This morning I visited my Zambian Auntie’s church for their
once-a-month Revival—a day of services, seminars, and testimonies. I found
myself in intercessory prayer, with everyone around me speaking out loud to
God, and the leader led us to pray for the “war we are waging against evil and
the Devil.”
There it was again. The Devil. This culturally familiar and
yet personally foreign idea I’ve tried to evade my whole life. In my
experience, Zambians talk about the devil a lot. It is often referred to and
renounced in prayer.
I’ve always been uncomfortable talking about the devil and
even believing in its existence. In my opinion, people too often invoke the
idea of the devil to scare people into Christianity or feel personally empowered
to condemn others. All that fire and brimstone racket doesn’t fit into my
conception of an all-loving, all-forgiving God. People who shout, “Repent or
perish, you sinners,” alienate me and I want to show a mirror to their face and
say, “Get off your high horse and judge yourself before you judge others!” The
idea of evil generally seems too simplified, absolute, and one-sided to me. We
can’t just put the world into two categories—good and bad—and feel comfortable
and complacent when we put ourselves on the good side. So up until this moment
I’ve told myself I don’t believe in the devil. I don’t believe in evil. If that
stuff exists, let God be the judge. It’s not up to me to decide what is evil or
not.
But then I found myself watching President Obama’s eulogy of
Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s funeral and I saw the faces of the other innocent
victims of the Charleston shootings. I think distractions of being in another
country and culture and recent stresses of school and my YAV year coming to
close have kept me from digesting the significance of the events in Charleston.
I was caught off guard as tears bubbled out of my eyes and I finally took a
moment to see truth about Charleston. This was a needless tragedy motivated by
pure hatred. How is this happening? How is this real life?
I found myself remembering my trip to Birmingham, Alabama
with the Pres House community a few years ago when I got a chance to visit 16th
Street Baptist Church. In 1963, four little black girls were killed on a Sunday morning in the basement of
that church. They were four innocent children, simply getting ready to go
upstairs to the beautiful, open sanctuary to worship their God. The poisonous
belief of white supremacy motivated the deaths of those girls. Across the
street from the church, Blacks would peacefully protest for equal rights, many
of them children. They would be violently brought to their knees by powerful
fire hoses, clubs, and fierce dogs. I remember walking on the same ground that
these blights in American history occurred, and I felt in the depths of my
heart the freaking tragedy of these events. Certainly this was evil. There was
an evil racism in our history. It was wrong. It was painful. It needed to be
overcome.
16th Street Baptist Church
But even in that moment, the evil I understood was distant.
That was fifty years ago. That was history. The deaths of those four little
girls energized the Civil Rights movement and the result was protests, changes
in legislation, and a new America. Today things are different now, right? We
beat racism, right? Evil is gone, isn’t it?
Isn’t it?
All I know is that this year I’ve been thousands of miles
from my home country, welcomed by a generous and loving Black community. And it
seemed like every two months there was a new event from the USA that I was
afraid to share with them. I didn’t want them to know the reality of how some
whites were treating blacks in the US. First there were the protests in
Ferguson, then the not-guilty verdict for Michael Brown killer, then the death
of Tony Robinson in my own Madison, WI, and then the brutal deaths of nine
Black AME members shot in cold blood by a white man they welcomed into their
bible study.
Gun violence is killing people in America. It’s happening in
our sacred, supposedly safe places—in homes, in elementary schools, and in
churches. Have things changed so much from the time four little girls died in
Birmingham, Alabama?
There is a plague, an epidemic, in this world and its called
racism. It’s called hate. It’s called oppression. It’s called violence. It was
around fifty years ago. And it’s around today.
I watched my President stand over a coffin draped with
flowers and call Rev. Pinckney a good man. I remembered another coffin. This
one was lying on the Zambian dirt about to be laid into a cemetery for the most
impoverished of Lusaka, a cemetery often raided and desecrated as people
desperately stole coffins and flowers to make one more kwacha to keep their
family alive or feed their desperate addictions. I called my friend, Teacher Mekelina,
a good woman when she died, too. And she was…she was a good woman. A hidden and
suppressed grief hit me as I listened to Obama’s words and as the faces of all
the victims were flashed on the screen. I couldn’t help but see Teacher Mekelina’s
bloated, dead face in the faces of the fallen. I couldn’t help but think of the
other Zambian dead bodies I paid respects to this year. I couldn’t help but
think of the brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers of my students who
have passed away, who my students just mention in passing, whose deaths are
just normal part of their lives and lives of most people here. The death of so
many Zambians is an injustice. The average life expectancy in this country is about
fifty years. That’s about twenty years shorter than the life expectancy in the
United States and most European countries. With so many advances in modern
medicine, in preventative care, in knowledge of personal health, its wrong that
we live in a world where those services are more easily accessed by a white,
developed world, and a black underdeveloped world is left to bury their loved
ones and then desecrate their graves out of desperation. I’ve seen five dead bodies
this year, and the people I live and work with here have probably seen more.
People are dying, in Zambia and the United States. Of course,
everyone dies, I know…I know. But death rates are higher for people living in
poverty. Poverty correlates with less education, more violent crime, and more
disease. I think too many white people are afraid to make the jump from
economics to race, but I think until we do, needless, hate-motivated death will
continue to happen. More black people live in poverty than white people. That’s
just the truth. In America. In Zambia. In the world. That means black people,
today in 2015, are being oppressed and murdered. And they are being oppressed
and murdered by white people, in disgustingly violent acts like the church in Chareleston,
but also in smaller acts of ignorance as white people live into their white
privilege. White people perpetuate violence against Black people by pretending
there is nothing they can do about it. Simply by going about our business,
pretending racism is history, pretending we don’t all affect each other, even
though we all share the same space, Planet Earth, actually perpetuates racism,
violence, hatred and acts like the Charleston church shootings.
When the Zambian pastor asked me to pray about this war
against the devil today, something clicked. Maybe he’s not talking about some
red, horned dude with a pitchfork. Maybe the definition of evil is needless
suffering caused by oppression. So then me pretending there is no such thing as
evil is like me pretending that there isn’t racism anymore.
There is evil. And its racism and poverty and death and
suffering caused by one group of people against the other. The pastor told us
to “arise” and fight these demons. I found myself envisioning myself getting up
out of my chair and changing my life, leaving this place, even this year, and
joining organizations, churches, political parties, friend groups and choosing
a new way and new people to associate with that will not keep me in my
sheltered white privileged circles but expand myself to live into an equal
world. I envisioned my Zambian brothers and sisters around me and my American
brothers and sisters of color doing the same thing, but once I did that I had a
new vision for myself.
Maybe my white privileged self doesn’t need to “arise” to
fight this evil demon called racism. Maybe I need to kneel down, sink to my
knees in humbleness. I pictured an image of white privilege as white people
standing up loud and proud, with their feet trodding, kicking, and keeping
others down. Following this metaphor, with all that distance between our eyes
and our feet, it is easy to ignore that those bumps that feel like stones or
rough earth beneath our feet are actually people’s lives, lives being cut short
by all they extra baggage and challenges that come from being born in one place
over the other, and in one shade over the other.
As a white person, I don’t need to arise. I’m already the
one on top. I need to stop ignoring the reality and the injustice of me getting
more than others. I need to realize that evil has been real and is real and I
have a role to play in fighting it.
I’m still not interested in using evil or the devil to
condemn or judge. And yet if I don’t condemn the deaths in Charleston, I have a
problem. This tragedy is worth condemning. I still don’t like moral absolutism.
But if I don’t say coldblooded murder is absolutely wrong, I’m never going to
be motivated to change my life and this world so these events are less likely
to happen. I am starting to understand that there is a place for condemnation
and evil is real. And the fact that I can say, “I am starting to understand…”
shows my white privilege in a nutshell. My ancestors weren’t slaves. They
weren’t lynched. None of my family has been victims of gun violence or thrown
in jail for petty drug crimes. Lots of people of color have known the things I’m
starting to realize since the day they were born. They encounter the evils of
racism everyday.
But for the rest of us. WE NEED TO WAKE UP! We need to wake
up and stop pretending all of this is history or far away or doesn’t effect us.
Dr. King said injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. If you
don’t see evil, look harder. If you don’t have the energy to condemn pain and
suffering, find some. Respond to injustice. Do something so we don’t keep
repeating history.
