The USA celebrates its 244th anniversary of independence from the United Kingdom Saturday. In reality, the phrase, Independence Day, is a fiction. Like the mythical Sankofa bird of African lore, we can only fly forward by looking behind us. Our nation has not thoroughly re-viewed the past as we move forward. Consequently, we must grapple with our horrible legacy of slavery, lynching, and racism to understand why lynching and racism keep happening. The ideology of white superiority got George Floyd lynched. This legacy was set place 157 years before the USA even formally existed.
Yet, when we ignore history, we are bound to repeat it.
Blacks were mostly enslaved and had been for 10 generations already by the time “independence” occurred. Black men could not own land or vote until slavery ended with the Civil War in 1865. Since then, Black men have had their voting rights repeatedly blocked and rejected. In large part, poll taxes and literacy tests kept Black women from voting until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, an entire century after the Civil War ended.
So when we use the word “independence,” we must acknowledge that independence meant very different things based on one’s race and gender in 1776. Unfortunately, independence still means different things based on race, gender, and sexual orientation today. The demographics of straight, white, and male still dominate American society as evidenced especially by the ideology and behavior of the current president of the US. We perpetuate our social crises by not understanding their historical roots. As a consequence, we also fail to update our understanding by failing to update our language and communication.
Activism changes the language
Amazon reports its best-selling American dictionary is by Merriam-Webster. The dictionary’s editorial staff announced it will be improving the definition of racism after receiving a challenge by recent college graduate Kennedy Mitchum. She wrote, “Racism is not only prejudice against a certain race due to the color of a persons [sic] skin, as it states in your dictionary.” Mitchum continued, “It is both prejudice combined with social and institutional power. It is a system of advantage based on skin color.” She got a call the next day from an editor for Merriam-Webster. They agree with her.
An editor for the dictionary, Peter Sokolowski, said that the definition has not been updated for decades and that the definition would be “sharpened.” The editorial staff will be tweaking other definitions of words related to racism. Mr. Solokowski made a poignant observation, “Activism doesn’t change the dictionary,” he said. “Activism changes the language.” Additionally, changing the language changes the way a society thinks and acts.
As our behaviors change for the better, we must be sure our manner of description reflects our newly-acquired understanding. Mitchum noticed that white classmates used selective parts of the current definition of racism during discussions about race and racism to justify their opinions.
Ms. Mitchum did something about it and taught us how speaking up can make a world of difference. She challenged the editorial staff of America’s most influential dictionary to reframe our thinking about racism. This is exactly the kind of innovative thought and action that we need now.
Independence Day is a fiction for many Americans
Like “racism,” the American definition of “independence” has historically fallen far short of being comprehensive. For people of color in this country, true independence–the ability to live freely–is situational at best. We must face the fact that “Independence Day” is a fiction for many people of color in the “good ole US of A.”
For example, last year, African American Jaylan Butler was a member of the Eastern Illinois University men’s swim team. Apparently, Jaylan “wandered a bit too far” from his team’s bus during a highway comfort stop as the team returned from an out-of-state meet. He wound up with a gun to his head, a heavy cop’s knee to the back, and his face pressed into the snow.
Then Jaylan heard a deputy say, “If you move, I’ll blow your (expletive) head off.” These kinds of stories happen repeatedly in the US because our “societal DNA” has chains of mutated chromosomes causing a genetic disease. The symptoms include an irrational fear of African Americans and disproportionate use of force. Though terrible, this disease is curable with proper care and attention.
When one group of persons is diminished, we are all diminished
While horrible to witness, watch the videos of unarmed Ahmaud Arbery‘s and George Floyd’s lynchings. We see real-time presentations of white-American fear of black people–“negrophobia,” an innate or psychic fear of black people. As Arbery’s killers stalked him with a pickup truck, two against one, they surrounded him as if on a trophy hunt. Fearing what Arbery was “up to,” by running through a white neighborhood, these men, as co-conspirators, fired on Arbery in the heart with a shotgun at point-blank range.
Whether with noose or knee, for George Floyd the result was the same. Only the manner of the lynching method distinguished itself from the hanging of “strange fruit” of years past. For those yearning to breathe free, eight minutes and forty-six seconds on the necks and backs of racial minorities seems eternal, like racism itself. When a man says he cannot breathe, we have learned that such a situational lack of freedom has devastating consequences for all of us, for when one group of persons is diminished, we are all thus diminished.
We cannot watch the video of Breonna Taylor’s lynching because the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) only recently adopted a policy requiring body cameras two months after Taylor’s extrajudicial killing. The botched, no-knock raid occurred at 1:00AM. There is no other way to put it, Breonna was slaughtered–shot at least eight times according to the coroner’s report. Inconceivably, no criminal charges have been filed to date.
And, ironically, Breonna had dedicated her life’s work to caring for people. At the time of her murder, she worked as an emergency medical technician. Breonna aspired to a nursing career, to a home and to a family.
It is impossible to dream and to be independent, or self-standing, according to one dictionary definition, when you are shot dead in your own bed.
Astonishingly, LMPD officers lynched David McAtee who was working at his business in June 2020. The officers chose to leave their body cameras turned off despite the newly established protocol. This too is a form of cutting and pasting that must end, as these officers defined their accountability for racist conduct by cutting out the evidence.
These abominable actions are like an endless train wreck from which we habitually avert our eyes. Aversion has never been an option. Sanitizing, editing, cutting and pasting, whatever you want to call it, we must bring this freight train to a full stop.
Now is the time for us to love our neighbors
Many Christians have also been selectively cutting and pasting the teachings of Jesus, our redeemer, and political theologian. As a Jew, Jesus constantly referred to the Hebrew Testament requirements to care for the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the stranger. And shamefully, the Church has often been in league with slaveholders and racists across history. Now is the time for us to love our neighbors as Jesus taught.
Three weeks ago, the Rev. Dr. William Barber II addressed the Poor People’s Campaign to lament the death of George Floyd. Dr. Barber’s speech explored the poetic beauty of Isaiah 58, a text about being righteous even in the face of an all-encompassing wickedness. He unfolded that passage like a piece of origami, an origami dove of peace.
Drawing on the reading, Barber called upon us to fast from what is wrong so that we “shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in” (Is. 58:12). By fasting, or stopping our participation in systemic racism, we become part of the solution. “Just stop it,” Barber intoned, referring to stopping the wickedness and injustice of racism. “Just stop it.” I think he would accept the friendly amendment, “Just stop cutting and pasting the past to justify the present.”
Fueled by racism and often by ignoring the Gospel and twisting the epistles, we have gone down a blasphemous path. The fact is that this country has a verifiable and rapacious appetite for extrajudicial killing—lynchings1, often incited by mobs, that occur outside of the legal justice system2. Mr. Floyd was lynched. It is indisputable. The judge and jury were absent and could not test the evidence. Only the prosecutor-cops and executioners were present. As an attorney and a priest, I know we can do so much better than this.
Detractors may say that I am exaggerating things. I’m not. Watch the YouTube video about the Jim Crow Museum. Look at the horrible proofs collected by Ferris State University Professor David Pilgrim.
Read our history, but read our true history without the whitewashing that has gone on for centuries. Read our history with George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in mind.
Remember 14-year-old Emmett Till. He was beaten and tortured beyond recognition to the point that his mother, Mamie Till, insisted that his casket remain open for the world to see what was done to her son. Even today, his marker on the Tallahatchie River has been defaced so many times that it has now been bullet-proofed.
Visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, AL. View their program, “From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration.” Experience some stories from over 4000 lynchings. Learn their names: Michael Donald, James Byrd, Jr., Freddie Gray, Jr., and now Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, David McAtee, and on and on. Don’t look away. Let all of God’s children face this epidemic together.
I am not encouraging faith advocates to establish a particular supreme religion. I’m inviting all faith members to participate in democratic public rhetoric. The First Amendment guarantees our free exercise of religion and free speech to address our petitions in the public square. Let us all collaborate on dismantling the racist machine. We have the ability. We have the roadmaps of our sacred texts to encourage us along the way. We can be repairers of the breach together. We can stop all of the cutting and pasting, the editing of past and present, and do what is right.
Conclusion
The world’s religions have tenets comparable to the Golden Rule of Christianity, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That’s a mighty instruction from which we can work together, including those who do not have a faith practice. Let us reflect and commit ourselves to know the past so that we can fight the wickedness of lynching, racism and injustice in all of its forms. Let us repair the breach of inequality so that we all experience a true Independence Day every single day for each and every person.
- Ida B Wells-Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, 2012. See also, Michael J. Pfeifer, ed., Lynching beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).
- Jack Shuler, The Thirteenth Turn: A History of the Noose, First edition (New York: Public Affairs, 2014).
