And I Had Such High Aspirations

Timothy Dalrymple, Evangelical Gatekeeper, asks, Is the Defense of Traditional Marriage Like the Defense of Slavery?:

While [sic] I believe (and I would encourage all Christians to believe) that every homosexual individual deserves all of the same rights and protections that heterosexual individuals enjoy — and preventing gays from suffering bullying, for instance, is absolutely a civil rights issue.  

Well, not exactly a civil rights issue. More a human dignity issue. But in the case of protection in the law, yes. In terms of hate crimes and such, yes!

I believe all humans are, essentially and in themselves, equal in the eyes of God and ought to be treated as equal before the law. 

Wow. That was just... I'm amazed! I'm floored, really; I can't believe such a prominent member of the religious right is making such a bold declarative statement on behalf of the rights of LGBTQI.

But...

Ah, daggannit. Spoke too soon, didn't I? I shouldn't be surprised, of course. Just, I...

...just as it does not follow that every human action is equal in the sight of the law (the state has every right to treat people differently on the basis of their actions), so it does not follow that every human relationship need be equal in the sight of the law.

SMDH.. One can assume just from this that Dalrymple isn't arguing that homosexuals are equal before God. Certainly I'd expect him to say that same sex/queer relationships aren't "God's plan for our best" or some such argument that the Christian church should continue to shun, alienate, and perhaps belittle non-heterosexual relationships. But this goes the extra step to say that such relationships should also not be recognized as on equal level with heterosexual relationships.


I can see why gay rights advocates make the comparisons in their plight to the struggles of Black slaves and unwilling-participants of Jim Crow, and I can also see why such incomplete comparisons are troubling to African Americans (in that making such comparisons is belittling to both struggles with their unique identities). But Dalrymple here brings up a very familiar argument I hear in studying Black US history: Of course they are equal before God and before the law. Except in practical terms. And they're not really human, too.

Also.

Oh, and the short answer to Timothy's question? The same biblical exegesis used to promote freedom for slaves is the same used to liberate Christianity from homophobia. The same exegesis used to promote slavery is the same used to entrap Christianity within homophobia - and thus teach that White, heterosexual Christianity serves a God who can't see outside White, heterosexual Christianity, and is afraid and hateful of those outside the gates.

Oh yeah. Gatekeeping.

Come on, Timothy. Surely you can do better. I believe in you.

EDIT:
There is much more to say about this. I know that many would argue that Timothy - who is a Facebook friend of mine, though we never interact - is a good guy and that others would argue that there isn't a homophobic bone in his body, etc., etc. The truth is, whether or not he, personally, is a bigot is not the point. I don't blog just to point out the errors and the prejudices of specific people - that would take too long and that's what HuffPo is for. I'm also not interested in whether or not this person has a good heart and is kind to homosexuals/kittens/undocumented/little old ladies. I mean, it'd suck if he wasn't and be nice if he was. I'm taking issue with his stated words which have power. I'm interested moreso in patterns and particularly the patterns of Evangelicals that are used to silence, shame, sequester, ostracize and, yes, oppress those who are different than they. And Mr. Dalrymple is but one of many, many, many within that movement - that I myself am a native son of and still love and want to identify myself with - that make such alarming and disastrous mind-bends. It is a very, very, very unloving and unChrist-like and bigoted position and posture to publish to take against people while at the same time say that you're NOT taking such a position against people. This is not to mention how the guest post was all sorts of wrong, using a tradition that has not been kind to women, the poor, slaves, and people of other faiths and ethnicities as a rubric for how we should now treat gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer and trans* people.

Not cool. Not cool for Dalrymple. And not cool for Evangelicals who read and agree with his positions and further along marginalization and oppression in the name of a man who affirmed, invited and welcomed all outcasts and outsiders.

Not. Cool.

Compromise IS American, And That's the Problem

James Wagner, the president of Emory University, wrote an editorial on how compromise is a good thing, is fundamental to how the US operates, is a higher order for a good cause. It's important, he states, for getting by, for learning how to negotiate, and for political discourse.

He outlines this all in his Letter from the President, “As American as … Compromise.”

He's wrong about pretty much everything. Citizens and students don't become better and wiser citizens and students through compromise. We do through listening and experience and higher ordered thinking and going through the wringer of experience and critical thinking and listening again and again. And we learn through history, especially history of the marginalized. And we make connections and we consider again and again how these connections are relevant to not just ourselves but those inside and outside our neighborhoods, those who work for us, those who make our products, those who are in our prisons, those the majority society consider less-thans.

And we repent where we need to repent. We recognize the evil and the grave mistakes that we as a society and a people have done and in many ways continue to do and we take that evil seriously in order to exorcise it from our collective and individual actions.

But James Wagoner demonstrates that White America has yet to repent. Has yet to listen or make connections or consider history or the present through non-privileged perspectives. Has yet to consider amends because it hasn't made a conscious choice yet to repent of the very horrible sins that made it phenomenally rich.

To much of White America, the three-fifths compromise was a necessity in order "to form a more perfect union." The ultimate compromise on slavery - which allowed it to operate mercilessly for generations and allowed its primary stakeholders undue influence in US politics - wasn't appalling, wasn't a sign that the United States was based more on slavery and destruction of human beings and families than on its alleged "freedom." No. According to Wagoner (and many textbooks from my own childhood), the need to bring the two opposing sides together for the lofty goal of making a United States was a "higher aspiration."

Higher, apparently, to minds in the 21st Century, than an unequivocal call for the end of any form of slavery, than for an end to the slave trade or the end to considering human beings as chattel.

Compromise may sometimes be a negotiable we have to work through. But consider what there is to negotiate. The so-called "Third Way" isn't necessarily a better way because it's more expedient. In the case of the Three-Fifths Compromise, the lives of millions of African and Black slaves were disregarded and then monetized for political "purity" of white folks. That's not a good thing. Not back then. Not now. In the case of the so-called Fiscal Cliff, the lives of millions of poor people hang in the balance of a highly politicized scandal of American-styled "justice."

It is a great evil that rich, white men can claim the stakes for everyone else and then dress up their card game as a noble pursuit.

Insert tired Frenchie joke here.

The underclass is not something to "balance" or compromise on, are not tokens, are not poker chips.

NOTE:
With his response/clarification, Wagner apologizes for his insensitivity, makes some profound statements that gave me pause to think that he would retract his earlier statement, but then doubles down on the "higher aspirations" language and reprints the original.

Why not just admit it was a complete failure? Are the "chattel" not worth it?

Moving Abe

An occasional one-off with a semi-celeb on Twitter is what passes for a brush with celebrity for me. So, Chicago-based rapper and political activist (as well as would-be alderman) Rhymefest has tended to have a contentious interaction with the Occupy Movement. Unlike another Chicago-based rapper who's worked with Kanye, Lupe Fiasco, he sees the Occupiers as wasting time and space better used for direct political action.

RHYMEFESTVerified ‏@RHYMEFEST

People got beat up by police for what? To not run a candidate and fund them to be the change they wanted? Boooo occupy! I'm done

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jasdye‏@jasdye

@RHYMEFEST Abolitionists didn't change things by running their candidates, but by changing natl convo and moving country towards freedom

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2:40 PM - 7 Nov 12 · 

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12hRHYMEFESTVerified ‏@RHYMEFEST

@jasdye the times have changed

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4hjasdye ‏@jasdye

@RHYMEFEST mr things change, mr they stay the same. While the GOP is off-the-cliff right (and anti-everybody), the DNC ain't repping the ppl

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Rhymefest disregards the overriding lessons of the Emancipators and the Civil Rights Era as being out of time. Fine. But then tell me that Occupy hasn't helped to shape the discourse of American politics - tell me that the Tea Party movement also hasn't done so. Tell me that right now this whole Fiscal Cliff nonsense isn't largely directed by the rhetoric of one sort of radical, non-pragmatic paradigm or another.

He's a hostage!

Well, actually...

Tell me that the post-Sandy Hook imagination of the American populace isn't directed by one form of radicalism (the No-Restrictions-Ever-on-Guns NRA and their stand-ins) and the rest of us aren't trying to feebly talk about sensible gun control measures.

Imagine if a large, national peace movement were actually put in place some twelve years ago - rather than a late-to-the-game anti-GOP posturing. How would the conversation about war and violence be engaged now?

Politicians, as historian Howard Zinn points out in his must-read work - including the Zinn Reader - do not lead - they follow. As much as Abraham Lincoln wanted to end slavery, he had to garner popular opinion in order to get to the office of president in the first place. And before that happened, the popular perception of slavery as being a largely harmless and beneficial financial institution had to be challenged.

So, the slave narratives. So, Douglass, and Garrison, and Sojourner Truth, and Beecher Stowe. These figures and their heroic, bristling words waged a war for the hearts and souls and minds of men and women.

The reformer is careless of numbers, disregards popularity, and deals only with ideas, conscience, and common sense... He neither expects nor is overanxious for immediate success. The politician dwells in an everlasting now... His office is not to instruct public opinion but to represent it.
- Wendell Phillips

The institution of slavery was peculiar to the South. It was an issue that, as a force of evil, was only understood to a small minority of the white population. Yet all were responsible for its continuation even as it was cloaked through being race-based and therefore imperceptible to the White mind as - as a deliberate matter of dividing and conquering - it was out of the sight and experience of the Whites of the North, and out of the personal physical and psychic reality of the majority of White Southerner. The South and the North needed the issue of slavery to be pushed in the open and come to a volatile head - otherwise it would have stayed hidden. Not that slavery itself wasn't a constant threat to the very Southern "way of life" that Southern elites were trying to maintain at all, unbelievable costs. But slavery may never have ended if its death knolls weren't forced through abolitionism (which, again, isn't the same as saying that abolitionists "caused" the secession. But, regardless, they had a hand in forcing the Southern elites to take a form of action, and they opened the way for Lincoln to sign both the Emancipation Proclamation and then the 13th Amendment)

That possibility would not have been the case were it not for the rebellious acts of the slaves themselves opening up the remote possibility of a way out - opening up the imagination of White Americans in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries to the radical reality that Black slaves were not property but people. I contend that slavery would have been much more profitable and therefore more desirable to the entire US if the slaves hadn't acted out in various ways against the bitter institution of slavery

All true Reformers are incendiaries. But it is the hearts, brains and souls of their fellow-men which they set on fire, and in so doing they perform the function appropriated to them in the wise order of Providence.
- James Russel Lowell

It wasn't Abraham Lincoln that freed the slaves. It was the actions of the slaves which energized the abolitionists who powered the imagination and moral compass of the United States which brought the conflict to a crucible. This crucible was important, for it meant that the slave-holding elite of the South believed that reparations with an abolitionist-leaning North were now impossible, ergo, they had to go on and make their own country and go so far as to start a war with their free neighbors to the North (Southern Apology Myths withstanding).

In all ages, it has been first the radical, and only later the moderate, who has held out a hand to [those] knocked to the ground by the social order.
The moderate, whose sensitive ears are offended by the wild language of the radical, needs to consider the necessary division of labor in a world full of evil, a division in which agitators for reform play an indispensable role.
- Howard Zinn

To use biblical imagery, when the reformer is the voice of the prophet, we have Moses confronting Pharaoh  "Let my people go." Or we have a newly liberated people, who are slightly more liberated, but then codified back into serfdom through Solomon. In the meantime, we have  Moses, Joshua, Saul, and David - each of whom represents the law, each tightening the screws on their people. Each inching just a bit closer, in their kingly duties, to the role of Pharaoh over Hebrew slaves - though this time, the Hebrew ruler was enslaving his own as well as neighbors - despite the warnings against doing such in the Mosaic law.

Then there's the Samuels and the Nathans. The prophets who spoke to and against, who checked, who lacked fear in the face of the terrifying, who dared speak against the thieving, murderous ways of the kings against common sense.

We need more Samuels and fewer would-be Solomons. We don't need our Garrisons to turn into Lincolns. We need Occupiers to continue to Occupy the American imagination, not pragmatically bow to the whims of a fickle populace.

Greed and Charity (I)

How do we define the difference between greed and what we just described as envy? It strikes me as though they are different by degrees. One is the indelible mark of wanting what belongs to others and stealing it. The other may just be when it's become the consumption - not just a desire, but a life spent in living that way? Could that be a difference?

We've been so educated and conditioned to think that we deserve what we have (unless we have nearly none, then that is given to us by someone else's hard work and we are just maggots and leeches living off their hard-won bucks), and ironically, the more we have, the more we feel entitled to it. Perhaps greed is to envy what bitterness is to rage.

Consuming. Life-long. Disastrous. Life-defining.

We build entire rationalizations around our passions and entitlements. Especially when what we have belongs to another.

Like the institution of slavery.

Not just rationalizations. But infrastructures and superstructures of rationalizations. Theologians and pastors and scientists were employed to wipe the moral reprehensiveness of generational indentured servitude, brutality, and cultural genocide. And then when that system ended, it began all over again in various forms through Jim Crow laws and various political, spiritual, social, and economic factors that largely kept the Black man indentured to the White power structure in one way or another (I have had people argue that there was really no difference between pre- and post-Civil War for the majority of African Americans in the South. But that shows a lack of understanding of the full degredation of the slave institution at the height of its power). The white power structure, stinging with their greed and bruised egos, decided to redefine the Civil War as a tragic battle of states rights, and that White Supremacist tale continues to live on and grow strength.

And then there's a prominent Republican who bills himself as an anti-racist running around in front of giant Confederate flags and spewing nonsense about how the Civil War wasn't REALLY about slavery,



Ta-Nehisi Coates points out the ridiculousness of these statements. As we've noted before on this blog, anti-Civil War arguments tend to focus on the violence that could have been avoided upon whites, but ignore and/or trivialize the relational, familial, physical, sexual, psychological and spiritual violence that was daily and hourly forced upon black slaves.

[C]omparing figures obscures a larger reality--from the time slavery was introduced to Haiti to the time it left, there was violence. Slavery is violence and any survey of its history violence at its onset, violence at its height, and violence attending its end.

At the heart of this all is the idea that the slave-owners had every right to continue to own slaves until they were done with them. That they owned human beings and had every right to define when and how long and under what circumstances they would give up such rights to their "property."

This is greed in its fullest form. Most of us can now see plainly how evil and warped this form of all-consuming greed was. But it's much harder within the context. When the institutions around us - the literature, the sermons, the television shows, movies, educational system, think tanks,most op-eds, talking heads may say that greed isn't good, but support greed in most of its forms.

We are not allowed to even question our main economic engine for fear of being ostracized. But capitalism runs on greed. It runs on the idea that people are property. We can argue that workers and consumers enter into agreements with capitalist endeavors and are therefore not forced, but that's merely propagandist semantics when there are no viable alternatives for most people. If two thirds of the world have jobs that pay roughly $2 a day, how can we justify this as some sort of "freedom" of economic or social means?

To paraphrase Sartre, There is no exit.

To quote Admiral Akbar, It's a trap!

Yet if we were to look at many of the justifications used to keep the American/Confederate slavery system in place, we can see that Americans of all stripes are using very similar language to justify the global slave market and below-poverty-wage jobs in the US now. You may have used some of these assumptions before. I know I have.

Slavery was vital for the continuance of a superior Southern lifestyle which emphasized good manners and graciousness. Unlike the barbarians.

Slavery was the key to national prosperity—for both the North and the South; nearly 60 percent of U.S. exports of this era were cotton; the slavery advocates argued that if their economy were tampered with, the great industrial cities of the North would crumble; many Southerners viewed the North as a parasite, nourishing itself on slavery while at the same time criticizing it.

The coercion of slavery alone is adequate to form man to habits of labor. Without it, there can be no accumulation of property, no providence for the future, no tastes for comfort or elegancies, which are the characteristics and essentials of civilization.

Mudsill theory is a sociological theory which proposes that there must be, and always has been, a lower class for the upper classes to rest upon. The inference being a mudsill, the lowest threshold that supports the foundation for a building. The theory was first used by South Carolina Senator/Governor James Henry Hammond, a wealthy southern plantation owner, in a Senate speech on 4 March 1858, to justify what he saw as the willingness of the lower classes and the hegemony of non-whites to perform menial work which enabled the higher classes to move civilization forward.

"They [the North] have demanded, and now demand, equality between the white and negro races, under our Constitution; equality in representation, equality in the right of suffrage, equality in the honors and emoluments of office, equality in the social circle, equality in the rights of matrimony. . . . freedom to the slave, but eternal degradation to you and for us"
- William L. Harris, Mississippi's commissioner to Georgia, December 17, 1860

The economy needs it.

Some were born for such work.

They actually enjoy it.

If we allow them the same access we enjoy, we will lose and end up in slavery ourselves.

We do them favors by allowing them to work for us.

They are better off with it then they were without it.

We are teaching them the value of productivity so that they, too, may rise from poverty and into genteelness...

Do these sound familiar?

These are the psychological trappings of the great sin of greed. Forty-one thousand children are dying today from lack of food, and millions - even in the US - have barely enough to survive. Yet our economic system is built on prevailing assumptions that we need what we don't need or even desire. Therefore, what others don't have, what in turn forces them into selling children into prostitution, or crossing geo-political borders without permission, or lives of crime, even, is not our problem and therefore we are, according to our justifications, under no obligation to right those wrongs.

That is, unless we can name our greed for what it is: entitled selfishness and the unrighteous justification that allows us to continually steal from the mouths of starving babes.

The counter to this, of course, is charity. Not charity of individuals. But charity of society.

Not the charity as we currently frame the phrase - a few dimes thrown in support of a cause celebrè. But rather an over-reaching, fundamental power of investment and justice for those deprived of basic human needs and rights.

More on that later...

Wrath and Patience

We struggle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers.

This is where it gets personal for activists/slacktivists and others like me filled with, say, righteous indignation. It's right and good to be angry about certain things. But to be overcome by it is to lose grasp of the fact that we are in a long-range run.

The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.

That means, for me, I must not grow weary in doing good. But I must not also stoop to the level of demonizing those I disagree with. And trust me, that's freaking easy. Someone accuses Black and Latinos pointing out institutional racism as being, itself, racist, and I'm ready to send them a verbal hell-storm.

But maybe being incredibly radical isn't about forcefulness of the mean as much as direction of the end. Maybe radicalness isn't so much about treating one group of persons as a protective class as it is about treating the (oftentimes ignorant, sometimes ignoble) oppressors as fully human persons and demonstrating that shared humanity in front of them.

I, for one, can learn much from the patience - and radicalness - of the Quaker John Woolman.

John Woolman believed slavery was unjust— that it was cruel for those in bondage and corrosive for the bondsman. So he wrote an essay explaining why (“Some considerations on the keeping of Negroes: Recommended to the professors of Christianity of every denomination”). And then, since he was sure that his condemnation of slavery was true, and that the truth of it was compelling, he set out to talk to those who disagreed.
One by one, meetinghouse by meetinghouse, home by home. He would speak to gatherings of Friends, or would arrive for dinner at the home of Quaker slaveowners, and he would talk to them about his “considerations” and concerns with this practice. After the meal, he would pay wages to those slaves who had attended him. And he would invite the slaveowners to liberate their slaves, paying them back wages for their years of service.
Crazy. But even crazier: This worked. Conversation, liberation, transformation. That was Woolman’s method and he continued it, unchanged, throughout his life.

Well, almost unchanged. He eventually switched to traveling on foot out of consideration that the stagecoaches he had been riding in were cruel to the horses.

If you live somewhere on the East Coast of the United States, anywhere in between New York City and Richmond, Va., then you’re probably not far from some old historic Friends Meeting House. John Woolman spoke there. He arrived there on foot and spoke about slavery until he had convinced the Friends who gathered there to condemn the practice and cease participating in it by emancipating their slaves and paying them for their service. And then he left on foot, heading for the next such meeting house or home to have that same conversation again, and again and again.

And that is how John Woolman changed the Friends, and how it came to be that the Friends would help to change America. 

That really happened. That is really how it happened.

A re-education. Others talk about violence being the only way out of slave conditions. Still others maintain (out of a belief that property rights trump all else) that the slave owners need to be paid for the loss of their "property." But I see that as a false equivalence. The best process is to demonstrate that there are better ways, while protecting the oppressed.

Homosexuals, bisexuals, transgendered, African-descendents, mixed-raced, Anglo, Latino, poor, rich, management, cops, protesters, the 99%, the 1%, indigenous, English Language Learners, gringos, straights, queers, agents, hip-hop heads, scholars, Africans, South-East Asians, long-distance drivers, manufacturers, union members, prostitutes, slave-wage earners,sweat shop workers, bureaucrats, Parisians, Kenyans, Afrikaans, day laborers, servers, activists, civil servants, farmers, pharmacists

Among this list are scattered oppressors and oppressees, with many carrying both titles. But all are human, even when they/we don't seem to be. The greatest danger, IMO, is forgetting that we, in our fight against the violence of oppression, do not pick up the tools of the oppressor and so become the oppressor - only changing the face of the game, but not the game itself. Compare Woolman's approach to Soviet Russia's.

Although sometimes the new masters are better and more benevolent than the old ones, it seems to me that history has taught us that we need a different approach, a different way of seeing reality than through our relation to our money and our leaders. These are abstract ways of viewing life and they serve the function of denying us the pleasure and reward of our own work, world, and relationships.

It is not righteous wrath that will deliver us out of the systems of oppression, but revolutionary patience.