Tag: White Supremacy

The hopeful part

Reading The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future by Robert P. Jones, Simon & Schuster, 2023 and RCL Pr29A.

November 24, 2023

I got to the hopeful part.

Robert Jones’ first account of a community attempting to deal with its white supremacist past is set in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. That’s where the fourteen year old Emmett Till was visiting relatives in 1955 when he was abducted in the middle of the night and lynched. Two local white men were tried for his murder but an all-white jury acquitted them. A year later, the two men sold their story to Look Magazine for the 2022 equivalent of $43,000.1 In the interview, they admitted to torturing and killing Emmett.  Double-jeopardy prevented them from being re-tried.

Fifty years later, neither whites nor blacks in Tallahatchie County knew about Emmett Till or the trial. No one had talked about it all for years. One man — Jerome G. Little — grew up in the county where it happened. He only learned about it while he was in Europe serving as a Marine. He came home feeling “something was just in me to make sure that everybody in this county… everybody in this nation understands what happened and why.”2

Little was elected to the Tallahatchie County Board of Supervisors and became its first black President of the Board in 2005. The next year he began forming the Emmett Till Memorial Commission. The black and white members of the ETMC have now been working together for nearly twenty years. Together they built the Emmett Till Interpretive Center which “exists to tell the story of the Emmett Till tragedy and to point a way towards racial healing.”

This week, I have learned at least two things.

First, the truth needs to be told. Names need to be remembered. If we don’t continue to “say their names,” their stories will be forgotten. Emmett Till’s nearly was.  

I have a new appreciation for organizations which commit to tell the truth, and “say their names,” like the church I attend which says this in its weekly bulletin: “[We] acknowledge that we gather on the unceded and ancestral land of the Abenaki, Pennacook and Wabanaki Peoples…”

Second, the route to racial reconciliation will probably not run in a straight line from any one person’s inspiration to its realization. Racial reconciliation is not one person’s work. Individual initiative is necessary, but then it takes a village and living in a village means making room for different perspectives, strengths, limitations and visions.  

What if we are just an individual. What if we haven’t found a village yet. What do we do?  The advice I hear in this Sunday’s gospel is, “the next right thing.”  Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, care for the sick, visit the prisoner. 

While we’re we doing those “next right things,” we can also imagine a better, closer-to-redeemed world.  As the members of Tallahatchie’s ETMC said, (and I love this): “Imagination lets us smell the flowers in the seeds we plant.”3

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

1 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

2 The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, Robert P. Jones (Simon & Schuster, 2023) at 88.

3 The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, at 101.

Lent 2B – On a hill [not] far away…*

Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16, Romans 4:13-25, Mark 8:31-38

Mark 8:34 “Let them take up their cross…”

Before it became a religious symbol, the cross “was an effective and feared symbol of imperial might.”[1] An ancient form of execution, in Roman usage it was a terrorizing deterrent to criminals or those who would challenge the sovereignty of the state. Crucifixion gruesomely tortured and killed the condemned. It was usually done “… in public places or along busy roads, to ensure large crowds and even to offer a kind of public entertainment.” It was a “public spectacle of humiliation, presenting the victim as something less than human….”[3] “[It was] so inhumane that Cicero, writing in 63 BCE, argued it should be outlawed.[2]

There are so many similarities between Jesus’ crucifixion and the lynching of Black men, women and children in America that theologian James H. Cone, wondered what it was which kept White American Christians from seeing the connection. “…[I]t is a defect in the conscience of white Christians and [explains] why African Americans have needed to trust and cultivate their own theological imagination.”[4]

Perhaps the Sunday morning church hour is the most segregated time in America not only because our towns and cities are segregated, but because White Christians refuse to know about the genocidal realities of White Supremacy [5] – a willful ignorance which has corrupted White theological understandings of the cross.

“What is invisible to white Christians and their theologians is inescapable to black people. [For black people] the cross is a reminder that the world is fraught with… many lynching trees. We cannot forget the terror of the lynching tree no matter how hard we try. It is buried deep in the living memory and psychology of the black experience in America.”[6]

Once we see the similarities, the challenge and calling for White Christians comes into focus. Christians are not called to worship and adore crosses. We are called to outlaw them and take them down, whether they manifest as lynching trees or lethal injections or police brutality or a criminal justice and prison system.

As a meditation on Mark 8:34, think about reading James Cone’s book The Cross and The Lynching Tree. In it, Dr. Cone reflected on his own life experience and the stories of Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, Ida B. Wells and others who contended in some way with White Supremacy’s lynching trees. The book is accessible and heart-breaking and tells a truth White Christians need to know.

[1] Punt, Jeremy. Cross-Purposes in Paul? Violence of the Cross, Galatians, and Human Dignity, Scriptura 102 (2009) at 448.

[2] Myers, Ched. Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Orbis Books; 20th Anniversary edition 2008) at 383.

[3] Punt, Jeremy. Cross-Purposes at 449.

[4] Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree, (Orbis Books,  Reprint edition 2013), Digital Location 1075.

[5]  The Equal Justice Initiative documented more than 4,400 racial terror lynchings in the U.S. between Reconstruction and World War II.  The NAACP documents 4,743 lynchings between 1882 and 1968.

[6] Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Digital Location 4563.

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

✽ First line of the American hymn, “The Old Rugged Cross.”