Monk
The Abbey of Gethsemeni is not in Washington County, but
it’s a short drive through the rolling hills of Marion and Nelson counties. One
of the most famous modern-day monks lived and worked there with his brother
Trappists, and even though he took a vow of silence, he said an enormous amount
through his prolific writings. Late in his too-short life, he had a kind of
revelation in Louisville one day, and turned his attention to social justice.
He wrote an essay called Faith and
Violence.
In this essay, he argues that the Christian must face the
truth of the racism with which he has been complicit, and that there is a
collective responsibility and a collective guilt for the current (1967)
situation.
Prophetically, he expresses empathy for the Black Panther movement,
Stokely Carmichael, and even those who have advocated violence against the
state, and he deprecates the white liberal by agreeing with Malcolm X that
their interest in the Negro was spurious and superficial, “his basic conviction
that the Negro was somehow more of an animal, a distinct and exotic species of
human being.” (184) He goes on to add that “observation of whites visiting
Harlem in search of certain types of recreation made this supposition rather
plausible.”
But Merton closes with an affirmation that even though it
is valid for Blacks to reject white intervention into their quest for
liberation, that does not free the white Christian from her obligation:
We must continue
to treat our Negro friends as persons and as friends, not as members of a
hostile and incomprehensible species, and it is to be hoped that they will do
us the same honor. Above all, the Negro has a right to self-respect in his
identity as a person of his race and we must continue to do all that we can to
help him in this—as well as doing all that we can to see that his human and
civil rights are guaranteed him, even when he may seem to be acting in such a
way as to forfeit them in the eyes of a truculent and critical society. (179)
Getting past the sexist and archaic-sounding language,
Merton is more on point today than ever. And I am overwhelmed with sadness at
how little real progress has been made. Even though we have elected, and
re-elected, a Black President, the football players of the NFL are being
excoriated because they protest in the most benign way imaginable the
extra-judicial killings of their Black brethren.
We, as Christians and people of faith, must be a part of the revolution that is coming against the
barbarity of the prison industrial system, the so-called war on drugs, the
ghettoization of the Black family, the school to prison pipeline, voter
repression, and red-lining. If we are not wanted, we can back away from those
spaces and educate ourselves and other whites, find places where we can be of help,
and continue to stand for justice. As one Christian
In Faith and Violence, a book
published amid the political turbulence of 1968, Thomas Merton told an old
Hasidic story about two men, one drunk and one sober, who were beaten and
robbed as they traveled through the forest. Asked later about what had
happened, the sober one described the violent encounter in vivid detail, but
the drunken one seemed quite placid. “We’re all right,” he said. “Everything is
fine.” Merton went on to observe that for some, faith “seems to be a kind of
drunkenness, an anesthetic, that keeps you from realizing and believing that
anything can ever go wrong.” But, he asked, is faith a “narcotic dream” or is
it “an awakening”? Then he delivered his punch line: “What if we were to awaken
to discover that we were the robbers, and our destruction comes from the root
of hate in ourselves.”
Question:
Is the obligation to talk about slavery on the White population? And to what
end?
The purpose of learning about slavery here is manifold.
First, young people can be helped to understand the chain of events whereby
today, Black men are incarcerated, unemployed, and under-educated at alarming
rates; Black women suffer higher rates of cancer, heart disease, and numerous
life-threatening illnesses; and Black children are guaranteed to start out with
a playing field that is grotesquely uneven. There is, once “awakened,” no way
the learner cannot see the direct line from slavery to the challenges (far too
light a word) faced by Black Americans today.
If white people will talk about slavery, then it is highly
likely that Black people will join the conversation.
This land is not blessed. It is not sacred. It is haunted
and poisoned. It is tainted and cursed. It has the cries and moans of slaves
tilled into it, and the crack of the whip echoes in the branches of the trees
when they are bent by the wind, and the tears of the families separated by the
practice of the slave market and the stock farm, deep in its roots.
Question:
What would it take to make things right between the white and Black population?
See
“Reparations”.
Question:
Things seem “fine” here. Why not leave well enough alone?
That’s
a good one. Key word is “seem.” Actually, it doesn’t even take a whole lot of
digging to uncover the detritus of grievances, some old, some quite fresh. The
Black people here are trusting and authentic, and once they know you are on
their side and that your intentions are honorable, once they see you don’t live
on “White Street,” and you’re not part of the “establishment,” they will tell
you. At least, the younger ones will.
So
things aren’t “fine.”
In
Faith and Violence, Merton writes
about the riots in Harlem in 1964. He points out that the police captain
shouted at the rioters through a megaphone, “Go home! Go home!” and that one
protestor replied, “We are home!”
This
is the only home, Merton goes on to say, White America has given them:
tenements, a ghetto, neglect and ruin, and all that results—gangs, addiction,
and crime. (137) This allows white America to stereotype the Black residents of
Harlem (and by extension, all Black neighborhoods and “ghettos,” even though
whites created them) as lawless and “bad.”
White
people and Black people need to learn this!
Merton
goes on to say:
The majority of
people in Harlem are good, peaceable, long-suffering men and women, socially
insecure but more sinned against but sinning. What is to be wondered at is not
the occasional mass demonstrations and rioting, not the juvenile delinquency
and…violent groups… What is to be wondered at is the persistence of courage,
irony, humor, patience and hope in Harlem. (137)
Somehow, oddly, the Saddlebred horse that made Kalarama
farm famous was named Harlem Globetrotter.
For those who never left Washington County, Harlem didn’t mean much, but they’d
probably seen the Harlem Globetrotters on TV. Saddlebred horses, it turns out,
have often been treated abusively. Slaves in this county, and this city, were
treated worse than horses, even Saddlebreds.
Connections are everywhere.
