Crucifixions among us

Reading James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree is a profoundly moving exercise in learning to see anew: to see in the cursed ropes and trees from which thousands of black men, women, and children were tortured, hung, and killed, the wood of the tree upon which Jesus of Nazareth was tortured, hung, and killed two thousand years ago. For Cone, discerning a parallel between these two “symbols of death” is more than a mere intellectual exercise. Rather, as Cone writes, “The cross and the lynching tree interpret each other,” meaning that Jesus’s crucifixion was truly a “first-century lynching” and that lynchings of black men, women, and children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States were—truly—contemporary crucifixions (James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 161). The God of Jesus of Nazareth, Cone helps us to see, is the God of solidarity with the lynched, the tortured, the executed—the God who was­—and is—lynched on a tree. Thus, for Cone, learning to hold together the cross and the lynching tree—to see one in the other—is the key to being authentically Christian in a country that still carries the weight of the racial injustice upon which it was built: “Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a ‘recrucified’ black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy” (xv).

Images of black fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons hanging from ropes above masses of white people make my stomach hurt. The gravity that pulls her, that pulls him, earthward seems almost to pull me earthward whenever I see it. And the baffling grins on the faces of the white women and men gathered there—what the f---? It is too much for the mind to comprehend. And yet, it is so near in time and space. The second epigraph on page one of Cone's text describes a lynching that took place in Fayette County, Tennessee, which I drive along the edge of at least once a year when I go to my sister’s house outside Memphis. It’s a beautiful area: the road winds through expansive fields with enormous properties dotted with plantation-style houses hemmed in along the road by white-picket fences. The trees near the road I drive along are thick and strong, towering. It has never crossed my mind driving that road that these are the parts where black folks got killed at the end of ropes hanging from trees like these for being black, for loving themselves, for daring to be in a white world.

But Cone calls me to see the lynching tree and the cross not just in West Tennessee, or even in and around Nashville, where plenty of lynchings also took place. Cone calls us to train our eyes to see other places where people are crucified today. For instance, I have seen and stood beside the bench at 2nd and James Robertson where a homeless man was crucified by a gun, the campsite where a man was crucified by the warmth of his own fire that literally swallowed him whole, the stoops and overpasses and alleyways where women and men are crucified by a system that criminalizes them for their poverty. Even more closely to home, more recently, my stomach has been made uneasy by the crucifixions that will likely soon take place nine miles west of downtown Nashville, at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Two weeks ago, I embraced Nickolus at a prayer gathering inside Unit 2, Tennessee’s death row. A few days later, the state set April 2014 as the end of his life—unless he can find alternatives before then. Others, however, are out of options. Like my friend Donnie, one of the most courageous and deeply faithful men I have ever met. His spirit guides him in confidence outside the walls of that place—even if that should happen through the little room with the gurney. But all I can do is think: The state of Tennessee wants to kill Donnie? And Nickolus?

After we learn to see anew that “the lynching tree reveals the true religious meaning of the cross for American Christians today” (161), that the cross and the lynching tree are also the execution chamber, the streets, the places where people are dehumanized and condemned to die, what do we do? In the words of Latin American liberation theologian Jon Sobrino, who Cone quotes, we must find ways to “take the crucified down from the cross” (quoted on 161).

How, then, can we take down from the cross Nickolus and Donnie and Billy Ray and Abu and the seven others who already or will soon have execution dates? At the prayer gathering on Unit 2 two weeks ago, my friend Kurt, also facing down an eventual death sentence, squeezed my hand ‘til it turned purple as he prayed in a booming voice for God to stop the death machine. From where will the answer to that prayer come?

Our societies do, indeed, still crucify and lynch human beings—legally and extra-legally. The first step is to learn to see it in our own communities, as James Cone compels us. The next step is to take our sisters and brothers down off the cross. But the power of death is so strong that it sometimes seems impossible. And yet, Cone suggests, God transforms death into new life. My question is, can pentobarbital—the drug used to euthanize dogs that the state plans to begin using to kill human beings—be transformed into hope and new life, as Cone suggests? If so, I do not yet know how.

I intend to continue responding to Cone’s call to see crucifixion in my own communities, including that of men, women, and children who endure poverty and the burden of criminality, as well as those incarcerated and those sentenced to death. I have never stood in the place of such persons, as Cone has with those who have faced the threat of the lynching tree. But I do know many at risk of crucifixion by name, by face, by the warmth of their touch. I believe more and more—especially after finally reading The Cross and the Lynching Tree—that it is for the liberation of such women and men that theology and ethics must carry out its work.

May it be so. And may the death machines be dismantled.

[Note: The background artwork on this blog, depicting a person in solitary confinement, was created by Derrick Quintero, who is also facing a death sentence at Riverbend here in Nashville.]

Episteme #7

A woman? A minister?

As a white male raised in a “Christian” home, I grew up, as most white males raised in such homes, going to a mostly white church—a “Church of Christ,” in the Stone-Campbell, Restoration movement (Disciples of Christ and the Christian Church have the same roots). Unlike most Churches of Christ in the south and across the country, while its leadership is almost entirely white men, the church I grew up attending in the northeast consists of a number of African American families as well. Race was hardly ever a part of our consciousness in such a way that it was articulated or discussed; rather, we all “got along” quite well, and black families in the church, from my point of view, seemed just as much a part of the congregation as white families.

However, sex and gender, as well as sexuality, were very much on my church’s radar, and therefore also on mine as a young person growing up in it. In her book Plenty Good Room, Marcia Riggs describes a number of scenarios allegedly common in the African American church in which women struggle to attain roles of leadership, are manipulated into subservient and/or sexual roles by male pastors, or are the object of misogynistic expressions of desire. As such, Riggs names “the African American church as a site of sexual-gender oppression in which male power (as clergy exercising patriarchal privilege) operates consciously and unconsciously to create sexism and heterosexism” (Riggs, Plenty Good Room, 29). Riggs writes, further, that African American women and men “labor” “under” a “racist-sexist-capitalist oppression” that prescribes or forces certain stereotypes that become accepted roles into which women and men are pressured to fit, and that, under such pressures, “the sexual-gender relations of African American women and men are mostly reactive rather than creative responses” to their oppression (54). In light of these realities, Riggs posits a renewed “moral vision” for the African American church (95), a “moral education whereby women and men acquire virtues and values associated with a sexual-gender morality” that is constituted by just, relational, balanced power dynamics, as opposed to manipulative, controlling, power-over practices of relating across sex-gender lines (100, 105).

I cannot speak to any experience in the African American church as I grew up in a mostly white church that also included a number of African American families. However, insofar as (as Riggs argues) the sexual-gender injustice of African American churches finds its origins, in part, in white, patriarchal, sexist, capitalist forms of power, then it is possible to speak with some experience, as a white male, to the realities Riggs describes and analyzes in Plenty Good Room.

In the Churches of Christ, women are largely resigned (but for a few “progressive” churches pushing the boundaries in recent years) to a kind of second-class status. In more traditional congregations, women are not allowed to speak at all in church services (aside from singing with the rest of the church, a cappella)—no praying, no reading scripture, and certainly no preaching. The stated source of these restrictions is commonly the Apostle Paul’s prohibitions against women’s participation in various aspects of gathered worship, as well as those of his household codes that position men in authority over women in family life.

I can remember a conversation I overhead as a young boy in which my mother and some of her female friends from church were conversing with a woman new to the church, who was struggling with some of the restrictions place upon women’s participation and leadership in worship. I can remember one of the women, in a well-intended effort to persuade their new friend of the good sense of our church’s guidelines, saying something to the effect of, “I’m glad I don’t have to be a leader in the church—it’s easier to stay out of the way!”

Like some (though not all) of the women described in Riggs’s text, some of the women in the church in which I was raised—wonderful, loving, nurturing, hard-working women, and most certainly “leaders” at least among other women in the church—came to be content with the prohibition against their speaking or leading in church—which is, in Riggs’s terms, an unjust relationship of power—and even came to favor such prohibitions as making for an easier existence.

Just a few days ago, my wife, who was also raised in the Churches of Christ, was officially ordained as a minister through our house church (an official “church” with the IRS), which is ecumenical and affiliated with no single denomination. It was a beautiful, deeply moving ceremony held at the site of Nashville’s old Tent City, and was attended and led by many friends, mentors, family members, and former residents of Tent City, where my wife and others spent years working with and on behalf of people enduring homelessness under the shadows of the highway overpasses above. It was only in recent years that she was even able to conceive of the possibility that she might become a “minister”—the church tradition we grew up in never allowed such a thing to even be imaginable in the first place. And still today, there is only one Church of Christ congregation in the U.S. that I am aware of that has appointed a woman as an Associate Minister. A relative heard about my wife’s ordination, and, because s/he simply has no frame of reference for such a thing, having spent his/her life in the same tradition as we have, was somewhat baffled. A woman? A minister? How is that possible? I can’t blame someone for holding to the only belief on such matters they have ever known. But it’s remarkable how “natural” such prohibitions become when they are presented as God’s word, as the only possible way to do things.

While we do not currently worship in a Church of Christ, we do still have relationships with many people in the tradition, and a number of people in attendance at my wife’s ordination are members and even leaders in local churches of Christ. With my wife’s ordination, and with a blog post she wrote that was, in turn, passed along to many people in the churches of Christ, I believe she has enacted, in some small way, the beginnings of a process of what Riggs calls “resocialization”—an “ongoing” process and set of practices that reorient religious institutions toward sex and gender justice through more equitable and mutual power dynamics (111). I, for one, am grateful and exceedingly proud to have the opportunity to be, as a male, the spouse of a female minister—or, as I like to say, “the Reverend’s husband.” I do not know what difference it will make, but I pray that my wife’s witness will serve to further the “moral education” and “resocialization” of a tradition stuck in forms of “sexual-gender oppression” that are embedded in its very “ecclesial practices” (29). My wife’s ordination, in itself, obviously does not accomplish full gender justice in the church, but it is, I believe, a profound, embodied gesture in the right direction, and I hope it will serve to exert pressure, or at least the pressure of conscience, in those places where women are still not allowed, because of patriarchal, racist, and capitalist norms, to exercise the gifts God has given them.

I would like to further study the dynamics of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism for the ways in which they factor in the prohibitions against women’s leadership. Patriarchy’s influences are obvious, but racism and capitalism are less obvious, and yet I would be interested to reflect on the ways they, too, are at work in prohibitions against women—even white women. I would also like to consider the experiences of black women in the churches of Christ, both white and black churches of Christ (there are both in the U.S., though a larger percentage of congregations in the tradition are white).

Episteme #6

Acceptance and the Refusal to Accept

James Baldwin

Du Bois understood that to be black is in America is to be “a problem” (Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1). But Baldwin understood that to be black in America is to never “really be considered a part of [America]” to begin with (James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 78). “[S]carred by the conditions of [a] life” in which, from an early age, one tries “desperately to find a place to stand,” a life in which mere survival is a kind of miracle, Baldwin understood the reality of being black in America as the reality of being pushed out, unwelcomed, placeless from day one in the only place one knows (73). It is alienation, exclusion, demonization—as if such orientations were inscribed in the very being of the land of the free and the home of the brave.

For Baldwin, calling home a place from which one is perpetually and violently excluded can only result in a kind of sickness, a “chronic disease,” a “dread” that leads to a “rage” one must either live with or surrender to (96). The result of such rage is often a hatred that is oriented at once towards those who exclude and also a hate towards oneself—a multifaceted hatred that is ultimately destructive, but which nevertheless cannot be totally escaped (114). Thus, Baldwin writes, “It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition.” On the one hand, “acceptance…of life as it is,” the acknowledgement that “injustices is a commonplace.” And yet, on the other, the fact that “one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength” (114-115). In the context of a world characterized most dramatically by a fundamental cognitive dissonance—the state of having to stand where there is no “place to stand”—Baldwin posits, with a sense of both firmness and exasperation, that one must intermittently accept and at once absolutely refuse to accept the way things are. In such a tension, Baldwin might say, is survival, perhaps dignity, and, at the very least, a path forward.

Do the Right Thing

I am reminded of the exasperations that have resounded from the lips and actions of other persons of color (both historical and fictitious, and even when fictitious, as real as can be), tired and filled with rage at having no place to stand, of being perpetually excluded and pressed down and brutalized, and finally exploding with a force like that which welled up in James Baldwin that led him to hurl the glass of water at the white waitress in the restaurant in Trenton (98-99). I think of the exasperation of Mookie, Buggin’ Out, Radio Raheem, and others who slowly endured the racism at Sal’s Pizza in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a racism that eventually erupted into violence, and, at the hands of white police officers, death. I am also reminded of an episode of The Wire in which Bodie, a young man who pushed drugs on the streets of Baltimore, and who was possessed by a deep sense of morality and righteousness, exasperated by another death of another friend in a city where life is survival against the poverty and violence of power and the neighborhood it created, blew up and began kicking in the windows of a police car parked at the scene. As he kicked off the rearview mirror, voices can be heard in the background shouting, “Attica! Attica!” And thus, I am also reminded of the uprising at Attica Prison in Attica, NY, in 1971. Fed up with the austere, excessive, violent, and purely punitive conditions at the prison, inmates formed a coup and took over control of the prison, demanding that changes be made. After some successful negotiations with laywers, New York’s Governor Rockefeller sent in the National Guard, who proceeded to retake the prison and, in the process, kill ten prison guards and 29 inmates, with many others wounded.

Attica uprising, 1971

The gift of James Baldwin is his ability to articulate poetically the sickness and rage that wells up in a people who have no place to stand, and the ways in which life lived under such circumstances can only consist in both acceptance and absolute refusal to accept oppressive conditions. Survival and dignity, he might say, depend upon both, at different moments. Manifold characters in TV, film, and literature, as well as real-life women and men, embody the righteous rage that wells up, in between moment’s of survival-as-acceptance, when one is excluded on the basis of one’s race, class, gender, or orientation. The lesson for me, as a white male, is that I must continue to learn—and teach others—that moments of rage must be respected and seen within the trajectory of structural racism and the poverty and violence that are left in its wake. As Baldwin would instruct, however, such rage, when it takes the form of hatred, is ultimately destructive to all parties. But in order to move forward, such exasperation must be given space to express itself.

I would be interested in thinking further about the stereotypes of white gentility and black rage, both in their cultural constructions, and in their corresponding historical moments, and what, theologically and ethically, we might say about the difference between the two.

Episteme #5