In this season of debate about US health care reform, Broadstreet Ministry in Center City Philadelphia recently hosted a health care town hall with Congressman Joe Sestak.  Rev. Bill Golderer, convening minister, began the event by directing the attention of community members and media gathered to the bright origami swallows hanging in the rafters of the sanctuary.  Each piece of paper contained a prayer or lament from someone in the community. We were asked to hold the weight of the prayers hanging above us in our awareness during the dialogue.

This invitation is an important one for communities of faith to hold forth as the health care debate resumes following the August recess.  Now is the time we must ask: whose voices are given priority in our dialogue?  What are the prayers of the community that have seemed to be ignored or unheard?  There are nine million uninsured children in the United States who are not filling our headlines with their shouts at town halls, though their lack of access to quality health care deserves such indignance.

Further, now is the time for communities of faith to critically confront the structures that lead to significant disparities in access to quality health care based upon a child’s racial-ethnic identity.  As Children’s Defense founder Marian Wright Edelman has spelled out, “minority children are uninsured and underinsured at far greater rates than White children. One in 13 White children is uninsured, compared to one in five Latino children, one in five American Indian children, one in eight Black children, and one in nine Asian/Pacific Islander children.” (find column attached below)

Now is the time for communities of faith to pass the mic to those too often ignored or unheard by our legislators.

In your community, who is holding the microphone, and who is going unheard?

Laura Markle Downton
Princeton Theological Seminary

http://www.childrensdefense.org/child-research-data-publications/data/marian-wright-edelman-child-watch-column/unfair-childrens-health-disparities.html

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Similar to the obligation our country has to insure healthcare for its people, we the people have a moral obligation to care for the health of ourselves and our neighbors.  What responsibilities does this commitment hold us accountable for? We can look at this answer through many different lenses: social, religious, economical. But as I read environmental news every day I see more and more how related our environmental stewardship and healthcare are.  Lisa Jackson, who President Obama elected to head the EPA, recently reports about environmental justice and EPA’s pledge to renew it for minorities. It is fact that minorities and low-income people are victims of more pollution and riskier environmental degradation. Extensive exposures to pollutants cause these groups to fall ill with diseases like asthma and cancer and are a real threat to their health.  Every day there are reports about exposures to lead in neighborhoods where owners are too poor to replace paint, old pipes and other sources of the contaminant. Liver disease is linked to pollutants such as pesticides and heavy metals in our water and air. We are all held accountable for these pollutants; they are not exclusively generated within the boundaries of these neighborhoods but are carried universally from each emitter. What are we subjecting ourselves to?

Additionally, businesses that could provide jobs are leaving these areas of town.  Companies like coal plants and similar polluting manufacturers are coming into these neighborhoods where land is not as valuable. This challenges minorities’ quality of life and jeopardizes their healthcare. Chris Foreman, who is professor at University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, expressed threats to minorities’ neighborhoods that include filth, odors, dust, noise, congestion, and the absence of recreational and park facilities.

These neighborhoods are truly “the least of these.” This is our obligation as Matthew 25 believers. Jackson encourages, “we have to go to every community and show them that the issues of environmental protection are their issues and that our world is their world. That’s how we bring every voice to this discussion. That’s how we bring real change.” Environmental stewardship is where health care, true care for the health of our neighbors, begins.

A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but an accurate weight is his delight (Proverbs 11:1)

I call upon all people of goodwill to support H.R. 1459, the Fairness in Cocaine Sentencing Act of 2009. Senator Jim Webb recently sounded the alarm about the brokenness of our prison systems. His pronouncement, of course, is nothing new, but it lends visible and much-needed support to the cause of prison reform. And, to be sure, altering cocaine sentencing policy lies at heart of prison reform.

But why, inquiring citizens ask, should we use every available means at our disposal to contact our respective members of the House Judiciary  and House Committee on Energy and Commerce and express support for H.R. 1459? Briefly phrased, cocaine sentencing disparities disproportionately impact minorities, interrogating our national commitment to equal justice under the law. H.R. 1459 aims to alter the Controlled Substances Act and eliminate two things. First, it aims to “eliminate increased penalties for cocaine offenses where the cocaine involved is cocaine base.” And secondly, it aspires to eradicate “minimum mandatory imprisonment penalties for cocaine offenses.” The title of H.R. 1459, Fairness in Cocaine Sentencing Act, assumes that a gross inequity exists within current sentencing policy (the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, PL 99-570, to be exact). The inequity, referred to by many as the “100:1 quantity ratio”, means that “it takes 100 times more powder cocaine than crack cocaine to trigger…harsh five and ten-year mandatory minimum sentences”. According to a report by the 2009 Criminal Justice Transition Coalition, the disparity, despite being “facially neutral”, unevenly penalizes minorities. 

If we are to achieve our country, as the eloquent James Baldwin once said, then policies championed by the White House must not unfairly punish those who go to the crackhouse. If we are to achieve our country, let us call on Vice President Joe Biden, a repentant architect of this sentencing policy, and the White House Office of Urban Policy to proudly and persistently support this bill. All too often, the penal structure of our criminal justice is a modern-day example of unbalanced scales. Although not always in intent, cocaine sentencing consistently—and adversely—impacts minorities in ways that are so horrifically disproportionate that the words of the black bard Tupac Shakur come to mind: “Lady Liberty needs glasses/ And so does Mrs. Justice by her side”. Let us march one step forward from aspiring to equal justice under the law to its actuality, and inch towards achieving our country by supporting H.R. 1459.   

Shoutout to James Rucker and colorofchange.org for being a drum major for justice on this critical issue.

The ubiquity of the term post-racial is more than an artifact from a presidential election cycle. Rather, it represents our readiness, as a country, to prematurely eulogize the persistent correlations between race, poverty, geographic dislocation, etc. President Obama deserves credit for treating race with a measure of nuance. Yet far too frequently, Obama exchanges his law professor subtlety for MTV multiculturalism—a place where the correlations of race and social ills shuffle into an iPod of many colors, where every kid from every nation sings,”Only in America is my story even possible”. Or, switching songs on the same playlist, “only in America can a skinny kid with a funny name… ”. As a black seminarian, I love Obamarama. But I worry that the newness of our historical moment may cause us to miss old storylines. For instance, the leading sentiment of Obama’s “Change in America” is a brilliant, but repackaged, innovation of Reagan’s talk about “Morning in America”. Even more troubling, Obama’s rapid ascent to the White House—and his rhetoric about that rise—both encourage and enable a reassertion of the myth of rugged American individualism. And that myth, if I can remix Emma Lazarus this time, is about tired and huddled masses of every nation coming to a post-racial American meritocracy. President Obama is a historic and historical figure, the latest high priest of a distinctly American and modern liturgy of progress. And in his office, he is to lead the faithful beyond partisanship in Washington, caricature on talk radio, ideology in policy implementation, and of course, the specter of racism.

For Christians, whom I presume (safely, I hope) are unwilling to participate in this liturgy of progress, the question then becomes: are there any alternatives? Perhaps, we can recover liturgies of lament from the Psalms to discipline our expectations of public servants and of ourselves as politically engaged Christians. Such liturgies can make room for suffering in our sanctuaries, rooting our ultimate hopes for beloved community in God. And if we are doubly blessed, they will reorient our political imaginations to the sweat and struggle of a liberal democracy built on incrementalism.

Prophetic Critique and Free Speech in the Age of Obama 

I understand that we are gathered here today to discuss the relationship between prophetic critique and freedom of speech, because the racist, sexist and generally demeaning pamphlet that appeared on our campus last Fall, The Foreskin, has been defended from alleged “prophetic” criticism by assertions, from some, of a right to free speech. Moreover, recent criticism of racist images linked to President Obama – especially the cartoon of the slain chimpanzee in the New York Post, but also the postcard photo of water-melon patches at today’s White House – have only heated up the issue on our campus. These images also have been defended as “free speech.”

Both of the terms before us, “prophetic word” and “free speech,” are important notions, but each often suggests a caricature that must be questioned. I want to probe below each caricature, and in so doing address the relation between them. Overall, I hope to show, first, that prophetic criticism should not be seen as an opposite to valuing freedom of speech, and, second, that “free speech” is not free from a prophetic criticism of its limits. Let me unfold this more slowly.  

THE PROPHETIC WORD AND RACIST IMAGING

We are asked to reflect, first, on the notion of “the prophetic word.” The term suggests primarily a dramatic language event, delivered by an impassioned critic of bold speech, and most usually by one who is seen as performing an act of “speaking truth to power,” as we say, and also on some matter of injustice suffered by the poor and by the oppressed. This is generally correct, especially the linkage between the prophetic and the needs and perspectives of the poor and oppressed. In the caricature of the prophet, though, what so often gets foregrounded is the figure of a courageous individual, undertaking often biting, direct, contentious discourse.  The striking singularity of Pablo Gargollo’s bronze statue, “The Prophet,” comes to mind.

Missed in caricatures that focus only this singularity, and on prophets’ biting words, is that the prophetic word – exhibited in the Hebrew prophets, in the prophetic voices of Jesus and others in the New Testament, as well as among prophets of our own age – has some other features. What are these? For starters, consider internal anguish. Prophetic speech is voice usually issuing from the lips of an anguished heart and soul. Such a one is often slow to speak, maybe does not even want to speak. There is a spirit of inner contortion and struggle. This is perhaps also imaged in Gargallo’s bronze sculpture, in that he places empty space and circling and jagged pieces of bronze within the prophet’s inner space and being.  

Note also, the prophet’s anguish also involves thinking. Prophets ponder and seek to read the signs of the times. They have usually watched how the scales of justice have tipped, been tipped, and how life is led by many, callously or sensitively. Recall, Jeremiah pondering and challenging the corrupt King Jehoiakim, prompting memory, artfully recalling the better, counter-example of his father, Josiah, who in the past had “remembered the cause of the poor and needy.”(1) Prophets at their best observe the to and fro of nations, and groups, of the powerful and those lacking power. So the prophet is not just a courageous and biting speaker (”of truth to power” and so on), but also one long-suffering, taught by suffering, observing the times and finally- having “seen too much,” perhaps – comes forth with prophetic criticism. Sometimes, too, the prophetic action is not just speech, but is also combined with some artful performance, some alternative meaning-laden gesture: Jeremiah planting a tree on the eve of a foreign empire’s invasion, Jesus telling parables, maybe mixing spittle with dust from the ground, or, driving money-changers out of the temple. Martin Luther King, Jr., too, insisted on creativity and drama in his prophetic witness. Recall the marches, the linked arms, the songs. Especially, the songs. And then, too, there was Gandhi’s penchant for creativity and drama, the “Salt march,” for example.

I prefer to speak then not so much of prophetic word, but of “the prophetic”, “prophetic criticism,” or “the prophetic function,” understanding these as mixes of spoken and performed word, anguished struggle within oneself as well as with others, and involving a discerning reading of the signs of the times. The prophetic, then is an orientation, a sensibility, a criticism in the name of the poor, yes, often impassioned, yes, but also a kind of lived practical wisdom. 

So away with the caricature. It does not lead to effective practice of the prophetic, because it often reduces the prophetic to deployment of quick, often foolishly courageous tongues. It also allows those who are comfortable with unjust structures to parody and dismiss the prophetic. Defenders of those structures of power often isolate themselves from truly discerning prophetic critique by likening the prophetic to quick-speaking, judgmental, sophomoric protests by immature leftists.(2)

Moving beyond the caricatures, then, we can say some more about what constitutes discerning prophetic criticism. Although the prophets usually respond to actions in history, especially events and practices that make for suffering and wrong enacted upon the poor, if it is truly discerning in its critique, it also considers words in history, the ways images function in culture to shape and impact actions. Many Americans tend to dismiss this discerning function of the prophetic as mere “political correctness.” That though is an all too convenient dismissal of the insight that actions and practices are often sustained and given greater impact because of key images circulating in culture. These images are a key part of the “ethos” of unjust structures, and this, too, needs attention from discerning prophetic critique.

Let me pause a minute to clarify this term, “ethos.” By “ethos” I will mean a prevalent cultural tone, often carried in images and vernacular expressions of a social group which structure, both consciously and usually unconsciously, the daily practices and opinions of that group.”(3) The key function of an ethos is to integrate the beliefs of a social group, and to integrate the understanding in beliefs with practices, all in ways that make them last and have strength.(4)

Let us take an example – one current in the news today and bearing on the campus racism that has surfaced in our midst – the cartoon by the New York Post cartoonist, Sean Delonas. This cartoon showed a chimpanzee just shot by police, with one cop observing, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” While conceptual creativity could come up with various interpretations of the dead chimp – as “just a chimp,” or the chimp that was actually shot by police a few weeks ago, or maybe U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or again, maybe all the Democrats and 3 Republicans who voted for the stimulus bill – all this “creativity” overlooks the already circulating meanings that reasonably would tie the chimp to President Obama.

I am among those who see the cartoon as gesturing toward Obama, because its image, of a chimp likened to the writer of Obama’s stimulus bill, trades on the long-standing identification of Blacks with simian and ape-like forms (chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, monkeys), and in ways that reinforce, through alleged humor and satire, cultural views of Blacks’ inferiority. This is not a matter of some liberal squeamish political correctness. A political and historical trail of evidence is clear.  

David Pilgrim, curator of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University points out that

a quick trip to the Jim Crow Museum will reveal evidence of the long and insulting history of simian representation of Africans and African Americans.  There are postcards that show African Americans as almost indistinguishable from monkeys and apes.  There are prints that show Blacks and monkeys romantically involved.  There are dozens of other objects in the museum that link Africans and Americans of African ancestry to monkeys and apes. . .  In the 1940s, . . . many three-dimensional objects were produced in the United States that tried to link (in a negative way) Blacks to monkeys. . .

In the 21st century the cruel linking of Blacks to simians remains fairly common. For example, porch monkey is a slur against Black people who are believed to be lazy.  A large Black person is sometimes called an ape or gorilla.

But one doesn’t have to delve deep into history to come up with a veritable American tradition of identifying peoples of African descent with apes. No, ape-like or simian images have been applied very recently to Obama and also to his wife, Michelle, well before the Delonas cartoon. The New York Post incident is another stop along the way of this ugly cultural habit.

Early on, for one example, there was the creation and selling of a sock monkey, a kind of stuffed animal figure, named by the marketer, “Obama.” Also, t-shirts have been sold across the South and elsewhere with the words “Obama in O8″ stenciled under an image of a “curious George” type monkey holding a banana. A recent YouTube video called, “Obama Monkey,”  shows a monkey representing a Black woman who is supporting the candidacy of Senator Obama. The linkage has been found also abroad, in Japanese media, where then Senator Obama is depicted as a monkey giving a speech about change. There’s another video on YouTube entitled, “Michelle Obama without Make-Up,” which then racially caricatures her as an ape. (I do not enjoy referencing these links, but since so many are in denial or ignorance, it is worth doing so.)

At U.S. football games, racist chanting, often deploying monkey noises and gestures against Black athletes, has been so frequent as to lead to court cases.(5) And, I am ashamed to report that on our own campus, the last time a Foreskin-type racist incident occurred, in 1997, white students in the Princeton Seminary cafeteria line mimicked an African student, who was a food-server behind the counter, by making monkey gestures and signs at him – supposedly without mal intent, intending to be humorous, and in good camaraderie –  supposedly (I stress).

Discerning prophetic criticism might ponder, further, that in all these cases of racist imaging in the U.S. American ethos, from the most blatant ones to the most purportedly unintentional, there is usually a claim to humor or satire. This means that in the U.S., the tradition of white folks’ humor and satire, especially regarding racial matters, has been sullied, perhaps to the point of irretrievability, until such time as full and ready equality of opportunity has been won in this country (we are, of course, a long way off from that day.(6))  It is almost impossible for us whites to be funny about race and racism, without resurrecting the tones and timbres of past deployments of racist humor, which so often were ways to etch more deeply racist habits and assumptions into the American cultural repertoire.

Perhaps – I emphasize the perhaps – there is a kind of white humor that can work, if it is an obviously sarcastic form spoken by whites against whites, and for white’s liberation from oppressing ways. One sees this, at times, in the speeches and writings of anti-racist white author, Tim Wise.(7) But even Wise uses humor very sparingly, and when doing so walks a razor’s edge between discourse that is racially liberating, and discourse that threatens to raise the ugly beast of racialized humor. Few whites have the skills to walk that razor’s edge, and even if they have the skills, much depends on discerning wisely the context.

Ignorance about this legacy, the belief that cartoonists of The New York Post, or pamphleteers of the Foreskin on a racially tense campus, could foreground humor in a flip and breezy way, is a kind of ignorance that is itself also part of the ethos of racism.

A final, brief word on the prophetic critique of racism’s ethos. Because I have been focusing on racism as a problem of ethos,(8) I have not focused on individuals, either on the writers of the Foreskin, or on the cartoonist Delonas. I do not believe they should be at the center of a redressive drama. The center of a discerningly prophetic drama should be on our entire cultural ethos – the U.S. culture and the ethos pervading this campus. I hold myself, this faculty, and our administration, as those who together bear primary responsibility for taking the actions necessary to redress the ethos that lives from structural conditions. This responsibility is not best exercised simply by taking punitive measures against individuals. We must address matters like representative diversity in our faculty and administration, student recruitment, required courses, special seminars, and so on. All too often, we have acted as if matters of racism are an occasional, aberrant, maybe waning reality, and as if we could do our work in classrooms on theology and ministry by treating racism occasionally, as a kind of optional topic, seen often as only tangentially related to our scholarship and common life. Such a viewpoint leaves us bankrupt for dealing with the powerful ethos of racism in our communities.

“FREE SPEECH” AS DEFENSE

But now I want to comment very briefly on the other notion that often suffers caricature, “free speech.” When even the most discerning among prophets point out the problems of the ethos of racism, the response is often, “I have the right to free speech,” “I did not intend any harm” – maybe even, “But I was trying to do good by my satire!” So, a brief word on “free speech. (Alas, I can hardly do justice to the complex legal and philosophical treatments of this notion.  At another time, we will have to hear from our legal minds on this issue.(9)

The caricature haunting the notion of “freedom of speech” foregrounds an individual, usually a solitary figure, giving voice to her or his opinion, a judgment on some matter of politics, morals, customs, religion. In common parlance, it’s as if what is spoken just comes up out of the inner recesses of a discrete individual – heart, mind or gut. It is this fountain of individual expression that is thought to be guarded by constitutional rights to “freedom of speech.”

Missed in this caricature is the fact that speech really isn’t free. In the first place, the speech that issues from an individual’s lips almost never has its source only in that individual. It comes through those lips but has been formed and rehearsed in that individual’s social life-practice and journey, shaped by cultural currents, flowing in historical groups – and all these together condition an individual’s speaking. Speech is embedded in, mediated by, always related to, these networks. This is true, in an obvious sense, grammatically, in that the words a speaker uses are parsed, conjugated and declined in some language system that extends beyond the speaker. Of even greater import, though, are the social systems in which our speech occurs. The content, style and tone of what individual speakers offer is mediated by group and cultural tradition(s), by the currents of our intersubjective experience, by the ways we have our common life with one another. If nothing else, the fact that we are nurtured by mothers and fathers, provides a social bond, often the first one, which limits and shapes what we often term our free speech.

Individual speech is especially not “free” when it comes to matters of race and racism. To be sure, speech varies, often radically, from individual to individual, as we note when comparing, say, a President Obama with eminent movement leader Malcolm X, a liberal Rachel Maddow with libertarian Patrick Buchanan on cable TV, or, blogger Michelle Malkin with scholar Rey Chow, a Tim Wise and a Rush Limbaugh, a Cornel West and a Shelby Steele, and so on. Those differences in individual speech about race, along with their rights to equal protection when speaking out, should be protected; but neither our respect for their protection nor our noting their individual differences from one another, means that their speech on race and racism is “free.” They are all cases of conditioned speech. This is especially the case in white communities. Culture critic and theologian Thandeka documented how whites inherit through family practice most of their racist proclivities, sometimes vicious, sometimes more benign.(10) William Kunstler, the great human rights defense attorney, who insisted on having lawyers at the defense table when he worked a racially-charged case, commented: “We whites imbibe racism like babes drinking milk at our mother’s breast.”(11)

Overall, the meaning of our speech lies not in our intentions, not in the particularities of individual intentions, stylistic and content differences. Those are at play, but the most powerful meanings are due to the ways speech is embedded in larger cultural matrices. No speech is really free; it is embedded in its originary contexts and group meanings, and embedded, too, in the kind of meaningful impact it sparks in those who hear and interpret that speech.

All this sets the stage for appreciating why, in the legal arena, there are “limits to free speech” alongside the much-touted “protection of free speech.” We know the famous example in which someone speaking loudly the word “fire” in a crowded theater is not protected in that speech-making event. It is a freedom questioned by its destructive consequences. In other less obvious cases, where the lines between appropriately controversial and destructive speech seem less clear, we struggle to discern where to draw the line at which speech begins to have destructive bearing on others, when it might be slanderous or libelous and hence subject to legal sanction. The line may be hard to draw, and we need the courts to help us draw it in tough cases, but that the line is there signals that speech is not free.

So, away with this caricature, too! Let’s move beyond free speech caricatured as an individual fountain emitting words and opinions with no sense of limit. If we care about a public virtue working to eradicate racism, and especially about Christian virtue, we do better to talk of measured speech, a freedom of speech that also measures or gauges the consequences of its utterances in the social body, from which speech comes and to which it returns. In matters of race and racism, especially, speech needs to be measured in terms of its contribution to outcomes or effects. Especially, in a Christian community, I would argue, this approach to our “free speech” is important. We should ask – again, especially if we seek to be discerning in our prophetic criticism – how does our individual speech intersect the wounded fabric of U.S. American social, personal and political life?

Christians and others who seek racial justice will often need to engage in a moral practice that goes well beyond what is legal. “Just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s right,” chant some activist friends of mine. When we Christians fail to measure our speech against its real outcomes and effects, and instead make recourse to some allegedly pure intentions within our individual beings (and I am often unclear as to how “pure” these are), then, we reinforce one of the dominant trends of our culture that keeps alive what scholars call the “new racism.”(12) In this racism it is assumed that if persons’ intentions are pure, if they meant no malice, no malice can be found, and they thus cannot be held responsible.

This “new racism” is especially entrenched in U.S. American courts. Today, if one wants to seek court protection for racial discrimination, usually you are going to have to prove racist intent in the group or person being accused. No longer, as in court rulings just a few decades ago, especially during the civil rights movement, can one argue, as effectively, from only harmful effect and outcome to racial discrimination. You have to prove intent, something that almost is impossible to do. As Kimberle Crenshaw and others in critical race theory have shown, this “places almost the entire range of everyday social practices in America . . . beyond the scope of critical examination or legal remediation.”(13)

Christians, above all, who are called to become a “body of Christ,” a “basileia of God,” a new community, they/we, especially, are those whose “new life” is so pervasively social and communal, that we must consider the effects and outcomes of belief and policy in the politics and economics of community life. This is all the more true for Christians living in a U.S. culture, where racism seems so slowly to die.

At their best, we pursue, through daily practice and our organizing work, a moral practice that is higher than what legal practice mandates, especially today given the U.S. courts’ position on proving racial intent. We do this to renew the legal and social orders as well as to be faithful to our visions of all people’s dignity, of moral life and of spirit. We need a moral practice that builds and re-builds new community by examining not so much our personal intentions, but speech’s and action’s outcomes and effects. It is in outcomes and effects that the cancerous powers of racism metastasize. If we fail to go there, staying with intent and intention, we fail to treat the problem. We continue the legacy of destruction. And Christians, in particular, will one more time be “conformed to the world” – one that is racist and destructive of the common good.

In short, I repeat: the drama should not be your intentions or my intentions, whether we are “sensitive” or “insensitive.” (Please no more sensitivity sessions and campus forums for individuals while leaving unexamined social structures’ practices and their outcomes!) The drama should be our adventure together in addressing and redressing the conditions of racism – its ethos, structure, policy and historical tradition. On those conditions we must all work together, to craft the structures that change ethos.

(2) Exemplary of this is the tendency, evident in an essay at the conservative American Thinker web site, to point to quick-speaking, judgmental and sophomoric protests by some students at San Francisco State University (on the matter of Palestinian liberation), and then infer that the same spirit exists among a whole phalanx of liberal, politically correct and judgmental faculty who have a stranglehold on North American higher education and are a group sowing their “hate speech. What a fantasy! But it’s a convenient way to dismiss the more sober, truly prophetic criticism, the effectively critical advocacy of the rights of Palestinian peoples, and opposition to the travesty of justice in the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza that were supported by the previous U.S. administration.  Richard L. Cravatts, “Hate Speech at San Francisco University,” The American Thinker, March 7, 2009.

(3) On “ethos,” compare the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition: “characteristic spirit, prevalent tone of sentiment, of a people or community, the ‘genius’ of an institution or system;” anthropologist David Bidney, “the process of habituation with reference to a given ideal;” Geertz in Interpretation of Cultures, ethos is “the tone, character and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood; it is the underlying attitude toward themselves and their world that life reflects;” and Serena Nanda, in Cultural Anthropology, stressing “ethos” as the “key term dominant in the integrating functions of culture.” All of these are glosses on Aristotle’s view of eithos as a fusion of a certain character of the person with ideals of excellence.

(4) More philosophically, ethos is carried in what philosopher of practice, Theodore Schatzki, refers to as a group’s “teleo-affective structure.” Theodore R. Schatzki, The Site of the Social: A Philosophical Account of the Constitution of Social Life and Change (University Part, PA: Penn State University Press, 2002), 80-2.   

(5) Peter Jepson, Tackling Militant Racism (Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 75-7.

(6) As just one source of evidence for this claim, see sociologist, Joe Feagin, Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression (Routledge, 2007).

(7) See his new book, Tim Wise, Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama. City Lights Press, 2009. See his several other books as well, e.g. White like Me.

(8) At another time we would need to examine the always intersecting matters of sexist, homophobic, nationalist and elite classist features of systems. I have addressed that interplay more directly in a book, Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis. With a new Preface (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2005).

(9) For some sources to inaugurate both philosophical and legal reflection, see Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too (Oxford University Press, 1994); Christopher M. Finan, From the Palmer Raids to the U.S. PATRIOT Act (Beacon Press, 2008); and Robert Justin Goldstein, Flag Burning and Free Speech: The Case of Texas v. Johnson (University Press of Kansas, 2000).

(10) Thandeka, Learning to Be White: Money, Race and God in America (Continuum, 2000).

(11) The point, obviously, is not to blame white mothers for white racism, but to indicate how intimate the imbibing of racism is in white family life.

(13) See sociologist Amy Ansell, New Right, New Racism: Race and Reaction in the United States and Great Britain (NYU Press, 1997). Planks of the “new” or “modern” racism include: “obvert racism is bad, but mostly over,” “whites no longer see themselves as racist,” “the playing field is now fairly equal,” “racially-focused special programs and services are now unnecessary and unfair to whites,” “If racism occurs, it was unintentional because ‘I am not a racist’ “, and,  ”In order to seek protection from discrimination, one must prove intent to discriminate.” On these planks see Kimberly Holt Barrett and William H. George, “Judicial Colorblindness, Race Neutrality and Modern Racism: How Psychologists Can Help the Courts Understand Race Matters,” in Barrett and George, eds, Race, Culture, Psychology and Law (Sage Publications, 2004), 31-46. See also Racialized Politics: The Debate about Racism in the United States, by David O. Sears et al (University of Chicago Press, 2000). On the “new racism,” see also sociologist Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race: Difference, Globalism, Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), and Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism (Routledge, 2005).

(14) Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995), xv.

These remarks were originally delivered at a forum at Princeton Theological Seminary, entitled “Responsibly Engaging the Dialogue between Prophetic Word and Free Speech,” March 3, 2009. The forum was part of a campus wide process to discuss the appearance last Fall of a highly offensive and anonymous student publication, “The Foreskin,” which tried to use humor and satire on racial and sexual issues. Identified authors of the pamphlet and others have used their announced absence of mal intent and rights to “free speech” as defense. 

In response to many of the raids that were separating parents from their children, senior citizens from their caretakers, and spouses from one another, The Latino Leadership Circle, The Council of Churches of the City of New York, CONLICO, and the Latino Pastoral Action Center hosted “LEVANTANDO NUESTRAS VOCES” (Lifting Our Voices) at La Sinagoga on 115 East 125th St, NYC.

I was there, along with Grant Brooke, listening to testimony after testimony of people—mothers and their children, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters of all races, cultures, and colors—speak about the raids, the difficult process of legalization, the abuse they received at the hands of dishonest lawyers and intimidating officers.

Gabriel Salguero, a pastor and the Director of the Hispanic Leadership Program at Princeton Theological Seminary, among other roles, hosted the event that also called for people to be informed of their basic human rights by staff on hand, to sign petitions, and to present their pressing cases.

I was so surprised that it was packed with so many people—leaders from the community, media, pastors, politicians, religious folk, etc, etc.  Why?  Well, I often feel that churches stay away from controversial issues, unless they concern the so-called “culture wars.” 

Churches walk a fine line, as tax-exempt organizations that have a respected role in the government’s view, when they take on controversial issues such as immigration (of course with notable exceptions like the Sanctuary Movement, which has been thrown around again recently).

As far as immigration reform aiding undocumented immigrants, what roles CAN churches play? What roles DO churches play?  People of faith?

The unfortunate choice of the cartoon as appropriate political criticism should instead be placed in the category of blatant racism. The Stimulus Bill may draw critique, but it is preposterous that it necessitates the employ of racist caricature that depicts African Americans as monkeys and chimpanzees.

Why is it so difficult for some to evaluate without resorting to such base tactics? Come on, it’s 2009…yes, even here in the United States!  People of all backgrounds have expressed outrage at Sean Delonas and the New York Post editors, Bob McManus and Col Allan. Reverend Al Sharpton has called for folk to join in the protest rallies to remove the New York Post from circulation, and for all clergy to address this issue from their respective pulpits.  It is appalling that one should come across such invective that is passed off as political satire, but I find it particularly disturbing that it occurred during Black History Month.

La lucha continua, on with the fight and may we all rally together calling out our uniting “charge” that we will no longer tolerate racism because “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28)

Cheers and blessings.

Holder spoke the truth; though there are many facets of our society and culture that appear to embrace racial and cultural diversity and harmony, there are many that are not a far cry from the days of slavery and segregation.  Our society is filled with instances of modern-day slavery, as people from various immigrant communities are forced to do work they might not otherwise, had they the opportunities that others have had, and as minority groups still continue to struggle to have the same access and opportunity to quality education, health care, etc.  Also, one cannot help but recognize the way our cities and towns are structured – always segregated.  Take for example Austin, Texas.  It is an extremely diverse city which is filled with beautiful people from various countries and different faith traditions.  Nevertheless, it is very segregated.  East Austin is overwhelmingly populated by Latino and African American communities, while the rest of the city almost seems worlds away, divided by the 1-35 that few, from either side, rarely cross.  I am certain that this cultural landscape is not unique to Austin, Texas.  It is, in part, what Holder is referencing.  Perhaps we go on, patting ourselves on the back, reassured that we are doing so much better, turning a blind eye to the ways in which are cities, our schools, our circles of friends, and so on, are not so diverse.

Why is it so hard for us to take in Holder’s words?  Why is it so hard for us to admit that we do in fact live in a time and place where modern-day slavery and modern-day segregation exist?  Is  it because we have an aversion to admitting our own complicity?  Is it because we are an ahistorical people who are unaware of the sad and shameful history which has laid the foundation for our current circumstances?  I think it is, at best, a little of all of these.

Therefore, it is – without a doubt  - the call and the responsibility of the Church to speak prophetically about our racial prejudices and divisions, and to humble ourselves and heed prophetic words when we hear them.