I’ve had the issue of race on my mind more than usual lately. Last week I participated in a panel discussion held at USA following Rob Gray’s and Joe’l Lewis’ remarkable documentary Mobile in Black and White, and then on Sunday we had some sixty people show up at All Saints to view and discuss the documentary as well. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately on matters of race. Of course one doesn’t need twenty-twenty vision to see that there is still a profoundly intractable racial divide in our country. In Mobile alone our schools are about as segregated as they were when the courts ordered integration. Our neighborhoods bespeak the economic disparity between Blacks and Whites. Our beloved Mardi Gras is segregated. One crew , whose membership exceeds five hundred, a good random sample of white Mobile, parades racial slurs affixed to their floats on Mardi Gras day in plain view of our black brothers and sisters among the downtown buildings that represent equality and justice, a sure signal that the problem is very real. Are we not paying attention? Our draconian immigration law in Alabama is indisputable evidence of our intolerance of our Latino brothers and sisters looking for a better life. It wasn’t all that long ago that vast numbers of Native Americans were deported from their lush homelands around this nation to the arid prisons of the western deserts.
On a world wide scale the xenophobic divide between Middle East and the West is deepening, and between Asia and the West as well. Our xenophobic predisposition, our meaning the entire human community, will do us in if we fail to see what it is doing to our world. It is the source of envy, the lust for power which breeds injustice, the fear of those different from us, and it is the source of violence. Its ramifications reach into every segment of our common life. In short it is the “crimp” (as I have said in recent sermons) in our DNA that allows evil to enter our world. Many anthropologists believe that this genetic encryption has found its way into our DNA through centuries of violence; violence begets violence quite literally in the collective memory, violence inbred, remembered on the genetic level.
But we humans have a counter predisposition in our DNA as well, and that is the predisposition to love. If we were to recognize that all of us have this problem of xenophobia and racism, that we are all to some extent guilty of it, and complicit in it, then we take a first step towards standing against it. The first step is to end violence, the second to share power, the third to dignify the abased of our world. These steps apply to the local, national and global levels. We must recognize that we humans are literally kin, of one blood. Indeed we now know that humanity began as an astoundingly small tribe in sub-Saharan Africa. We all, worldwide, have the same ancestry. We are all each other’s “people.” We have a choice now as a local, national and global community, a choice that seems perhaps as important now as it ever has been….a choice that has for millennia been at war within us…and that choice is between fear and the violence fear begets, and love and the new life and dignity and freedom that love begets, and perhaps over the years of practicing such love we begin the healing of our broken nature that we have acquired, and become the very means of God’s gracious commonweal meant for all of God’s family, all the peoples that are of one blood, and all means all….there is no “other.” One body, one blood, one hope in God’s call to us.
