Are we really sharpening the heart, mind, body, and soul?
I’ve read several essays about the protest and the pain that is wreaking emotional and spiritual havoc due to the continuous killing of black and brown bodies. I know you have, and you, like me, don’t want to read anymore. But the killings are continuous, like an uninterrupted chain of evil, a never-ending waterfall.
In one article, a protestor said, and I paraphrase: “Yes, all lives matter, but Black Lives Matter because we are being slaughtered in the streets all the time.”
Anthea Butler, an associate professor of religious studies and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote an opinion piece for Religion News, titled “A fire this time” in 2016 about the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Religion News republished the same article in June 2020.
Professor Butler refused to be silent with her emotions about continuous killings. She wrote:
“Police are still jacking us up and shooting black people for minor infractions, and white Americans are still yelling, “We want to take our country back.”
America is reaping the bitter fruits of the racist, white supremacist crap it has sown.
What’s next? Hell, if I know. I can hazard a guess: the streets this summer will be full of pain and protest. Police will be even more fearful—and trigger happy. White suburbanites will buy more guns to make themselves feel safer, and Donald Trump will look like a savior. Preachers will ignore, or call on people to pray, but will not act.”
The only difference in 2020: coupled with the police killings is COVID-19 pandemic.
Continuous police killing is like a never-ending waterfall. Bodies drop to the ground aggressively, tears of family and friends roar and rumble, and justice rolls like a bloated corpse.
Like the Psalmist says, “O Lord, how long will the wicked, How long will the wicked rejoice in triumph?” (Psalm 94:3).
It’s been too long. At the height of the civil rights movement, a group of white ministers issued a public statement urging Dr. Martin Luther King, in the name of the Christian faith, to be more patient in his quest for justice and to relax the relentless struggle for civil rights. King’s response came in the form of the famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” as a sad misunderstanding of time, the notion that time itself cures all ills. Time, King argued, “could be used for good or for evil. Human progress, he said, is not inevitable, but rather it comes through the tireless efforts of [people] willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
It’s been more than fifty years, when has time been ripe to do right?
Is the time now with the flood of letters from editors, business owners, college and corporate presidents and CEOs apologizing for their silence, speaking up as allies? Is it creating a relentless list of black resources, streaming Black Lives Matter movies, and republishing and publishing words of Black authors?
Or are these cascading apologies never-ending waterfalls?
Until next time,
Angela
Source: Something is About to Happen, Thomas G. Long