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by
Duke L. Kwon
Read between
June 13 - July 24, 2021
The segregated structures of American life function as a sort of cataract to true sight.
The civil rights movement dealt a powerful blow to White supremacy, but the blow was not fatal.
White supremacy sought to steal personal power, of body and mind, from generations of African Americans. We write these words with tears.
When asked in 1970, “Why did you single out the church?” Reverend Calvin B. Marshall III, chairman of the NBEDC, responded without hesitation: “Because the church is the only institution claiming to be in the business of salvation, resurrection, and the giving and restoring of life. General Motors has never made that kind of claim.”5
Blood spilled in violence doesn’t just dry and drift away in the wind, no! It cries out for restitution, redemption. —Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth
We tend to imagine Zacchaeus to be something like Joe Pesci’s character in the holiday classic Home Alone. In reality, he was more like Joe Pesci’s character in the mobster classic Goodfellas.
The ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable. —Martin Luther King Jr.
King reasoned similarly when he wrote that “pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.”
The work of restoration demands, in the end, the giving not of a check but of one’s soul—the giving of one’s very self.
I imagine that the first question which the priest and Levite asked was: “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But by the very nature of his concern, the good Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” He concludes, “The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others.”
If we are to understand why the call to restoration remains unheeded in our lives and across our nation, we must learn to recognize the deterring power of fear.
Reparations remains largely unconsidered not merely because we are unpersuaded by its moral propositions but because we feel threatened by its personal implications.
the goal of White supremacy is not fundamentally to hate African Americans. Its goal is to instrumentalize them, and then, having exploited and exhausted their utility, to render their humanity and its claims upon White Americans utterly invisible.
the call of reparations is not merely for a check to be written or for a debt to be repaid but for a world to be repaired.
When threatening truths bear down on us, it is tempting to take shelter inside our consoling half-truths and to close our eyes to everything else.
The Christian church in America exists in a cultural context that is predicated upon self-deceit. The foundation of the Christian faith, however, is the unwaveringly true word of God made known in Jesus, and this faith’s precondition is the falling of scales from dishonest eyes.
White supremacy is, quite simply, a social order driven by the pathology of its own omnipotence whose destinarian ambitions to control the world amounted to little more than the metastasization of vice.
