Repairing, part 2

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Your Journey Group packet for May, on our theme, “Healing,” includes this one:

"Exercise #4: Wrestle with the Call of Reparations. Does racial healing require reparations? Or is it unrealistic? Or both? Whatever your opinion, should we not at least make space for the discussion? Doesn’t refusing that space drive us farther from healing? The reparations debate challenges us with hard questions: What does apology without accountability mean? How can personal reconciliation occur without structural repair? How much of our comfort are we will to sacrifice to heal others’ pain? Are you willing to look honestly at the casualties of your comfort and success? Can we disagree about the efficacy of reparations and still consider each other allies? This exercise invites you to explore the diverse articles below not simply with the question of 'What’s my opinion?' but also 'Where is my resistance coming from?' 'What scares me about this topic?' and 'How is the conversation itself trying to help me heal?' Come to your group ready to share what the below articles taught you about yourself."

What follows provides links to 13 articles, 10 of them from 2019 or 2020. Many of them are 2 or 3 page newspaper columns. One of them pointed out that,

“As of 2016, the average white household had more than 10 times the median wealth of a black household....On average, black households with a head who holds a college degree have two-thirds of the wealth of White households with a head who never finished high school.”

The only long-form journalism on the list is the aforementioned 2014 article by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates particularly focuses on housing policy in the post-war period – because this is a huge part of the story behind that wealth gap. Home ownership is “the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history.” And through the 1950s and 60s, blacks faced tremendous obstacles in home ownership. As Coates explains:

“The FHA had adopted a system of maps that rated neighborhoods according to their perceived stability. On the maps, green areas, rated 'A' indicated 'in demand' neighborhoods that, as one appraiser put it, lacked ‘a single foreigner or Negro.’ The neighborhoods were considered excellent prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where black people lived were rated 'D' and were considered ineligible for FHA backing. They were colored in red. Neither the percentage of black people living there nor their social class mattered. Black people were viewed as a contagion.”

With banks unwilling to loan – in part because the FHA wouldn’t insure the loan – blacks seeking to buy a house turned to buying on contract. The seller keeps the deed, the buyer accrues zero equity until the final payment, and if one payment is missed, they’re evicted, with no equity, no deed, nothing. It’s like renting only worse, because if the water heater blows, or the roof leaks, the resident has full responsibility for fixing it.

So we’re not talking about the injustices of the 1860s, but of the 1960s. And of the 21st-century. Banks have continued to steer black clients to subprime, predatory loans.

“In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. In 2011, Bank of America agreed to pay $355 million to settle charges of discrimination against its Countrywide unit. The following year, Wells Fargo settled its discrimination suit for more than $175 million. But the damage had been done. In 2009, half the properties in Baltimore whose ownders had been grated loans by Wells Fargo between 2005 and 2008 were vacant; 71 percent of these properties were in predominantly black neighborhoods.”

Racism is not our fault, but it is our responsibility. No one alive today started the inculcation of our thought patterns, assumptions, and implicit biases with the idea of white supremacy – yet all of us, black or white or indigenous or of color -- picked up that influence. That we have that is not our fault. What we do now, is our responsibility.

We’ve been carrying around a wound our whole lives – a color line cutting through our hearts. Those of us with more privilege, may crouch within privilege and try not to think about our wound. We can be forgiven for trying not to think about it -- though that's not the most helpful response. Mindfulness Based Pain Management programs now in some hospitals coach patients with pain NOT to try to distract themselves, but to actually bring attention to the pain. Really focus on it, observe it, get to know it. The result is that less drugging ourselves to mask the pain is necessary.

With reparations we have a way to actually heal – to take real steps toward repairing. That prospect is the most inspiring, hopeful uplifting message I have ever received or could hope to impart. A new country. Full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences. Finally seeing ourselves squarely, and able to face each other squarely. Oh, man, that would be great – and it’s imaginable in ways I’ve never seen. A national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.

It’s been a long toilsome slog – imposed upon the bodies our black, indigenous, and people of color neighbors, but it has also oppressed the oppressors. Fear, and constriction – narrow minds and small hearts adopted as counterproductive defensive strategies have diminished the lives of those who have all the ostensive privileges.

It's been a long, toilsome slog, but I feel like real healing – respite and repair – is at last reachable. Certainly not inevitable, but more possible than it has ever been. It makes my eyes tear, and my heart soar. This generation can do some real repairing of the centuries-long wounds.

We can support H.R. 40, the bill that John Conyers has been introducing every year for many years, in Democratic and Republican administrations. It would set up a commission to study reparations. It wouldn't pay out anything to anyone -- just set up a commission to study the questions. And that very mild proposal hasn't yet made it out of committee.

There are also possibilities for local action. There are ways that we can contribute ourselves to repairing. Our UU congregation in Tulsa joined with other Tulsa congregations to collect money for reparations for the 1921 Tulsa massacre. As UU World reported:

"The $28,048 collected by March was all disbursed to survivors. The plan is to make distributions quarterly if donations on hand total at least $100 per survivor."

I preach this good news today: repairing is possible.

May it be so. Amen.

Go to part 1

Repairing, part 1

Go to part 2

Shavuot, which begins at sundown today, marks the end of a seven-week period called the Omer, or Counting of the Omer, which began at Passover. The first day of Passover commemorates the escape from Egypt. The last day of Passover, a week later, commemorates the crossing of the Red Sea, and Shavuot commemorates the receiving of the Torah from God on Mt. Sinai.

On this Shavuot, we look at repairing, and draw on the Jewish concept Tikkun Olam, to repair the world. In Jewish social thought, Tikkun Olam has come to mean we share a partnership with God to improve the world and help others.

The Torah -- consisting of the five books Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy – has enslavement at the center of the story. The Jewish people were enslaved in Egypt, and became free. That’s something for which to be grateful. One might be grateful for that in the sort of way that one is grateful for antibiotics: we use to be subject to a lot of diseases that now we aren’t, thank goodness. But the Torah makes clear that this episode of enslavement isn’t just a horrible thing in the past which we can be grateful is over. It’s an ongoing instruction in how to live now.

For instance, because of that past experience in Egypt, there’s a requirement of care for immigrants. Leviticus 19 commands:

“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”

Also based on that experience in Egypt, there’s an injunction about slavery. Deuteronomy 15 commands:

“If a member of your community, whether a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you and works for you six years, in the seventh year you shall set that person free. And when you send him out from you a free person, you shall not send him out empty-handed. Provide liberally out of your flock, your threshing floor, and your wine press, thus giving to him some of the bounty with which the Lord your God has blessed you. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you; for this reason I lay this command upon you today.”

This is in the section of Deuteronomy known as the Deuteronomic Code. It is presented as sermons by Moses. Scholars say it was probably composed around the time of King Josiah, near the end of the 7th century BCE – so, about 2700 years ago. It is “essentially the work not of a jurist or statesman, but of a prophet” – which is to say, its primary impetus is to call out and correct injustice.

The Deutoronomic Code provides protections for women, children, widows, foreigners, and the poor. It methodically provides legal compensation for those victimized by the inequities and brutalities that may otherwise inhere in the social system.

Healing is our theme for May. Healing and wholeness come from the same root. In law, a tort remedy’s purpose is to make an injured party whole. That’s the legal term: “make whole” -- make whole – heal – repair the injury, the wound. The Deuteronomic Code from 2700 years ago was about making whole the victim’s of that society’s inequities and brutalities.

The wholeness sought was not just for the victim, but for the society. If I do something that hurts you, there is not one injury, but two. It hurts you, and it also rends our relationship – and there’s a need for repair at both those levels. I, the perpetrator, also need to heal from the wound it does to me to know that I have done harm – and from the wound it does me that I have done harm even if I don’t know it. If I go blundering about oblivious to the damage I’m causing, that damage nevertheless cuts me off from the possibility of flourishing relationships and from the fulness for which human life yearns. It constricts me in ways of which I might not be consciously aware.

The principle applies to nations as well as to people. When, in the years after World War II, Germany considered reparations for the Jewish people, at first only 29 percent of West Germans believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people. Forty percent thought that only people ‘who really committed something’ were responsible and should pay. Twenty-one percent thought that the Jews themselves were partly responsible for what had happened. Over the next year, Germany’s intentional process of reckoning with itself shifted those numbers, and Germany ultimately paid to Israel more than $7 billion in today’s dollars. On top of that, Germany paid individual reparations claims. By 1961, reparations money had paid for two-thirds of the Israeli merchant fleet, and reparations money funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system, which tripled its capacity, and nearly half the total investment in railways.

Nothing, of course, could make up for the Nazi murders, but reparations “did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.” Germany didn’t just repair Israel. Germany repaired Germany.

It took a little longer after World War II for the US to reckon with Japanese internment camps, but in 1988, Congress authorized payments of $20,000 in reparations to most living internees. Sam and Sumi Koide, long-time vibrant members of this congregation, both of whom died this year, were active in the campaign to make that happen. Was it enough? Probably not. But it was significant repair – of those harmed, and of the nation’s wounds that it recognized, at last, it had, in fact, inflicted upon itself.

The possibility of repairing damage done by centuries of white supremacy is alive today in ways that it has not been for 156 years – not since Lincoln’s assassination was followed by the Andrew Johnson administration which overturned Special Field Order Number 15 – a.k.a., General Sherman’s “40 acres and a mule” plan.

Of course we have questions about reparations. How would it work? Should the money go to individuals or into community investments and programs? How do we trace lineage? Are we talking about Black people, or all people color, or indigenous peoples? Would reparations bankrupt the Federal Government? Or the questions that sprang to David Brooks’ mind:

“What about the recent African immigrants? What about the poor whites who have nothing of what you would call privilege? Do we pay Oprah and LeBron?”

I don’t know the answer to those questions. I don’t think we need to know the answer right now. All we need to know right now is that these questions are not unanswerable. There are various proposals for how to answer them. Put all proposals on the table and let’s work out something.

We might start with Boris Bittker’s proposal (cited in a Jonathan Rauch's article) that we offer reparations for official school segregation.

“A program to compensate children who were required to go to segregated schools would not raise any conceptual difficulties in identifying the beneficiaries. Entitlement would depend exclusively on the fact that the student was assigned to a black school, regardless of his actual racial origin.”

As Jonathan Rauch adds:

“They are easy to identify. Many of them are very much alive. It cannot be seriously disputed that they were wronged, not only educationally but morally, by being forced into separate and hardly equal schools. Moreover, the perpetrator of the injustice is not a race, a “society,” or slave owner who are all long dead. The perpetrator, like the victims is identifiable and very much alive: government.”

That would be at least a start – clear and do-able.

The reparations conversation was significantly revived by a long article in Atlantic by Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2014. Coates concluded:

“And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations — by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences — is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely....What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices — more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.”

Go to part 2