Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good
I spent a few hours tonight with regional churches—and will report on what I noticed in tomorrow’s post.
In the meantime, I’m reflecting on all of the ways that our historical focus has undermined our ability to deeply see the social stakes, why Black people are so fed up, and what we can do differently.
More tomorrow.
This casual essay, which began as a series of tweets posted over 3 hours on July 4, 2015, focuses on the English, Caribbean, and mainland U.S. components of the Western Hemisphere’s story: these are the parts that intersect with my lineage. There is much, much more to be told, particularly of the Black Africans that White Spanish and Portuguese traders took to South America. There are also many others more qualified than me to tell the South and Central American chapters of this story.
As far as I can tell the only appropriate place to start this story is 12,000 years ago with the ancestors of the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.
When they first arrived on this continent, fanning out from the north and from the south, Christianity had not yet been invented. 11,400 years later, when Portuguese, Spanish, and other European sailors got lost in the Western sea, there was no such thing as a Protestant either. The indigenous nations in the northernmost territories of this continent successfully repelled the Norse at the start of the 2nd millennium. But they couldn’t stop the Western Europeans from sailing west.
In most ways, the 15th Century was discontinuous with the era I was fortunate enough to be born in. But it was continuous in two ways:
By 1619, English traders and pirates had been touring the Atlantic for just over a hundred years. Giovanni Caboto made the first trip between Bristol and what’s now Canada for England’s Henry VIII—but that was just the start.
When we say history is usually written by the victors, this is what we mean: every fall, United States residents take a few days off and argue about 1620. Good, plain-minded Americans have their children dress up as turkeys and pilgrims and wave corn husks and reflect on gratitude. Every fall! But there was 12,000 years or more years of history here prior to 1620.
I make it a point to read articles from indigenous writers at every national American holiday including the one some celebrated on July 4. Read, for example, Mark Charles (@wirelesshogan) on how the Declaration of Independence smears and defames indigenous people. Also read Simon Moya-Smith (@SimonMoyaSmith) and the web publication Indian Country Today (@indiancountry) for stories on the ongoing and vibrant-despite-everything indigenous life on this land.
“America, America! God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.” —Katherine Lee Bates
The first permanent English settlement on what’s now the US was in Jamestown, Virginia. Its birth year was 1607, and it was one of three formed around that time. A comparable company docked in St. George’s, Bermuda (1612), and a third claimed rights to St. John’s, Newfoundland, now Canada.
The Jamestown colony was governed by a contracted stock-based structure called the Virginia Company of London. The Virginia Company had the full authority of the English monarchy to come west, seek gold, and claim land around the Chesapeake Bay. So when English separatists eventually got here in 1620, they found indigenous people, prior European settlements, and a small African population.
Every second of the United States’ history is entangled with migration, human trafficking, labor, and commerce. In the Virginia Company (1606-1624), we can see the corporation preceding the state. The song of the American state has always included a profit bassline. The driving motif has not been wonder. It’s not been escape from tyranny. The driving motif has been resources and power, and “One ring to rule them all.” That ring is commerce, backed by religion.
From the very first boat, the United States’ European settlement project has privileged the corporation. And this makes rulings like Citizens United vs. FEC much more aligned with the US national project than departures from it. We’re simply becoming more explicit about the comparative value of the human life. It’s a calculus usually only implied in common rhetoric: our value is latent in the government’s continuing and routine treatment of indigenous, Brown, and Black peoples on this continent and beyond.
At the National Cathedral’s July 4 organ recital this year, the host quietly and soberly told the crowd, “This nation was shaped from borrowed materials and transported peoples.”
They weren’t borrowed, though. They were stolen and never returned. They weren’t transported. They were kidnapped and used for profit. Even in our effort to face the history every holiday, we continue to resist language that doesn’t occlude and obfuscate.
As I’ve searched for those Black people who were already here when the Mayflower docked, I’ve only come across a few names and thin stories. *
There’s “Juan Pedro,” a Spanish-speaking Angolan who, born free on the African continent, became war booty for the Portuguese. He was born in 1593, and enslaved 26 years later. The Portuguese slavers on the San Juan Bautista marched him to the port of Luanda and set sail for the New World.
Take a moment here to note the name of their ship. The San Juan Bautista. The St. John the Baptist. John the Baptist was a character in the “good news” stories of Jesus who assumed responsibility for preparing people for Jesus’ public work.
But there was no good news in the hold of that slave ship. The crew of the English ships the Treasurer and White Lion boarded the Bautista and took possession of its cargo and all the enslaved on it. That was how Juan Pedro ended up with 349 other Africans working on the plantations of the Bermudan governor.
And then there was the 20 or so slaves already on the Treasurer, the ship that raided the Bautista for England. And the 32 blacks already in slavery in Jamestown in 1619.
There was a woman deposited from Africa to Jamestown via The Treasurer who we only know as “Angela.” And there were “Anthony” + “Isabella,” two of the 1619 cohort, who gave birth to William Tucker, the first known Black child on the continent (1624). What possessed these two—what possesses any of us?—to sustain love and create new life under these conditions? I still don’t know.
“Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” —Francis Scott Key
The Dene Nation’s Georges Erasmus has said that community isn’t possible without common memory. The one thing that the United States does not have is a common memory. What students and voluntary immigrants like me learn via textbooks, monuments and the media does no justice to the 12,000-year histories of this “land of the free.”
The United States began with White families that saw no conflict between wriggling out from under the Crown and using force to master others. Not only were they and their generations affected by this logic, but, through the baby state, it also ensnared the NDNs they dispossessed and determined the environment in which Africans they imported would be expected to work without pay and freedom for the next 89 years. And so it was incredibly appropriate that the Independence Day recital at the National Cathedral included both Darth Vader’s Imperial March and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Many of us know that Thomas Jefferson included an anti-slavery clause in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.
The clause didn’t make it into the final version: when the draft went before the majority, they were too comfortable with slavery to remove it. And the English abolitionists noticed. Here’s Thomas Day in 1776:
In 1835, Rev. Dalcho wrote, “The celebration of the Fourth of July belongs exclusively to the white population of the United States.” A minister who owned slaves in South Carolina, Dalcho wrote in his local paper that the US independence war was a fraternal quarrel “among equals,” that it did not concern “Negroes.” All this despite the fact that Black soldiers fought on both sides of that war. Indigenous people also fought on both sides of that war. But a slave-owning Christian minister said the Fourth of July had nothing to do with them.
Oh, how convenient it must be to have religion, ideology, and politics at the ready to crown you the apex of creation.
I recently argued we need to “tell the truth” about US racism. But that requires us to tell the truth about the US. Even more basic than the Union or Confederate battle flags are the battles begun with the first ships and the first New World pulpits. The logic’s embedded in the first drafts of the Declaration and constitution, in the battle-poem-turned-anthem, and the battle hasn’t ended.
“This nation, for all its hopes and all of its boasts, will not be free until all of its citizens are free.” —John F. Kennedy
The battle hasn’t ended.
I remember Juan Pedro, the 26-year-old Bantu man I mentioned earlier who survived the Atlantic crossing only to be traded again. Lord Rich, former Bermudan governor, sent Juan to Essex, England, and then sent him to Plymouth a year later. Juan was the first Catholic in Plymouth, and in the New World war between the Calvinist Puritans and everyone else, Juan Pedro lost.
Plymouth’s slaves gained freedom in the mid 1600s as England went into its civil war: would-be loyal Royalists hoped to attract free Blacks. By the 1650s, Juan Pedro had found land to own. He was also a Black Catholic man caught in anti-Catholic, rising White Protestantism. In 1654, he armed himself in support of the Catholics in Maryland and Virginia being attacked by regional Puritans—and as they fell, so did he. Virginians executed him by firing squad in 1655. He was 62 years old and a long, long way from home.
Not all Western Hemisphere Black people feel this way, but some of us sense, from time to time, that we’re also a long way from home. We make lives here, lives of faith, lives beyond faith, we build houses and families, we have children in hostile territory. We survive. I don’t know why we survive. I only know that we do.
The last year has been hell for Black people in the United States. I was so excited about Independence Day 2014. I didn’t have to work on July 4, for the first time in a decade, and so I stopped everything—all writing, editing, and reading—and instead ate tasty, inauthentic New World pizza and watched the World Cup. I had just that single month where I thought the illusory American Dream might include a viable role for someone like me.
And then Ferguson became a hashtag.
Every month after that, there was some other trauma, some new revelation of trauma, some belligerent sign this wasn’t “home.” The last year, I’ve manifested the most amazing experiences of my life and I’ve also felt the most besieged in my life. The hashtags keep on coming. The war dead keep piling up.
That’s why the only way I could think of to handle the holiday this year was to wear all-black, write my little heart out, and light fire on my TL with this article.
Thank you for witnessing my process and also witnessing our collective story.
ACTION: Mark Charles would like to convene a conference in Washington, D.C. at the end of 2016 to begin building a common memory. There’s so much merit in this goal. Please work with the 5 Small Loaves community to make it happen.
* I drew several of the most humanizing details about Juan Pedro, the Bantu Catholic freeman-turned-soldier, from Tim Hashaw’s book, The birth of Black America: The first African-Americans and the pursuit of freedom at Jamestown (2007). Hashaw wrote this book to help fill in some of the deep silences about African-Americans in history on this continent.
I especially appreciate his work because one of my frustrations as I wrote this, and one of my perennial frustrations about national histories generally, is not being able to hear these ancestors in their own voices. Some weren’t literate and couldn’t write. Others who did write were writing apologetics for the White moderate and abolition movement, a social and political movement structured around persuading voting White Americans that emancipation was a moral good, even when it failed to persuade them that Black people and White people were also equal. I want to hear my ancestors in their own voices. Perhaps, one day, my descendants will also want to hear mine.
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American Anti-Slavery Society (1835). The Anti-slavery Record, Volume 1 (digital edition, pp. 115). Retrieved July 3, 2015, from https://books.google.com/books?id=_vISAAAAYAAJ
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—. (2003). Before the Mayflower: A history of Black America. Chicago, IL: Johnson Publishing Company.
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Charles, M. (2014, December 22). The Doctrine of Discovery: A buried apology and an empty chair [blog post]. Retrieved July 5, 2015, from http://wirelesshogan.blogspot.com/2014/12/doctrine-of-discovery.html
—. (2015, April 24). Creating a common memory with the Doctrine of Discovery [blog post]. Retrieved July 6, 2015, from http://wirelesshogan.blogspot.com/2015/04/creating-common-memory-doctrine-of-discovery.html
—. (2015, June 11). The dilemma of the Fourth of July [blog post]. Retrieved July 3, 2015, from http://wirelesshogan.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-dilemma-of-fourth-of-july_11.html
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Hashaw, T. (2007). The first martyr. In The birth of Black America: The first African-Americans and the pursuit of freedom at Jamestown (pp. 127-151). NY: Carroll & Graf Publishers. Retrieved July 2, 2015, from http://www.scribd.com/doc/151439192/John-Pedro-First-Martyr#scribd
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Note: This article features Anansi, the Akan spider-man. And because I love you, it includes no images of actual spiders. —KM
A lot of people I know skipped church last weekend. A lot of Black people I know skipped church last weekend.
A sprinkling of days after a young White racist slaughtered nine praying Black people in the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South, a lot of sweet souls skipped church, and I was tempted to be one of them.
Brokenhearted, I was tempted to crawl back under my summer blanket and wail in the timeless language of tea and chocolate and fitful sleep. Instead I rose and put on a dress shirt instead of sackcloth, and I went to the morning service at my congregation.
I left the sanctuary as empty as I’d entered it. In fact, I left even emptier than I’d entered it. I’d walked into the building with two mites of hope, and my offering dissipated in an unrelated sermon series and two nods to Charleston: one reference to “somber feelings” and one “racial…uh…stuff.”
Tywanza Sanders, 26 years old.
Clementa Pinckney, 41 years old.
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45 years old.
DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49 years old.
Cynthia Hurd, 54 years old.
Myra Thompson, 59 years old.
Ethel Lee Lance, 70 years old.
Daniel Simmons Sr., 74 years old.
Susie Jackson, 87 years old.
Their bodies will be buried this week. Black churches are burning across the South. And the most my congregation could say was “racial stuff.” We couldn’t even say their names.
At Rev. Pinckney’s memorial service on June 26, President Barack Obama praised him as a good man who gave his prime years to religious and public leadership, to both preaching and protest. The president noted what inspired Pinckney to serve the communities beyond his congregation: the Black Church has always sent its servants out into the world.
“To put our faith in action is more than individual salvation, it’s about our collective salvation… to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and house the homeless is not just a call for isolated charity but the imperative of a just society.”
Pinckney’s persistent faith, Obama said, drew on the same spirit that inspires the U.S. to expand its freedoms and policies of care, and to account for a wider circle, not a narrower one. The faith and grace of God is in that movement. Obama unsteadily sang “Amazing Grace”; the organist helped him, and the church said Amen.
Last weekend, I couldn’t have sung with them. This weekend, the release of song still feels alien. As I watched the C-SPAN funeral feed on Friday night, it hit me that Clementa Pinckney was the same age as my sister. Six days after that supremacist killed him and the other Emanuel members, a third member of my sister’s generation, a friend, mother, wife, and the senior minister of one of my churches, “put on invisibility” and passed away.
In my fatigue over the last 10 months of relentless Black Death, and my sadness at the passing of my friend and mentor, I find myself far less awed by the “amazing grace” invoked at the Pinckney funeral and far more amazed at the apathy of the faithful.
It was amazing apathy, not grace, that kept John Newton comfortable in both slavery investments and Christian preaching for forty years before an English politician introduced him to abolitionism. How was it that the word he preached failed to awaken him to the sacred life of his African siblings?
And the AME denomination, the oldest independent Black denomination in the world—how is it that the word that the AME denomination has preached since 1816 hasn’t yet transformed it into an advocate for all Black lives, not just some? The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered equal access to civil marriage, and LGBT-antagonist church folk struck up apocalyptic mourning chants as soon as the decision hit SCOTUSblog.
Wanted to take refuge in the Black Church last weekend. Not even slightly tempted this weekend. #BlackChurchSex
— mackenzian (@mackenzian) June 26, 2015
The Emanuel 9 deserved more than limp euphemism. We deserve more than apathy in the face of inequity.
This Saturday as I ventured out to church again, Bree Newsome and James Ian Tyson brought the Confederate battle flag down from its mast in front of the South Carolina Capitol complex. Shortly after their arrest, two Capitol employees raised it again. One of the flag-raisers was Black.
After Newsome’s and Tyson’s arrest, South Carolina residents rallied outside the capitol to “Defend the Flag.” The scripture-quoting pole-climbing film-making Black activist woman and the man who spotted her on the pole had never allowed the battle flag to touch the ground: they offered the Confederate soldiers’ emblem far more respect than the secessionist movement ever claimed for them. As South Carolina’s flag came down, battle flags west of SC went up: Alabama crowds drunk on nostalgia took to the streets to declare that they, too, matter and they wished they were in Dixie.
As I saw the stories about Newsome, Tyson, and the battle flag coming down, the flag action bail fund ticked past $30,000, $40,000, $60,000, then $100,000. I saw the spirit of Anansi at work.
Kwaku Anansi is the trickster, shapeshifter, and storykeeper of the Akan diaspora. He brings wily, situational wisdom, prudence, and cunning skill to the inequitable world of the animals, that world where Tiger is king and expectations of spiders are low. The Greeks called Anansi’s gifts metis, but I grew up seeing empire-identified critics fretting over whether we should tell Anansi tales to children and blaming the spider-man for inspiring social fraud and corruption.
They were wrong. Anansi is worthy of honor. And when spun into action like spiders’ silk, Anansi’s metis is a beautiful and powerful thing.
In one story, Anansi wonders how to undermine Tiger and draw some of the boastful king’s power to himself. Tiger challenges Anansi to earn renown by besting Snake. Anansi doesn’t attack anyone. He fails at first with a conventional trap. And so our hero “goes home to think.”
“A trap will never work,” Anansi said to himself. “Snake can climb trees and slither and slide away, so I’ll have to outsmart him. And I’m the smartest fellow there is!”
And so he uses his intelligence to find a way. He appeals to Snake’s beliefs about himself, and with all his wits and hearts and guts, Anansi gets what he wants.
“You come against me with hate and oppression and violence,” Newsome shouted from the middle of the flagpole. “I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.” And it came down. Anansi targets Tiger’s and Snake’s false pride and no one is harmed. A scripture-quoting woman climbed a pole and made the SC Capitol and its sluggish legislators look foolish.
It was the most straightforward solution I think she could have found, and it had good precedent. Not allowed to eat at a restaurant? Go sit at the counter and wait out patrons’ fury. Banned from the front of the bus? Don’t use any buses until you’re free to sit where you please on any of them. Tired of legislators stalling and want the secessionist battle flag to come down? Go up and get it yourself, and wear safety gear.
In the late 1940s, theologian and activist Howard Thurman described trickster wisdom as “perhaps the oldest of all the techniques by which the weak have protected themselves against the strong” (Deception, Jesus and the Disinherited
But the cunning surprises that worried Thurman aren’t the only quality Anansi brings with him. The adaptability and resourcefulness of metis also showed up in Newsome’s and Tyson’s direct action yesterday. Both activists were absolutely measured, calm, and intentional, and they confounded the expectations of a system that has responded to #TakeItDown/#KeepItDown with “We’ll discuss it next legislative session.” In the meantime, the system only recognizes passive compliance and submission.
Passive compliance will not do in this season. Newsome and Tyson cooperated with police but were never once out of control. They made the pole-climb a craft (technê). Their team documented the action meticulously. And they promise there will be more to come.
All through our history we’ve seen that Anansi’s wisdom doesn’t surface on a plane of equals. And this is the challenge of marginalized people:
All the while, we live in contexts that deny our humanity, our magic, and our trauma; that expect us to keep producing through pain; and that have the gall to fly supremacists’ battle flags over our coffins. One hundred and fifty-two years after emancipation, the system still hasn’t digested that we are no one’s inferior. And so we use the gifts of Anansi.
Euphemism can’t get us to clarity now. A teacher told me last week that every new headline of murder or arson is another call to know and speak the truth. She was right. Choosing the filthy rags of euphemism over the salve of truth can only delay our healing: all our euphemism is like filthy rags, and if there’s any social institution that should understand what this means for our “salvation” as a country, it’s the Christian church.
A sector of the US Adventist church recently apologized for the racism that launched it 70 years ago. Current leaders recognized that though they were not culpable for their predecessors’ wrongs, they were responsible for the system they inherited and steward today. That’s part of what knowing and speaking the truth can do.
While I kept up with the flag action on Saturday, I also saw that the National Cathedral’s dean had called for the removal of two Civil War stained windows. The National Cathedral is one of my favorite churches in the world: it took more than eight decades to build and the designs of its windows reflect that history.
I can’t agree with the dean that we should remove these panes. I do agree with him that we need historians to help us re-frame the windows with a thoughtful contextual display. As I said on Saturday, the natural fractures exposed during the Civil War persist in new forms in contemporary US politics and politicians. We can’t gut living history and think no one will notice. Racism is neither dead nor extreme, and we have to tell the truth about it.
Dear Lord, I thank You for the faith that frees,
The love that knows it cannot lose its own;
The love that, looking through the shadows, sees
That You and he and I are ever one! —James Dillet Freeman
Earlier this year I wrote about my denomination’s long track record of taking no action during critical human rights cases. So this week has stunned me twice over.
The first shock came after the non-indictment of NY police officer Daniel Pantaleo for the death of Eric Garner. As Garner’s mother Gwen Carr said at a press conference on December 3, “I don’t know what video [the grand jury] were looking at. Evidently it wasn’t the same one that the rest of us was looking at.” The family’s grief, confusion, frustration, and anger about no accountability, shared by viewers nationwide, has sustained and intensified marches, rallies, protests, boycotts, die-ins, disruptions, and blockades up and down the country.
Even among Adventists.
Last weekend, college students at Oakwood University, an HBCU in Huntsville, AL, and at Andrews University, host of the Adventist seminary in Berrien Springs, MI, pressed through the cold in their respective states to protest racism, injustice, and police brutality under the #BlackLivesMatter banner.
Within days, the Northeastern Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, the regional (historically black) church administration that serves the state of New York, published a statement about the Garner case in the name of conference president Daniel J. Honoré.
“As I think of my own sons and the thousands of minority youths whose spiritual home is the Northeastern Conference,” Honoré wrote, “I cannot help but be compelled to join our voice to those crying out for a more just society… The Word of God urges us ‘Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.’ (Isaiah 1:17)”
His staff posted a photo of the statement on Facebook, it took off from there, and the president stuck around to personally respond to comments and stand by his letter. He didn’t just make a pronouncement and then dodge feedback from behind the internet curtain. I was impressed.
As reactions flowed in (the thread is still active nearly a week later), both affirming and race-naive comments were posted, but on balance it seems feedback was mostly positive. I wrote:
“Congratulations to the NEC leadership for speaking up on an issue that directly affects your constituency members… In about 50 years, maybe sooner, and just as happened with those who participated in the [Civil Rights Movement], our denomination will write hagiographic articles in the Adventist Review about the few who spoke up and took action and were visibly engaged in anti-oppression work this year despite all the pushback… and no one will admit there was any opposition at all.” —Keisha McKenzie
Daneen Akers, co-producer of the film Seventh-Gay Adventists, responded too: “The Civil Rights movement was deeply faith-based, and it’s encouraging to see a church leader recognize that these actions are part of doing justice now, loving mercy now, and walking humbly now.”
The thread quickly included people angry that the statement went out on official church letterhead and members wondering out loud whether Honoré will find himself out of a job over this letter. No, he won’t. Not even close.
Because by Tuesday morning this week, Honoré’s colleague and national supervisor chimed in with a statement of his own about the Brown and Garner non-indictments:
“The Seventh-day Adventist Church in North America is deeply saddened by the tragic death of Eric Garner and the heartache it has caused his family and community. We extend our deepest condolences and continue to pray for his family.
“The recent grand jury decisions in Ferguson, Mo. in the death of Michael Brown and Mr. Garner in N.Y. have stirred great emotions in the hearts of many Americans who question the equity with which all of God’s children are treated. Many citizens, including Seventh-day Adventist pastors, educators, and students have participated in non-violent marches, peacefully calling for equality and asking for change. We continue to support the right, which we are afforded in this country, to peacefully speak out and call for change.
“It is time for our society to engage in open, honest, civil, and productive conversation about the rights and equality of every member of our community. We pray that the tragedy of these two deaths will bring about much needed change and address the pain that many ethnic groups are facing in this country. We pray that awareness will lead to a two-way conversation that will lead to healing.
“We pray that those on either side of this conversation will speak with peace, love, and grace.
“We pray for the day when all of God’s children treat each other without suspicion, bias, and hatred. As the Apostle Paul reminds us: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.'” —North American Division president Dan Jackson
I couldn’t hold it in.
Pigs are flying! @NADadventist stands with Adventists protesting racism & injustice: http://t.co/Tjgjog2NvQ Well done, Dan Jackson.
— mackenzian (@mackenzian) December 9, 2014
No, really; I don’t believe it and may need to search Google for the best way to eat one’s hat. Thank you, @NADadventist. 🙂 — mackenzian (@mackenzian) December 9, 2014
The NAD liked that idea so much that they retweeted my post.
Perhaps neither of these statements would have raised eyebrows in another denomination: the NAD statement isn’t an affirmation as much as it’s a commitment not to interfere. But in Adventism, it’s news. There are reasons for that.
In its formative years, the Seventh-day Adventist community was awash in benevolent racism: during the late 1800s and early 1900s, church leaders framed newly freed Black Americans as a pitiable community in “moral darkness” and special need of evangelism. The goal: that they might be won to the faith and lifted up from their spiritual and social degradation by those truths that only a White-led church could teach them.
“Instead of wondering whether they are not fitted to labor for white people, let our colored brethren and sisters devote themselves to missionary work among the colored people. There is an abundance of room for intelligent colored men and women to labor for their own people…
“Opportunities are continually presenting themselves in the Southern States, and many wise, Christian colored men will be called to the work. But for several reasons white men must be chosen as leaders. We are all members of one body and are complete only in Christ Jesus, who will uplift His people from the low level to which sin has degraded them and will place them where they shall be acknowledged in the heavenly courts as laborers together with God…
“While men are trying to settle the question of the color line, time rolls on, and souls go down into the grave, unwarned and unsaved… The work of proclaiming the truth for this time is not to be hindered by an effort to adjust the position of the Negro race.” —Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, volume 9, section 6 (1907-1908)
In the mid-20th Century, during the thick of the US Black Civil Rights Movement (CRM), Adventist administrators and theologians actively discouraged participation on the anti-segregationist, pro-civil rights protests and activism of the day. West Chester University professor Timothy J. Golden put it this way in a wonderful historical paper last year: the church refused to support members in advocating for civil rights, but to this day appeals to and benefits from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act that resulted from their unauthorized advocacy.
Who will help me bake the bread? asked the CRM. And the Adventist church replied Not I.
Adventism maintains this historical ambivalence toward public engagement today. The result is a sort of selective self-interest that usually keeps the organization out of the public eye, but also usually leaves a subset of constituents out in the cold. Administrators’ statements on seeking “a more just society” and “equality,” particularly at this moment in US history, are a welcome departure from that custom.
Janelle Monae’s latest album, The Electric Lady, includes an interlude that made me chuckle the first time I heard it but makes me nod in agreement. Monae’s albums ask us to imagine a world in which she and her musicians are androids and humans rebelling against a system that represses innovation and doesn’t see them as fully human.
About halfway through the album, DJ Crash-Crash stops off in a shop to have his body chrome polished. He says to the studio, “Y’all know why we out here getting our chrome right?” Someone off-mic replies, “It don’t shine by itself.”
It don’t shine by itself. This world won’t shine by itself.
At the start of the 20th Century, White wrote, “I know that if we attempt to meet the ideas and preferences of some of the colored people, we shall find our way blocked completely.” She encouraged the church to value “the closing gospel message” above the “colored people” she believed needed that message to avoid eternal ruin. Advocating for their social equality would be a distraction, and the church should prioritize.
I learned enough to name my rage about injustice when I was about 12 years old. Over the next ten years, thanks in part to the writers I read, I began to see rage as undirected power. And in the decade since then, I’ve practiced directing my power toward living well despite the status quo. My church’s statements this week don’t convert me to passive optimism. They drive me to keep working with the willing, whatever the institution chooses at this late stage.
I keep living, despite a culture telling me lives like mine don’t matter. I keep worshiping, despite church workers who teach that my kind of human being is ineligible for its membership, clergy, and kingdom. I keep working and creating, despite an economy stacked in hiring and in business development against people with my profile. I keep on keeping on because there’s no other viable option: I will not yield to genocide or suicide; I will live and live well.
Reflecting on the speculative fiction community’s need to grow out of its racism and embrace the diversity of those who love and contribute to it, Daniel J. Older writes, “The lionizing, sugarcoating and kneejerk flurry to defend and silence uncomfortable histories has to stop if we are to move forward.” There isn’t a corner of society in which that’s not true.
But just for tonight, while we decide how we’ll move forward and welcome those just waking up, I have an original recipe for eating one’s hat:
So good!