By Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas – September 2, 2020

The texts I received from family and friends after video of yet another Black man, Jacob Blake, falling victim to potentially deadly policing were no longer angry, anguished or heartbroken. They were asking for a serious answer.

What to do?  It’s time to declare a national emergency on lethal police action.

What we are witnessing is about more than white privilege. It is about more than whether or not certain persons or police are racist, or anti-racist for that matter. It is about anti-Blackness.

It is time that this society faces the truth that the American exceptionalism that is so deeply rooted in our nation’s identity and that protects social constructs of whiteness at all costs depends on a fundamental narrative of anti-Blackness. This narrative projects the Black body as such a dangerously threatening one, practically more beastly than human. Like an animal, Black people are viewed as likely to erupt into a life-threatening tirade with little provocation, and thus are inherently violent and to be feared.

This anti-Black narrative has penetrated our collective psyche. It explains the almost instinctive tendency of some individuals — even those who otherwise consider themselves nonracist — to call police on Black people engaging in ordinary human activities. It’s as if the reality of a Black person simply going about the business of being human is so jarring to one’s psyche that something must be wrong. This explains why the police are called on Black people who are waiting, sleeping, barbecuing or birdwatching.

And then there are the police. Research shows that Black males are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white males. Other studies show that Black people who have been fatally shot by police were twice as likely to be unarmed as a white person.

These figures reflect bad policing techniques and systemic racism within law enforcement agencies, but the problem goes beyond these things. The influence of an anti-Black narrative is apparent in a study that concluded that “Black faces looked more criminal to police officers; the more Black the more criminal.’” The same study found that “Black faces and Black bodies can trigger thoughts of crime (and) thinking of crime can trigger thoughts of Black people.”

The discriminatory effect played in reverse in Kenosha, Wisconsin, when police allowed an armed white man who had shot several people to walk away without incident.

When people suggest that “bad cops” are not indicative of all cops, it’s instructive to remember how pervasive this narrative is: Law enforcement officers don’t need to be corrupt or overtly racist to see Black bodies through a lens of threat, fear and criminality.

What, then, are we to do about it? It is time to declare a national emergency in this country as we have for critical attacks on the country, and for contagions and other public health disasters. This anti-Black narrative threatens the lives and livelihood of not only the 13% of this country’s population who are targeted by it; it threatens the survival of the nation itself. Any narrative that dehumanizes or degrades another person is violent, and violence breeds violence.

That Black people are disproportionately trapped in the violence of poverty, with its social comorbidities of inadequate health care, substandard housing and insufficient employment, educational and recreational opportunities, is no accident.  Neither is the violence that erupts onto the streets in protest or in the all too common violence of crime. It is the result of an uninterrupted cycle of anti-Black violence that leads not only to the devastation of Black communities, but of the nation.

Yet it is not on the streets where this nation’s devastation is most evident. Rather, it is most evident in the places of power where laws and policies are put into place. It is in the rhetoric from the highest levels of our government that fuels anti-Blackness, jeopardizing the nation’s vision of itself as a democracy where there is freedom and justice for all.

Thus, we find a nation increasingly divided against itself as anger and frustration are stoked by the never-ending cycle of violence. Declaring a national emergency in response to anti-Blackness is the essential first step in stopping the violence that will destroy the nation.

As a start, such a declaration would entail immediate implementation of the following:

·         A national platform for historians, educators, political scientists, and thought and faith leaders to lead the nation in reckoning with anti-Blackness and its consequences.

·         A task force of social, political, economic, business and faith leaders to develop an urgent plan to address and eliminate poverty with all of its social comorbidities in this country.

·         A reallocation of federal, state and local funding priorities to support safe communities as opposed to policing communities. This means shifting from community police to community responders such as social workers, mental health workers, pastors, teachers, etc., recognizing that every call does not require law enforcement.

A national emergency is the minimum needed to end the texts I am getting every day. “It never seems to stop,” one person recently told me. “I’m not even trying to change hearts anymore, I’m just trying to survive being Black in this country.” We need to realize that all our lives and the future of our nation are in the same boat.

(The Very Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas is the dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Theological Seminary, the canon theologian at Washington National Cathedral and author of “Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God.”)

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Jesus said to him, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.” – Matthew 18:22 NIV

As I’ve been pondering this parable of Jesus—one of his most challenging, which is really saying something—I have found myself wondering how many of us have absorbed any of these beliefs about forgiveness. This writing does not recommend any of these 4 italicized beliefs.

– Forgiveness means excusing or overlooking the harm that has been done to us and saying that everything is okay.

– Forgiveness means allowing those who have hurt us to persist in their behavior.

– Forgiving requires forgetting what has happened.

– Forgiveness is something we can do at will, and always all at once.

If we have absorbed any of these distorted beliefs about forgiveness, it can come as both a shock and a relief to learn that such ideas would be foreign to Jesus. Clearly he expects us—requires us—to forgive. Yet in his teaching about forgiveness, nowhere does Jesus lay upon us the kinds of burdens we have often placed upon ourselves—burdens that can make one of the most difficult spiritual practices nearly impossible.

The heart of forgiveness is not to be found in excusing harm or allowing it to go unchecked. It is to be found, rather, in choosing to say that although our wounds will change us, we will not allow them to forever define us. Forgiveness does not ask us to forget the wrong done to us but instead to resist the ways it seeks to get its poisonous hooks in us. Forgiveness asks us to acknowledge and reckon with the damage so that we will not live forever in its grip.

Sometimes we are given the grace to forgive quickly. Sometimes the grace to forgive takes a long, long time to receive. And so forgiveness often requires practice. It takes choosing to work at it. We might have to chip away at it again and again and again. Seventy-seven times, at least, as Jesus says in this passage.

Forgiveness might well be the hardest blessing we will ever offer—or receive. As with any difficult practice, it’s important to ask not only for the strength we will need for it, but also the grace: the grace that will, as we practice again and again, begin to shimmer through our wounds, drawing us toward the healing and freedom we could hardly have imagined at the outset.

Is there some forgiveness you are being asked to practice? Are there any ideas about forgiveness that you might need to release—or take on—in order to enter this practice? How might it be to ask not only for the strength but also for the grace you need to forgive another—or yourself?

THE HARDEST BLESSING

If we cannot
lay aside the wound,
then let us say
it will not always
bind us.

Let us say
the damage
will not eternally
determine our path.

Let us say
the line of our life
will not always travel
along the places
we are torn.

Let us say
that forgiveness
can take some practice,
can take some patience,
can take a long
and struggling time.

Let us say
that to offer
the hardest blessing,
we will need
the deepest grace;
that to forgive
the sharpest pain,
we will need
the fiercest love;
that to release
the ancient ache,
we will need
new strength
for every day.

Let us say
the wound
will not be
our final home—

that through it
runs a road,
a way we would not
have chosen
but on which
we will finally see
forgiveness,
so long practiced,
coming toward us,
shining with the joy
so well deserved.

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