Justice: Odds and Ends

1.  Protest is good; repentance/restitution is better.

Jackie Robinson: "I cannot stand and sing the anthem.  I cannot salute the flag.  I know that I am a black man in a white world."

Colin Kapernick:  "There's lots of things [racial wealth gap, racial profiling, mass incarceration, War on Drugs] that need to change [white repentance].  One specifically?  Police brutality.  There's people being murdered unjustly and not being held accountable.  People are being given paid leave for killing people.  That's not right."

What should white Christians do?  Start a repentance movement?  Symbolized by kneeling on both knees with our foreheads touching the ground whenever the national anthem is sung, whenever the Pledge of allegiance is recited?

Are we "one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all?"  Or are we a deeply divided nation, under the American trinity, with liberty and justice for only a few---a rich, white, male elite?

Billy Graham defined the kingdom of God as "justice for all."  So at its best the Pledge contains a great truth.  But the problem with the Pledge is our founding fathers created a nation for rich, white males;  women, the poor, Native Americans and Afro Americans didn't count as full fledged, equal citizens.  Today, in 2016, they still don't count as equal citizens.  Some progress has been made, yes, but we  are still far from full equality.  Whites are still choosing to protect their vested interests, not to repent of their widespread social evil, of their ethnocentrism and oppression.

2.  New African American Museum on the Mall

As one sees pictures of the African American museum on TV, in the background, the Washington Monument shows up.  What a tragic irony!  The father of our country who owned hundreds of slaves; on the same Mall, we find the Jefferson Memorial; Jefferson, in his lifetime, owned about 600 slaves.  The Capitol building was built by slave labor; the White House was built by slave labor.  Georgetown University, in its early days, owned slaveholding plantations which helped finance the university and at one time sold 272 slaves to forestall bankruptcy and closure.