Guns and Race in Chicago

Let’s talk about the second amendment. Let’s talk about the fact that it was never meant to be about individual rights to carry whatever weapons one wants. Let’s talk about the fact it was never written with the idea of semi-automatics or tanks. Let’s talk about well-regulated militias, which eventually became state guards, but which at least one purpose was for the regulation and keeping in line of slaves to guard against the very real threat of slave revolts. But it was never, until recently, meant to be constitutionally interpreted as being a right for individual firearms owners to own whatever weapons they wanted.

Let’s talk about the NRA. Let’s talk about the fact that they’ve spent the last three decades not just actively blocking through legislative bullying, but torturing and threatening the lives of any who would dare study the effects of guns and weapons of mass destruction and effective methods of gun control that would save lives without taking away our rights. Let’s talk about Wayne LaPierre, the cro-magnun carrying rhetoric too insipid, vomit-inducing, and warmed over for even Fox News. And Fox News is the Hot Pocket of media rhetoric.

Let’s talk about white people hyperventilating about the widespread violence in Chicago’s West and South Side neighborhoods as if it was a place in which they had any involvement, investment, or concern. And here I don’t want to just limit the scope to the Second Amendmenters, the TP, the gun fetishists, the neo-cons, or Republicans. I want to consider such auspicious Democrats as Rahm Emanuel and most of White Chicago. For if we cared about the people and neighborhoods of color in Chicago, our crime prevention would have a hell of a lot more involved, intricate, and inspired investment than locking up significant percentages of the young-to-middle-aged black and brown male populations. There is work, there is money. Lord, there sure is a lot of wealth accumulating in this city – but it accumulates at the White Center: The Loop, Lincoln Square, gentrifying neighborhoods like my own Logan Square and Humboldt Park neighborhoods. Those areas largely unaffected by red and yellow dots.

Courtesy the Chicago Sun-Times

This money is set aside by venture capitalists for venture capitalists. The rest of the city (“Brown Chicago”) gets token scraps here and there. But even those are threatened. Union jobs for the city? Not if some in White Chicago have their say. Unions are made of the rabble, and therefore not dependable to keep their money circulating where its immediately valuable to the center of WC.

But as long as the Loop, Lincoln Park, and Wicker Park are operating, the poverty and gun violence of Brown Chicago barely registers as a problem in White Chicago. So the mayor can shut down schools and after-school programs and community-based mental health clinics and homeless transitioning programs – what little that has worked to reduce violence and increase safety for children and adults – while touting a broken-windows crime-fighting system that does not work (unless the effectiveness we’re looking for is how much of BC can end up locked-up for non-violent offenses). He can close down those schools and open up non-union charter schools run by unprotected teachers and as a business – a business that, incidentally, is run like many other businesses in Chicago. Which means there are plenty of jobs and money for the city and even for minorities! As long as you’re connected to influential politicians in the city. The rest of Brown Chicago can, apparently, suck it.

You see, as long as blow-hards like Wayne LaPierre and states like Indiana, Arizona and Louisiana continue to justify and act as points of access for guns in Chicago, it really doesn’t matter how tough the gun laws are in Chicago. We have too many guns with too much access for too many people. As a result - mixed in with racial and class violence that is top-down by its very nature - dozens of innocent children and young folks are gunned down every week, long before God has kissed their lives.

So though Chicago can do little about the gun culture (thanks to back-ass gun fetishists), we can do much to alleviate violence in our city. We can supply meaningful, living wage jobs in our economically depressed regions, we can support grassroots collaborations between neighbors, we can entreat the mayor to expand schools rather than close them, we can support affordable housing over homelessness and displacement. We can open hospitals and trauma centers near the centers where trauma tends to take place.

We, in WC, can partner listen to (and patronize the businesses of) BC and partner with them to see effectual, transitional, substantial, lasting change.

When Men Rule, Patriarchy IS the Norm

Note: This post is a part of the One In Christ: A Week of Mutuality organized by Rachel Held Evans. 

In Evangelical Christian - and almost solely in ECc's, as most other movements are fairly set in one cycle or another* - churches, there is a debate raging between those who believe that it is biblical and proper to have  both males and females sharing positions of power or only males holding positions of power**. Egalitarians believe that women and men should both share pastoralships and teaching positions over males and females. Complementarians hold that women have different roles and abilities than men and that it is the woman's responsibility is to complement male headship.

Complementarian Russel Moore (via Denny Burke via Rachel Held Evans):

To use the word ‘patriarchy’ in an evangelical context is uncomfortable since the word is deemed ‘negative’ even by most complementarians. But evangelicals should ask why patriarchy seems negative to those of us who serve the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the God and Father of Jesus Christ... Egalitarians are winning the evangelical gender debate, not because their arguments are stronger, but because, in some sense, we are all egalitarians now. The complementarian response must be more than reaction. It must instead present an alternative vision—a vision that sums up the burden of male headship under the cosmic rubric of the gospel of Christ and the restoration of all things in him. It must produce churches that are not embarrassed to tell us that when we say the 'Our Father,' we are patriarchs of the oldest kind.

I don’t understand when people, especially Christians, defend male, hetero-, white supremacy. No, that’s not true. I do. I just don’t want to.

Oftentimes, I’m told that I let my political persuasions influence my theology. The truth is, sometimes I do. But we all do. We all take cultural, social, economic, political, and historical concerns as a way of interpreting our faith and philosophy. And we use that lens as a means of understanding our cultural, social, economic, political, and historical context. We use our conceptual frames as a means of understanding our realities and our realities frame our conceptual understandings.

This can be a vicious cycle, especially if every means of our reality is filtered through similar voices. This is especially true if the filter belongs to the dominant culture (which in the US belongs to any combination of White, heterosexual, male, middle and upper class, and Christian people).

This is why it’s important for Christians – and especially male, hetero-, and white American Christians - to understand that the bible isn’t written either for or by us. The voices we see and hear in it are not Western, nor are they affluent. They are, however, part of a society that is influenced by male patriarchy. That was the rule of the game in the Ancient Near East culture. That was the rule in Ancient Greek society, in Roman governance. And it’s the predominant rule now. Not just in Muslim cultures, not just in African or Latin cultures. In fact, in some circles, those cultures are more egalitarian or matriarchal than many white American cultures.

The fact is that patriarchy isn’t an alternative view of society. It’s the dominant view of society. It’s the view that Jesus cut down in his interactions with females and males, his approach to healings, his Sermon on the Mount. The way of patriarchy is the way of the world. Jesus has a kingdom (or Basileia, let’s say, as it isn’t run by kings, per se) that is not of this world. It’s a different way of interacting, of doing, of being, of relationships.

Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed. So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith.  Now that this faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian.

So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 

Before Jesus, we were under guardianship, we were under custody, locked up. Before Jesus, we were divided by race, class, sex. When we continue under the rules of the world, we are under patriarchy, under rule. Now, through the person and rule of the Christ, we are all free to be fully involved in every aspect of worship and being with and under God through the person of Jesus Christ, without division, without dominionists or lords. Under equality, we no longer have to trust that hopefully this male/ruler/leader won’t be a tyrant. Hopefully. We are free from having to rely on the goodness or badness or incompetence of a few men.

The ways in which this was radical and liberating in the Middle East, the Roman Empire, in Hellenistic cultures can hardly be overstated  - though I believe that the passages in I Tim and Titus that complementarians use to justify their positions were written because some people, in their new found liberty acted without thinking of their cultural context and how that might have destroyed the witness of the Gospel. It was, for some, too much too soon. There is a lesson there...

While we should not use our freedoms to act like fools, nevertheless we are free according to the biblical witness.

Consider the way Jesus approached women in public. Consider the radical approach he took with the Samaritan woman. Men did not talk to women out in the open, for women were beneath the dignity of a man's response. Yet a religious Jew was talking to an adulterous Samaritan woman. It was so radical that she was almost convinced that he was propositioning her. But his offer was to make her the first evangelist in Samaria. In asking her for some of her water at the beginning of their conversation, in fact, he was already beginning to empower her.

Consider that in each of the Gospel stories of the first Easter, the first apostles and witnesses of the resurrection were women - at a time when women's testimonies were not trusted in court. Consider that Apollos was largely discipled by Priscilla, a woman (whom some argue wrote the book of Hebrews). Consider the number of female church leaders in Rome that Paul addresses at the end of his letter there, including Junia (pictured above at the right). Consider Mary Magdelene, one of Jesus' disciples and highly praised by him and the Gospel writers.

These are not in the least bit isolated incidents. Or at least, they are not meant to be. They were counter-cultural, just as surely as the gospel is, every bit as much as the Basileia is. Shame on us for believing that the God of all creation doesn't want to work through women. Shame on the church for shutting down the voice of the Body of Christ and continuing our systemic fails. Shame on the Body of Christ for neglecting the Body of Christ.

Shame on the priesthood of believers for not upholding a universal priesthood of believers. Shame on those of us who believe in democracy and representation to practice such a blatant apartheid.


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*For instance, Catholic churches are nearly unanimously run by male clergy while Mainstream Protestant and African American Baptist churches tend to be unquestioningly egalitarian.


**Of course, when we talk about limiting power to a select few, my question would be, are we actually being egalitarian? If the majority of the power in the church is in the hand of the pastor and/or the elder board, can that church truly be about equality? My argument would be that it, while sexual equality in those positions brings us closer to true equality, most institutionalized churches have a power dynamic that looks like the radical early churches. Even so, the name "egalitarian" in this context is a bit misleading. To be truly egalitarian, the dynamics of the church would play out more closely to the Meetings of the Friends - circles, circles everywhere.

Lazy Sunday Readings: American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard Daley - His Battle for Chicago and the Nation

In order to understand where Chicago is going, we must look back to where Chicago was. In order to put the current mayoral run in Chicago into perspective, we must look back at the singularly most powerful figure in local politics from the last century, Mayor Richard J. Daley.

From Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor's magnificent American Pharaoh's prologue:

Daley, who served as mayor of Chicago from 1955 until his death in 1976, was the most powerful local politician America has ever produced. He possessed a raw political might that today, in an age when politics is dominated by big money and television, is hard to imagine. He personally slated, or selected, candidates for every office, from governor to ward committeeman.... When he wanted something from them - whether it was a congressman's vote on the national budget or a patronage position in the county sheriff's office - he almost always got it... But Daley's influence reached far beyond the borders of his city and state. His control over the large and well-disciplined Illinois delegation made him a kingmaker in selecting Democratic candidates for president -- he was, Robert Kennedy once declared, "the whole ballgame."

To what end did Daley use all of this power? He reigned in an era rich with ideological leaders. Martin Luther King Jr. was battling for civil rights, and George Wallace was fighting for segregation; Eugene McCarthy was campaigning to end the Vietnam War, and President Johnson was struggling to win it. Daley had an ideology of his own: the flinty conservatism that prevailed in Bridgeport and in much of white ethnic, working-class America in the 1950s and 1960s. A devout Catholic and loyal machine member, he believed deeply in authority. He favored the strong over the weak, the establishment over dissidents. Daley liked presidents, business leaders, and powerful institutions; he was offended by anti-war protesters, civil rights protesters, and hippies, who sought to influence policy without doing the hard work of prevailing at the ballot box. Daley believed that poor people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as his Bridgeport neighbors struggled to do. And he believed in racial segregation, of the kind that prevailed in his own neighborhood. Blacks stayed in the Black Belt to the east of Wentworth Avenue, and whites stayed to the west.

Daley shaking his fist at those d***ed hippies at the DNC in Chicago in '68. More on this story here, where I lifted this pic.

Those were Daley's views, but his agenda in office was less complicated: he was motivated first and foremost by a drive to accumulate and retain power. That was the way of the Chicago machine, and it was Daley's -- make deals and share the wealth with the Church or the syndicate, with black political leaders or anti-black neighborhood organizations, and with anyone else whose votes would help elect the machine's candidates. Daley's primary test of a political cause was whether it would increase or decrease his power... He formed alliances with politicians who could deliver votes, and ruthlessly cut them off when they were no longer useful - or when they became so strong that they posed a threat.

Daley came to see the great liberal crusades of the 1950s and 1960s - civil rights, the War on Poverty, and anti-war movement - as a threat to his power, and he battled against all of them. His focus was Chicago, but his power and influence were such that he ended up quickly shaping the national agenda. Nowhere was this more true than on civil rights. Daley was elected at the dawn of the civil rights era... The ... movement first took hold in the South, where Jim Crow enshrined racial segregation in the law books, but its implications for Chicago were substantial. The city was in the midst of a demographic revolution when Daley took office. The city's black population was reaching record levels, as trainloads of blacks fled their hard lives in the rural South for the promise of a better life in northern cities.

Chicago under Daley became America's major northern civil-rights battleground. After his success in the South, and after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Martin Luther King Jr. decided to take his movement to the North - and he chose Chicago as the place to start it off. King moved into a tenement on Chicago's South Side for eight months in 1966 and spearheaded the Chicago Campaign, personally leading open-housing marches into the city's white neighborhoods. Daley responded to King's drive with a brilliant campaign of his own. Daley did not make the same mistake so many southern governors and mayors had: he refused to let the movement cast him as the villain in its drama. In the end, Daley's handling of the Chicago Campaign would have far-reaching effects on the civil rights movement across the country. Daley also played a key role in preserving racial segregation in education, both in Chicago and nationally. Chicago's public schools were nearly as segregated as the southern schools that were being ordered by federal courts to integrate. Daley fought back attempts to integrate Chicago's public schools, and took on the federal government when it tried to force school desegregation on the city.

Daley was also a leading opponent of President Johnson's War on Poverty, and again his victory was felt far beyond Chicago. Daley did not share Johnson's moral commitment to using government programs to lift the disadvantaged up from poverty, but his greatest objections were political. Johnson's poverty programs incorporated the liberal notion of "maximum feasible participation," which meant that poor people should have as much control as possible over how poverty programs were run. Daley saw these programs as a threat to the machine, because they put money and power in the hands of independent community activists.

It goes on to acknowledge his great, grand mid-20th century accomplishments: the wide Dan Ryan expressway, the busy O'Hare Airport, the tall Sears Tower, the illustrious Magnificent Mile. But then the authors note that these accomplishments worked to further segregate the city and to give the greatest benefits to the wealthiest.

The segregation is still widely felt within this city, whether through the forced displacements of gentrification or through the apartheid-like differences in schools with nearly universal Black and/or Latino students versus those serving more White students.

It's important to know that the city has a history of strong segregation, because then one may understand why a progressive Black candidate like Danny K. Davis would give up his mayoral run (a fairly decent one) in order to give his endorsement to Carol Moseley-Braun (who is much more centrist), so that an African-American can stand a better chance against the White candidate, Rahm Emanuel (who is being supported now by former President Clinton). Ordinarily, wouldn't one progressive want to support another progressive - if that progressive truly believed in progressive causes? I think so, but in this case, the segregation issue was just too big to ignore. (Although a true progressive policy would make it so that all parties are heard and given a true chance to succeed. Which is what I believe that Miguel del Valle offers.)

At least that's my theory.

More Supreme Court case wackiness (Or: How I was wrong and learned to be wrong again)

The other day I mistakenly assumed that when asked about her knowledge of major cases in the US Supreme Court, Governor Palin was asked about any of which she knew off-hand. That question would make sense, because she should have some sort of authority on what it is that the Supreme Court has done and does do. As next-in-line for chief executive of the whole United States of America, she should be well acqauinted on the roles, responsibilities and histories of the other branches as they are all intricately and powerfully connected. That's how the founding fathers set this government up, at any rate, with checks and balances up and down and accross the lines.

Apparently, Ms. Palin was asked to name another SC case that she disagreed with outside of Roe V. Wade, which may be a bit harder - at least for the typical American citizen. But again, despite what Fred Thompson declares (that she wasn't prepared for that question because she wasn't handled with a list yet), it should not be beyond her grasp. Not if she is seeking for the office that she is seeking.

But since your all-time high-stakes debate is set to happen in a couple hours, allow me to help you out. Governor Palin, if someone asks you what you find abhorrent and wrong, the answer should always be, "Man's inhumanity to man." Or some such approximation. And the further removed and more So, therefore, if you are allowed to go back into history, choose something distant and universally regaled, such as Plessy v. Ferguson which legalized discrimination based on skin color, allowed "separate but equal" status to blacks in the US, and declared that it is not the job of the government to protect the rights of the individuals suffering under discrimination by other individuals (or local bodies of governance) in local areas.

I mean, no less a conservative than Justice William Rehnquist disagreed with this ruling.

No. Wait, haha. I was wrong again.