I just finished listening to President Obama's excellent speech in Dallas honoring fallen police officers; the speech was both inspiring and realistic. Read The New Jim Crow for greater depth on racial profiling and mass incarceration.
In my opinion, one of Obama's most important sentences was this: "We ask too much of the police; we ask to little of ourselves." Interpreted: In addition to law enforcement, we expect the police and the whole criminal justice system to be social workers. In addition to dealing with criminals, we expect the police to handle the homeless, the drug addict, the mentally ill. The rest of society, you and I, cop out.
Our churches should step up and triple our support of Habitat for Humanity to build homes for the poor.
Our churches should step up and triple our support of CCDA (Christian Community Development Association) as it rebuilds poor communities.
The health care professionals and social workers should expand drug addiction programs. We should cut our military budget in half; then use the billions saved to fund housing, health and mental health programs. If you don't like government programs, then get heavily involved in church-sponsored programs such as Teen Challenge. Learn to live simply so you can give generously.
President Johnson created the Kerner Commission to study the 1967 race riots---what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent a repeat, again and again. The Kerner Commission did a great job, but LBJ rejected the report. Why? No federal monies were available; they were all tied up in the Viet Nam war. How stupid can we get?
One thing was missing from Obama's speech---a direct call for America, and especially the white church, to repent of the 400 endless years of white ethnocentrism and white oppression. Without full repentance, calls for unity and reconciliation are shallow and superficial.
On the surface, a person could draw the conclusion that the issues of 1968 and 2016 are quite different. 1968 faced the lack of civil rights, legal segregation, Jim Crow, etc. 2016 is facing mass incarceration, racial profiling and the racial wealth gap. But, in my opinion, the underlying causes remain the same.
To refresh my mind, I googled the 1968 Kerner Commission Report (The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder). The fundamental cause: "white institutions created it [the racial ghetto], white institutions maintain it, white society condones it." This creates a separate and unequal society.
Among the social institutions that created, maintains and condones systems of oppression such as mass incarceration is the white American church. The white church maintained white superiority and privilege; it did not repent and then do justice. By and large, over the past 50 years, the white church still hasn't repented, still hasn't done Jubilee justice.
A sobering historical example: The same religious abolitionists who fought so hard to end slavery also wanted the freed black slaves to remain in the South. They did not want large numbers of freed slaves flooding North to become their next-door neighbors. Most abolitionists still believed blacks were inferior as did Lincoln.
The Kerner Commission picks on the media: "The press has too long basked in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with white nam's eyes and white perspective." I am afraid this statement applies to much of the American church as well.
In 1998, Senator Fred Harris revisited the Kerner Commission Report; He concluded: "Today, thirty years after the Kerner Report, there is more poverty in America, it is deep, blacker and browner than before, and it is more concentrated [segregated] in the cities." Any solution will have to be "compassionate, massive and sustained. It will require new attitudes, new understanding, new will." In other words, repentance, love and justice.
The white institutions that created, maintain and condone the racial ghetto---racism, poverty and oppression---include Congress, the presidency, the Supreme Court, Wall Street, the white church, to name a few. To my knowledge, none of these institutions have admitted their guilt and taken steps to change. Instead they have developed clever ideologies to rationalize away their responsibilities.
None of the Republican candidates for president in 2016 quoted and embraced the Kerner Report. Neither did any of the Democratic candidates. President Obama implied white responsibility, hinted at it, in his Dallas speech. But at a time when citizens and police are dying, he needed to be more blunt and specific. The white church needs to step up and lead national repentance--- a repentance that leads to restitution, release of the oppressed, and repair---Jubilee justice.
My next blog on the topic is titled "Community Policing and Community Development."
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