Lynching revisited

Tonight the Rev. Dr. James H. Cone, a Union Seminary professor who was among the first to articulate a black theology, challenged a notion I wrote about earlier.

"While the era of lynching may be over, that of marginalization is not," I said.

Dr. Cone said, "One can lynch a person without a rope or a tree." He cited the handling of hurricane Katrina as one example. Or the fact that one of every two black men aged 18 to 28 in America is involved with the criminal justice system (a.k.a. "for-profit industrial prison system"). "Any time people are treated as having no dignity or worth, they are being lynched."

His argument is that the lynching tree and the cross interpret one another: "no American Christian, white or black or otherwise, can understand the American church without connecting the cross with the black body hanging from a lynching tree." He declared the need for a theological war on white supremacy using the Bible's liberating message for an unredeemed and tortured world.

When I lived in South Dakota, I think even a speaker as compelling as James Cone would have had trouble convincing me that I had bought in to a white supremacist attitude. How could there be white supremacy when there are almost no black people living nearby, I would have asked?

Now I am tempted to say that what my home state suffers from is worse than white supremacy, something like "white protectionism." Native Americans are predominantly clustered together in reservations, two of which make up two of the five poorest counties in the United States. When I spent time on Pine Ridge last spring, I realized that there was an aspect of my state's geography and sociology that my social studies teachers, dear people that they are, didn't and probably couldn't teach me about.

Until you've come into contact with another culture with an economic reality that is totally foreign to your own, you can go on believing that white supremacy is something practiced by extremist wackos in the forests of Montana. You can think that the brokenness of inner cities such as Chicago's south side is a consequence of unfortunate housing and economic development decisions and lack of personal ambition. You can claim not to be a racist if the only people you encounter on your walk home from the grocery store are ones who look, talk, and dress just like you.

At times like this, the only helpful thought that comes to mind is one we Lutherans hold to:

"We confess that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.
We have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole hearts.
We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
For the sake of your son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us.
Forgive us, renew us, and lead us,
so that we may delight in your will and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your holy name."