Listening for a Silent God

For a while, I have been listening with interest to the claims by some that God made Donald Trump president of the United States. (https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2019/02/01/sarah-sanders-god-wanted-trump-to-be-president-peter-guthrie)

This week, Mark Lindell, the “My Pillow” guy, repeated the claim at the CPAC event. (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/1/mike-lindell-my-pillow-founder-says-donald-trump-w/)

The claims make me shudder.

The God that I was taught was not a God who approved of hatred and bigotry; my Sunday School God was one who demanded that we love God with all our hearts, all our minds and all our souls – and our neighbors as ourselves. (Matthew 22:35-40 and Mark 12:28-34) My Sunday School God said I had to love the white people who were hosing little kids in Birmingham and church deacons who were lynching black people just because they could – lynching them for things like registering people to vote, for example.

My Sunday School God said I had to forgive any and everyone who offended me. No doubt it was that Sunday School God who empowered the survivors of the mass shooting by Dylann Roof of people attending Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Church to say they forgave him.

My Sunday School God wanted all people to be free; my Sunday School God supported liberation and dignity and justice for all humans – and my Sunday School God had no favorites. It would have seemed preposterous for the God who created everything and everyone to hate everything He/She created.

So, I have long been puzzled by the God of white people who seems to support racism and sexism and all of the other “isms.” I have long been troubled that my Sunday School God seemed cut out of the story by some white people, who saw nothing wrong with lynching someone on a Saturday night and going to church on Sunday morning.

I have been puzzled by the silence of my Sunday School God who has allowed so many people to suffer from the oppression – economic, social, cultural, emotional and psychological – levied on some people by another group of people who have decided that they are better than everyone else.

If God put Donald Trump in office, what does that say about who God is, ultimately?

This man and his administration are waging war against the concepts of “liberty and justice for all.” They are practicing selective immigration, calling people of color by horrific names and being willing to spend literally billions of dollars for a border wall on the US southern border, while leaving the northern border virtually alone. It is not a new thing; white people in this country have sought to control the number of people of color coming into this country for hundreds of years, but by virtue of being alive, I am experiencing this latest assault.

This God is allowing policies to be passed which will adversely affect “the least of these” for generations; this God continues to allow unarmed black and brown people to be shot by law enforcement officers and get away with it.

This same God allowed “good, God-fearing Christians” to participate in mass murders of black people without having to answer for it. (https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/tulsa-race-riot) (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/death-hundreds-elaine-massacre-led-supreme-court-take-major-step-toward-equal-justice-african-americans-180969863/) . This God said and did nothing when black people and white allies tried to integrate churches during the 60s.

And just this week, this God allowed the United Methodist Church to pass a discriminatory judgment against the LGBTQA community. (https://www.npr.org/2019/03/02/699506797/united-methodists-face-fractured-future)

Why is God silent when people hurt and are discriminated against? Why does God apparently support racism and sexism and all of the other “isms” that cause so many people to suffer?

We don’t have answers, or at least I don’t. Black theologians have struggled with this question for the longest time. The late Rev. Dr. James Cone wrote extensively about it in his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree.

The challenge for pastors and preachers is to keep people believing in this silent God, elevating God above the stench of oppression wielded by white supremacy which is practiced all over the world.

Benito Mussolini, an adherent to and believer in white supremacy, said, “God does not exist. Religion in science is an absurdity.” I can’t go to that place; belief in a just God is the only thing that keeps oppressed people sane.

But if God wanted Donald Trump to be president, what does that say to the masses who are being oppressed and denied equality, justice, and fairness?

It would be nice if God would step up and put oppression in its place and exact from all who say they are believers …a command to stop throwing their whiteness around and treat all people with the dignity and respect all of God’s people deserve.

A candid observation …

On “Getting Over” Racism

There are few things that rankle my spirit like white people saying to and about black people that we should “just get over” slavery.

Their saying that shows a profound ignorance, arrogance, and lack of the capacity and demand to understand what the American white supremacist system has done to so many people and continues to do.

Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson had a guest , Canadian author and columnist Mark Steyn – to make the statement. (https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tucker-carlson-tonight-guest-says-african-americans-need-move-slavery-213605922.html?.tsrc=fauxdal&fbclid=IwAR3f-i3x7-lcPBw7–iTP20-aqkg5QEl_ZcATVn6owsJZIIUzfiy01mnlhY) When I posted the article on my Facebook page complaining that this statement is totally insulting, I got the expected push-back from some who think that Steyn was right and from some who castigated me from taking issue with it.

The question I always ask is “do white people ask the Jews to “get over” the Holocaust?” They do not. What happened to the Jewish people in Germany – and to others whom the Germans believe were unfit to live – should never be forgotten.

Why, then, should what this country did – and continues to do – to not only African Americans but to people of color in general be forgotten? If the truth is told, this country has never dealt with what it has done. The power structure works to keep hidden and diminished the horror of racism which is the child of white supremacy. America has worked hard to communicate the false narrative that it is the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” when in truth, this country was never meant to be a place of equal citizenship for all people from the very beginning.

The belief that black people were inferior to white people was built into the DNA of this country and has since prevailed. In his book, The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South, author Charles Marsh recalls that the message and ethos of white supremacy was not only politically but religiously supported. His father, a Christian pastor and preacher, would not preach an egalitarian message from his pulpit; he says that his father had “not been convinced by the civil rights brass that God was on their side.” The fact that blacks had no recourse from established institutions – from the church all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court – ought to cause many of the “get over it” advocates some calm.

The American eugenics movement was based upon the belief of white Americans that this country was built by white people for white people. American science in the area was so deep and broad that the Germans borrowed from the research and conclusions reached by American scientists and politicians to set up their own system of the genocide of Jews and “other undesirables.”

If the assault on black people had ended, if it hadn’t persisted in areas including housing, education and economic development, not to mention health, perhaps it would be easier for African Americans to move past our lingering pain, but the racist assaults and attacks have not ended. Bryan Stevenson, the founder, and director of the Equal Justice Initiative says that “slavery never ended. It just evolved.”

That statement is cutting in its truth.

The fact that African Americans have made significant gains not because of but in spite of the American political and religious systems says much about our character and tenacity. From being captured in Africa, to surviving the Middle Passage, slavery, and Jim Crow, we have prevailed. We have fought racism on every front – and we still have to fight. We are disrespected and accused of whining, when in fact we have adopted the words of the Declaration of Independence and of the Christian Bible and have made them work for us, even as this country has thwarted our efforts at every turn.

America will fall because of its refusal to make restitution for its white supremacist ways. Our race law, our policies and practices are known, studied and are recognized by countries all over the world. James Q. Whitman, who wrote Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law said that the tyrannical German ruler “regarded the United States as the obvious leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration.”

In the present day, Russia is exploiting America’s racism to manipulate and engineer specific outcomes in our elections. (https://qz.com/1495383/a-racial-history-of-russian-meddling-in-us-politics/)

So, let’s not talk about “getting over” something that we have never fully acknowledged as being as damaging and toxic as it is and has always been. No person, government or institution can heal from a situation unless and until they admit the problem.

America has done none of that.

A candid observation …

Politics Aside, Sexual Harassment is Unacceptable

Like many, I have been troubled by the eruption of the political scandal in Virginia, made public by revelations of racist behavior by the state’s governor and attorney general, and of sexist behavior by the lieutenant governor.

While it appears that the revelations were politically driven, the fact remains that what we learned was troubling. To be honest, I leaned toward wanting the public to give Gov. Ralph Northam a pass. White folks have put on blackface ever since I can recall and have kept live their association with the Ku Klux Klan, though they’ve wanted to keep it a secret. The picture in the yearbook was taken over 30 years ago and to be honest, as this government has given so many accusations of egregious behavior a pass, I shrugged it off. From all reports, Gov. Northam has been an exemplary person and has worked for racial justice.

I was glad that he at first admitted that it was him in the picture we all saw. He apologized and I was done with it. But then he changed his story and I also paid more attention to the “when” of the story. I had originally chalked his actions up to youthful foolishness – something of which we are all guilty – but this picture appeared in the governor’s medical school yearbook. Presumably, the governor and his friends were in their mid-20s, too old for such pranks. And I took issue with the fact that a medical school would even publish such offensive images. And so I changed my mind about chalking it up. And while I believe in the Christian mandate to forgive, I wonder what forgiveness looks like in this instance.

I am still wrestling with what I believe should happen. Something should happen, but I am not sure if I believe it is resignation.

That situation was enough to have to absorb, but then we were hit with the accusation of sexual impropriety toward a young woman by Virginia Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax. In this era of the #MeToo movement, this type of behavior perpetrated by powerful men has been revealed as being all too common. In spite of how some men have gotten a pass in light of accusations, as was the case with United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, many of the men who have been exposed as having been involved in this kind of behavior have lost their jobs, their reputations, and in some cases, their freedom.

I was clear, though sad to feel this way, that Fairfax should resign.

Why am I wrestling with the fate of a white man and resolute on my belief that the black man should resolve? It is partly because with the blackface accusation, I am convinced that many to most white men have a history of racist behavior. It is part of our culture, and I am convinced that many who engaged in such behavior did as they did because of peer pressure. To not join the crowd would set them up to be ostracized from their friends and kids do not handle separation from their friends easily. Even though Northam was older when he allegedly engaged in the prank that was caught on film, it is quite possible he was just trying to “fit in,” and if the Christian mandate to forgive is genuine, we must forgive, not hard to do in light of Northam’s public record of service. Where I shudder is the idea that a medical school, preparing people to take care of all kinds of people, blacks included, would sanction and publish the picture. I would not want to be treated by any doctors from that institution.

But in the case of Fairfax, as much as I want to defend him, I cannot, because sexual aggression toward women has for too long been sanctioned and accepted. Powerful men have for decades abused their power by using sex to intimidate and manipulate women. Their sexist behavior has caused far too many women too much pain, a pain which has been exacerbated by a general tendency in society to disregard the women’s claims of sexual assault. Men have had no reason to curb their impetuous sexual behavior and have taken advantage of the same.

If Fairfax did what he has been accused of, who is to say he would not do it again? In all honesty, there are women who are willing to compromise their bodies and their values for the opportunity to connect with a powerful man, and the men know it. The only way to get men to understand that having male genitals does not give them a pass to do whatever they want is for enough of them to have to face the music and lose something that is important to them. The sex drive is powerful, but it has to be controlled.

I am still offended that Brett Kavanaugh got off and was put onto the US Supreme Court in spite of Christine Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony. Worse, I am still offended that Clarence Thomas was likewise elevated to the nation’s high court in spite of Anita Hill’s accusations against him. Men have for too long gotten away with being sexually arrogant, reckless and impulsive. They have not had to pay the price for damaging so many women (and children as well, both male and female). We have to deal with racism and have always had to; it is systemic and cannot disappear because we want it to. We have to stay on the battlefield and fight against all the ways in which it impacts people of color.

But sexual recklessness, carried out by men, some powerful, some not, needs to be stopped. Men are too willing to give themselves a pass on what they do with their bodies, while they have a little too much to say and opine about what women can and should do with theirs.

As my son would say to his sister when they were little and she was trying to boss him around, “You’re not the boss of me!” so too, we as women, have to be consistent and say to men who disrespect us, “you are not the boss of us!”

A candid observation …

White Supremacy Robs Country of Moral Agency

This week I was listening again to an interview of author Adam Cohen by Terri Gross of NPR’s “Here and Now” and was reminded again of how white supremacy has robbed the world of the capacity it had to honor God’s command that we “love our neighbors as ourselves.” (https://www.npr.org/2017/03/24/521360544/the-supreme-court-ruling-that-led-to-70-000-forced-sterilizations)

Cohen is the author of Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck. The book is a fascinating account of how this nation is white supremacist at its core – having a mindset that upholds that white people – more specifically white men – are superior to all people who do not meet their standards of excellence. The affected targets of white supremacist policies and practices are black and brown people, for sure, but also women, Muslims, and Jews, members of the LGBTQIA community, the disabled …the list is actually quite extensive.

We already know that wealthy, Protestant, white male superiority was written into the Constitution; we know that Thomas Jefferson never intended for people to believe that all people were created equal. Our founding document was meant to clear a way for wealthy, white, male landowners to make America white and to keep it white.

That statement is not hyperbole but is supported by America’s own documents and statements of and from American folk heroes. United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a key character in Cohen’s book, was a supporter of eugenics – the discipline which worked to create and maintain a “master race,” which, it decided, included only “Nordic” people. Holmes, says Cohen, “had suggested years earlier that the best route to societal reform lay in “taking in hand life and trying to build a race.’” (p. 9) In ruling for the constitutionality of the government’s practice of sterilizing people whose existence they thought threatened the goal of creating a master race, words of Holmes showed how the poison of white supremacy permeates even the institution charged with meting out justice when all else fails when he said, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Belief in the supremacy of white people (who were white enough, not “swarthy, as Ben Franklin once complained about the German people) led people and continues to lead people to believe that some people, because they are “better” than others, are worthy of better treatment, better opportunity and better lives in general. In the 1920s, the eugenics movement was hugely popular. Eugenicists believed that “the unfit,” whom they defined, “threatened to bring down not only the nation but the whole human race.” (p. 2) John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Alexander Graham Bell were supporters of white supremacist thinking. Members of Congress relied on and celebrated their whiteness; Sen. Ellison DuRant Smith writes Cohen, said: “Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock.” (p. 5)

Books were written describing the peril of the existence of white people, including The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, and The Passing of the Great Race. Those books are probably on the bookshelves of many of our politicians who still find it difficult to treat people of color with dignity and respect.

Seen in this light, it is not or should not be surprising that the president of this country is fixated on trying to “fix” America’s “browning” problem by building a wall on our southern border, spouting off all kinds of unkind descriptions of who these people are in his opinion – rapists, drug addicts and criminals in general. Those words gaslight the racist beliefs held by so many people who ascribe to white supremacist doctrine. This country has been fighting against allowing people in this nation who are not white almost since its existence. The Immigration Act of 1924 encouraged people from northern Europe to enter this country while closing or widely limiting the numbers of people allowed to enter who hailed from southern and eastern Europe (they were not “Nordic” enough.) States in this country made laws which allowed the sterilization of people judged to be inferior which resulted in untold numbers of women who they believed fit into the “inferior” category to be segregated – i.e., kept away from men for as long as they were of child-bearing age, or to be forcibly sterilized if they remained integrated into the general society.

The work involved in the American eugenics movement was so renown in establishing white supremacy as the will for the world that the Germans borrowed many of America’s findings, based on faulty science, for the establishment of Nazi policy which resulted in the extermination of at least 6 million Jews. In the language of eugenics, Jewish people were inferior. Their presence was not necessary for the good of the world.

The rampant and rancid expression of racism we see today, spawned and nurtured by the principles of white supremacy, is not new; they are part of the very legacy of America. This president and his cabinet apparently have deep roots in white supremacy. More and more we see brazen expressions of their arrogance based on their race, and we see other white people remaining silent.

This is America.

People keep saying that what we are seeing and hearing is “not who we are” as a country. Megan McCain, the daughter of the late Senator John McCain, said being called “racist” is the worst name anyone can be called. The fact is, however, is that the proponents of white supremacy are standing on the shoulders of people before them who pushed white supremacy as the will of God for this country. White supremacists have long overridden even the concept of the sovereignty of God by deciding that not all of whom God created were worthy of being created.

A friend of mine said recently, “My work is to wipe racism out of this world.” It’s a noble dream, but it appears that white supremacy is a tree with roots far too deep to ever be completely unrooted. White supremacy has robbed our country and this world of being moral when it comes to racism, sexism, and discrimination against others in general. We are bound to know its history and to create strategies which will expose it for what it is while establishing and creating justice for those who white supremacists believe are inferior.

This president and his friends in office are merely following the script put in place by those who came before them.

A candid observation …

On Having a Mother in the House

I have smiled, chuckled and laughed out loud as I have watched House Speaker Nancy Pelosi handle the president of the United States.

She has reminded me of my own mother, and of the mothers I have known and watched. Mothers have a way of making known to children – spoiled or not – as to how far they can go. In the case of my own mother, it was a look, accompanied by a particular timbre of her voice, that let me know that I was standing on shaky ground. It was not wise to continue what she obviously considered to be unacceptable behavior when I got “the look” or heard “the voice.”

Speaker Pelosi, the mother of six children and a grandmother, knows how to be a mother as well as how to work the system called politics. As I think back on the day of her swearing-in as speaker, I am moved again at how she called the children to come forward. I was moved to tears that day because it was such a warm moment in what has been a bitterly cold political season, but I was also moved because she was bringing a different spirit into the House of Representatives. It was going to be different. She would handle her political duties, but she would also handle the children in her midst.

As I have watched her handle the president – and that is the correct word for what she has been doing – I go back to seeing those children surrounding her. They were invited into the cradle of political power; they laid their eyes on the woman who would keep things in order and listened to her voice. They watched her use the gavel, the symbol of her power, and they left feeling a kind of assurance we have all felt when we have known our mothers (or mother figures) have shown us that they had things under control.

Without raising her voice or quaking under the pressure and criticism, Speaker Pelosi has told the president what will and will not happen. She has let him know that she will not be bullied. She does not scare easily, and she has not let him objectify her. She seemingly has let him know how far is “far enough,” and he, like a child, has gotten the message. She has acted courageously, firmly letting him know that he will not be allowed to present the State of the Union address in the House chambers, and when he pushed back, like an arrogant jock, she pushed back yet again. Her message: it is not going to happen.

The more petulant he gets, the stronger her resolve becomes. It is as though she is saying that as long as he is in her house that he will follow her rules – or, more accurately, the rules of the American government. It is as though she is saying that if he wants to be an autocrat, he will have to get out of “her house.” As mothers are charged to take care of their children, Speaker Pelosi takes seriously her charge to take care of the American people and the American government.

I find myself comforted by her presence. I find that I give little sighs of relief that there is finally someone in the House who loves this country more than his or her political proclivities. It feels like that as long as Speaker Pelosi is in charge, the train wreck that the president is causing will be less severe. It feels like we may survive this terrifying chapter in American history.

I have been deeply disappointed in the GOP men – and women, certainly, but mostly the men – who have quaked under the president’s bullying. I have been disappointed that they have stood idly by and let him do whatever he has wanted to do, just because they are afraid of being attacked. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is a total disgrace. None of these GOP lawmakers have honored their promise to protect the Constitution of the United States. It has been disgusting to watch.

But Speaker Pelosi has let it be known that she is not “fooling” with them. She is a savvy politician, yes, and a woman who knows how to use her power. She remembers the lessons of politics that her father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., who represented New Jersey’s 3^rdcongressional district and later became the mayor of Baltimore, taught her and she is using them. He taught her how to play political hardball, and she learned well.

And I feel a measure of comfort.

Speaker Pelosi is no saint and is not perfect; that is not my argument. What I am arguing, however, that it has taken a woman to reel in a power-hungry and power-grabbing man who has stopped at nothing to get his way, a man who knows little about politics and who cares little about the American people – including his “base” to which he always directs his rhetoric. He is a stirrer of hatred and bigotry, a man who has no regard for the “rule of law” which he claims to respect.

But in Speaker Pelosi, there is a “mother in the house” who is determined to keep her house in order. She is giving “the look” and sharing “the voice” to remind her adult male children that she is “not fooling with them.”

A candid observation …