We can never be too grateful that there’s still a free flow of information in our country. We can learn if we look, for instance, that the bubonic plague in the mid-1300s not only killed off an estimated 30% to 60% of Europe’s population, it brought about profound social changes. “The plague… discredited the leaders of society, its governors, priests, intellectuals and theories supported by them. These elites were obviously failing in their prime social function, the defense of the common welfare, in the name of which they enjoyed their privileges,” wrote David Runciman recently, quoting a historian of the Black Death in the London Review of Books.
Because we still have freedom of speech in America, we can read a recent sermon on the similar condition of our society by the Rev. William H. Lamar IV, pastor of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C.
The Rev. Lamar wrote, “Multiple factors are responsible for the alarming death rates that black, brown, Native American and poor white communities are experiencing from the novel coronavirus.
“Mendacious, misanthropic political leadership. A so-called health care system driven by profit and not human flourishing. An economic reality where even the below-a-living-wage money earned by poor and working-class people is siphoned off to the wealthy via tax cuts and tax policies that force wage earners to pay a larger share than dividend earners.”
In almost the same moment we see images of our president playing golf, spraying narcissistic rage about being fact checked by Twitter, we read of an address delivered by his presidential opponent Joe Biden, marking the “grim U.S. milestone of more than 100,000 Americans killed by the novel coronavirus,” and telling the bereaved, “This nation grieves with you.” Or at least some of us do.
As the CDC reports dryly, “Health differences between racial and ethnic groups are often due to economic and social conditions that are more common among some racial and ethnic minorities than whites. In public health emergencies, these conditions can also isolate people from the resources they need to prepare for and respond to outbreaks.”
Various preliminary studies from the East Coast show that “Black/African American persons” have nearly double the death rates per 1000 than whites, while “Hispanic/Latino persons” have more than a third more deaths than whites, the CDC reports.
The Rev. Lamar observed in his sermon, “Would majority-white, middle-class neighborhoods not have hospitals? Would white people be forced from public housing without an offer of viable alternatives so that fat cat developers could feast on public land and make exorbitant profits? COVID-19 — and its impact on black and brown communities — is the American empire in viral form. It lodges itself among the poor and feasts upon them.”
COVID-19 is showing us, in the most horrible and truthful way, the reality of racism in America today.
Writing in Sojourners, a spiritual values magazine, Kelly Brown Douglas asked, “What values were really at stake for the 81 percent of white evangelicals who voted for a presidential candidate who uses crass language and admits to engaging in coarse behavior, and whose campaign was marked by vitriolic hatred of various people, particularly people of color?”
Douglas’s piece had a subhead that read, “For much of American evangelical history, spreading the gospel meant spreading whiteness.” She continued, “The value proposition of the Trump campaign was made clear in the campaign’s ‘Make America Great Again’ vision. This mantra tapped into America’s defining Anglo-Saxon myth and revitalized the culture of white supremacy constructed to protect it.”
When this “vision” of the superiority of whiteness permeates police departments, an unarmed, 46-year old African American, George Floyd, who was a security officer at a bar and restaurant, is choked to death by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, or an African American jogger, 25-year old Ahmaud Arbery, is shot by white men in his own Brunswick, Georgia, neighborhood because, they said, they thought he was a burglar. Why? Because he was black.
A sociologist at Rutgers University recently analyzed police killings and found that African American men and boys are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by cops than white men and boys. “That’s better odds of being killed by police than you have of winning a lot of scratch-off lottery games,” the researcher said, according to a piece in the Los Angeles Times.
As the COVID-19 death toll climbed last week, some American cities — such as Minneapolis, Memphis, Los Angeles and now Albuquerque last weekend — saw street demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd that were mostly peaceful at first but turned aggressive and sometimes violent, with more protests sure to follow. Are these murders and the COVID-19 minority death tolls linked? Of course.
The Rev. Lamar says, “I am a preacher. So when I dust the COVID-19 crime scene, I am ultimately in search of theological finger prints.” He continues, “Political systems require a theological system.”
“What kind of God-talk,” he asked, “makes possible a refusal to provide universal health care that may have mitigated this (COVID) crisis? What kind of God-talk makes possible a refusal to invest the money necessary to end homelessness? What kind of God-take makes possible the racializing of criminality and poverty? What kind of God-talk gives political power to science-denying policy makers? The answer? White evangelical God-talk…. The political order that presides over the United States would fall overnight if white-evangelicals withdrew their support. But they will not.”
Lamar concludes, asking, “How would the novel coronavirus be affecting my community if the God-talk of white evangelicals, whose theology controls our political landscape, sounded more like Jesus?”
Being able to read such thinking, interpret it and make use of it if we can, is the root reason for the First Amendment — summed up as mind-expansion in the “marketplace of ideas.” You don’t have to be a follower of a religious denomination to have access to its thinking. I didn’t have to go underground to get it. Other people who read more widely than I do opened my mind by sending the material to me. I dug a little deeper. And why? Because I trusted that the information was there to be found, still protected by the First Amendment. That’s why we know the president revealed to us, inadvertently, his true nature with a thanks via Twitter to Cowboys for Trump in New Mexico after its founder had said, “The only good Democrat is a Dead Democrat.” The president actually didn’t disagree. He made a point of saying so in a public tweet. It’s in the record. And a great many of us will never forget it.
With a plague upon us, there is a growing urgency among large numbers of secular and religious Americans who value social justice to expel this country’s embarrassing, incompetent and discredited leadership in this November’s election. The boat gets bigger and bigger all the time. And that’s because America’s information jungle, for all its madness, shows more and more of us what’s really being thought about every day in this sorrowful and most unhappy land of ours.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Another great article today, Barret. Full of truth and compassion. Thank you.