Serving as Equals
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Tag Archives: racism
The Prodigal Parable
The Parable traditionally known as The Prodigal Son (Lk. 15: 11–32) is obviously a story of estrangement and reconciliation and forgiveness. So clear is this message, there should be no diluting or compromising it with violence, discord, or unforgiveness. However, the United States, a country filled with active churches, has the highest rate of incarceration in the world by a large margin. On top of that, we are seeing a spirit of vengeance in politics that seems to keep on growing. Does this parable’s meaning just disappear at the church door on the way out to the “real” world? A lawyer, Preston Shipp, author of Confessions of a Former-Prosecutor is an example of this disconnect. While raised in the church, he dreamed of being a prosecuting attorney from a fairly young age to protect society from the bad guys who victimized the good people. For many years, he fulfilled this dream by working at the state attorney’s office in Nashville. All this time, Jesus’ parable was in a totally alien universe, to judge by his own account. So, somehow, the simple and clear message of the parable is extraordinarily difficult to hear and believe in and act out in life. Why is this? Does the Parable itself give us insights into these difficulties? Let us take a look for ourselves with the help of Preston Shipp.
The elder brother’s relationship with his younger brother is not brotherly, although I suppose a cynic might say that’s what brotherhood is. Given the outrageous way the younger brother left home (demanding, not requesting his half of the inheritance) there are understandable reasons for this attitude. In any case, the elder brother’s calling his younger brother “that son of yours” in speaking with his father, suggests a highly depersonalized relationship with his brother. Preston Shipp writes about how he realized that the justice system is designed to prevent a prosecutor from having any personal awareness of the person he was prosecuting, let alone a relationship. This changed when a professor he had in college asked him to teach some law classes for college credit in a woman’s prison. This experience of bonding with incarcerated persons lead him to leave the prosecutor’s office. He now works for the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. Clearly, the way we manage relationships has a lot to do with how forgiving, or not, we might be. The second time Preston taught a course, he was highly impressed by a woman named Cyntoia Brown. She was underage when convicted of murder, but was sentenced as an adult. As he learned of her exposure to sex trafficking from an early age and other factors, he saw a person in a way that a prosecuting attorney is not encouraged to see a defendant. Imagine his shock when he received a copy of a court document he had filed while still working as a prosecutor, showing that he himself had rejected her appeal of a 51-year sentence and had never recollected it after meeting her in class.
Although the elder son is dutiful in the sense of staying home and working on his father’s farm, the way he berates his father for receiving his younger brother suggests he has little love for the work or for his father. Serious dissatisfaction with one’s work and family situation can harden the heart and make one less inclined to forgive. However, when the father tells the elder brother that everything he has, his elder son also has, we gain the suspicion that perhaps the elder brother was surrounded with blessings, like fattened calves, that he did not see or appreciate. Such lack of appreciation also dampens a sense of forgiveness of other people. The elder brother may have stayed with his father geographically, but his mind and heart seem to have been miles away.
The trauma of abuse or violent crime can make it difficult for the victim to forgive. Preston Shipp encountered many such crimes and knows what they cost the victims, although he also realized that the justice system did nothing to assist such victims except to feed any vengeance they might have. There is nothing in the parable to suggest that the elder brother had suffered any such trauma. The father, on the other hand, was surely traumatized by his younger son’s departure, and yet he welcomed him back with open arms. Cyntoia Brown was traumatized when she saw that her appeal had been denied and that Preston Shipp had been the one who reviewed it and rejected it. Preston expected to be skewered by her when he came to the next class, but he found her deeply forgiving, in spite of her hurt. This particular story has a happy ending in that, with the help of some celebrities taking up her cause which brought her into the public eye, Cyntoia was finally released from prison and has become an activist for many social causes, hoping to prevent what happened to her from happening to other people.
Shipp explains in many ways how vengeance is systemic in our judicial system and throughout our country’s cultural system. This system of vengeance is greatly exacerbated by systemic racism that has characterized American culture since colonial times and continues unabated to the present day. Racism, of course, entails much depersonalization of the other. More important, participation in such as system skews our perception of reality where many things taken for granted shouldn’t be. Will we ever bottom out of this collective sin the way the younger brother bottomed out of his sensual sins? On the other hand, this parable depicts a party being celebrated by an entire household, except for the elder brother. We can take this party as an image of a society transformed by forgiveness and reconciliation, an eschatological vision, we might say. Surely this party is an image of God, in Christ, “reconciling the world to himself.” (1 Cor. 19) Does this image attract us in any way, enough for us to desire to enter into it? Or are we more attracted to a society governed by the elder brother as he berates his father for such a celebration?
.When the father says to his elder son that the younger son had been dead and has come to life, (Lk. 15: 32) the story shifts to the Paschal Mystery. Such radical forgiveness makes one vulnerable, as the father was vulnerable. Who would want to be treated as the younger son treated his father? Who would want to be treated the way the older son treated his father? It is sobering to recall that the person who told this beautiful and edifying story was crucified as a criminal. Can we trust that this victim is risen and is still inviting us to the party?
The Voice of the Canaanite Woman
The opening verses of Isaiah 56 and the 11th chapter of Romans celebrate the incorporation of the Gentiles into the blessings bestowed on the Jewish people by God. Both of these passages make the integration sound as easy as pie but most other portions of scripture suggest that the matter is far from easy, so perhaps the pie is in the sky, well out of reach. The Jewish people had a lot of bad history with Gentile nations, both from being aggressors in the conquest of Canaan and from being oppressed by Egypt, Assyria and Babylon. In Romans, Paul struggles, not with Gentiles, but with his fellow Jews who have, for the most part, failed to accept Jesus as the Risen Lord. We know from this epistle as well as several others, that Paul also struggled with fellow Jews who did accept Jesus but had trouble accepting the Gentiles if they would not accept the Torah.
We can see this tension in the Gospel. Jesus treats the Canaanite woman harshly when she asks him desperately to heal her daughter of a demon. (Mt. 15: 21-28) It is possible, as many scholars suggest, that Jesus was testing the woman to provoke her to her strong act of faith. I’m inclined, however, to think that Jesus himself struggled with the request from an enemy people. Significantly, Matthew’s designation “Canaanite woman” is anachronistic; Mark is more contemporary by calling her a Syro-Phoenician woman. The Syro-Phoenicians tended to collaborate with the Roman rulers, so the bad blood is both current and historical. As a human person, Jesus would have been born in a social milieu where these tensions would have been absorbed from an early age.
Curiously, Jesus does seem to be a little more patient, or at least less impatient, than the disciples. While Jesus is silently letting the woman pester him, as if at some level he is willing to put up with her, the disciples are urging Jesus to send her away, Jesus finally says to the woman that he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. When the woman persists in crying out for help, Jesus shockingly tells her that it is not right to toss the children’s bread to the dogs. One might think this sort of insult would cause the woman to give up and turn away, but she persists with the retort: “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” This plea converted Jesus, convincing him that she had great faith and her faith had healed her child. How might these words have changed Jesus, assuming he needed to be changed in relation to the woman? The woman’s words are quite disarming in the way they absorb the insult without reprimanding Jesus–or do they in a way? As I continuously reflect on the dynamics of race relations in our country, one of the things I am beginning to notice is how black people have to be very careful about what they say to whites who have the power. I am beginning to see that those of us who are white don’t pick up on this sort of dynamic very well. We take our superiority so for granted we don’t see it and can’t hear it.
But Jesus did hear the undertone. As a Jew living in an Empire run by the Romans, Jesus would have known very well the fine art of speaking truth to power. Usually, he would have been in the same subordinate position in relation to a Syro-Phoenician. But this woman was desperately in need and had come to Jesus only to be trashed on account of her ethnicity. The role-reversal would have been startling to Jesus. Suddenly, he was being treated as the oppressor–which he was at the moment. Jesus, who had come to serve, not to be served by oppressed people, would suddenly have been awakened to the truth of his attitude to the Canaanite woman and to the rest of her people, He wastes no time in commending the woman’s faith and proclaiming the healing of the woman’s daughter.
There is much else in this narrative to suggest that Matthew places it in a process leading to the mercy of God to the Gentiles through Jesus. For example, this narrative takes place between the two feedings in the wilderness which are often taken to refer to feeding the lost sheep of Israel and then feeding the Gentiles. The “dogs” get quite a few crumbs from the table after all and so they receive the mercy the woman asked for.
But what is important about this story is that it leads us into our own struggles with racism and other ethnic prejudices. Many of us think we have done the job by denouncing prejudice and racism but we overlook the instinctive reactions we absorbed before we were conscious of what we were absorbing. Jesus heard the voice of the oppressed in the Canaanite woman that we often fail to hear. Just as Jesus, in his humanity, struggled with accepting the cup of his passion in Gethsemane, Jesus here struggled with his own teaching to love his enemy. Just before this incident with the Canaanite woman, Jesus has said that it is what comes out of a person that defiles, not what comes in. We might say that prejudice does defile us to a certain extent as it enters us, but it is when it comes out of us that it seriously defiles us. In the end, love and compassion rather than prejudice came out of Jesus.In his own conversion. Jesus gives us a powerful example of the need to be converted by hearing and seeing and then casting out the demons of prejudice that hold all of us in bondage.
Connecting our Desires
If mimetic desire, grounded in our mirror neurons, holds us all together whether we like it or not, why are we human beings so far apart and alienated from each other? Perhaps the catch is: “whether we like it or not.” If we don’t like being connected with the desires of other people, we will either claim ownership of our desires and dare anybody to challenge this ownership or try to expel the other. Both claiming ownership or expulsion only lock us tightly in rivalry with them so that our desires don’t connect. Instead they crash into each other into a soup boiling over so that nobody gets anything except more rivalry for the sake of rivalry. [See Mirroring Desires below if you haven’t read it already.]
In the history of race relations between blacks and whites in the U.S., from the standpoint of while people, we have had ownership through the institution of slavery and expulsion through segregation such as Jim Crow Laws or what one might call “social custom.” Those of us who deplore such attitudes and their results tend to expel racists, convinced that they deserve it. There is a dangerous tendency to believe that rivalry is a good thing in a righteous cause. Unfortunately, righteousness with this attitude is self-righteousness and rivalry in a good cause still makes that cause disappear in through over-involvement with our rivals.
There is an even more insidious problem here, however. It is well-known that the people who most strongly deplore others for certain actions or attitudes are often disturbingly prone to at least the temptations to the same actions and attitudes. Although statistics consistently estimate that roughly six times as many white people than blacks commit drug offenses, ten times as many blacks are sentenced to prison for drug offenses. All the while, there is consistent denial from those involved in the justice system that there is any racial bias affecting this situation. If these denials are as sincere as, to a chilling degree, I fear they are, then there is a lot of preconscious racial bias circulating like a plague. Speaking for myself as I confessed in Recovering Racists, I think that we all have a serious need of becoming more aware of our preconscious attitudes.
This post isn’t just about race relations; it’s about human relations. Our connections to the desires of other people can attract us to some but repel us from others. We tend to find ways to feel righteous about being repelled by some people but we are often rationalizing our preconscious reactions without ever actually thinking about them. Other posts on this blog and my book Tools for Peace look at spiritual practices for living with mimetic desire constructively. On technique is what moral theologians traditionally call a moral examen. This examen needs to be focused on our preconscious reactions to people so as to make them more conscious. This gives us the chance to do something constructive with them. One thing I find helpful is to look a person in the eye. That can easily transform the person before us.
Recovering Racists
I have just returned from the 2013 Theology & Pace conference held in Chapel Hill, NC on “Lynching, Scapegoating and Actual Innocence.” The subject is difficult to work with but becoming aware of what we have done in our own country is a necessary step to finding ways to preventing the same kind of thing happening again. Two factors were particularly important to making the workshop a positive experience. One: a sense that we were exploring the issue as a group and coming to terms with it as a supportive group. Two: the forgiving tone of the speakers. Julia Robinson, who read a paper specifically on the history of lynching and the violent atonement theology that supports it, delivered her presentation in a gentle but firm voice, embodying forgiveness not only in word but from the depths of her being. Such an approach is modeled on the Gospel where Christ the victim forgives us so that we can begin to see our sin clearly and turn from it.
Paul Nuechterlein, the one speaker who was white, confessed to being a racist. This might sound strange, coming from a man who is active in race relations, but it echoed the same admission of a biology professor I had in college many years ago. As it happens, I have never heard a person who actually did show a racist attitude make this admission. It is sobering, but important, that it is not until we repent that we begin to see what we are repenting of and enter into recovery.
The most important thing about repenting and recovering is that we take personal responsibility for ourselves. We cannot take responsibility for the attitudes of others whom we consider racist. I remember telling a person what I had learned about the effect of racial discrimination on a daily basis and that person countered by telling me about a company run by black people who won’t hire whites. I cannot take responsibility for that company but that does not absolve me of taking responsibility for myself.
In entering into recovery from racism and sustaining that recovery, I need to become aware of small things where my own blindness emerges. An example of this blindness on my part came in an earlier entry on this blog post called “Selling Postcards of the Cross” where I wrote about James Cone’s book The Cross and the Lynching Tree. I used the phrase ‘”Cone shows us this truth in spades.” (I have now edited that sentence.) Of course, using this phrase about any writer who is not black would be the complement I intended it to be. I suppose one could say that some people are too sensitive about these things, but I have come to the conclusion that the important thing for me is to be more aware and sensitive and let other people take care of their own sensitivities.
Taking personal responsibility for being a recovering racist can only be done by increasing our awareness of the interaction of our own desires with those of others. Insofar as racism continues to be a strong element in our society, racist desires continue to seep into us at a pre-conscious level. On a more hopeful note, the desires of others to overcome racism also sink into us at this same pre-conscious level. By watching our thoughts, we can become more aware of what desires we are importing and seek to affirm the desires that seek to overcome prejudice, the desire to feel superior to some people, and complacency with misuse of power that keep some people down. Most of all, we must support one another.
See also: Knowing the Wild Things Between Us
Selling Postcards of the Cross
“They’re selling postcards of the hanging
They’re painting the passports brown.”
White boys like me mostly didn’t know what Bob Dylan was singing about when “Desolation Row” first came out on “Highway 61 Revisited.” James Cone’s book The Cross and the Lynching Tree tells us it was about lynching. Lynching was a public spectacle where people took pictures and made postcards out of them.
Cone goes on to argue that the lynching tree was a series of grisly re-enactments of the crucifixion of Jesus. He also demonstrates on how very difficult it has been and still is for Americans to see this truth. Reinhold Niebuhr, arguably the greatest American theologian was, in spite of his social concerns, blind to this reality. Even black people have had trouble seeing this connection, though Cone shows how some black women, especially Ida B. Wells articulated it powerfully. He contrasts Niebuhr and all white liberals with Martin Luther King, Jr. who put his life on the line.
The dynamics of lynching as analyzed by Cone provide powerful confirmation of the theory of collective violence of René Girard. (See my article Violence and the Kingdom of God.) Girard argues that perpetrators instinctively fail to see what they are going. Cone shows us this truth in a powerful manner.
Dylan goes on to sing that “the circus is in town” and then catalogs Western Civilization turned topsy-turvy, suggesting that lynching does this, thanks to the “blind commissioner.”
Cone is right about whites’ blindness to this truth, but Dylan did write “The Ballad of Emmett Tell” in 1963, telling the story in stark terms, though without any Christian reference except to complains that the human race has fallen “down so god-awful low.” Then there is Mark Twain who wrote “The United States of Lyncherdom,” calling lynching for what it was and clearly discussing the human mimesis just as Girard was to do half a century later.
Cone’s book is written calmly, even gently. There is no mincing of words, yet the words are somehow full of forgiveness. The forgiveness in Cone’s words, the forgiveness proclaimed by Jesus, should be enough to undermine our trust in ourselves and our ability to see what we are doing. We must repent not only of lynching, but of our collective hatred of enemies today.
Imaginary Visions of True Peace 