March 3, 2022
©Wendell Griffen, 2022
Photo / Bloomberg.com – Photographer: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Europe
What should your neighbors do if a bully broke into your home in broad daylight, began killing members of your family, and publicly announced that the killing would continue until you surrendered or abandoned your home?
Should the neighbors send thoughts and prayers?
Should they wear the favorite colors of your family?
Should they stop doing business with the bully?
Should they seize property and bank accounts owned by the bully? If neighbors welcomed you and your family into their homes, would that alter the reality that they refused to help you and your family fight the bully?
How would those responses make your neighborhood safer?
How are they consistent with the moral duty to value the lives and peace of neighbors as highly as we value our own lives and peace?
These questions have troubled me since Russian military forces invaded Ukraine on orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Thoughts, prayers, economic sanctions, and other acts of sympathy for Ukraine have been expressed and invoked with much fanfare by political leaders. Humanitarian aid has been promised and is being provided for Ukrainians who fled their homeland since the invasion began.
Those things will not stop the invasion. They will not prevent Putin from invading other nations. They will not discourage other would-be bullies.
Ukrainians do not need a global sympathy exercise. Threats from capitalist politicians that their nations will quit doing business with Putin’s Russia do not help Ukrainians fight Russian invaders. Thoughts and prayers do not prevent Ukrainian men, women, and children from being terrorized. Sports boycotts of Russian teams and athletes will not protect Ukrainian women and girls from being sexually assaulted and raped.
Ukrainians know this is true. So does Vladimir Putin.
Putin, like all sociopaths, is not deterred by expressions of condemnation and sympathy. He invaded Ukraine despite numerous appeals from political leaders in the European Union and NATO and warnings that invading Ukraine would result in severe economic responses.
Putin invaded Ukraine despite those appeals and warnings because no national leader promised to help Ukraine defend itself against his planned invasion. No nation sent military personnel to help Ukraine defend itself. The invasion has gone on for a week. Ukrainian President Victor Zelensky has been begging the world for military help as his people are being bombed, shot, and terrorized. His pleas have resulted in the moral and military equivalent of a global sympathy card.
President Zelensky and President Putin know the difference between a sympathy card and the help Ukraine needs. They also know that world leaders have the weapons, warriors, and other resources needed by Ukraine.
What perturbs Zelensky and delights Putin is the knowledge that world leaders lack the will to bring their arsenals, warriors, and other war-fighting resources to bear against Putin.
Otherwise, they would have done so before now. Ukrainians would be joined by warriors from other eastern Europe nations and warriors from the European Union and NATO to repel the Russian invasion on the terms that bullies understand and fear, namely, armed defeat by a committed military force. That military resistance to Russian aggression – coupled with economic and diplomatic isolation – would show Putin, the Russian population, and other would-be bullies such as China, Israel, Iran, and India that the term “global neighborhood” means more than stock exchanges and commercial ventures for profit-taking.
Good neighbors do more than bring meals and sympathy cards when death-dealing bullies attack others. Good neighbors help one another fight off bullies.
Perversely, Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has exposed the moral and ethical incompetence of capitalism to the world (not that the proof has been unavailable or inconspicuous before now). Having a neighborhood where bullies are not free to victimize people is always a “vital strategic interest.”
However, the capitalist nations that make up the G7 have a notion of neighborhood that is no bigger than their collective wealth and comfort. They do not include Ukraine, Palestine, South Africa, and other places where state sponsored violence is happening to people because those places are not part of their notion of “neighborhood.”
Hence, people send “thoughts and prayers” as Vladimir Putin’s Russian soldiers murder people in Ukraine with impunity.
Hence, people send “thoughts and prayers” as Israel murders Palestinians and steal Palestinian land and water with impunity.
Hence, people send “thoughts and prayers” as the wealth, health, and other inequities that defined the apartheid regime of South Africa continue with impunity.
Hence, people send “thoughts and prayers” as police officers kill and terrorize people and communities of color with impunity.
People who send “thoughts and prayers” when bullies attack their neighbors are not courageous. They are not loyal. They are not helpful. “Thoughts and prayers” do not stop bullies. Bullies know that is true. People attacked by bullies know that is true.
“Thoughts and prayers” from dithering capitalists are expressions of sympathy, not support for oppressed people. As such, “thoughts and prayers” merely mark the people who send them rather than use their power to help oppressed people fight bullies as cowards and hypocrites.
History will show that capitalist nations with plenty of troops, tanks, and attack helicopters did not send them to help Ukraine. Hence, Putin’s invasion will succeed.
The world will never forget that rich nations refused to help Ukraine defend itself. Also, bullies will not forget.
Reprinted with permission by author.
Hon. Rev. Wendell Griffen Trustee, Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, Inc. Senior Pastor, New Millennial Church, Little Rock, AR he/him/his Author, The Fierce Urgency of Prophetic Hope (Judson Press, 2017)
America is addicted to white supremacy
March 7, 2022
Susan K. Smith
This country is addicted to its belief in and adherence to white supremacy. It is an addiction that displays as do all addictions: The desire for the power of white supremacy is part of the political circulatory system of this country, and because of that, the country cannot just declare that we are over it. America needs to be detoxed of its poisonous, destructive tumor.
There have been spates of time in our history where there has been a kind of remission. After the horrifically toxic years following Reconstruction, Black Americans, and women for that matter, were allowed into the political system.
But Black political and economic progress almost always has been followed by white backlash. It’s the addiction, made evident.
Once a person is addicted to a substance, his or her body needs it and their body is forever challenged and threatened by that need re-emerging. The blessing or evidence of healing is revelatory when the addicted person’s physiology and spirituality has risen above raw desire.
America’s addiction to white supremacy is no different. When it comes to white supremacy, American simply does not want to let it go. And so we have not.
This addiction to white supremacy exists in spite of the historical Jesus and his teachings. Some white supremacists have declaredthat Jesus’ mission really was to minister to and save the most wealthy, not those who suffer from political, economic and social oppression.
Historian Anthea Butler says:
White Christianity is a Christianity that is based on the following: Jesus is white. Jesus privileges white culture and white supremacy, and the political aspirations of whiteness over and against everything else. White Christianity assumes that everybody should be subsumed under whiteness in terms of culture and society.
White Christianity assumes that it does not have to look at poverty. We see this in the form of the so-called prosperity gospel, and that any blessing you get from God is because God favors you. If anybody else is out of favor, let’s say some poor kid in Northwest Philadelphia who doesn’t have enough to eat, well, that’s just too bad because they’re not blessed of God.
If you grew up in a home where the gospel was taught, this remaking of Jesus as the champion of white supremacy is puzzling, confusing and troubling. But in all truth, the only way to understand what is going on, and the role of Christianity in all of it, is to understand the ethos of white Christianity — a belief system that exists North, South, East and West.
What, then, do Christians who believe in the biblical Jesus, the Jesus of the gospel, do to effectively combat a nation that is addicted to white supremacy and that justifies its actions on their re-make of Jesus and Jesus’ purposes? How does one fight a group of people who have effectively de-defied the biblical Jesus and God, the parent of Jesus?
It is troubling, again, for those of us who internalized our Sunday school lessons, who resonated with the stories of Jesus loving all people, mingling with and touching and healing those who had been determined to be “the least of these.” The gospel message gave hope to the masses, which is necessary for the strength to survive oppression. With so many white Christians having rejected the biblical Jesus and replacing that figure with their own icon, how does the biblical Jesus survive — or in this time, does he?
Robert P. Jones, author of White Too Long, writes that America always has had a fascist undergirding, revealed during moments of white backlash toward Black progress. Are the believers in the biblical Jesus too silent? Too afraid?
It seems believers in the biblical Jesus ought to lose their fear and stand up, speak out and confront the distortion of Christianity we see playing out. We need to gird up and, like Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, face those who would bully believers in the gospel.
The Ukraine is in a war, surely, but this country is in a war as well with a nation that is addicted to its substance of choice — white supremacy. This country does not want to be healed of it; the goal is to inhale more fumes of power to maintain its high. America, just like any addict, may know that it is on a dangerous course and might die but has no power or desire to stop the ravaging of its soul.
It is time for believers in the biblical Jesus, the Jesus of the gospel, to stand up and be heard and seen.
Reprinted with permission by author.
Susan K. Smith is an ordained minister, activist and author. A graduate of Yale Divinity School, she is the director of clergy resource development for the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference. Her latest book is With Liberty and Justice for Some: The Bible, the Constitution, and Racism in America.