NURTURING RECONCILIATION: BHM – We Need A Civil Reconciliation Movement
VJN invited Michael Raburn to share his thoughts on the film Selma and the Civil Rights Movement.
I saw the film Selma recently (and I highly recommend seeing it). It stirred up a lot of thoughts and feelings and predominant among them was how much has changed and yet how much remains the same in the American South that has always been my home. It’s hard to overstate the sea of change brought to African American lives by the Emancipation Proclamation and then the legal and institutional reforms of the Civil Rights Movement. But it is equally difficult to articulate the negative cultural echoes reverberating from those clarion calls. Not that these long strides toward justice caused those echoes in the sense that they are in any way culpable for them but they exist as effects that warrant attention.
The aftermath of Reconstruction saw the birth of an underground (barely so) racist movement built on misplaced nostalgia and fear that carried on and worsened the ethos that tolerated (even preached as Gospel) slavery before. As years crept on, segregation was the visible fruit grown of those seeds and when the Civil Rights Movement plowed those fields, that wicked fruit reseeded the cultural ground and racism was thoroughly sublimated in the still white dominated South.
As I watched the reenactment of hateful actions in the Selma of the 1960s it was not hard at all for me to imagine people I went to high school with or students I have taught within the last five years acting much the same (given the chance), whose thoughts, hearts, and lives bear much more resemblance to those segregationists than to those marching for freedom. We don’t have duplicated separate drinking fountains or restrooms in the South anymore but we are not all that much less segregated now than we were 50 years ago. As Rev. Dr. King knew (and had begun to focus on when he was killed) the racial skew of economic inequality has kept practical segregation quite in tact. The poorest neighborhoods in the South are the darkest skinned. The lower middle class are somewhat mixed. But as you ascend, it gets whiter and whiter. The food deserts turn into Whole Foods, check cashing liquor stores turn into Starbucks and beleaguered public schools turn into niche private schools or semi-public charters. Churches and private schools remain largely separated. And as we have seen in the past year, state legislatures are keen on rolling back even the institutional and legal gains of the Civil Rights Movement. Our Supreme Court is either okay with this, altogether uninformed, or willfully ignorant about the cultural state of things in the South.
The goal of the Civil Rights Movement was that people “be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.” The enduring challenge in realizing that goal is that in order to judge the content of a person’s character you have to know each other. And to know each other you have to get to know each other. And to get to know each other you have to be around each other. Segregation perpetuates the racist ethos it expresses because it prevents people from getting to know each other. There is only one way to change hearts and that is for hearts to be exposed to each other and come to know each other.
The original Civil Rights Movement did all it could within the cultural context it inherited. But it had barely begun, only cleared away some of the accrued detritus, the ramshackle structures of the post-Reconstructionists, when the purveyors of privilege declared the work done. Those vile extra-legal structures were removed but little was put in its place to enable and foster social growth among African Americans or the South generally. Instead, those with unchanged hearts and minds shifted to using existing legal structures to carry on the same divisive work. African Americans born in the South are born under a legal system that is gunning for them (often all too literally) and incarcerates them at rates and for lengths exponentially higher than their social peers. Our justice systems are altogether dependent on police and prosecutorial discretion and those discretions are tainted with the sublimated racial ethos that has survived like cultural kudzu.
But the foundation laid by the Civil Rights Movement endures. It was never a completed edifice, none of its leaders thought so. It was – and is – the slab on which we might build a different culture. It remains for us to build on that foundation, to clear away the weeds of fear, hate, and prejudice, to create a society where we can judge the content of characters because we know each others’ hearts. This is why we talk so much about reconciliation because this is the long, hard, deep work that remains. We need a Civil Reconciliation Movement that is as motivated, and organized, and passionate as the Civil Rights Movement was. As they fought for legal rights, we must fight for hearts. We must intentionally create spaces where people can get to know each other, do life together, and have their hearts knit together. This is especially the work of churches because the Gospel inherently, necessarily, brings together people who are not like each other to live into community together. This means we are always going to have to fight for each other’s freedom and equality. If we can desegregate our hearts and learn to love each other by living together, serving each other, we will insist on each other’s freedom and equality. Injustice becomes intolerable when it is done to a friend. That is what we need now. Beyond securing rights, we need to grow friendships.
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A bit about Michael:
Michael Raburn pastors Vineyard North, an intentional community in the northern part of the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. He has a Ph.D. in theology and ethics from Duke University, teaches at local colleges, writes, and has a weekly podcast with Amy, his wife and partner in all things. Together they have seven children and more creatures than you would believe. Visit mikeraburn.com to learn more.