On Sunday, August 17, 2014, I preached this sermon in response to recent killings of unarmed Black men by police officers.
Really? I Don’t
Think So
Rev. Tom Sorenson,
Co-Pastor
August 17, 2014
Scripture: Matthew 15:21-28
Let us pray: May the words of my
mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O
God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
New York City police strangled
Eric Garner to death. Los Angeles police shot and killed Ezell Ford as he lay
on the ground. Ferguson, Missouri, police shot and killed Michael Brown. All
three of these victims were unarmed Black men. They are just recent examples of
police violence against Black men that got some publicity. Various Internet
sites report that a Black man is killed by police or vigilantes every 28
minutes in this country. Remember Trayvon Martin? He’s just another one we
heard about. Police violence against Black men doesn’t always result in death.
Recently in Seattle a Westlake Mall security guard maced a Black man while
ignoring white law breakers. Remember Rodney King? I used to work at Catholic
Community Services in the Central District of Seattle, where the population is
mostly Black. One day I was looking out a window from which I could see our
parking lot. There was a Seattle police car there, and a Seattle police officer
was talking to a Black man he apparently had pulled over. There was no
struggle. The Black man wasn’t threatening the police officer. Nonetheless, a
second police car showed up. Then a third. A co-worker who also saw what was
going on said “It’s the Central District.” These are but a very few examples
from America’s shameful and sinful culture of racism.
Most of us are white, and I need
to ask those of us who are: Do we get it that Black Americans are afraid of the
police and have good reason to be? Pastor Jane tells a story from a seminary
class in which the teacher asked how the students would react to the police
knocking on their door. The white students said they’ be curious and want to
cooperate and help. The Black students said they’d be suspicious. Those Black
students weren’t being irrational. They weren’t being paranoid. They were
reacting out of their experience and the experience of Black people generally,
just as the white students were reacting out of their experience and the
experience of white people generally. Of course no generalization is true of
every member of any group of people, and certainly not all police officers are
a threat to Black people, but it is still true that on the whole Black
Americans experience the police differently than white Americans do. They
experience them in significant part as a threat. That’s because the police
represent society at large, and our society at large is racist. It was in its
origins. It still is.
Our society is racist, but just
how does racism work? That’s a crucial question for us Americans today. Here’s
a good answer to that question from an African-American pastor. The Rev. Tony
Lee, identified in an article on The Huffington Post’s religion page as an
African-American pastor of an AME church in Maryland, says that the problem of
young Black men dying at the hands of the police is an example “of daily antagonisms felt by
black people on the street.” He said “This is part of a wider school-to-prison
pipeline and the ghettoization and de-humanization of black bodies.” There’s
the crux of the problem in one word—dehumanization. American racism does
nothing less than deny the full and equal humanity of Black people. That’s how
racism works.
It doesn’t just work that way in
our country. We see it at work in our passage from Matthew this morning. In
that reading Jesus has an encounter with a woman identified as Canaanite. That
means she’s not Jewish. It means she’s from a different people than Jesus is.
In this story Jesus calls the Canaanite woman a dog. Hard to believe perhaps,
but Jesus calls another human being a dog. The way Matthew tells this story,
for Jesus, at first at least, the Canaanite woman who asks him for help isn’t
even human. When he calls her a dog he makes her less than human. He gets over
it by the end of the story, but in the story he denies the full humanity of the
woman with whom he’s speaking.
That’s how racism works. For a
racist a member of the other race isn’t fully human. That’s how human cruelty
usually works, especially when it’s practiced on a huge scale. For the Nazis
the Jews were less than fully human. How else could they slaughter so many
millions of them? For American racists Black people aren’t fully human. How
else can we lynch so many of them? How else can we deny them equal opportunity
in employment, housing, health care, and especially legal justice? If a leader
wants people to brutalize another people that leader has to start by
dehumanizing the people he wants brutalized. Back in the 1960s we called
Vietnamese people “gooks.” I did it myself. We were killing Vietnamese people in
huge numbers, so we dehumanized them. Dehumanizing them made it easier for us
to kill them. It made it possible for those of us who weren’t personally directly
involved in killing them to live with the way our country was killing them.
Racism dehumanizes. That’s its primary sin. It makes human beings less than
human. It calls people dogs.
Jesus got over it in our little
story, thank God, but how he did raises an important issue for us. In the story
the Canaanite woman basically outwits Jesus. When he calls her a dog she says
yes, but even the dogs get the crumbs that fall from the table. Jesus is
impressed, calls her a woman not a dog, and gives her the help she has
requested. In the story the dehumanized one brings about a change of
consciousness in the one doing the dehumanizing. I’m really glad Jesus gets
over his dehumanizing of this woman in our little story, but we need to be
really careful about how that happens. You see, the racism of white Americans
isn’t a problem for Black Americans to solve. It is a problem for us white
Americans to solve, as our colleague the Rev. Dr. Marsha Williams, a Black
pastor in our Conference, recently reminded us. Jesus’ failure to recognize the
full humanity of the Canaanite woman was really his problem to solve, not hers.
So let’s take this story as a warning, not as a model.
Speaking now as a white person
and to those of you who are white, if our racism is our problem to solve, how
do we do it? I have no magic answers to that question. We’ve all grown up in a
radically racist culture. Yes, racism isn’t as bad—or at least isn’t as
overt—as it used to be, but our culture is still radically racist. You don’t
get over a history of centuries of virulent racism in a few decades, maybe not
even in a few centuries. So getting over American racism is not a simple task,
and there are no simple means of doing it. This morning I want to suggest just
one basic but indispensible step.
You white folk among us, how
many of you, how many of us, understand that we have white privilege every
moment of our lives? We’ve all got it whether we’re aware of it or not. If
you’re not doing anything wrong, like speeding say, do you get nervous every
time you see a police officer? No? That’s white privilege. When you apply for a
job do you think that you have to be much more qualified than the applicants of
another race if you stand a chance of getting hired? No? That’s white
privilege. Have you been turned down for rental housing on some obviously made
up excuse? No? That’s white privilege. If you’ve ever been involved in any kind
of court case civil or criminal, have you thought the court was going to rule
against you just because of the color of your skin? No? That’s white privilege.
We white people have it, every last one of us.
It is so easy for us white
Americans to convince ourselves that racism is a problem of the past not of our
present. Heck, we’ve even got a Black President, right? So how can our society
be racist? Well, whether we like Obama as a President or not I trust we’re all
glad that his race didn’t stop him from getting elected, but one election
doesn’t wipe out racism. Lots of people still voted against Obama quite without
regard for his politics just because he’s Black. Moreover, it’s so easy for us
to point to Obama as proof that we aren’t racist, then go on with our usual
racism with nothing really changed. It is white America’s denial of its racism
that is the biggest obstacle to overcoming it.
We’re not going to solve
American racism here this morning. Far from it. We can however stop lying to
ourselves. We live in a racist culture. It’s not our fault that we do, but we
do. Overcoming racism has to start with us becoming more aware of that
foundational fact of American life. We white people have to start admitting our
white privilege. And we have to stop dehumanizing people of color. I’m sure we
would all say yes, of course, Black, Red, Yellow, and Brown people are all
human beings. We’d all say it, but do we really get what it means? Do we really
get what true equality means? When you see a Black person on the street who you
don’t know can you really say to that person Namaste, the God in me greets the
God in you? Maybe we’d all answer yes; but when I hear that yes part of me
wants to say Really? I don’t think so. I think we’ve all got racism in our
bones because we all grew up in a racist culture. The only way we’ll ever get
over it is to start by admitting it. So let’s admit it, shall we? Maybe if
enough of us do fewer unarmed Black men will die at the hands of the police. Amen.
