#480: Is this, finally, our nation’s Great Awakening?

In this moment of national crisis, the popular uprising triggered by George Floyd’s killing raises the question: Is America finally ready to acknowledge and repair the systemic racism embedded in our culture? 

William Bratton is the former police commissioner in Boston, New York city, and Los Angeles.  When interviewed recently about George Floyd’s killing, he referred to slavery and racism as “America’s original sin--the scar that never heals.” My own awakening to that scar’s depth took many years, but I was fortunate to have many opportunities.

In December 1969, during my senior year at Holy Cross, all the Black students packed their bags and left campus, vowing never to return unless a group of expelled Black students received amnesty.  During a recent student sit-down protesting a campus visit by GE recruiters considered “scabs” (since GE was on strike), a disproportionate number of the protestors punished were Black.  A college administrator offered the excuse that, in a big mostly white crowd, those students were easier to spot!

In response, we white students went on strike in solidarity with the Black students.  Eventually amnesty was granted, and all the Black students returned to a campus newly awakened to their plight.

I spent the summer of 1971 as a research assistant for a doctoral thesis on “Racial Stratification in the US in the 20^th century.” My job was collecting data for the chapter on lynching.  I constructed tallies of the lynchings in each state for each year since 1900.  Such tallies were rarely published in mainstream (white) periodicals, so I spent two months digging through obscure, often defunct Black journals that printed monthly totals of lynchings.

One day a Black reference librarian confronted me.  Why, she asked, was a white boy like me searching through these Black journals?  Why wasn’t this job given to a Black student?  What was I trying to prove?

Our encounter, perhaps 20 minutes long, ended with me (1) getting access to the archives I sought and (2) realizing that the burden of proof was on me to both acknowledge my privileged state and to persuade her of my bona fides.

My research left me appalled. I learned that thousands of Blacks were lynched not only without trials but also often without being charged, and even without any crime at all being committed.  Blacks were often lynched to cover the crimes—or simply the embarrassing behavior—of whites (as when a white girl flirted with a Black who was then lynched for rape after she was, in fact, beaten by her white boyfriend).  Blacks were lynched singly and in groups.  Blacks were not just lynched by hanging: Blacks were shot, drawn and quartered, tarred and feathered, buried alive, burnt at the stake, blowtorched, skinned alive. Pregnant Black girls were lynched after their babies were ripped from their wombs.

And blacks were lynched in frighteningly large numbers throughout the 20^th century, well into the 1950s— right into my own lifetime.

It became clear to me that lynching was a cultural institution aimed not at justice, nor at crime, not even at individual conflicts. Lynching was often disguised as vigilanteeism, but in reality it aimed at terror--terror to frighten the Black population into continued submission.  In short, lynching replaced slavery to keep Blacks in their place during the Jim Crow era. And I saw that, as lynching finally faded away, the states with the most lynching became the states that executed the most Blacks.

My work that summer made me aware that terror against Black people had “evolved” from one institution to another: from slavery to lynching to the death penalty to mass incarceration to police brutality.  These different forms of terror all aimed to keep Blacks in “their place.”  Whites thus aimed to maintain supreme control.

In 1972 I moved to Washington, DC for work, and barely three miles away whole city blocks still lay in ruins from the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination four years before.  My job was in a comfortably white suburb, but there was nothing comfortable about those burnt-out Black neighborhoods.

In April 1973 I flew to Chicago to scout the University of Chicago for my doctoral studies.  Riding the elevated train south from the Loop would bring me west of the campus, so I planned to catch a bus east to the school.  I soon realized I was the only white person on the train, and every station stop simply added more Black passengers.  Finally an older Black woman got up and approach.

“Do you know where you’re going, young man?” she asked.

I told her my plan to reach the campus.

“Well, it’s best if you get off this train as soon as possible.  This is not a safe train for you.”

I thanked her, thinking that I was still not fully aware just how deeply divided our culture was--and had been for generations.

That fall my wife and I move to Hyde Park, the university enclave on Chicago’s South Side. We soon learned that none of our neighbors dared to venture into the “ghetto” neighborhoods to our north, west, and south.

 The following summer my parents visited and I offered to drive them to see the house they had lived in when my father was in the navy in the 1940s.  Thirty years later, it was an all-Black neighborhood, and when we parked across the street the Black gentleman rocking on the porch was clearly frightened by this car full of white people staring at his house--and we were too frightened even to explain our presence.  We simply drove off. To this day I regret I did not talk to the man.

In 1977 we moved to Dorchester, a rapidly changing inner-city Boston neighborhood with its historic Irish and Italian population fleeing as Black families moved in.  We found our apartment by word of mouth: it  had been off the market for two years for fear of Black tenants. Our suburban relatives were often reluctant to visit our “tenement” home, but we stayed.

Our children eventually enrolled in the Raphael Hernandez Bilingual School, where they acquired a unique education as members of a white minority in a multiethnic student body.  This was, of course, fresh in the wake of Boston’s busing crisis over segregated schools, and as we persisted we witnessed most of our white neighbors moving away rather than subject their kids to Boston’s public schools.  Citywide, schools became increasingly Black as white families abandoned a school system they could no longer dominate.

We still live in Dorchester, and our once lily-white neighborhood now includes a stable mix of Black families, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Haitians, gay couples, and a remnant of the Irish and Italians.  But as late as the late 1990s, my daughter’s Holy Cross classmates were often not allowed by their parents to spend weekends at our “inner city” home.

By now our own family includes people of color on both sides: my brother’s wife is Chinese-American, and our nephew’s wife is African-American. Their wonderful bi-racial kids are now our beloved kin.

Through all this time I’ve met my share of overtly racist people, but for every person who spouted racist sentiments there have been many more who were simply blind to, or even in denial of, racism’s pervasive grip on American Life.  Perhaps they have not benefited from experiences like my own, which awakened me to the reality depicted by the evocative imagery of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:

African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands. But we have to stay vigilant, because it’s always still in the air.

For me, the basic truth is that slavery’s impact has never been eradicated.  And this brings me back to the notion of slavery as our Original Sin.

Most people’s worldview is shaped by their view of human nature. People who think human nature is simply good expect a world of happy human relations, and seek to blame any distress or injustice on external forces. People who see human nature as basically evil expect the worst of others, and seek to shield themselves from all threats.  But Christians have a more complex view.  For us, human nature is essentially good but factually flawed and wounded. We therefore hope for the best but expect that humans, unaided by divine grace, will typically fall into evil ways, not because of external forces alone, but because there is a moral misery within us.

This idea is usually applied to the whole human race.  But what if we apply it to a nation?  Is it possible that our national character is so rooted in our original enslavement of others that we as a people are fatally wounded and permanently incapable of goodness?

My own experience since 1969 until now has made me think so.  Yes, we have witnessed great gains since the civil rights movement of the 1960s.  Since the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther king, we have seen Blacks take leading roles in movies, television, sports, business, and politics at all levels--including the presidency itself.  Mixed-race couples and families and now more widely accepted, and there are broad legal protections for Blacks in housing, folding, employment, voting, and education. 

But the Covid-19 crisis has exposed how superficial some of these gains have been.  Black Americans are harder hit by the pandemic because Black Americans still lacked the privileges white Americans enjoy in housing, health care, wealth, and education. It was Dr. King himself who believed that America’s wounded nature would require more change than mere civil rights:

The Black revolution is much more than a struggle for civil rights of the Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws--racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society.  It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.

The moral ills King decried in 1968 remain deep flaws in American Life.  One might even think that their persistence, despite all the activism and progress of the past 50 years, proves that no treatment will ever heal our national scar, so deep is the wound.  We might fear that slavery and racism comprise not only our Original Sin but even our permanent moral defect.

But now the perfect storm of pandemic and police killing has unleashed fresh healing forces.  People pent up from confinement take to the streets, unmindful of the health risks, to decry the death toll that both police and pandemic have taken on Black America.  We now see both the spread of virus and the blight of brutality as symptoms of our deeper moral malady.

And now come polls suggesting that, for the first time ever, a majority of Americans are finally awakening to the historic reality of systemic racism.

So against all odds, amid all the sickness and chaos, all the failed national leadership and the heroism of frontline workers, all the patience of those staying home and the persistence of protesters marching and kneeling and even lying in our streets--amid all this rises the hope that now, at long last, we might be ready to shed our past, to rip off that ancient scar and find true healing of our deep national wound and, with God’s grace, get to our nation’s promised land where we can, finally all together, breathe freedom’s fresh air. 

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2020

#449: Can Americans Elect a Moral President?

Chagrined observers of the nastiness we call “Campaign 2016” have begun to inject the character question into their coverage of the candidates. 

Even before the KKK uproar, the below-the-belt debating, and Mitt Romney’s aspersions and allegations, commentators (especially on the conservative side) were denouncing mean-spirited tactics and schoolyard taunts as evidence off the candidates’ unethical roots. 

So evangelical talk show host Michael Brown derided the willingness of voters to support candidates who lack a “solid moral base.” He wondered how they can justify voting for “someone who has a long track record of being ruthless, cruel, unchristian, immoral, profane, full of pride, greedy, and double-minded.” He bemoans that people are not looking for “men [sic] of integrity.” This is because he believes that an American president must be “a moral and ethical leader, a leader who will make godly choices.”

On the Catholic side, columnist George Weigel has lamented the anger pervading the campaign, grouping supporters of Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders under the same “glandular” label.  Such anger, he claims, cannot be righteous:

Anger is a glandular thing. An angry politics is a politics of the gut. A passionate politics, informed and disciplined by reason, can be a politics of the intelligence, a politics of great ideas: a politics, if you will, of sound moral judgment. And sound moral judgment is rarely, if ever, the child of anger.

(Note that George Weigel neglects the reverse possibility: that anger can often be the righteous child of sound moral judgment--witness Jesus with the money changers!). 

Catholic politics, he says, must always be moral politics:

Catholic political theory is an extension of Catholic moral theology; or to put it another way, Catholic political theory treats politics as an arena of moral reasoning and moral judgment. The Catholic citizen, as the Church understands these things, is obliged to think, not just to feel; to judge, not just to react; to exercise prudence in weighing options among usually-imperfect alternatives, not to indulge in fantasies about simplistic quick-fixes to all that ails us and the world.

I think both men are onto something—but they  fail to go far enough.  The truth is that asking for a “moral president” is really asking for two things.

A Moral Person.  First, it is asking if the president is a moral person, a person of integrity.  Given contemporary politics (perhaps politics in general), this is asking a lot: a public official who is consistently honest, humble, dignified, unselfish, kind-hearted, willing to sacrifice, acts with sound judgment rather than blind anger.  How many past presidents could pass that test?  How many public officials today? 

In my view it is fair to pose the “personal integrity” test, although we risk having no one to vote for.  And anyhow, it may be important to look for more.

A Moral Presidency. A presidential inauguration includes a solemn oath.  In it, the new president promises, not to be a good person, but to protect and defend the Constitution.  In other words, the oath of office pertains to the president’s official duties rather than his or her private life.  And as Weigel notes, political policies are (for Catholics, at least) rooted in moral principles—or should be.

Thus we voters must hope not just for a moral president, but also for a moral presidency.

The standards for this are not rocket science.  Catholic Social Teaching, rooted in the Gospels and shaped by papal teaching since 1891, provides clear criteria for moral policymaking.  And since 2013, Pope Francis has shrewdly employed his popularity to make these criteria the stuff of headlines.  During his U.S. visit, for example, both his White House speech and his address to Congress offered us clear guidelines for a moral presidency.

Thus we can list major current issues and compare the positions of any candidate with Catholic Social Teaching.  Here are some examples. 

Climate Change.  The official Catholic position, forcefully articulated in Pope Francis’ June 2015 encyclical letter, is clear: climate change is real, is fueled by runaway consumption which breeds economic inequality, widespread resentment, and terror.  Reversing this threat to “our common home” is a moral imperative of the highest order.

We should look for candidates, then, who make this position a key plank of their platform.

Economic Inequality.  Pope Francis has called inequality “the root of all social ills,” and concluded that peace remains impossible until the problem of inequality is solved.

Since 1970 the U.S. has emerged, under both parties, as the most unequal of all major nations.  And the gap between rich nations and poor nations has also grown wider.

Which candidates call us to break with this history? 

Open Immigration.  Catholic Social Teaching acknowledges the right of governments to regulate immigration in the interest of public safety--but it also proclaims migration to be a human right, which governments cannot violate.  Which candidates stand by this human right? 

Nuclear Weapons.  Since Vatican II, Catholicism considers the production, installation, distribution, sale, threat, or use of nuclear weapons to be an unconditional evil.  A moral presidency would include aggressive efforts to remove nuclear weapons from the planet.

Weapons Sales.  The U.S. is the world’s largest arms dealer, and Catholicism teaches that arms sales not only promote war, but they also prevent the poor from escaping poverty.  Which candidates name the arms industry as a scourge on the common good?

Defense of Life.  Before the U.S. Congress, Francis called for defending life at every stage--which means opposing both abortion and the death penalty.  A moral presidency would defend this “seamless garment” of life.

Human Rights.  The Catholic definition of human rights includes the right to Health Care, to Housing, to Migration, to a Living Wage, to Education, etc.  None of these are privileges to be reserved, inherited, or rewarded. They are everyone’s birthright. A moral presidency would be committed to the government’s responsibility for securing such rights for all citizens

This list ignores both parties and personalities.  It focuses only on moral principles.

As Americans prepare to choose a president, it makes perfect sense to seek a moral person.  It makes even more sense to seek a moral presidency.

This sets extraordinarily high standards for voters to consider.  I doubt we have a single candidate who meets them all.  Our responsibility is to get beyond the personalities and parties to determine this: which candidate measures up to these standards better than any other?

Given what I have seen of this campaign, I can only think: God help us all! 

   © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2015

#430: 10 Reasons to Choose the Life Penalty

After several weeks of a trial to convict the Boston Marathon bomber who had already admitted his guilt, the question now is: will the jury choose life or death?

Martin Richards, the 8 year old boy killed in the Boston Marathon bombing, went to school just a few hundred yards down the street from my house.  This week his killer’s trial has entered the penalty phase, when jurors will decide if Dzhohkar Tsarnaev will be sentenced to death or to life without the possibility of parole.

But just before the penalty phase began, the boy’s family publicly requested that the death penalty be set aside.  No one suffered more than the Richards.  Martin’s sister lost a leg, his mother suffered serious injuries, and his father was forced to make the soul-rending decision to leave his dying son in order to say his sister.  Their plea now is to be released from the further suffering the death penalty would bring.  Known as active Catholics in a heavily Catholic neighborhood, the Richards intended to speak only for themselves, yet they can also be seen as representing modern Catholicism’s increasing rejection of lethal violence.

The taking of human life has many forms, but none is more central to Christianity than the death penalty.  Jesus himself was a victim of capital punishment, and the instrument of his execution--the cross--has long become the “trademark” of his followers and their faith.  Indeed, we’ve become so accustomed to the cross, and even the crucifix, that we might be shocked to imagine, as one Bostonian suggested this week, walking into a church to find Jesus hanging from a noose or strapped to an electric chair.

Most of Jesus’ apostles were also killed by the authorities.  We call them martyrs, but they effectively spent their last days on death row.  The same is true for more than a few Christian saints even into the 21^st century, executed for their faith.  The image of Christians killed by ISIS is tragically fresh news. 

Sadly, Catholics had been not only victims of the death penalty, but agents of execution as well.  The Inquisition regularly tried and condemned “heretics” and “witches,” even if the actual killing was done by civil authorities.  And we should never forget that France’s patron saint, Joan of arc, was only canonized after being burned at the stake following the Church’s condemnation.  Over the centuries, then, the Church has been both the victim and the perpetrator of the death penalty. 

But recent years have brought a dramatic shift, as Catholic teaching has come to reject virtually every argument used to justify capital punishment.  That teaching has had its effect: fewer than half of U.S. Catholics support the death penalty, down from 70% a generation ago.

But it is still worth seeing why the Church now opposes virtually any use of the death penalty, even for cases as uniquely heinous as the Boston Marathon bombing.  In view of Pope Francis’ plea to build an encounter culture, these reasons might help us to encounter others at this very moment, when the death penalty is urgently debated.

The Vatican, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the U.S. bishops collectively, and many bishops of individual states have gone on record opposing the death penalty.  They have joined together in a growing consensus about why the death penalty is wrong.  Drawing on their views, here are 10 good reasons:

1. Playing God.  Catholics believe the power over life and death belongs to God alone.  Murderers usurp that power for themselves, which is the most profound reason for calling murder evil.  And executioners, no matter how good their intentions, usurp God’s power as well.

2. Cycle of violence.  Catholics are supposed to believe that violence is not the greatest power on earth.  We believe, in fact, that love can conquer violence.  But answering violent acts that take human life by taking another human life means we give in to the power of violence and thereby perpetuate it.

3. No deterrent.  There is no evidence that executing people reduces crime.  In fact, states that execute have higher crime rates than states that don’t.  And European countries, all of whom ban executions, have much lower crime rates than the U.S.

4. Expensive and inefficient.  It cost several times more to implement a death sentence than it does to impose life without parole.  Years or decades of appeals often mean criminals eventually die on death row anyway before they can be executed.

In the specific case of the Marathon bomber, the killer’s lawyers publicly stated that, had the federal government taken capital punishment off the table, Tsarnaev would have pleaded guilty, thus avoiding any trial at all, and would already be out of sight, serving a life sentence without parole. Thus the trial was only needed for one thing: to secure a death penalty. That means that this week’s penalty phase—as well as the entire trial before--are but one wasteful part of the unnecessary price we pay by insisting on the death penalty.

5. Prolongs victims’ sufferings.  Execution is not magic.  It will not bring back the dead, or make their families suffer less.  On the contrary, the death penalty keeps a case alive far longer than the disappearing act of a life sentence.  This is precisely why the Richards family fears the anguish they will undergo after a death sentence.  The Boston Globe’s Kevin Cullen, who has listed all the terrorists already waiting on death row since 1993, predicts Tsarnaev’s death sentence would never actually be carried out.

6. Racism.  In U.S. history as well as today, minorities are disproportionately targeted by the death penalty.  In part, this reflects the difficulty poor people have obtaining effective counsel.  The result: a double standard by which better-off criminals are likely to evade the death sentence. Thus, while African-Americans make up only slightly more than 10% of the American population, they constitute more than 40% of those on death row.

7. Innocence. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 152 people sentenced to death have been exonerated since 1973. An increasing number of these were exonerated when DNA evidence proved they were innocent. On average, these people spent 11.2 years on death row before being released!

No human institution will ever be perfect, so we must always be prepared to identify and correct our errors. But once a person is executed, it is too late to correct that mistake! How many innocent have been executed before they could be exonerated? How many innocent deaths are justified by our desire to kill the guilty? 

8. Cruel and unusual?  Cruel and unusual punishment is prohibited by the U.S.  Constitution, but those words have yet to be clearly defined.  Yet every attempt to invent a more “humane” form of execution ends up in grotesque suffering, mistakes, and mishaps.  The result is the irony of people shocked to learn that a state might return to firing squads because lethal injections have proved so difficult to implement.  As the rest of the world leaves the death penalty behind, the American practice of it appears even more to be cruel and unusual. 

Some argue that while in general the death penalty is wrong, in the specific case of the Marathon bomber it is uniquely justified.  But of course that simply makes the penalty that much more unusual, and no less cruel. 

9. Last resort.  In its attempts to promote a “seamless garment of life,” the Catholic Church now teaches that the death penalty must be regarded as a last resort--to be used only when there is no other way to protect society from a criminal.  But the high security prison in Colorado to which the U.S. has already sent convicted terrorists means that any threat is removed, and any further suffering is prevented.  In practice, then, the Church’s teaching of a last resort faces us with the truth that there may be no situations where there is no other alternative.  Clearly, in this case, as in virtually every other case, life without parole is an available option.  Those seeking death face the burden of explaining why the alternative cannot be justified.

10. It is bad for us.  Virtually all advanced democracies have eliminated to the death penalty--except the U.S.  By now, moving beyond executions is the world’s mark of a truly civilized country.  Given the alternatives, capital punishment serves only one real purpose: revenge. And the world now regards revenge as a relic of a more primitive culture.  In short, the presence of the death penalty in our society separates us from the truly civilized world. Thus resorting to the death penalty appeals to the worst instincts in our nature, and makes us less as a people. 

Listen to the joint statement of Jessica Kensky and Patrick Downs, newlyweds who each lost limbs in the Boston Marathon bombing, as they describe the spiritual challenge before us all:

In our darkest moments and deepest sadness, we think of inflicting the same types of harm on him.  We wish that he could feel the searing pain and terror that for beautiful souls felt before their death, as well as the harsh reality of discovering mutilated or missing legs.  If there is any one who deserves the ultimate punishment, it is the defendant.  However, we must overcome the impulse for vengeance.  

By overcoming that impulse for vengeance, by    rising above those dark instincts and choosing life, we become more—we become a better people.  And still justice is done.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2015