Last week was a bad week. Two Black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were murdered by police officers and then an ex-Veteran with mental health issues shot 12 police officers in TX killing 5, and then was killed by an armed drone. I was at FGC 90 minutes north of St. Paul where one of the murders took place. Already scheduled before any of this took place, was FGC's plenary speaker: Nekima Levy-Pound, an African American attorney who is one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter in MN. She in fact came from two days of protesting in front of the MN Governor's mansion to speak to us.
Nekima spoke very powerfully from her heart about her families journey with racism, her own path to becoming an activist and her faith journey. While her religious language is slightly different from that of Friends she very clearly described being called by God, over and over again being stretched, being asked to find courage and take risks and stepping forward and being faithful, and being protected. At the end of her talk someone announced that another person had been shot by the police (this turned out not to be true.) But concerned about that, I went back to my room and did a media search in order to try to find out.
I wound up instead doing something I never do (for people of any race): watching the videos that were posted of the two murders. I call them murders because when you watch them you quickly become very clearly that these were not people resisting arrest, they are people being killed in cold blood, for being Black and in the wrong place. After I watched these I wound up watching a press conference by President Obama right after we landed in Warsaw Poland, responding to the news of the second shooting. (This was before the shooting of police officers in TX.)
His press conference began with very polished prepared remarks which included the statistics about the number of black people stopped by cops 30% more likely than whites, 3x more likely to be searched, the number of arrests 2x higher for Blacks vs Whites, the number of black people prosecuted and convicted, etc. But a short while into his talk I listened to our normally very articulate President start to speak ex-temporarily and to travel in circles. He was doing this in the way people do when they are trying to find words to express a certain concept, but cannot quite find the right words. What he is struggling with is both expressing the tragedy of these Black deaths and also wanting to hold up that all Police are not bad and do a hard job on behalf of the community. He struggles because our society is literally thinking so black and white about this subject that people are just choosing up sides and picking who is good and bad. He is trying carefully to not take sides or be accused of taking sides. But he struggles with how to communicate the idea that we are all connected and that there is suffering on both sides.
Then I wound up watching a video by an African American police officer , Nakia Jones,(the only Black woman on the force she serves in Ohio). The media has reported this as a "very emotional response". Nakia starts out very calm but does become more emotional in her tone of voice and tearful, but she is also in Quaker terms eldering her fellow police officers. She speaks directly to white officers and tells them, "we have all taken an oath to serve our communities, to die if necessary to protect them. I take that seriously, if you are racist and you are serving in a community of color take off your uniform or transfer." Nakia's offering is very courageous as she will face those same officers in her work place. There have been false rumors that she was fired, but the Mayor's office confirmed there have been KKK threats since she spoke out.
Prior to all this I have felt that as Quakers, as a primarily white church, that we did not appropriately have something to say about Black Lives Matter. That it is not white people's place to speak to either what Black people's experience is or what actions they are lead to take. That much of our attempts to help, while well meaning, reflects an ignorance of the actually history of racism in this country or the experience of Black people. However, the day after hearing all these messages from Black people about present day racism, I found myself in Meeting for Worship reflecting upon the fact that during the abolition movement Quaker's first moved to get unity in the Society of Friends that the owning of slavery was wrong and to labor with Quaker slave holders to get them to give up owning slaves. The position taken was that slavery was morally wrong both for the slave and for the owner. That it was morally corrupting to own a slave.
It occurs to me that we, Quakers do have something to say to white officers about the racism that can consciously or unconscionably drive them to acts of violence around people of color. I believe that anyone wearing a blue uniform in this country should have to go through a week long training on racism (sexism) and oppression theory. But also as our national dialogue becomes literally black and white in its exploration of these events I think that the Quaker notion that there is that of God in all people is an important offering to the national dialogue. I do not mean that to be an "all lives matter" statement that inadvertently dismisses the important effort to elevate out of obscurity and indifference the routine killing of black people. I mean it to be a statement that confronts racism as a disease that is ripping our country apart and asks us to remember that the disease is destructive on both sides and that the way out of the killing and hurting is for us to join hands in confronting the mindset of racism as one that is an acid that burns everything it touches.
