Black as Hell

One of our members at All Saints who is African-American got told at school this week by a fellow student that she was, “black as hell.” She said she was afraid of this boy. One of the insidious realities of white privilege is that we, the privileged, simply don’t have to worry about such things. Indeed, it is hard for me to empathize with the fact that black people fear the police, that they are constantly, every day facing either the explicit or implicit specter of prejudice and disrespect. That is true for black school girls, as well as for the President of the United States. We have a long way to go in this country towards healing the wounds of shaming racism; wounds that are still in our own day being inflicted.

The old admonition from our sacred lore, in both Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament, is still true: That our fear of the stranger would be our undoing. I remember a few years ago, a young boy was lost in a national park, and the reason it took so long to find him was that he had been taught by his parents not to speak to strangers… so, of course he never spoke to the rescue workers passing by him day after day. Dehydrated and hypothermic he was lucky to be found and rescued. Anthropologists say that such so-called xenophobia comes from a primitive fight or flight trait deep in our collective memory as a species; a trait essential for the survival of the tribe. But our sages throughout our moral history warn us against it, not simply as the practice of good manners, but as an essential way of living necessary for salvation (salvation in scripture concerns the whole, not the individual); an essential way ahead in our evolution as a species capable of sacrifice and moral grace and empathy…. a greater and enlightened solution than fight or flight for the good of the whole.

The great sages, the prophets, the mystics in every religion of which I know speak of a sacred contingency that we humans are one community, intimately connected; that the well-being of all is profoundly connected. In other words, we are less when others are treated as less, and more when others are treated as more; that the plight of the dispossessed and the abased has everything to do with the dignity of us all; that in 2015 a little girl is ridiculed for being black, means that the rest of us are in need of repentance, healing and wholeness. That is why our faith can no longer be a source of personal comfort only. That is why our faith must be an activist faith. When a little girl’s personhood is threatened, the personhood of the community is threatened. The behavior of that little boy is learned behavior; he well may be the discriminator of the next generation. And indeed if we allow our society to persist in racist scapegoating and injustice, then the future for all of us looks black… black as hell. It is for us as activist Christians to model behavior that befits the vision of equality and mutual respect that our ancestors of the faith taught, the vision for which Jesus sacrificed his very life.

On Sunday March 8 at both services we will honor those activists for dignity persecuted in Selma fifty years ago, a former generation judged, “black as hell.” These were people who stood up to the deranged fear of the privileged. We will do well to remind ourselves on this Sunday what we are here for….We are to embrace our brother, our sister who comes as a stranger. We are “to seek and serve Christ in all persons and respect the dignity of every human being.” That is not a slogan… that is Gospel activism.