America’s Underwear is Dirty

It is probably safe to say that all of us were told by our mothers when we were little that we should always make sure our underwear was clean. They said the reason was that we never know when or if we might be in an accident. “You don’t want anybody to see that you’ve got on dirty underwear,” my mother would say.

America, it seems, has never changed her underwear.

The entire debacle of ICE agents ripping children from the arms of their mothers, and of putting children in detention centers while concurrently sending their parents to jail is not a new thing. More accurately, America’s power elite have a history of separating children from their families.

When Africans were brought to this country, it was common for those purchasing Africans would buy a mother or father, leaving screaming and terrified children behind. In many cases, those parents never saw their children again.

It is America’s underwear.

What allows anyone to separate families, ignoring the screams of mothers and their children, is the presence of cognitive dissonance, defined as “holding onto contradictory ideas simultaneously,” according to Joy DeGruy, author of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.”

In America, she says, people hold onto the idea of freedom while doing something which is totally in opposition to that ideal. Thus, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who would staunchly defend his belief in democracy and Christianity could and did defend the policy of separating families of people coming to America from Central America.

Mr. Sessions does not, cannot and will not allow himself to…consider that these people are human beings, parents who love their children and who would not even think of leaving a despotic political situation and leave their children behind.

He does not relate to the immigrants as human beings. He has disassociated himself from them and therefore cannot feel their pain and worse, cannot believe that they are capable of feeling the same pain as does he and others whose humanity he respects.

Heather Anderson Williams writes in “Compartmentalizing Slavery” that “most white slaveowners …would have only a limited sense of what enslaved people felt and they did not pause the morality of an institution that deprived humans of their liberty and wantonly destroyed their families.” (http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/06/how_white_people_justified_and_struggled_with_separating_slave_families.html)

Likewise, there was no sense of how Native Americans felt when the Europeans came to America, bringing with them diseases to which Native Americans had never been exposed which resulted in over 90 percent of the Native American population at that time dying off. Nor did they consider what Native Americans felt when their land was taken, or how they felt when Europeans ignored their humanity in the quest for power and control of this country.

Martin Luther King said that there is a phenomenon called “thingification.” In an address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, he said, “A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will thingify them – make them things. Therefore they will exploit them …”

That “thingification” has contributed to the oppression of blacks in this country for 300 years, for the decimation and genocide of Native Americans, for the oppression of women, members of the LGBTQ community, for Muslims, and now, for the horrific treatment the current administration is meting out to immigrants coming to America seeking asylum.

Those ripping children from their parents have made these people “things” in the classic sense. Though they hear the children screaming for their parents, and the parents screaming back to their children, reaching for them, they have distanced themselves from the human tragedy in which they are engaged. Like the Europeans decimating the Native Americans, and like white people thinking only of ways to use black people to further their economic goals, these people today cannot conceive that the parents and children’s screams they are hearing are genuine.

They have dissociated. These people are not true human beings, capable of feeling as do the law enforcement officers and government working against them.

America’s underwear is dirty. She has never changed that part of her presence which was sullied and soiled from the moment the Europeans landed on these shores.

Sometimes, something is so dirty that it cannot be totally cleaned. There is a gray film over it and no amount of washing or bleaching fixes the problem.

This desire to protect whiteness, which is at the base of most of the oppression in this country, has sullied America’s underwear for hundreds of years. Attacking a group of people, ruining their families and causing a lifetime of hurt and pain, is part of what has stained the ideal of American democracy. It is a stain that was begun from the moment Europeans arrived here, and it continues to spread.

Were America taken to an emergency room, sick and in serious condition, it is a sure thing that those trying to treat her would see her dirty underwear, clearly never changed …and be appalled, judgmental and perhaps unconcerned. America’s poverty of humanity caused by her consistent “thingification” of people is leading her to a bad place, where her myth of being “the greatest nation in the world” will no longer stand up to scrutiny. Her dirty underwear will finally be completely exposed.

A candid observation …

What is a Racist?

Donald Sterling swears in interviews that he is not a racist.

His estranged wife says the same, as does the young woman who was heard talking with him in those now infamous tapes where Sterling said he didn’t want her to bring blacks to “his” basketball games, among other things.

He said in an interview with Anderson Cooper that he made a mistake, that it was the first time in 35 years he’d said such things.

Why does that sound like a crock?

Everyone knows by now that Sterling refused to rent property to black and brown Americans, saying disparaging things about them. He said that Hispanics “smoke, drink and just hang around the property,” and that blacks “smell and attract vermin.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/05/12/donald-sterling-apologizes-for-racist-comments-blames-woman-for-baiting-him/?tid=hp_mm)

What is amazing is that Sterling and others say Sterling is not a racist. If that is the case, what is a racist? Is everyone who says racist things racist, or are they just ignorant, insensitive and bigoted?

A definition of bigotry is ” intolerance toward those who hold different opinions from oneself.” Another definition of a bigot is one who is stubbornly intolerant against any belief that is different from his (her) own.

Racism, though, goes a little deeper. A definition of racism says that racism is the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. That definition also says that racism is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior. (https://www.google.com/search?q=definition+of+racism&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb)

In other words, racism includes the belief that one race is superior to another …and a racist has the power to discriminate against a group or individual in a way that exercises power over that group or person. Racism includes the belief that one race is supreme…and that it has the right to oppress another group or individual based on the belief in that supremacy.

Can we say that we are all bigots on some level? Probably. But racism implies systemically provided and sanctioned power to oppress another group of people. From the beginning of this nation, even in the writing of our Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution, racism has been a bedfellow.

If Sterling isn’t a racist, I don’t know what a racist is. Kareem Abdul Jabbar said last week that more people believe in ghosts than believe in racism. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/04/kareem-abdul-jabbar_n_5263235.html) White people don’t want to “own up” to the fact that racist exists, that it is an American problem which goes largely unchecked and ignored. Americans seem to want to wish racism away. It is too ugly to face…

And yet it exists.

Donald Sterling is a racist. He believes in the supremacy of the white race, and he has the economic means and power to keep other races “in their place.”

He’s not the only one. He’s just one who got caught.

A candid observation …

When Humiliation Explodes

http://www.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/... — http://www.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/020903-o-9999b-098.jpg filedesc Tuskegee Airmen – Circa May 1942 to Aug 1943 Location unknown, likely Southern Italy or North Africa (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oppression, under any name, is humiliating.

I recently watched the HBO version of the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, a work which was much better, actually, than the film Red Tails. There were a lot of “ouch” moments in the film for me, but one particularly painful moment for me came in a scene where a white commanding officer told a black recruit that he was “nothing,” and after he was finished, the recruit was forced to salute.

It made my stomach turn.

Oppression comes in many forms: it may be racial or sexual; it may occur between a parent and child or a husband and wife or between partners. In all cases, oppression appears to be a form of sophisticated and sanctioned bullying, designed to keep the oppressed “in his or her place.” And in assuring that “place,” someone is inevitably humiliated.

A woman, Marissa Alexander, was recently sentenced in Florida to 20 years in prison for firing a warning shot into the air as her husband threatened her with violence. Domestic violence is a form of oppression, and it is humiliating. As is the case with so many cases of oppression, the oppressor in the case of Alexander escaped charges in the incident; he is free while this mother is in jail for trying to protect herself and maintain a sense of dignity.

Oppressors have power because their oppression is supported by society; their society-sanctioned bullying is carried out so that they can maintain power, and that power is used not to uplift society but to belittle other individuals, but what people do not seem to understand that individuals can only take so much humiliation before they explode. People have a need, a desire, to be honored and to be treated with dignity, and when that doesn’t happen, after a while, something inside one’s spirit gives out.

In the HBO movie, the recruit who was early on humiliated was punished later for being a show-boat; he was a licensed pilot when he entered the Tuskegee program but was never honored as such. He was treated as a nothing, and so when he had an opportunity to “show his stuff” in a plane, he did so, and was punished by being put out of the program. It was too much. He begged for mercy, to be allowed to stay in the program. He said he’d do anything…but his begging was for naught. In despair, he snapped; he ran impulsively to a plane, got in, and took off on a suicide flight. If he was going to be out of the program, he would be “out” on his own terms. He would NOT go home humiliated, not again.

That humiliation builds and then explodes is no surprise. What is troubling, however, is that oppression continues as a force in life, causing far too much despair, far too much humiliation.

Rev. Jesse Jackson said that people only revolt when they are humiliated. Race riots, women finally fighting back against abusive spouses, children exploding because of overbearing parents …all seem to bear out Jackson’s statement. After a while, those who are oppressed say “enough,” and violence ensues.

That’s not a comforting thought…but what it is is a troubling reality.

A candid observation …

Jesus, the Homeless Hero

Every now and then, a question will come from out of nowhere that is so profound one has to stop and think. Such a question was in a post by Paul Raushenbush on the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-raushenbush/shane-claiborne-new-monastics_b_1156525.html) this week: How can you worship a homeless man on a Sunday and evict him on a Monday?

The question was in reference to Jesus, the Christ, whose birth Christians the world over will celebrate this Sunday. The scriptures that will be read, describing the night the child was born in a manger “because there was no room in the inn,” are romantic at best, because they camouflage the fact that even in Jesus’ time, the issue of class was a problem.

Jesus, the Palestinian Jew (despite Newt Gingrich’s claim that the Palestinians are an “invented” people) was not part of the in crowd. His parents were not wealthy, not even close; they did not belong to the upper class. Clearly, that is the case, because had they had money, someone, somewhere would have found room for this very pregnant woman.

Throughout Jesus’ life, he posed a problem for the powers that be. Scholars including James Cone, William R. Herzog and the Paulo Freire and Obery Hendricks have suggested that Jesus’ life and ministry was all the more dangerous and difficult for him because he was part of the oppressed class, and spoke against oppression in what some would call “subversive speech.”

We Christians are too far removed from the Palestine and Roman Empire of Jesus’ day; we have a need to believe in the myth of Jesus as opposed to his hard message. We forget that Jesus saw the elitist class of Jerusalem collaborate with the Roman government, something that resulted in more oppression for “the least of these.”

Jesus, in Matthew 25, was not an observer, looking into the lives of the oppressed; he was an insider, looking out, and not liking what he saw.

Freire said that understanding Jesus’ life that way, we understand that the parables were not “earthly stories with heavenly meanings,” but rather they were earthy stories with heavy meanings.” William Herzog, in his book, Parables as Subversive Speech,” said that Jesus was aware of the exploitation of the masses that went on, and he challenged it. Herzog said that the “parable was a form of social analysis, every bit as much as it was a form of theological reflection.”

We Christians do not want that, though. It seems that we cannot fathom the idea that Jesus was not mild and meek, but was instead a rabble rouser, every bit as irritating and annoying to some as is Michael Moore or the late Rev Dr. Martin Luther King. The thought that Jesus might indeed be in the midst of an Occupy tent camp repulses those of us who hold onto myth.

The truth is that we tend to deify people once they are gone. Jesus was hated when he was alive; once he died, he became a hero. The week of his death, according to the Bible, was one in which this schizophrenic type of belief was obvious; on a Thursday, they hailed him as a hero, but a couple of days later, egged on by the religious elitists, they urged the government to crucify him.

That biblical reality notwithstanding even in hero status, the message and mission of Jesus as a social revolutionary is a message that the hero-makers want to, frankly, subvert, recast, and ignore. We are not unlike the Maundy Thursday crowd, praising Jesus (for our own selfish purposes) one moment, but then rejecting him three days later.

He was not rich enough, not “right” enough, not “connected” enough, to be worth caring about deeply. The upper class cares for its own but Jesus just did not belong to them.

We Christians may not all be upper class, but we have issues and beliefs which we hold onto, and frankly, this notion of Jesus as a revolutionary, one who challenged the status quo, just does not work for us.

Sad.

In essence, we are still capable of worshipping him, a homeless man, on a Sunday …and evicting him on a Monday.

A candid …and painful …observation.