Editor’s note: This commentary is by Joseph Gainza, the founder of Vermont Action for Peace and the producer and host of “Gathering Peace” on WGDR and WGDH. He lives in Marshfield.
[T]wo events last week confronted us with our unacknowledged assumptions values, and the way we conduct our lives. Each in their own way exposed the deep denial so many of us employ to maintain our equilibrium in a world rapidly changing while at the same time only all too familiar.
I am speaking of the horrible killings at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and of the release of the letter to the world which Pope Francis wrote seeking to awaken us to our unity with, and responsibility to all of creation.
The killings and the encyclical highlight, in totally different ways, the tragic separation from one another and from the natural world so many feel, and which our economy and culture do so much to exacerbate. The massacre of nine members of the Emmanuel AME Church confronts us, in ways hopefully unavoidable, with our failure to see, to remember, and to end the deep racism which from its inception has disfigured and stained our nation. Hopefully this terrible loss of life, and the extraordinary statements of forgiveness by loved ones of those killed, will finally break through the denial, the indifference or the despair with which we as a people have responded to race hatred.
If we were to break through the denial, we might learn that racism in this country has always been fundamentally connected to economic exploitation. In slavery, human beings were exploited to increase the wealth of their masters – unpaid labor, they were treated in some cases, worse than farm animals. In Jim Crow South, black citizens were kept out of the political process while they were largely confined to manual and service jobs. They lived under an apartheid system which enforced its domination, as reported by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, with 3,959 lynchings between 1877 and 1950, an average of one a week for 73 years. The “crime” could be a black man bumping into a white woman while rushing to meet a train.
The wealth of nature is destroyed to create money wealth so that some small segment of our human family can consume orders of magnitude more than huge numbers of us.
In the North, red-lining, exclusion from job training programs, inferior schools, biased hiring practices and other forms of exclusion kept the majority of black people out of the economic and social mainstream. Many labor unions, unfortunately, also had exclusionary practices. Together these practices kept vast numbers of black households from accumulating financial assets enjoyed by many, certainly not all, white families.
We no longer lynch black people the way we did so easily in the past. Now, our police often kill them for little, if any reason. They are caged in our prisons and on our death rows in numbers far exceeding their proportion of the population, while data shows they do not commit crimes at a greater rate than white people.
Today the more formal barriers to equality have largely, not totally, been removed. But in an economy which has exported so many jobs – a large percent being entry level jobs — the competition for what remains is fierce. In this atmosphere, race hatred, which seems to lie just below the surface in this country, rears it ugly head as “they” are seen as taking “our” jobs. This becomes a subtle form of “divide and conquer” where workers are pitted against one another and the dividing line is race. Again, the owners of capital, who move the jobs to low wage nations, benefit.
Pope Francis points out that this “us and them” mindset reaches into our relations with the rest of creation. Our fellow creatures, the air, water and soil, on which all life depends, are seen as something to be heavily exploited. The wealth of nature is destroyed to create money wealth so that some small segment of our human family can consume orders of magnitude more than huge numbers of us. When it is reported that 85 people control as much wealth as half of humanity, 3.5 billion people, we know something is terribly out of whack. The pope calls us to an appreciation of “integral ecology.” In Laudato Si, he says “… the analysis of environmental problems cannot be separated from the analysis of human, family, work-related and urban contexts, nor how individuals relate to themselves, which leads in turn to how they relate to others and the environment.” We often treat one another the way we treat the living earth.
In the killings and the race hatred which motivated them, and in the thoughtless destruction of our common home, there is a common root – these actions raise fundamentally moral questions. They are moral questions which we as individual persons and as a nation have largely refused to address. They can be summed up as: are we one people, intimately connected to this one planet, as biology, physics, chemistry and other sciences, as well as all the great religious traditions tell us, or are we just individual, autonomous, beings in a competitive battleground, each out to get our own, struggling to dominate and exclude the other? If nothing else, this last week of both horrible news and good news should force us to seek an answer.
