In the sixty years since the publication of Strength to Love this nation has indeed made progress in efforts to bring an end to legalized racial segregation, discrimination and political disenfranchisement. This is evident in the gains in socioeconomic status, educational achievement and upward mobility of African Americans and other people of color. The election of President Barack Obama in 2008 and again in 2012 signaled a shift that the country was finally ready to consider the content of the character of a person more so than race as deciding factors of their qualification for leadership. It was a hopeful sign of progress, that although white supremacy was still alive, one could perhaps begin to envision a time in the distant future when it would finally meet its end.
However, the 2016 election and the ensuing presidential administration deftly squashed that hope and revealed the fragility of the progress made in race relations. Fueled by a white nationalist base of supporters and armed with Fox News as a partner in disseminating white supremacist propaganda, the policies and actions of the administration revealed such disdain for people of color, the poor, immigrants, LGBTQiA people and others. The same brand of evil Dr. King decried in his essay had once again reared its ugly head and roared from the highest office in the land for all the world to hear. No, Pharaoh’s army is still not dead…yet.
We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. — Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
How long, oh Lord?! — Oppressed people everywhere
Dr. King pointed out in many of his sermons and writings that in the struggle between good and evil, good will eventually prevail. This is the crux of Christian faith, the same faith that fueled the Civil Rights Movement. He was always careful to caution that the pursuit of justice and equality was a long game, but one cannot help but wonder just how long the arc of the moral universe is and if we will live to see it truly bend. Just days ago I turned on the news to hear that Ralph Yarl, a sixteen year old Black child was shot in the head and again in the arm because he rang the doorbell at a white man’s home. This is a story that should be more in keeping with headlines from 1963, not 2023. This event and the many, many others occurring with horrific regularity is indicative that white supremacy is dying a long, slow death. But how long will it take before it’s dead?
The global pandemic forced the world to stare death in the face. We saw how quickly an otherwise healthy person could succumb to Covid-19. But anyone who has endured sitting with a person dying from a terminal illness such as cancer or heart disease can attest that in those instances the process of dying is much longer and has observable stages. In the early and middle stages of death a person can experience bursts of energy where they are out of bed and engaging in normal activities again. These bounce back periods can convince one that death is much further away than it really is. If Dr. King is right that the evil of white supremacy will die upon the seashore then perhaps what we’re experiencing now is a bounce back period. Dare we hope that its death could be closer than we think?
In the wake of any death comes the opportunity for the living to create, form and shape a new identity and ways of being. I’ve often attempted to engage sacred imagination to envision this country and the world absent this brand of evil. Who could we be? How will our relationships be different? What will society look like? This is challenging for many reasons, namely because white supremacy is hardwired into the mainframe of this country and impacts and influences each of us. And because of course, white supremacy is but one evil in this world that threatens our lives; there are many more. Scholar and writer on civil rights issues Dr. Kimberlé Creshaw wrote, “Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.” All oppression is linked, therefore even with the death of white supremacy comes the needful deaths of classism, homophobia, misogyny and so on.
This reminds me that after the Children of Israel and the mixed multitude traveled through the parted sea and reached the shores of the Wilderness of Shur (Exodus 15:22) they faced another set of challenges and complications, including a lack of clean water and a consistent food supply for the multitude. Although God met their needs at every turn, the people complained and rebelled against God’s leadership through Moses. Their disobedience caused God to allow the Children of Israel to wander for forty years before entering the land promised to them. During that time God made room for them to discover their identity post-enslavement, to confront their own disobedience, and wrestle with a different kind of evil, one that lived within.
If Dr. King is right about the death of white supremacy on the seashore then a life beyond it will still require lots of radical truth-telling. Society will be forced to reckon with the ways white supremacy has shaped and formed it and how other forms of oppression have been nurtured alongside it. There will be much work to dismantle systems and divest from racist frameworks as much as the need for individuals to do the internal work of rooting out racist ideologies and behavior. It seems that just like the Children of Israel, our society too will have to deal with the evil on both sides of the water.
