These religious leaders have aligned the church with the state – despite the fervent declaration that the U.S. Constitution demands a separation between the two. The church has always needed the government and the government has likewise always needed the church to support and increase the wealth of the nation. Jesus’ name is used, but Jesus’ commandments are not practiced. Too many Christians have a Christianity in which Jesus is absent.

The core of this nation – which was cracked from the beginning – was never strong enough to support the pillars of hypocrisy that made up its foundation. The power brokers were never satisfied with the “all people are created equal” narrative, and whenever it seemed that equity was creeping into the society, the more they used their power to squash it. (https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/nov/10) https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/wilmington-massacre-2/) They never lost their belief that their whiteness and their money gave them carte blanche to do what they wanted with the lives of the people on whose labor they depended for their wealth.

There is no institution to which to turn for help. The church, for the most part, has been compromised; church leaders who might speak up are silent; others are boldly in support of the former president and his policies. This impotent church is not new; Dr. King wrote of it in the 60s. (https://www.interfaithamerica.org/article/martin-luther-king-jr-s-hard-words-for-white-christians/)

The US Supreme Court – and many of the federal courts – have been compromised. Despite the cry against having “activist judges” the GOP/MAGA people are hell-bent on getting activist judges on the bench and those already on the bench are reducing the capacity of those in need of justice to trust the courts.

Without genuine Christianity – i.e., a religion that knows and practices the precepts of Jesus, without a society that believes in the worth of all people, without protection from the courts and law enforcement, including judges who rule against those who fight for equality liberty, and justice for everyone, America is in a dangerous place. The MAGA supporters want a man who has shown us who he is – and his supporters are all right with that. If those who believe in justice, equality, and fairness for all do not step up, the man found guilty yesterday on 34 counts will continue to walk in the arrogance of his whiteness and wealth, and mow down the possibility of there ever being “liberty and justice for all” in this country. There has never been, but this man will cement the pillars of injustice that have long characterized our government.

I hope people realize what is at stake and will do the work to make sure this convicted felon and any felon who comes after him will never step foot again in the White House. And I hope people who believe in the precepts of the Christ will take this existential threat seriously and work as they never have before to honor and respect the ways Jesus taught us to build community.

If we do not, we will reap a horrific harvest.

A candid observation…

How Do the Faithful Oppressed Pray?

As many people, Black and white, but especially Black, are watching the trial of ex-Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, it is safe to say that many are waiting with bated breath. The instances of white officers getting away with shooting and killing Black people have been too many; even in cases where videos have captured the actions of the accused officers, making many believe that the justice system would have no choice but to arrest, indict, and convict the accused, they have been acquitted or exonerated before even having to go to trial.

It is not a sure thing that Chauvin will be convicted. If he is not, I was asked, what will happen?

I don’t know, but I do know that internalized pain eventually erupts; one can only take so many hits to his or her concept of and need for justice before the pus that forms from the untreated wound caused by injustice pushes its way out.

What, then, or how …do the faithful oppressed pray? What types of prayers are pastors of Black congregations offering to and sharing with their members? Or are they praying about it at all? Are they avoiding the elephant in the room because, frankly, they do not know what to say or how to say it?

There has been a frustration that many Black pastors, theologians and scholars have grappled with for generations. William R. Jones wrote, Is God a White Racist? James Cone tackled the problem of a God whom the Bible says is no respecter of persons, but who has not interceded and stopped white supremacy – which supports the dehumanization and criminalization of Black people. Cone’s answer was the development of Black Liberation Theology. Black people have wondered where God is and why, if and since God shows no favoritism, hasn’t God stopped the insanity called white supremacy?

The frustration with God by leaders of oppressed people shows up in the Bible. Moses, pegged by Yahweh to lead the Israelites from Egyptian captivity to freedom, expresses the frustration in Exodus 5:22-23, saying, “Then Moses turned again to the Lord and said, “O Lord, why have you mistreated this people? Why did you ever send me? Since I first came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has mistreated this people and you have done nothing at all to deliver your people. (italics mine.)

Many Black faith leaders feel Moses’ frustration. God has, in fact, been manipulated to act as a protector and supporter of white supremacy. Throughout American history, white Christians – in both the North and the South – believed and preached that God was in favor of segregation and against the mixing of the races in any fashion, including education and burial, thus, they preached the rightness not only of segregation but of lynching as well. Many white Christian hailed their God as one who supported and ordained their cultural leanings.

God looked the other way, it seems, during the violence carried out by whites against Black people during the Civil Rights Movement. In history, God has certainly either looked the other way or refused to see – and stop – the violent desecration and ruination of entire black communities perpetrated by white people who believed Black people did not and should not have the right to vote. “Good Christian” white people resonated with the words of one Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell, who said, as he riled up white people to violent insurrection against black people and the government in Wilmington, North Carolina because the whites resented the power of the Black voting bloc and their considerable presence in state government, “Here in the most quiet and conservative of the original 13 states…we are reduced to the pitiful necessity of choosing whether we will live under the domination of Negroes…” (David Zucchino, The Wilmington Lie, p. 147) Whites in Wilmington did, in fact, succeed in murdering hundreds of Black people in that 1898 insurrection, destroyed Black homes, churches, and communities, and were successful in driving Black people out of office – and keeping them out until the early 1970s.

As the Black residents of Wilmington saw what was going on, the religious leaders urged them to pray, assuring them that God would hear their prayer and stop the murderous rage of their white brothers, but to no avail. The riot and insurrection went on as planned – and in the end, the whites revised the story to read that it was Black people who had instigated the riot and that they had only retaliated to save their lives and the lives of their families.

There are many accounts of Black people praying against those who oppressed them, but in spite of the prayers, the attacks and the oppression that is a part of an Empire run by white supremacists have continued.

What, then, do the oppressed pray? How do the faithful oppressed have conversations with God and what is the desired outcome?

It spite of the prayers of Black and other oppressed people, white supremacy has not disappeared and is not in danger of doing so. Do we pray for the ability to hold on? Do we pray for new vision and new tactics? Do we pray for new leaders? We have done all of that; we have held on and the nonviolent direct action taught by the Rev. James Lawson and practiced by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is probably the reason more Black people have not been killed by white supremacists with guns.

But at the end of the day, what should be the corporate prayer of the faithful oppressed? What should we be praying now, in light of the quest for justice for George Floyd and unprecedented voter suppression laws being created? ? How do faith leaders train their people to handle their hurt, frustration, disappointment and anger over racial oppression that never ceases?

Surely, there must be an answer and some specific words that can be codified and shared with us all as we wait, with bated breath, to see if a murderous police officer will be punished for what he has done.

Black People Waiting, Again

As the trial for the accused officer who kept his knee on the neck of George Floyd begins today, Black people are again in a metaphorical waiting gallery, where we will watch and hope that justice will be done.

In our history, we have always been in courtrooms – sometimes on the main floor, sometimes sitting in the back or in the balcony – but we have been there, over and over, waiting for justice to roll down like a river, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

There was the trial of the Scottsboro Boys in 1931, where nine Black boys, ages 12-19, were accused of raping two white women. They were tried by a white lawyer – and all but one of them, a 13-year-old, were convicted of rape by an all-white, all-male jury and sentenced to death in spite of there being no evidence to support the rape allegations. (https://www.history.com/topics/great-depression/scottsboro-boys)

Black people waited…

Then there was the trial of the men accused of lynching 14-year-old Emmett Till. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were accused of the murder of young Till, but despite of clear evidence that they had in fact killed Till, they were acquitted by an all-white jury who deliberated for less than an hour. (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/emmett-trial-jw-milam-and-roy-bryant/)

Black people waited…

There was the trial of Anthony Ray Hinton, who was accused and convicted of murdering two white men, in spite of clear evidence that he could not have committed the murders because he was at work at a warehouse and had clocked in, in addition to being seen by coworkers. The evidence did not matter; he was convicted and spent over 30 years on Death Row. (https://www.al.com/opinion/2015/03/our_view_the_evil_in_the_antho.html)

Black people waited…

Black people waited as the case of the officers charged with the murder of Eric Garner went before a grand jury. Garner had been approached by police as he sold loose cigarettes on a New York street and was put into a chokehold as officers worked to arrest him. But Officer Daniel Pantaleo, accused of murder, was let off the hook; the grand jury ruled that the action of Pantaleo was justified and decided not to indict him. (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-city-officer-eric-garner-s-chokehold-death-won-n1030321)

Black people waited…

When George Zimmerman went on trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin, black people waited. Zimmerman was indicted but the jury found him innocent of any crime. (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/us/george-zimmerman-verdict-trayvon-martin.html)

Now, Black people are waiting, yet again, to see if an officer who knelt on the neck of George Floyd for eight minutes and 46 seconds will be convicted of any crime. The attorneys for the officer will work to impugn the character of Floyd – as is a common practice – in their effort to get Derek Chauvin, the accused officer, acquitted. Black people will be waiting and hoping for justice, but there is an undercurrent of doubt and a deep suspicion that the justice system will again prove that its justice is more for white people than for Black.

As the trial began today in Minneapolis, Black and white people were seen kneeling outside of the courthouse, in a ritual that reflected the belief that only God can make the man who stole a father, husband, brother, and son from his family by kneeling on his neck get the punishment his actions warrant.

Everyone wants justice when they are wronged, but for some reason the majority culture of this country does not seem to believe or lean toward bringing justice to and for Black people. Our white supremacist system remains stubbornly stuck in its beliefs, one, that Black people are inherently criminal and are therefore deserving of any actions against them given by police, and two, that Black people are not fully human. It is as though they do not comprehend the depth of emotional and spiritual pain Blacks have suffered at the hands of this system. With that mindset, the majority culture indicates that Black people could not possibly need justice.

So Black people and their allies are again waiting, waiting for the scale of justice to indicate that the crime and not the race of the officer or of the victim is the only thing that matters. The anxiety of people across this nation and indeed the world is palpable. The world is waiting to see justice.

Hopefully, this time, the anxiety will be relieved by a verdict against the accused that says black lives truly do matter, and that no person, white police officers included, is above the law.

A candid observation …

Our Slip is Showing

In the “old days,” women would wear slips under their dresses and/or skirts; to not do so was considered a violation of proper modesty. The slip could be whole or what was called a “half slip,” which was, as the name indicates, a garment that hung from the waist down.

Half slips were notorious for not being cooperative. You would get what you thought was your size, and the slip would be fine for a while, but sooner or later the elastic around the waist would wear, and the slip would not stay in place.

In variably, the slip would hang below the hem of the skirt or dress, and some other sympathetic woman would whisper, “Your slip is showing.”

I thought about that as I have been watching what has been going on in our government. Our foundation is one which was built on racism and sexism. Though we were purported to be a democracy, the Founding Fathers seemed to have disdain for the idea of too much power coming from the people. This government was always about elevating and keeping some in power, and about keeping other people down. According to Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States, four groups of people were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women and men without property.” (p. 91) Even at the inception of this “great democracy” the value system was firmly in place: the rich were to run the country and to maintain their power and increase their wealth by exploiting the working poor. Writes Zinn: “the Declaration functioned to mobilize certain groups of Americans, ignoring others.” “The American people” was never the masses, but was really the small group of wealthy, white, male landowners…”We the people,” a phrase coined by Governor Gouverneur Morris did not mean Indians or blacks or women or white servants.”

Charles Beard, a 20^th century historian, wrote in his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution that “the rich must, in their own interest, either control the government directly or control the laws by which government operates.”

If we read and study this history of America, we might not get quite as agitated as some of us are in the present day as we watch what is going on in our government. We are abiding by traditional American political history. That history is not a stellar one; it is fraught with discrimination and bias, with government allowing for and even sanctioning those who do what they think best in order to keep the moneyed class in power, to keep the oligarchy intact.

And while it has not gotten as much attention as the escapades that have been going on in and around the White House, the sexism that was written into our Constitution is rearing its ugle head as well. The House constructed a health care bill that is sure to have devastating effects on many, including women. In their work to craft this bill, a picture appeared having only white men in the White House, deciding whether or not maternity care and mammograms should be considered to be “essential” health issues to be covered under the Republican bill. (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/03/trump-health-care-summit-white-guys)

As this administration barrels through proposals that will hurt so many people, it seems that her slip is showing – a slip which includes her racism, sexism, and paternalism at the least. With these people in power, poverty will increase, as will mass incarceration; voting rights are in danger of being seriously compromised, and anyone who challenges the policies stands the possibility of being sanctioned. These people in power are not unlike, it seems, the Founding Fathers, who envisioned a country run by a small group of wealthy white men who controlled everyone and everything.

The slip which is America’s undergarment has been soiled by the dust that comes from such injustice, but it is America’s legacy. Those in power do not worry or care about if the slip is showing, but, rather, only that it stay in place in order to maintain – or in this case, regain – the status quo.

It’s called “making America great again.”

A candid observation.

No Place of Justice for the Masses

As an American who absorbed the civic lessons about the government – its three branches which were put in place by the framers of the Constitution to insure that our government would be a democracy of the highest order – I grew up thinking that when all failed for people who were looking for justice, there would always be the United States Supreme Court. I grew up believing that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was a place where anyone in trouble could find justice. Even the titles of these federal agencies brought a sense of comfort. When all else failed , there would always be something in our government which would protect the poor, the innocent and the forgotten.

But as I have grown older, I have been disappointed, over and over again, as I have watched the Court, for the most part, protect the interests of the government. In spite of the banter about the justices not being partisan, they have seemingly too often been aligned with the government and particular political parties. I was stunned when I read that U.S. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote, in the Dred Scott decision that there “were no rights of a black man that a white man is bound to respect.” I was stunned and hurt to learn that in the Buck v. Bell case, where a attorneys were fighting the right of an institution to forcibly sterilize people whom powers that be thought to be “feebleminded” that a former president of the United States, William Howard Taft, served as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the constitutionality of states carrying out the procedures. In that case, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, considered by some to be this nation’s finest legal mind, aligned himself with his opinion that eugenics was a right thing in order to create a perfect race of people, and he wrote against Buck and her case. Buck was poor and a victim of the heinous belief system of eugenicists, which was popular in the 1920s, and Holmes wrote, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

There have been times, for sure, when the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on behalf of a marginalized group of people. Brown v. Board of Education is probably the best known, when the Court ruled that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional, and the ever controversial Roe v. Wade ruled on behalf of women who declared that they, not the state, have a right to choose what they do with their bodies, but for too many cases, there has been no legal protection for the marginalized, not in local and state courts, and certainly not in federal courts.

If it is true that the Constitution was and is a magnificent document – and it really was – it is also true that too often, the tenets of that document have been woefully ignored. Among those tenets is the principle that all Americans were entitled to have speedy trials tried by a “jury of their peers.” And yet, in case after case, American courts have tried African Americans in trials which have had all-white juries, where black people have been deliberately excluded – and that is, if they have had a trial at all. Far too often, black people have only had to have been accused of a crime and a lynch mob has come and dragged them out of jail cells before a trial was ever held, killing them on the lawns of court houses or sometimes, in the deep woods – and none of these people have ever been arrested or held accountable.

It is a scary and real thought that there is no place where you might find justice in this land which some say is a “nation of laws.” It would be better to say that it is a nation of laws for those who can afford to pay for justice. Adam Cohen, in his book Imbeciles: The Supreme Court,American Eugenics and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, notes that the justice system in many cases has failed to adhere to the principle contained in the Hammurabi Code, which teaches that “the purpose of law is tonsure that the strong do not harm the weak.” That has not been the case, not in this country or elsewhere. Those who apply the law have been in too many cases totally biased and blind to the justice desired by “the least of these.” As Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, said that it is true that life is better for an individual if he is “rich and guilty” than “poor and innocent.”

That fact leaves little room to believe in the justice system. In fact, that fact belies the reality that the ideal and the real too often do not intersect, and that despite the lofty words contained in our written documents, justice for many is simply not going to a reality. The poor, the left out and the left behind are just out of luck in this “land of the free and home of the brave.”

A candid observation …