Kith or Kin
07-17-2016
By Gregg Hunter
“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” Matthew 6:24.
“And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.” Mark 3:25
This has been a very trying couple of weeks for every U.S. citizen. Seven deaths, seven lives lost, two regular black citizens and five police offices. Outrage, frustration and hopelessness have cycled through just about everyone’s minds. People have shed tears for their lost loved ones and for the lack of progress on race relations in our country. I attended a memorial service at my seminary, McCormick Theological Seminary, on July 11 to grieve with my fellow students and citizens of our wounded nation. Earlier that day I listened to an expatriate from the Dominican Republic who grew up in Brooklyn and now attends seminary in Cuba accuse the U.S. of being the primary problem with not just Cuba, but the world and especially for violence towards those of African descent.
So much anger, so much pain, I have witnessed in the last few days. At the service, we couldn’t even bring ourselves to sing songs of healing because what good are our songs when they paper over feelings of a wound that still has not healed. I could barely bring myself to speak and cried later that night in the solitude of my apartment. I thought I had no more tears to cry and had moved forward, but it turns out I still had a reservoir of emotion that I had left untapped. I am wounded, black people are wounded and our nation is wounded.
Yet, black people get wounded by the state and its institutions. We might not be considered ⅗ human, but instead one could say ⅗ American, not fully woven into the fabric of the American Dream and not melted into the pot fully. And therein lies the predicament I find myself in. I am divided and I try to serve two masters and I am not standing. I am black and American; I love my country yet my country has a strained relationship with people that look like me. I suffer from the disease of “doubleconsciousness”, trying to be fully black and fully American.
When I say I love my country, I mean it. I own a lot of U.S flag paraphernalia: shorts, tshirts, sunglasses, jackets, you name it I probably own it. I mouth the national anthem along with the singer everytime I hear it played, imaging the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air as the tune is sung. I cheer enthusiastically whenever I see red, white and blue clad athletes take to their athletic fields of play, spirit rising and falling like rollings hills in those great western parks like Yosemite with every second. There’s no other place I’d rather live. I love the freedom we espouse, the opportunity we offer, the food we consume, the music we listen to, the movies we produce; I love being a U.S citizen and the benefits that come with that.
Yet, those benefits came with a huge cost. This land belonged to other people and the Europeans that came over seeking religious freedom, among other things, seized that land by hook, crook and murder. Violently was the land taken and a trail of tears soaked the ground as they travelled to reservations, prisoners in their own home. That was the first wound, the original sin, the loss of paradise and Eden forever marred. Slavery was the second, Cain enslaving Abel instead of killing him. Europeans stole Africans (sometimes even with the help of other Africans) to work the newly stolen land of the “New World”, a vast frontier ripe with potential riches.
When the United States won their independence from Britain, the Founding Fathers reached a compromise on a problem the War for Independence had posed. They based the newly formed government on the premise that “all men are created equal” (I apologize ladies, their words not mine). Yet, they had not only maltreated the native peoples that lived here at first, but now enslaved another group of people. If all “men” are created equal, then can we justify keeping some in an inferior position? The debate raged and tortured the consciences of these enlightened men. Much profit laid in maintaining slavery and plus, the “Negro” (they had too much refinement to say “nigger” I imagine) was not a human but a mere beast to be put to work in the fields. Others were not quite comfortable with the reduction to beastliness of the Negro race but also did not see the Negro as on the same level as them; there was a recognition of humanity, but a tempered one. They reached a compromise: the “Negro” was ⅗ of a person, not fully human but not fully beast either; an inferior specimen ordained by God to remain in subordination to superior races.
There lie the first division of the house. The Northern states hewed to a tempered humanity, the Southern states to a vastly inferior subspecies. Either way, the Negro held no place in their vision of equal humanity. As the northern economy and southern economy went in different directions and the country expanded westward, the Negro debate grew more tense. Those in the West did not want to enslave black people, they just wanted nothing to do with them. The North also wanted no part in slavery and recognized the evil of slavery but it would turn out they did not want equality; in other words, “We’ll free you but don’t want to actually live in community with you.” The South raked in profit, at least the small number of huge plantation owners did anyway, off the free labor of black bodies; slavery was going nowhere in the South. This divided house between North and South didn’t even last a century and Civil War erupted, tearing the fabric of the country asunder.
The Union Army won the war and black people finally had a measure of freedom. I say measure because while we no longer worked the fields for free, we still had no stake in our adopted country. The great leaders of our race felt that we were entitled to the protections of the law as citizens of the U.S. but the great leaders of our nation did not feel the same way uniformly. So we stood in this uncomfortable space between blackness and being American. We had to fight in the country’s wars to defend the homeland and bring peace to the world while we knew no peace. We did not reap the benefits of war’s spoils: GI Bill and white picket fences in the suburbs; instead we got bills to pay and decaying communities. The only value came from our labor: in war, on the field of sports or in music; we could fight, sing, dance and entertain but God forbid we tried to break out of that mold to become a doctor, teacher or lawyer. We worked new fields in new plantations and the U.S. reaped what we sowed.
Over the years and with a lot of bodies piled up, we got another measure of freedom. We can go to elite universities, we can live in the suburbs (no more than 30% though), we can work in new fields. Yet too many live in a new plantation called prison and remain stuck in a hurricane of generational poverty that reaches back to the first step off the boat onto Virginia’s shore. No jobs, no resources, no food, no homes, no strong family units, a broken people left behind in a rapture of prosperity.
I have never truly experienced poverty. I was too young to remember when my parents were bankrupt and simulated poverty in a volunteer corps is nowhere close to the real thing. America has been good to me. I’ve never had a run in with the police, I have attended elite private schools, travelled the world and had great experiences. I have never wanted for anything in my life; I’m not rich, just another middle class young black male who was lucky to have a great support system for my mother, sister and I to draw on. I have no reason to dislike my country since my country has shown no dislike to me personally.
I struggled this week with the latest horror shooting of black males and the perception of reality that being black in this country is license to get you killed. How can I love a country that doesn’t love people that look like me? How can I love a country that causes so much pain to its own citizens and other citizens in different countries like Cuba? The system that the U.S. set up in the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War greatly benefitted the country and by extension me, but had done almost irreparable harm to other countries. If anything is to change the system must not be incrementally reformed but overthrown. Yet I participate in this system and benefit from our place in the world. I’d rather black in the U.S. than an Ukranian, Syrian or Venezuelan. Being black in the U.S. still grants more benefits than being black just about anywhere else.
I love my country and I love being black. Yet I cannot serve two masters because I will hate one and love the other, I cannot love them equally. I cannot serve God, my country, and mammon, in this case my black flesh. The U.S. claims to serve God but also has a love affair with the god of mass consumption and wealth accumulation; one of the most famous lines in American cinema is “greed is good” after all. The U.S. claims freedom for all its citizens yet polices some groups unfairly and incites a spirit of fear in the presence of law enforcement. From the beginning, the U.S. has divided its consciousness between guilt and greed, slavery and freedom and that division infects us all. I benefit from the sins of my country despite my country’s sins against people that look like me. Just as our nation stands conflicted, so did I stand conflicted.
I have a stake in maintaining the current world order with U.S. as hegemon yet for anything to change that order must be abolished. I know it, I feel it, I understand, but don’t know if I can wish for my country’s reckoning. My house is divided and I’m falling apart with each passing day. I don’t know if I can choose between my country or my black kin.
