Deceptive Fragments of Truth

Watch out for half-truths, partial truths, fragments of truth, biblical proof texting, historical proof texting, even eloquent error, as they deceptively and dangerously parade as the whole truth.  My favorite example of eloquent error---Pastor James Kennedy's sermon on George Washington in which he turned the bigoted billionaire into a Protestant saint.  Though impressively delivered, in my judgment, it was based 10 percent truth and 90 percent error.  But most of his listeners would have assumed it was 100 percent true.

Most Americans, especially white Americans, but also many black Americans, settle for half truths about social problems.  Fragments of truth are quite seductive and convincing because they do contain a kernel of truth.  Remnants of racism is one of those widely believed partial truths.  Partial truths are very dangerous and deceptive because they give cover for other causes of social problems which then go unknown, unchecked, unchallenged.

When most white American Christians fall for half-truths biblically, historically and socially, but then believe these half-truths are the whole truth, social evils such as ethnocentrism and oppression run rampant.  So it has been throughout all of American history.  Even most abolitionists did not give equal emphasis to both freedom and justice.  Because of the lack of emphasis on justice, soon slavery was replaced by another system of oppression---segregation, economic sharecropping, extensive use of prison work gangs, and lynching.  Not much of an improvement over slavery.   Lincoln believed that the solution to the race problem was to send blacks back to Africa, not to send whites back to Europe.

In the year 2000, Michelle Alexander, a brilliant, well-educated, black lawyer who worked in the area of civil rights, thought she understood why there were continuing serious social problems in the black community.  Alexander wrote in her 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, the following:  "I understood the problems plaguing poor communities of color, including problems associated with crime and rising incarceration rates, to be a function of poverty and lack of access to quality education---the continuing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow."  In other words, the historical remnants of racism argument; this statement contains some truth, but not the whole truth.

After 10 years of experience and extensive research, Alexander discovered that she and most other blacks including the leadership of 180 civil rights organizations only partially understood what was really going on in American society at large and how this was impacting and traumatizing black individuals, families and communities.  Here is Alexander's new insight:  "The new system [of racist oppression] had been developed and implemented swiftly, and it was largely invisible, even to people, like me, who spent most of their waking hours fighting for justice."

The criminal justice system had become not only a legitimate institution that upheld the law and punished criminals; cleverly and diabolically, it had also "emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well disguised system of racialized social control."  One by one, not in a mass roundup, black young males were arrested and incarcerated.  Over the years, the total exploded into 31 million arrests.  This catastrophe started with the 1982 War On Drugs which was combined with racial profiling and a planned media blitz from the White House that targeted young black and Hispanic males.

"A [largely unrecognized] human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch."  Martin Luther King, in 1967, said his Dream had turned into a nightmare.  From 1982 to 2017, the Nightmare exploded.  Alexande named this Nightmare, "mass incarceration."  Mass incarceration was deliberate and planned, not an accident of history.

The following is Alexander's description of the mass incarceration nightmare:

"Studies show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. . . .  In some states, black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times greater than those of white men.  And in major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and thus are subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.  These young men are part of a growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society."