Thursday, October 29, 2015

criminalblackman or oppressorwhiteman

The new "N" word is criminalblackman; crime and blackness are intertwined in the minds of many white people.  Even sociologists spend more time studying black dysfunctions than systems of white oppression.  On the surface, the high incarceration rate for black males seems to confirm this impression of a criminalblackman.

Crime is bad, evil, but the evil connected to white oppression is ten times worse.  So I am coining a new word criminallyoppressivewhiteman.

Last night I watched a Fox News pundit wax eloquent about black violence/crime in our inner cities.  But he seemed to be afflicted with historical amnesia.  There was no mention of the long history of white oppression with few white criminal indictments for evils such as Indian genocide, African enslavement and the theft of half of Mexico's land.

The more an American white talks about the criminalblackman, the more he covers up the fact that he is an oppressivewhiteman.  Almost every discussion whites have about race quickly turns into a discussion of black inferiority, flaws or dysfunction; blacks are THE problem.  White responsibility is largely ignored.


Ta-Nehisi Coates ("The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration") documents the long history of supposed black criminality; the following are some quotations from Coates.

"After decades of mass incarceration that have left the United States with the largest incarcerated population in the world, politicians of all stripes are suddenly declaring the policy a mistake.  But their pronouncements have failed to reckon with the phenomenon's deep historical roots, or with the damage it has done to black families."    Vanishing jobs and persistent racism a part of the story.

"black people are the preeminent outlaws of the American imagination."

"a portrait emerged of blacks as highly prone to criminality. . . . black villainy justified white oppression---which was seen not as oppression but as "the cornerstone of our republican edifice."

"Antebellum Virginia had 73 crimes that could garner the death penalty for [black] slaves---and only one for whites."

"Postbellum Alabama solved this problem by manufacturing criminals.  Blacks [freed slaves] who could not find work were labeled vagrants and sent to jail, where they were leased as labor to the very people who had once enslaved them."

"From the 1890s through the first four decades of the twentieth century, black criminality would become one of the most commonly cited and longest-lasting justifications for black inequality and mortality in the modern urban world."

"If policing in New York under Giuliani and Bloomberg was crime prevention tainted by racist presumptions" in Ferguson "it was law enforcement tasked with the job of municipal plunder."

"The principal source of the intensifying war on crime was white anxiety about social control."

"To return to its 1972 incarceration rate, America would have to cut its prison and jail population by some 80 percent."

Criminalblackman is a classic case of 'blaming the victim' in order to retain white superiority and white privilege, and in order to avoid a focus on the evil of white oppression.

For the rest of the tragic story, read The New Jim Crow.

Republicans, Democrats, Americans in general, and far too much of the white American church have served the American trinity of individualism, materialism and ethnocentrism/racism so that even in 2015 a deep belief and practice of black inferiority and black criminality continues to damage the black community.

What can/should the church do?

1.  Stop rationalizing white oppression, instead repent.
2.  Stop redesigning systems of oppression; instead release the oppressed.
3.  Engage in economic restitution and then repair oppression damaged communities.
4.  Following the Sabbath/Jubilee Year principles of justice, design new systems of societal fairness.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

What is a conservative radical?

According to Ta-Nehisi Coates (October 2015), Daniel Patrick Moyniham was a conservative radical.  What is a conservative radical?  Simply put, a conservative believes in freedom and family; a radical believes in justice.  A conservative radical is holistic in that she/he believes in freedom, family and justice.  A biblical conservative radical (Luke 4:18-19) believes in a freedom that releases the oppressed and a Jubilee justice that repairs the damage done by oppression and then builds kingdom of principles into a new and more just society.

Moyniham served in the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations but did not feel completely at home in any of them.  As a scholar and senator, he thought deeper than any of them.  But he was widely misquoted and defamed asserts Coates.  Coates, a black scholar/writer, has redeemed the unfairly defamed Moyniham, a white scholar/ statesman.  Moyniham deeply believed in society's most important social institution, the family.  All government policy should support the family.

Moyniham served under President Johnson but he did not fully support the War on Poverty because it was too welfare oriented, did not provide adequate support/jobs for black fathers, and did not address the fundamental cause of poverty---oppression.  In his book, The Negro Family addressed both the centuries of white oppression that damaged the black family, created the dysfunction, and then he designed policies to correct them. But the media and many scholars ignored his oppression argument and focused on his description of the tangle of pathology in the black family.  Of course, few whites are comfortable with the white responsibility for oppression so they quickly change the focus to inferior blacks, black dysfunction.

A quotation from Coates:

"President Johnson offered the first public preview of the Moyniham Report in a speech written by Moyniham and the former Kennedy aide Richard Goodwin at Howard University in June of 1965, in which he highlighted 'the breakdown of the Negro family structure.'  Johnson left no doubt about how this breakdown had come about.  'For this, most of all, white America must accept responsibility,' Johnson said.  Family breakdown 'flows from centuries of [white] oppression and persecution of the Negro man.  It flows from the long years of degradation and discrimination, which have attacked his dignity and assaulted his ability to produce for his family."

"The press did not generally greet Johnson's speech as a claim  of white responsibility, but rather as a condemnation of 'the failure of Negro family life.'"  Few whites understand oppression and fewer still accept responsibility for widespread Anglo oppression that caused Indian genocide, African enslavement, and the theft of half of Mexico's land.

Nixon liked some of Moyniham's ideas so he proposed the Family Assistance Plan, but it died in the Senate.

The American church has failed to combine freedom, family and justice because it does not understand the extensive biblical teaching on oppression and justice.  So the clever forces of evil outsmarted the church and designed a new system of oppression---the unjust mass incarceration of young black and Latino males.

American church: stop oppression, do justice or face judgment.

An historical example:  Lincoln freed the slaves---released from oppression.  Hooray!  Well, not so fast.  When the freed slaves walked off the plantation, they were instantly homeless, landless, foodless.  As might be expected, many freed slaves died.  Not a very pro-family policy.  A society that is truly, actively, pro-family, must add justice to freedom.  In an agricultural society, each freed slave family needed 40 acres and a mule to be self-sufficient.  Lincoln and Congress did not pass such legislation; maybe Jubilee justice should have been part of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Freedom without justice is a hollow, shallow victory.  Quickly, slavery was replaced by another system of oppression---segregation, sharecropping, prison gangs and lynching.

Luke 4:18---freedom, release of the oppressed; 4:19---Jubilee/Sabbath Year justice.  Or with liberty and justice for all!

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Trauma and Grace

For those interested in PTSD or PTSS (post traumatic slave syndrome), I now recommend three books:  Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Joy Leary, a black social worker; Trauma and Grace by Serene Jones, a white theologian; and,  a chapter 3 "Soul Anatomy: The Healing Acts of Calvin's Psalms" recommendation by Jones (the best chapter in her book built around Calvin's Commentary on the Psalms).

The following is my review of Trauma and Grace.

PTSD/trauma is caused by violence.  The violence can be either personal (such as rape) or personal/social (such as war or slavery).  Violence is the cause; trauma is the result.  This book is primarily about trauma, secondarily about violence.  A biblical synonym for social violence would be oppression which is found 555 times in the OT.  The best brief but vivid description of the trauma (RSV "broken in spirit") caused by oppression is found in Exodus 6:9.  For context, read also Exodus 1 and  6:1-8.

In Luke 4:18-19, Jesus inserted a phrase from Isaiah 58:6---"to release the oppressed"; in other words, not only the exploited, but the broken in spirit, the crushed, the traumatized, those in a spirit of despair.

Jones describes trauma in the following fashion: an injury, a wound, by a hostile, external force, not an internal flaw or weakness.  An assault on both body and spirit.  Trauma victims feel a threat of annihilation grounded in a real event, a shattering; even witnesses to violence can experience trauma.  Of course, repeated events of trauma such as would occur in lifelong slavery would be much worse than just one incident; such would be overwhelming, truly shattering.

A victim of trauma is described as excessively vigilant, numbness, anxiety, sleeplessness, a compulsion to repeat events, loss of memory, loss of control, choice, meaning, a sense of isolation, fatigue.

"When trauma happens, it becomes difficult for victims to experience the healing power of God's grace because their internal capacities (where one knows and feels) have been broken.  It is hard to know when your knowing faculties have been disabled.  It is hard to feel divine love when your capacity to feel anything at all has been shut down."

Grace needs to be both gentle and powerful.

There are three stages to healing: establishing a safe zone for the telling of the trauma story; the church needs to provide a nonjudgmental place for the hearing of the story;  the church needs to assist in the reintegration  into both everyday life and church life, both short term and long term.  Trauma is often enduring trauma, recycled trauma, relived trauma.

More on Calvin:

"He describes how, as a young and restless scholar in Paris in the mid 1500s, he suddenly found himself on the wrong side of a brewing civil war inside the royal family, and how, in the middle of the night, he secretly fled his French homeland, just barely escaping imprisonment and execution.

"He then describes finding himself in a German town and, rather by accident, being asked to minister to a community of similarly outcast French folks. . . . had been brutalized, as were their family members who remained behind them inside France.  The list of atrocities they suffered was long: they were 'maimed, executed, tortured, burned, and assailed on all sides by the wicked.'  In the midst of such tumultuous harm, he tells us that they turned to him for guiding wisdom and spiritual support to survive.  He reminds his reader that this story is not that different from King David's own, . . . and because of this, the king's poetry had much to teach the Frenchman's outcast flock about remaining faithful in the midst of terrible isolation and constant attack.  As he states it, "In considering the whole course of the life of David, it seemed to me that by his own footsteps he showed me the way, and from this I have received no small consolation."

Next, from Serene Jones:

"Stage One: Psalms of Deliverance: Establishing Safety, Providence, and Divine Witnessing: Psalm 10:12-18."

"Stage Two: Psalms of Lament and Mourning: Remembering and Offering Testimony: Psalm 22."

"Stage Three: Psalms of Thanksgiving: Reintegration of the Mundane and the Scope of Divine Grace: Psalm 119."

Trauma and Grace focuses primarily on trauma, not the violence that caused it.  Now we need a theologian that will give the same thoughtful attention to oppression that Jones has given to trauma.  The much needed book could be titled Oppression and Justice.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

America's Unpardonable Sin?

I have recently decided that there is a second unpardonable sin---the near total failure of the white American church to stop oppression and do justice in behalf of the millions of oppressed poor.  Biblically, oppression is a form of violence that crushes the poor and often it creates PTSD (Exodus 6:9).   Most of the American church either neglects justice (a sin of omission) or participates in oppression (sin of commission).

Theologically, there is almost no literature on the extensive (555 OT references) biblical teaching on oppression.  Rarely is the theme of oppression preached about from the American pulpit.  Wolterstorff asserts that the English NT has been dejusticized.  Result: oppression has run rampant in American society throughout our history including 2015.

In my home state of Iowa, we have a 2 and 24 problem---the worst incarceration ratio in the nation.
Two percent of Iowa's population is black; 24 percent of Iowa's prison population is black.  At least 20 of the 24 percent of this high black incarceration is due to white oppression enacted through the criminal justice system, not to excessive black crime as is commonly believed.  This high rate of oppression is what is truly criminal, evil, sinful; an unpardonable sin because there is no repentance by whites.

When will the white church repent, restitute and repair the extensive damage done to the oppressed.? Why are American systems of oppression never fully eliminated, only redesigned?  (Read The New Jim Crow).  It may be time for America to pray a Daniel 9 type prayer.

Daniel was as holy and righteous a person who has ever lived so he wasn't confessing his own personal sin.  But as a citizen of the nation of Israel, he was identifying with the sins of Israel as if they were his own.  And maybe they were.  We cannot claim the rights and blessings of citizenship and then deny our responsibility for the sins of our nation.  "Great and awesome God, . . . we have been wicked and rebelled. . . . . . . . . "

Here is my Americanized version of Daniel's prayer:  "Great and awesome God, we have sinned greatly in your sight.  Instead of repenting of our national sins of ethnocentrism and oppression, we have self-righteously rationalized them away.  We have called ethnocentrism, American exceptionalism.  We have neglected justice and the love of God.  We have loved money as a substitute for God.

Our national sins are piled high; we deserve judgment, doom, perdition.  If you will forgive us by your grace, we pledge to repair the damage done.  For more, see blog       "Lowell Noble's Writings."

Saturday, October 10, 2015

"The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration"

1.  REQUIRED READING

"The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration," by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic, October, 2015.  Coates is the author of two other excellent articles in The Atlantic, one of which is entitled "The Case for Reparations."

Coates and Michelle Alexander, author of the best-selling The New Jim Crow, are high quality thinkers and writers.  Both analyze with great historical and sociological precision.  Both authors have a deep understanding of American systems of oppression.  Alexander is a Christian; Coates is an atheist.  Both are black; neither writes from a specific biblical perspective.

Coates' 24 page article is full of gems of insight and wisdom.

Throughout American history, whites have engaged in an unending drumbeat of of supposed black inferiority and black criminality---a perfect diversion from white ethnocentrism and Anglo oppression.  Whites have misused the law and the criminal justice system to enforce their racial profiling.  So, in reality, whites are the immoral ones, the criminals par excellence, often with God's 'approval'.

Only a godless people would engage in Indian genocide, African enslavement and the theft of half of Mexico's land.  Only a godless people would engage in widespread injustice and then try to hide their social evil under a veneer of superficial justice.  Only a godless people would misuse religion to cover their diabolic evils.

Biblical justice releases the oppressed, sets things right, makes things right.  White Americans, especially white churches, must repent, restitute and repair; or face divine judgment.

To provide some biblical perspective that neither Coates nor Alexander give, I suggest reading the following Scriptures:

1.  The Messianic passages from Isaiah:  9:6-7; 11:1-4; 16:5; 28:16-17; 42"1-4; 61:1-4.
2.  Mt. 3:1 and Mark 1:7    Repent.
3.  Luke 4:18-30   Ethnocentrism and oppression; justice and reconciliation.
4.  Acts 1:1-8
5.  Acts 8:12; also 28:23 & 31.
6.  Romans 14:17 NEB  "The kingdom of God is justice."
7.  Mt. 6:33 (NEB)  "Seek first God's kingdom and his justice."