“For this is what the Sovereign Lord says: Enough, you princes of Israel! Stop your violence and oppression and do what is just and right. Quit robbing and cheating my people out of their land. Stop expelling them from their homes, says the Sovereign Lord. Ezekiel 45:9 The context of the above scripture is Israel and the dividing of the promised land. God warned the rulers over His people to do what was just and right. Throughout history and today, the people within the systems that oppress have driven human beings out of their rightful land, using the tools of that system to do so. Something as idyllic and American as family farms should never be linked with oppression, yet they are. The next story…
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Black Veterans Matter
When the troops came home from World War II, they were met with much fanfare. But there were vets who weren’t celebrated by America. Black veterans were not given the support they needed to begin their lives as civilians. They were denied money for college and purchasing a home. These funds were given freely to white veterans who were able to buy homes, go to school and get jobs, and begin to build wealth for themselves and their families. There was a deliberate plan by politicians of the South to exclude Black people and keep the Jim Crow laws intact. People of color weren’t allowed to make progress, to get ahead, to build wealth for their families and communities. No matter how heroically these men…
The Untouchables
The Untouchables (called Dalit today) were in the sewer of the East Indian caste system. They continue to be trapped in persistent poverty and despair. Even the shadow of a Dalit was considered a defilement. As repugnant and horrifying as we know this is, the land of the free and the home of the brave has established and sustained a caste system for centuries. The following story is a heartbreaking illustration of the sewer-level caste Black people have occupied and in many ways still occupy. It comes from the book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.(pages 121-122) One day in 1951 in the town of Youngstown Ohio, a little league team won a baseball championship. On that team was a Black…
Segregation in the Church
Segregation as a law was struck down by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education in the 1950s. There are many first hand stories about segregation in the schools, but I want to look into segregation in the Church. When Brown v. Board was passed, the Church tried to justify the continuation of segregation by using the Bible and Natural Law. In his book The Color of Compromise, Jemar Tisby relates what happened in the churches when integration became the law of the land. G.T. Gillespie, president emeritus of a Christian School called Bellhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, gave a carefully worded message to pastors there, titled “Christian View of Segregation” He admitted that “The Bible contains no clear mandate for or against…
In The Beginning
In The Beginning I began in the womb of Africa, a majestic continent rich in natural resources. According to my DNA profile, I am 40% Cameroon, Congo, and Southern Bantu peoples. I am 19% Benin and Togo, to a lesser extent Ivory Coast and Ghana, and even lesser extent Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal. How did someone with this ancestry get to America? When my ancestors were forced from their homes, put on a ship, and taken to the New World, Europe, and the Carribean Islands, including South America, they instantly became goods to buy and sell. How is it that human beings who could be bought and sold, taken to a land that professed freedom and equality? What was the justification for this tragedy? In…
In the Beginning
I want to look back at where America’s racial wounding began in order to discern how deep the roots of racial injustice are in spite of passed laws, Supreme Court rulings, and proclamations of unity. We can cry like the people of Israel in Jeremiah’s day: “We waited for peace and salvation, but no good came, and for a time of healing, but behold, terror!”(Jeremiah 8:15) In God’s kingdom, the answer is simple: Proverbs 6:14-15: “…there will be no healing or remedy because he has no heart for God.” America’s collective wound will continue to cause the imprisonment, slavery, and death of brown and black people until the country repents and turns to God. In his book, American Holocaust, historian David Stannard quotes a professor…
Be Whole
You’re a sell-out!” Angie Grier is the main character of my short story, Choose Life. She hears these words coming from the mouth of her beloved older sister. Angie, her husband and their two children live an idyllic life in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Brockton. She is accused of being a sell-out to the Black culture by choosing to stay away from her parents and siblings. This sets the stage for the rest of the story, but what I want to touch on is the significance of the oft-used phrase as it pertains to our society today. In the minds of those who have accused their fellow African Americans of such, they are meant to convey the distaste the speaker feels for someone whom…
Ancestral Wounds, Part One
What happens when you are judged by the way you look? What if you have lost in the eyes of another before you even open your mouth? A wound is formed in your soul and takes on a life of its own. Sometimes these wounds are accompanied by more of the same over a long period of time without being tended to. They turn into poison that finds its expression in violent rage. What about the offenders? Are they not just as wounded? Yes. Race is a hot issue these days, but it is by no means a new thing. It has been separating people for hundreds of years. Why, since it is a biological factor and on the inside we are all the same?…