A Misguided Benevolence?

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday January 15, 2006

I know that folks have kinda become accustomed these past few months to hearing me start out my sermon with something funny, but do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a funny story about Martin Luther King Jr? This was the best I could come up with:

Q: Why did the Chicken cross the road?

A: Because she had a dream....

Ok, here’s another one...One afternoon while the zoo-keeper was making his rounds he noticed that the orangutan was reading two books: the Bible and Darwin's Origin of Species. Surprised, he asked the ape, "Why are you reading those?"

"Well," replied the orangutan, "I just wanted to figure out whether I am my brother's keeper or my keeper's brother."

In any event, thought I’d try something a little different this year for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Generally I like to use this Sunday as an opportunity to celebrate Dr. King’s life -- to talk about what a great man he was, and the important things he accomplished (or at least tried to accomplish) for our nation, and also the many ways his life has inspired me personally in my own ministry over the years. But this year I want to try something a little different. This year I want to talk about the unfinished business of Dr. King’s legacy: about the challenges that are still before us a half century after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, and set in motion the chain of events that would eventualloy lead to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and in the process elevate this young, southern, profoundly eloquent black Baptist clergyman to national and then world-wide attention.

I’ve been thinking about these issues not only because of the ways that they’ve come up during the Samuel Alito confirmation hearings, but more particularly as I’ve been reflecting about the racial overtones and subtexts of the recent riots in France, and of course the tragedy of New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. I sincerely believe that thanks in large part to the work of Dr. King and of those who followed him, America potentially has a great deal to teach the world about diversity, pluralism, and how to live together peacefully and prosperously in a multicultural democracy. But before we can effectively teach these lessons to others, we first have to finish learning them for ourselves.

We’ve certainly had more than enough time to do our homework. The first black African slaves were imported into North America by the Dutch in 1619, although both the Portuguese and the Spanish had already introduced African slavery into their American colonies almost as soon as the New World had been “discovered” by Europeans a full century earlier. By 1776, when Thomas Jefferson and the Continental Congress declared to the world that “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...” there were approximately half a million Americans of African descent living in a condition of involuntary servitude in the territory that would soon become known as the United States -- a number that would grow to nearly four million by the time of Emancipation four score and seven years later, despite the fact that the Jefferson administration had outlawed the further importation of slaves into the United States in 1808, and that all of the northern states had already abolished slavery within their borders by 1804.

But Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793 had revolutionized the economy of North America, and in the process created a vast internal market for slave labor, which domestic slave traders were more than happy to supply. The happiness of both southern planters and northern mill owners was pursued at the expense of both the liberty and often the lives of a captive labor force whose only real share of the prosperity they generated was to be beaten and whipped, to be raped, and to witness the systematic destruction of their families as husbands and wives, sons and daughters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces were “sold down the river” in order to pick the cotton that made the textile industry here in New England possible.

And then it was only after another century of discrimination and exploitation, of segregation and sharecropping, and an intentional and systematic suppression of liberty and denial of justice often violently enforced by night riding lynch mobs, that Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and addressed the quarter of a million people who had gathered there to listen to him, and countless more who would hear his message through the media, both that day and on down through the years. The words King uttered that day, and especially his vision of a time when “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood,” and where “little children will...live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” remain so vividly in our minds that we can easily overlook the point he was trying to make earlier in the speech: that the people assembled there that day had “come to our nation’s capital to cash a check....a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice....”

We Americans like to believe that we live in a Land of Opportunity: a “melting-pot” of immigrants from all over the world, where anyone who is willing to work hard and sacrifice can create a better life, if not for themselves, than at least for their children. And yet there is one significant and easily-recognizable group of our citizens who still have not fully shared in this promise. Their families have typically been in this country far longer than mine, for instance; and for generations they have done much more than their fair share of the truly difficult, back-breaking menial work that has made American prosperity possible. The persistent influence of this long-established cultural racism becomes even more problematic when we recognize that the idea of “race” itself is simply a social construction. It has no basis in modern biology; it is merely something we have taught ourselves to see. Biologically, the children of former slaves and the children of former slave-owners often ARE literally brothers and sisters to one another, or at the very least distant cousins. It’s not a pretty story, but it is a scientific and a historical fact. Racial inequality is the lingering legacy of a 500 year old ideology which was used by one side of a large, extended family to justify and excuse the buying and selling of the other side of that family as property, exploiting them as if they were merely another form of livestock, and shamelessly profiting from that exploitation.

There’s at least one additional complicating factor in this already complex social equation, which is that because of this long heritage of economic exploitation, skin color has also become a marker of social class in this supposedly-classless society of ours. Yes, it’s a stereotype, and yes it’s also a form of prejudice, but the sad reality is that even today, if your skin happens to be dark, the immediate assumption (often not without reason) is that you are poor as well. And if you also happen to be young, and male, and wearing a particular style of clothing, a lot of people are automatically going to presume that you are dangerous and up to no good as well. All too often these kinds of negative expectations become self-fulfilling, as young people learn to see themselves as others see them, and give in to the pressure to live up to the stereotypes. And on some level it doesn’t seem to matter how hard you work or how much you study, how well you dress or how wealthy you become, even whether your image becomes a beloved international cultural icon and your name a familiar household word. Michael Jordon or Michael Jackson, Oprah or OJ. You may be rich, but you’re still not white...and in a world where black or white still seems to matter, it can often seem like that’s the ONLY thing that matters.

The complexities of healthy race relations are baffling even for the most perceptive and well-intentioned. No one now living in America today is individually responsible for the injustices of slavery, even though many of us have benefited indirectly and collectively from the legacy of that peculiar institution. I think it’s a little more difficult to make the case that the descendants of former slaves do not somehow still suffer from the vestigial consequences of their ancestors’ oppression, even though it’s unpopular to acknowledge that reality in a society which values the ideal of self-reliant individualism. How can we possibly hope to have repaired the social damage done by four and a half centuries of legally sanctioned injustice in a mere four decades? Certainly we’ve made a great deal of progress since that day two score and three years ago when Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln memorial and insisted that Uncle Sam make good on his bad check. But the interest alone on that enormous debt may well be more than we can pay back in our lifetimes. And the longer we wait to pay what we owe, the harder it will be to pay it back in full.

I know there are many people in our society, and probably many people right here in this church, who dismiss the idea of paying reparations for the injustices of slavery as hopelessly naive: at best a form of misguided benevolence intended primarily to assuage liberal guilt, and with little real chance of correcting the situation it presumes to address. And if it were simply allowed to become a matter of writing out checks to every living descendent of slaves now residing in America, this would doubtlessly be true. But it also occurs to me that once we accept the undeniable truth that the children of former slaves and the children of former slave-owners are in fact members of the same family, there is another tried and true method for giving a hand-up to one’s down and out relatives.

Try to imagine how you would react if one of your children dropped out of high school and started hanging out with a tough crowd, experimenting with drugs and running afoul of the law. I know it happens, even here in a place like Carlisle; but I also imagine that most of us would make every possible effort and spare no expense to get our child back on the right track again, and that even if we ultimately failed in our task it wouldn’t be for lack of trying. None of us want to spoil our children, but none of us want to see them fail either...so we try to give them the skills they need to succeed in the world, while at the same time attempting to shield them as best we can from at least the potentially most disastrous consequences of their inevitable mistakes. And if they need a favor, or a loan, or a job, or simply a helping hand from the old man...well, who among you, if your child asked for bread, would give them a stone?

Of course, there is a down-side to old-fashioned Nepotism which needs to be taken into account as well. When people mistakenly learn to take their advantages and privileges for granted; when success comes too easily, and certain individuals are promoted over other deserving souls solely because of their family connections, not only does it call into question the legitimacy of all their other achievements, but they may also fail to develop the abilities they need to confront and overcome real adversity when they meet it. Finding that right combination of challenge and preferment, which allows individuals to learn from their mistakes without being destroyed by them, is a delicate matter. The pressure to succeed in a community where expectations are high and failure is simply not an option can feel overwhelming. But it is marginal compared to the stress of living in a fundamentally hostile environment where the consequences of even the slightest failure are often fatal.

Navigating a world where the idea of race is understood as just a fiction, but the consequences of racism are still very real; where individual resonsibility and achievement are valued, but collective obligations conveniently overlooked, and collective privileges taken for granted; where skin color has become an indelible marker of social class, but the harsh economic and cultural realities of a society divided by class are often ignored or denied by those who benefit from them most; and where stereotyped expectations and prejudices shape the perceptions and the experiences of both the Privileged and the Marginalized, is certainly not easy for even the most humble and enlightened souls. Yet the path from where we are to the world envisioned by Dr. King leads through that complex labyrinth, and up a steep (and often slippery) slope to the top of a mountain, and then beyond. Let’s not be afraid to follow where it leads. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because she found the courage to pursue her dreams, and to sing aloud as she walked, in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

“Free at Last! Free at Last! Thank God Almighty, we are Free at last....”