Waiting for God and Justice

I heard a very disturbing story on the podcast “Code Switch,” told by Chenjerai Kumanyika, where he related a time when he and a friend, walking home from their school in Baltimore, decided to race each other. “Out of nowhere, a cop car showed up. They did the thing. They put us up against the car, they grabbed us (we were in 6^th or 7^th grade) and they spread us out and patted us down, looking to see if we had stolen something.” (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/code-switch/id1112190608?i=1000683056935)

Kumanyika recalls thinking, “How can they do this?” He and his friend were surrounded by multiple police officers with guns and handcuffs, and it was scary, to say the least. The police officers finished the search of their bodies, asking them if they knew anything about some items (not specified) that had been stolen, and they said no. Apparently satisfied, they let the boys go, but the damage was done; they abandoned their desire to race each other and walked the rest of the way home. He recalled that a few seconds after he got home, the police knocked on his front door, explaining that they’d noticed that Chenjerai had just run into the house. His stepfather had answered the door, and when the police gave their reason for their unwanted visit said, “Of course, he ran into this house. He lives here.”

Kumanyika is the host of another podcast, “Empire City,” a show about the history of the New York Police Department.

I listened to this story several times and shuddered because I know it is not an uncommon experience for Black males – young and old. The fact that two kids could not engage in a footrace with each other, something kids naturally do, drove home the reality that Black people, regardless of age, profession, or economic class, are not safe in this country. “Law enforcement” looks for reasons to stop and harass Black males, and the system does very little to address it or stop it from happening.

This country has a history of “law enforcement” targeting and detaining – people of color, especially Black males. The incoming administration’s vow to get rid of immigrants will make these types of occurrences more common; those who are or who have already been deputized to round up undocumented residents have been empowered to wield their power even more than they have in the past.

Just as police officers use the line “I was in fear for my life,” or give as an excuse for stopping someone, “he looked like …” someone who committed a crime, these deputized persons now will use as a reason for stopping people, “he/she looked like an undocumented immigrant.”

What does an undocumented immigrant “look like?”

In New Jersey last week, federal immigration agents raided a business. Without having a warrant, they entered the business through the back door and detained what they said were undocumented people. At least one of those detained was an American citizen and a military veteran. He reportedly tried to show his ID and veteran’s card to the agents, but they would not look at the documents. (https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/ice-raid-newark-new-jersey-business/)

“People were fingerprinted. Pictures of their IDs and faces were taken there,” Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey said, “I was appalled, upset, angry that this would happen here in this state, in this country, {and} that this would be allowed,” he said,

But his protestations, and those that will come from others as raids increase, are not going to stop the unjust treatment of people who others think may be undocumented. The quest is not seeking justice; the quest is to carry out a political promise to get rid of people this country does not want. (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/immigration-raid-newark-new-jersey-mayor-angry-rcna189100)

Before the election, I talked with a few immigrants who drove for Uber, which I use when I travel. Most of them with whom I talked were in favor of getting rid of undocumented persons. They had come into the country the right way, they said, and they believed everyone should do the same.

When I asked if they thought they would ever be targeted by law enforcement, all of them said they did not, and some lifted up their belief that the incoming president would make sure that did not happen – noting that they had voted for him. “He won’t let anything like that happen to us,” I was told. But again, law enforcement officers, or people deputized to do the work of “catching the bad people” have historically grabbed and detained people, forcing innocent people into the system or robbing them of their freedom. (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h1554.html)

Their reaction communicated to me a naivety and sense of idealism that is not real. Many law enforcement officers seem driven by a willingness to display their power, which seems absolute, not a belief in justice and fairness. They know they can do what they want to do for the most part and get away with it. That has been the case in this country ever since people were deputized to catch enslaved persons who had escaped; they were not kind or fair. The people who are being deputized now to “catch” the undocumented people here will probably act in much the same way.

The most troubling factor in all that is going on is that faith in a “good” God can waiver. The downtrodden, ignored, unserved, and underserved look to God for hope. In the current situation, the “other side” seems to have claimed God as being behind and in favor of their policies and practices. The avenues for help and vindication feel scarce; Black people and other marginalized groups cannot depend on police, federal or state legislatures, or the courts to protect and support them. Large groups of marginalized people are simply not safe in this country.

The most important work people must do in light of the current situation is to figure out how to hold onto hope when all logical avenues of help are owned, populated, and controlled by forces and systems that favor the wealthy and powerful.

The vast majority of persons in this country are in a scary place; immigrants, documented and non-documented, face a particularly precarious time, and minority groups seeking protection can expect less of it going forward. The people in power will use that power and authority to ignore, suppress, and oppress whomever they want and there will be little recourse for those who are targeted. The prayer is that “we the people’ will call on a God many are not sure hears or cares about them and live, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, with “infinite hope” and not descend into a place of “finite disappointment.” There is a God who loves justice. That thought and belief, even in the face of gross injustice, will keep us pushing against the forces that want those whom they consider to be “others” to crash and burn.

A candid observation …

Who Will Pick the Strawberries?

Mass Deportation Will Affect the American Economy – or Will It?

During the General Election campaign of 2024, a person who appeared to be an immigrant asked the now president-elect who would do the work in the fields if he were elected, given his plan to implement mass deportations.

The president-elect did not answer the question directly, but it is clear that if or when the deportations take place, the American economy will take a big hit. According to Mike Madrid, a Latino GOP political consultant and a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, the planned deportations would have a devastating effect on the American economy.

The American Immigration Council estimates that the cost to the economy could be over $315 billion, and that figure is thought to be very conservative. (https://www.fresnobee.com/news/politics-government/article294848924.html)

person in gray hoodie holding green and brown carton — Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

But it is hard to believe that the creators of Project 2025 have not already figured in the toll on the economy if immigrants are seized and either deported or thrown into detention camps.

Those who have salivated for this crackdown on the presence of immigrants in this country have certainly looked back and studied how after slavery was outlawed. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, the powers that be found a new way to use African and African American bodies to continue to do the work that created this economy, not as enslaved persons, but as criminals, whose sentence was to work in agriculture, companies, and corporations and not get paid.

Slavery was prohibited except in instances where Black people had committed a crime, according to the 13^th Amendment. The work, then, was to get people arrested – making them criminals – and then enslaving them legally. People of African descent were arrested and jailed for things like vagrancy, breaking curfew, walking on the wrong side of the street, and not having a job.

There is no reason to believe that the Project 2025 authors and supporters of the policy it has proposed have not already figured out how to use immigrant labor while simultaneously keeping them detained, denying them rights even if they are American citizens, and doing it all by taking away their independence and keeping them dependent on the government for food, water, and shelter, which in effect would become their “pay.”

Just as Black people were re-enslaved following the Emancipation Proclamation, immigrant labor will be used to continue to use immigrant labor, using new techniques, thereby quieting the segment of the population that wants those who are here to be deported, but who would welcome their labor under government control.

In 2023, 18 percent of the economy was built by the labor of an estimated 31 million immigrants. There is no way this country is going to stop using their labor; they will, or perhaps have already figured out how to continue to use their labor. (https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/how-does-immigration-affect-us-economy#:~:text=A%20total%20of%20thirty%2Done,percent%20of%20the%20civilian%20workforce.)

Some, perhaps most Americans are not aware of Convict Leasing (which is what was being practiced after the Emancipation Proclamation), a system that resulted in freed Blacks working for a corporation or business for the rest of their lives with no pay or benefits, and dying before their “sentences” were completed. That’s because the justice system found ways to raise their fines and therefore extend their sentences for doing the work that nobody else wanted to do, and not get paid. Many died while in the jaws of a racist but greedy government that needed free Black labor to grow the American economy. Some former slave owners were paid up to $300 for every Black person they freed. The re-enslavement of black people was a money-making operation for everyone except Black people.

It was called, according to the book by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, and it lasted for eight decades.

Immigrants do much of the work that makes life comfortable for Americans, including picking strawberries and lettuce and other fruits and vegetables we never doubt we will see in grocery stores. They paint houses and repair roofs for companies and receive a pittance of what those jobs are worth. They do much and have done much to build this economy, and there is no way the companies, families, and businesses that use them are going to let them go.

Those who are not deported but are relegated to detention camps will be the new captives, perhaps not giving as much a boost to the Prison Industrial Complex as did the criminalization of Blacks, but certainly contributing to a new system of oppression that will allow the development of a new economic project that will keep this economy alive at the expense of hard-working people, who have never been appreciated.

Some think that talking about the effects of mass deportation is hyperbole, and do not believe that America would resort to such callous treatment of human beings, but they reveal a lack of knowledge of American history. This political system built camps and detained over 100,000 Japanese following World War II. Jesuits were permitted by the Roman Catholic Church and this country to build boarding schools for Native American children, separating them from their families because, they said, they wanted to “civilize” the children – i.e., make them more like their oppressors. They were treated horribly at these schools as they were prohibited from learning about their culture and being beaten for many things, including speaking in their native tongue.

Right now, the American government is considering the purchase of 4100 acres in Texas to build a detention center for immigrants.( https://www.texastribune.org/2024/11/19/texas-border-starr-county-ranch-trump-deportation/)

Who will pick the strawberries? We need not worry. This government has a track record of figuring out how to get what it wants from the labor of people it does not consider or want to be considered to be Americans.

It is part of the American political tradition, a step back to “make America great again.”

The Cost of Denying What You See

The political climate in this country has many people angry, confused, and anxious. Even as the impeachment proceedings are going on in the Senate (I cannot call it a “trial” because it is so fraught with issues) there is no comfort that there will be a civilized end to the turmoil that has been the signature of this country for the past three years. Tribalism has become a live, virulent creature that seemingly will not be tamed or quieted.

I have been silent for weeks because I have not known what to say. What I see is the systematic unraveling of our country’s government as we have known it. I see values like honesty, regard for the law and for the Constitution, and political civility giving way to bold lies and sense of arrogance that dares anyone to try to stop what is happening. I see attacks on the press, manipulation of the concept of religious freedom to support one group of religious people at the expense of all others, and a disregard for this country’s allies.

I see the Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, showing and using his considerable political acumen, in all of its ruthlessness. I see one group of politicians trying to show the country and the world what is happening to America’s democracy, and another group of politicians saying that what we are seeing and hearing is not, in fact, the truth or real.

It is daunting and exhausting to watch.

But what is bothering me most is that people are denying what appears to be the truth; they refuse to listen to or look at voices and/or documents that support accusations that are being made. And I see simultaneously others who do see what is going on and who are gnawing on their fingernails as the process of dismantling this democracy is happening right before our eyes.

Denial of a problem does not make it go away. We, as human beings, are good at denying. Wives and husbands who get all of the warning signals that their spouse is cheating deny what they see. Parents who sense that their child is in trouble, perhaps doing drugs or drinking too much alcohol, or hanging out with the wrong people, deny what they see, sense, and feel. Neighborhoods deny that there the trouble that plagues other places could ever come to their streets until a horrific tragedy happens. People deny that there is police brutality until one of their loved ones becomes a victim. Parents deny that their son or daughter is gay until that child comes out; they have “known” all along, but preferred to live in denial.

Denial doesn’t work. Truth always comes up and out, and usually at the most inopportune times.

We in this country have lived in denial for a long time, pretending like our foundation is not racist and pretending that we believe in democracy. In fact, a broad swath of Americans has never believed that people of color are “equal” or deserving of full American citizenship. In the 19^th century, white people in the North denied that they were racist until they were faced with scores of black people migrating North, looking for work and dignity. Being against the institution of slavery was one thing; granting black people full citizenship and saying that they were equal with whites was quite another. We still live in denial about our innate racism, but it is part of the foundation of this country. Some analysts say that what we are seeing is the move to “make America white again.” The push-back against allowing people of color to enter this country or stay in this country is part of the fear of white people no longer being the majority population in this country by the year 2044. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/us/white-americans-minority-population.html) White men are intent on staying in power by any means necessary, but many of us are in denial that their practices and policies are rooted in the belief in the need to preserve white supremacy.

It is exhausting to watch, and troubling as well, because it seems that the progression of forcing regression to an earlier America where there was less tolerance of all people, in spite of our claim of American exceptionalism is on a fast train speeding down a hill. Nobody wants to admit it or talk about it. Nobody wants to say out loud that the voter suppression tactics that are being put into place are racist in their intent, designed to keep black and brown people out of the polling booths. And yet, what we are seeing is the result of having denied since our inception that white supremacy is America’s cancer. And it is eating us alive in the present day, even as we pretend we do not see what is going on.

Audre Lorde, an African American essayist, who described herself as a “black lesbian, warrior, mother, and poet” wrote the words, “My silences did not protect me. Your silence will not protect you.” The silence that so many people are living in and trying to maintain, the silence that keeps voices of truth from being heard, is not going to save America. Silence is denial, and denial is only a temporary stop-gap to the problems around us. Sooner or later, the truth will push through like an angry geyser, spraying the area around it with drops of truth.

The geyser of denial is bubbling beneath us, even as this president and administration continue their work to stay in power. I’m not quite sure what this country will look like once it bursts through our carefully cultivated ground of denial, but I am fairly certain that the “carnage” will be significant.

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 …

Wanting America Back

I was in a high-end restaurant, waiting to have a meeting with a friend, and arrived before he did. I was led to our table, which had already been reserved.

Our table was next to one at which four white women were already sitting. They were older, looking to be in their late 70s and/or early 80s. It felt like they were engaging in a “girl’s day out” kind of time. They were laughing and sharing, talking about their husbands, their children and grandchildren, their charity work, and their professions, from which they had all retired.

I couldn’t help but hear everything they were talking about, and found myself chuckling from time to time at some of the things they shared. Privacy was not an option or a concern for them.

So, when they started talking about politics and the current slate of GOP candidates, the fact that they were sharing their views for all to hear was not surprising. They were Republicans, committed Republicans, that was for certain, because they said so, out loud.
The GOP candidates were interesting, they said. Carly “what’s her name? Is she still in the race?” Fiorina didn’t impress any of them, nor did Jeb Bush. They never mentioned Ben Carson, and kind of skated through their opinions of the candidates who have now left the race, including Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee, and Rand Paul.

But then they got to the meat of their discussion: the top three candidates, according to the polls, plus Chris Christie. Trump, they said, was OK. Rubio was not; he was in favor of “bringing all those immigrants, or letting all those immigrants” come into or stay in this country. “Oh no, no immigrants,” said three of the women in response to the now-emerged spokeswoman for the group. One woman weakly tried to say that the immigrants who have been working here should be allowed to become citizens, but she was shut down.

Chris Christie should not be president, said the “louder-than-the-rest” woman because “he hugged Obama. That did it for me. He hugged Obama after Hurricane Sandy.” She said it in such a way which indicated she wanted everyone to know that yes, she said it, and yes, she absolutely meant it.

Obama, she said, was evil. Someone mentioned that Obama had visited a mosque, and had reported that Muslims were “good people.”

“Of course,” the ringleader said, “he would say that because he is a Muslim. Everyone knows that. He doesn’t go to church. He…is…a…Muslim.”

There was a pregnant pause while everyone pondered her pronouncement of “truth.,” but then the women got back to the other GOP candidates. With Trump being a little too over the top, and Rubio being in favor of keeping immigrants here and letting more come in, the only viable candidate, said the ringleader, with the other three women nodding their heads in agreement, was Ted Cruz.

“He is honest and loving and believes in the Constitution,” said Ringleader. “He is our only hope.” And then she said, quietly, “We have lost our beloved America. Our children’s children will never know the America we knew.”

Ah, the “give us our country back” sentiment took center stage. If Cruz could help bring sexism and racism back, and put all of the “isms” back in their places on the shelves of American values, then he would have to be elected president. If Cruz could get rid of Obamacare with no thought of how millions who now have health care would feel or survive, then he would have to be elected president. If Cruz could make it so that police could have free reign with arresting and brutalizing people, then he would have to be president. If Cruz could get the military up and running like a good American military should run, and “bomb the hell out of ISIS,” as Donald Trump has said, then Cruz would have to be elected president.

I sat there, not surprised at what I was hearing, but a tad irritated that they talked so loudly so that everyone would have to hear their political discourses. They were bemoaning the threat they and many white Americans feel from forces larger than them and their remembrance of an America where bigotry and privilege went unchallenged. They were bemoaning the fact that being “politically correct” means respecting people of different religions (Islam) and colors and nationalities. They were tired of it. They wanted the voices of white people to be heard again, loudly and clearly, putting everyone and everything that wasn’t white in their proper places.

To heck with this being the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” They were not interested in living into that pronouncement and they sure were not interested in nurturing the American value called pluralism.

I heard that in their discourse. I don’t think I was wrong. I wish I were…

A candid observation…