Tag: George Floyd

Its All About Time…

.Reading time 6 minutes.

Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.  People are now kneeling and praying and holding silence for this amount of time and it feels epic and unbearable.  It is easy in the midst of that interminable silence to understand how monstrous this act really was.

By contrast, there’s a shorter stretch of time that’s also worth noting: 5 minutes and 41 seconds.

That is the total amount of time we have witnessed the President of the United States appear at religious institutions so far this week.  Not in prayer, or in reverence, but as a self serving show.  On Monday, Donald Trump awkwardly held a bible while standing outside of a darkened St John’s Church in Washington, D.C. after using a small scale military operation to clear peaceful protesters.  It made me sick.  (But I’m getting used to the taste of bile in the back of my throat as long as he is president.)  Then yesterday he followed that up with what amounts to a drive-by strut on the catwalk at the St John Paul II Shrine with Melania.  I agree with Washington Archbishop Wilton Gregory that this display was “reprehensible.”

Here’s how it breaks down:

Trump time at St. John the Evangelist – 00:02:28 (not including the Third Reich style promenade from the White House).

Trump time at St. John Paul II Shrine – 00:03:13

Total Trump time for both photo ops – 00:05:41

Time Derek Chauvin knelt with his full adult body weight on George Floyd’s neck – 00:08:46

Fixing the perversion of religion, the misuse of religion in politics and government, … is the responsibility of the religious, specifically religious leaders.

Religion is not a prop.  What people believe and how they believe it is not a political marketing tool.  Our constitution provides for freedom of religion, as well as freedom from religion.  From a basic ethical standpoint, none of us should be subjected to each other’s beliefs either as bribery or deterrent.  The reason freedom from religion was equally important to the framers of the constitution is because, in their time, religion had been weaponized against people as a tool of coercion and oppression.  Disestablishment was about preventing the financial dependence of churches on public funds and avoiding an obligatory relationship between the government and one church. The Trump administration seems to have missed this.  But then you miss a lot about religion when you only know how to spend five minutes anywhere near a church.

Trumps on the Catwalk
The Trumps on the Catholic catwalk

I have written before about the many ways in which fixing white racism is the responsibility of white people. It is a similar situation with religion. Fixing the perversion of religion, the misuse of religion in politics and government, the leveraging, pandering to and otherwise abuse of religion by bad actors is the responsibility of the religious, specifically religious leaders.  Religion or lack of religion can and does inform many people’s political decisions, but political action cannot be beholden to any religion or religious ideology.  Political policy must make room for people’s different and varied religious beliefs and practices if they have them.  More importantly, however, political policy cannot use belief and practice to achieve its end.  Nor can policy be inscribed with religious doctrine.  Take careful note: Trump also just signed an executive order on Advancing International Religious Freedom.  Really, it just piggy backs on existing policies and priorities that the administration has expressed about religious liberty before. But appearances are everything to the Trump administration and to the untrained MAGA eye, he looks like St. Trump the Evangelist (for the last 48 hours, 5 minutes and 41 seconds anyhow.) But what else do you do in an election year when there is a global pandemic, race riots and historic unemployment? You sell more Trump steaks!

Religious/ spiritual/ ethical leaders of all kinds…progressive conservative, pro-choice, pro-life, Orthodox and Atheist must come together in this moment to recognize that all of our ideas about “faith” or “not faith” are being grossly abused and the result will be that we will all loose the right to our freedom of belief.  There is no policy agenda that is worth the loss of real liberty that comes from allowing the broad spectrum of faith to be co-opted and misrepresented by someone who only sees religious expression as theater.

We need to bring the curtain down on this show.

-ALD

“What Can I Do?”

.Reading time 3 minutes.

Omar JimenezThe problem isn’t just police.  The problem is the specific policing of blackness. Policing blackness is the attempt to constrain, contain, silence, appropriate, shape or otherwise mutilate the humanity of black people to suit white comfort.  Where it goes tragically wrong is when policing blackness is combined with a badge and a weapon and a license to police blackness in the name of “public safety”.

Policing blackness is a historical sickness that the Civil War, emancipation, voting rights and the Supreme Court have not cured or mitigated.  It shows up in every street crossed by a white woman when she sees a black man approaching her; it shows up when black people laugh and enjoy themselves in public and someone calls the cops; it shows up when a black person is assumed not to be in charge or in a position of authority; it shows up when black people are not paid the same as their white counterparts; it shows up when black children are treated like playthings or dolls; it shows up when black people protest and are called “thugs” while fully armed gangs of white people are called “patriots”.  And it shows up when a white cop decides he is where law and life begin and end, and no one does a damn thing to stop him.  Policing blackness is not so much a failure of law as a disgusting failure of morals.

I’m asked on a regular basis by white people who want to end racism, “what can I do?”…like I’m supposed to have an answer.  Like this is my problem.  But I’m not the one policing blackness in act, gesture, dress, language, history, politics, sex and every other way imaginable and unimaginable.  I wouldn’t know where to begin to tell white people “what can I do?” I have no way to understand that perspective. My blackness is so entirely foreign to white people in ways that whiteness can never be foreign to me because of the perversion of how my blackness has been policed by whiteness my entire life.  I have no answer to the question “what can I do?” There is no book, course, curriculum, workshop or checklist that I can write or teach.  White people, please stop asking me. Please figure it out yourselves.

The one thing I can say is that on the other side of this nightmare, whenever dawn arrives, no white person will ever feel as if they are entitled to ask me or any other person of color “what can I do?”  Because it will finally dawn on them that the act of asking “what can I do?” is in itself policing my blackness.

-ALD