A nation of immigrants and slaves

Immigration has been on my mind a lot lately, given ongoing talk of Trump's wall and the recent rise in bias incidents aimed at immigrants around the country.

I live in a city with a large immigrant population. Many of my neighbors in the city are here without documentation. So last night, I shared a short essay on Facebook on the welcome my ancestor Benjamin Nye received when he arrived on these shores in 1620. It was standard fare for the argument: We are a nation of immigrants, and should welcome other immigrants as we were.

This morning an acquaintance of mine left a comment on my post. "We are not only a nation of immigrants," he reminded me. "We are also a nation of slaves. Not everyone shared the American dream, though we all share in the American experience."

As Fahim reminded me, his ancestors didn't come here looking for a new beginning and the promise of freedom. They arrived in the cargo holds of ships. America wasn't William Bradford's city on a hill for them; it was a place where they were beaten and even hanged, until as late as the 1950s. That we don't tell their stories in our schools and worse, that we actively try to suppress their stories, is to our shame as a nation.

It's true that Lincoln officially ended slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation and that the United States declared the practice unconstitutonal with the Fourteenth Amendment. It's also true that no proclamation or constitutional amendment can alter a practice as deeply entrenched in the culture and society as slavery was.

Thus the United States gave up on Reconstruction after 10 years, and pent-up resentment over the loss of white status led to all manner of repressive measures intended to return blacks in the South to the place they held prior to the Civil War, within the constraints of the new laws. Sharecropping was just another form of slavery, as were prisons like Parchman Farm. Voter suppression and poll taxes kept blacks from exercising their right to vote, and soon returned control of the Southern states and their congressional representation to whites, after a brief period of black representation.

And of course the Ku Klux Klan and its reign of terror drove those blacks north who could make the journey, to seek not better economic opportunities but basic survival. Up North, black laborers were viewed as unwanted competition by white laborers who within a generation or less after immigrating could assimilate because they looked a lot like their neighbors.

So yes, in the days of Jim Crow justice, blacks were free, but it wasn't much different from the days of slavery. Technically it was no longer illegal to teach blacks to read and write, but their schools were badly underfunded, dilapidated and worse. They were equal in the eyes of the law, but they still couldn't use the same bathrooms, drinking fountains or restaurants as whites, let alone other public facilities.

As recently as the 1950s black Americans could be and were executed without benefit of a trial in a public lynching. Then there's what happened in places like Greenwood, Tulsa, Okla., in 1921, when black neighborhoods became prosperous.

The 1960s saw some progress, but it was far more limited than we prefer to believe. When the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation laws to be unconstitutional, the South saw a wave of public pools closed and private swimming clubs being opened, and white parents withdrew their children from public schools and enrolled them in private schools that were based on church membership or required tuition that lower-income black families couldn't afford.

Pictures of lynchings embarrassed the Southern states, so greater efforts were made to give blacks a trial. The death penalty to this day remains much higher for blacks than it is for whites, as are the number of false convictions. So lynching is still a thing. We've just given it a civilized gloss.

Blacks also are incarcerated at a disproportionate rate to whites for the same offenses, and with much heavier penalties. Poll taxes were declared illegal, but now that the federal oversight afforded by the Voting Rights Act has been removed, Southern states have passing voter ID laws to fight nonexistent voter fraud in areas with higher concentrations of minorities.

And, lest we forget, one of the effects of our country's reliance on fines to punish misdemeanors is that we have created a revenue stream for municipalities and an incentive for municipal government to impose late fees on those who don't pay their fines promptly. I'm sure you remember the Justice Department's findings in Ferguson, Mo. Justice officials said the city had been treating the black community like an ATM.

On it goes. We've made progress in our nation in terms of racial equality and justice, but it's come against a strong current of white resistance.

I really see one way forward, to make the past be as past as we want it to be, and that's to acknowledge it properly. When I was growing up we learned in school about some figures from African American history, like Harriet Tubman, Grandma Moses and George Washington Carver, and of course Martin Luther King Jr. That's pretty much it. Slavery got one paragraph in my fifth-grade history textbook and it was pretty much "Yeah, the Revolution didn't free the slaves, but we took care of that eventually, so it's all good."

Even then my education was limited. We memorized a few key phrases from "I Have a Dream," but never even looked at "Where do we go from here?" or "Letters from a Biringham Jail," much less learned about Malcolm X. We learned about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, but never about the head injury her abusive owner gave her, or that liberty when it came after the Civil War did not allow her to ride in "white cars" on trains. I didn't know anything about Frederick Douglass until I was in my 30s beyond "He's the guy with the hair."

None of the Framers was black, but there were black people in the halls of power back then. They had names like Jupiter, Sally Hemings and Oney Judge. They too are America. So are the contrabands and the 54th Mass. Colored Infantry who fought in the Civil War, or Varnum's Continentals in the Revolution. That we don't tell their stories in our schools and worse, that we actively try to suppress their stories, is to our shame as a nation.

If we learn their stories, and the rest of black history, like we've been learning white history, and elevate these heroes like we've elevated others; if we acknowledge the horror of what our nation did to thousands of women like Harriet Jacobs as a matter of routine, then maybe -- maybe -- we one day can say these things are past.

It's going to be a long haul.



Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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'jesus christ superstar'

The thing about the gospel of John is, it's got great theology but it makes for really bad music.

See? It really is about a bunch of dirty hippies.

I make this observation after somebody else has characterized "Jesus Christ Superstar" in the opposite manner; which is to say, the music is great but the theology is lacking. This assuredly is true, but then I was unaware that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice ever intended to write a work of theology. Rock operas generally are meant to entertain rather than to convey a seminary education, though doubtless there is some undergirding philosophy that may be understood if one listens closely enough to the music.

Another commenter correctly diagnoses the musical as 1970s eisogesis; that is, it foists 1970s thinking onto the gospel story. Eisogesis, incidentally, is a nice word. I must remember to use it in church some time. "Preacher, that's an eisogetical reading of the text. Learn to read the passaage correctly!" (Not that this is often a problem at my church. Sometimes, but it's rare and usually only happens when one of the elders is preaching.)

There is an irony in this observation about "Jesus Christ Superstar," namely that many if not most reactions of Christians to the show are themselves essentially eisegetical in nature. Believers typically see the musical through the lens of belief and thus regard it as either essentially faith-affirming or essentially hostile toward faith, without actually stopping to consider the motivations of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.

That is, the musical uses the language, symbols and even the stories of Scripture to convey tell its own story. Because it draws so heavily on the gospel, we often see it either as a presentation of the gospel ("It's about the Passion!") or as an attempted repudiation of the gospel ("It denies the Resurrection!") Both these interpretations are eisegetical in nature, relative to the text of the musical, without regard for the motivation of the show's creators or how its original audiences were meant to understand it.

A more exegitical interpretation would view the show through the lens of the 1960s, with Jesus as a representation of the highest aspirations of the sixties movements, and the Sanhedrin and Pilate representing authority and the status quo threatened by the rise of the flower children and peace movement.

Like any other piece of dramatic literature, of course, "Jesus Christ Superstar" is subject to reinterpretation through new productions that will reflect the values, beliefs and intentions that the director, producer and performers bring to the show.

Some of those reinterpretations are more authoritative anid compelling than others; but honestly, the worst are usually the ones that try to make it a gospel appeal. I saw one of those about five years ago, where they actually added brief snippets of dialogue to harmonize it with the gospels. It was a major disappointment.

But at least the music was pretty good.



Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Remember when music shaped the world?

Music used to be something that inspired us. It drew us together, made it possible to get through hard times together, and even made drudgery bearable.

When I was a kid we sang together in the car on long car trips. People sang together in church, not just choirs or worship teams but the entire congregation. We sang along with the radio. At Christmas time people went around caroling in groups from one house to another. There was music to educate, music to protest having to attend school, and songs like "This Land is Your Land" that everyone just knew. We didn't sing all the time, but it did happen.

Nowadays it seems like music is an empty exercise in narcissism, either of the singers who write only about themselves, or in the listeners who use their iPods as a shield against the world. I

t's hard to believe that only 40 years ago, people were using music to bring an oppressive establishment to its knees here in America, speaking up for Civil Rights, protesting war, and not only imagining a better world, but believing that it was within our power to create it.

Where are the Pete Seegers of today? Does no one perform powerful music this beautifully anymore? I was in tears listening to this song, and I hope that you were too.

gods of ash and stone

A fairly fundamentalist friend recently surprised me by admitting that he believes or is willing to believe the animist notion of dryads, naiads and other such elemental spirits that are familiar to us from Greco-Roman myth.

I admit it's an idea I've toyed with, because of stuff I've read or heard, and just because the geekboy within me finds the idea interesting and strangely compelling. I also like it because it's more nuanced than the fundamentalist view of spirits that "They're all demons."

Lewis actually discussed the notion in "That Hideous Strength," if you've read it. Merlin suggests that he can go out into the woods and glens of England and awaken the slumbering spirits he once dealt with back in the days of Arthur; and Dimble separately muses that such wild spirits could be spirits that haven't yet had to choose sides in the war between heaven and hell, or at least hadn't had to make such a decision during Merlin's time.

And of course if you're familiar with the stories missionaries tell from animist countries, there's invariably tales told of families or villages that were doing obeisance to a spirit. It wasn't an evil or malicious spirit necessarily; quite often it directed them toward good water, advised them on planting crops and so on -- and incidentally the one story I'm thinking of, from Cambodia, deals with a spirit that the family got into a relationship with after disturbing its sacred tree. Anyway, the spirits usually have a good relationship with the family until the missionaries come with the gospel and then, often though not always, the spirits go nuts and start threatening reprisals if people convert. Other times, they just fade out quietly as the family embraces the gospel.

In a larger sense, this is a reflection of what goes on when the gospel explodes in a culture where it was unfamiliar. The change the gospel brings is quite amazing: People who "get" it, who see the story as fulfilling a messianic expectation in their own culture, will see a values shift in terms of morals, justice and spirituality; while those who see it as a threat will start to define themselves in opposition to it. In a sense, those who have been seeking the Truth (or at least who see it) move dramatically toward it and those who prefer the secrecy of darkness move that way. The same perhaps could be said of dryads, naiads and others, for the sake of argument.

But of course, in a larger sociological perspective, we see the exact same phenomenon in conjunction with other socio-messianic movements. The music of The Beatles exploded on America like a small nuke, spiritually and socially. For large chunks of society, the 1960s was a time of redefinition, with utopian aspirations, social responsibility and breaking free of the shackles society had clapped on them. Others saw the cultural revolution spearheaded by The Beatles as a menace to society, and pushed back hard, to the point that rock music was seen as seditious, Lennon himself was regarded as a threat to national security and there was a serious move by the Nixon (?) administration to have him deported; and so on. We still see that divide perpetuated today, in the presidential campaigns, for instance, where McCain scored points with other conservatives by contrasting his service in Vietnam (establishment) with Clinton's identification with the Woodstock/hippie movement (counterculture).

So perhaps we should see "The Giving Tree" as personal revelation from the co-dependent spirits of the woods.

In the Torah, God warns the Israelites not to fall into the ways of the Canaanite people, saying repeatedly that their sins are why he is going to drive them out before the Israelites. There is another time, though, where he says "the land will vomit them out"; suggesting that this isn't just an action on his part but a reaction by the land itself, that the sin of the Canaanite peoples has so violated the natural order that the land itself was in revolt against them. In other words, sin has not just personal and interpersonal consequences, but environmental (in the broader sense than the merely ecological one) consequences as well.