If you’re interested in my social analysis and my scholarly reflections on race, I’ve written plenty of other books for you to read. I tried to make this book one of them, but in the end, I couldn’t. I kept coming up short. I kept deleting words from the screen, a lot of them, enough of them to drive me to despair that I’d ever finish. I was stopped cold. I was trying to make the message fit the form, when it was the form itself that was the problem.
What I need to say can only be said as a sermon. I have no shame in that confession, because confession, and repentance, and redemption play a huge role in how we can make it through the long night of despair to the bright day of hope. Sermons are tough, not only to deliver, but, just as often, to hear. Yet, in my experience, if we stick with the sermon—through its pitiless recall of our sin, its relentless indictment of our flaws—we can make it to the uplifting expressions and redeeming practices that make our faith flow from the pulpit to the public, from darkness to light.
There is a long tradition of a kind of sermon, or what some call the jeremiad, an extended lamentation about the woes we face, about the woes we embody, a mournful catalogue of complaint, the blues on page or stage. Henry David Thoreau was a friend to the form; so was Martin Luther King, Jr. Instead of blasting the nation from outside the parameters of its moral vision, the jeremiad, named after the biblical prophet Jeremiah, comes calling from within. It calls us to reclaim our more glorious features from the past. It calls us to relinquish our hold on—really, to set ourselves free from—the dissembling incarnations of our faith, our country, and democracy itself that thwart the vision that set us on our way. To repair the breach by announcing it first, and then saying what must be done to move forward.
I offer this sermon to you, my dear white friends, my beloved comrades of faith and country. My sermon to you is cast in the form of a church service. I adopt the voices of the worship and prayer leader, the choir director, the reader of scripture, the giver of testimony, the preacher of the homily, the bestower of benediction and the exhorter to service, and the collector of the offering plate. I do so in the interest of healing our nation through honest, often blunt, talk. It will make you squirm in your seat with discomfort before, hopefully, pointing a way to relief.
I do not do so from a standpoint of arrogance, of being above the fray, pointing the finger without an awareness of my own frailty, my own suffering and need for salvation. And yet I must nevertheless prophesy, not because I’m perfect, but because I’m called. God stood in my way when I tried to write anything, and everything, except what I offer you now.
This is written to you, my friends, because I feel led by the Spirit to preach to you. I don’t mind if you call Spirit common sense, or desperate hope, or willful refusal to accept defeat. I don’t mind if you conclude that religion is cant and faith is a lie. I simply want to bear witness to the truth I see and the reality I know. And without white America wrestling with these truths and confronting these realities, we may not survive. To paraphrase the Bible, to whom much is given, much is required. And you, my friends, have been given so much. And the Lord knows, what wasn’t given, you simply took, and took, and took. But the time is at hand for reckoning with the past, recognizing the truth of the present, and moving together to redeem the nation for our future. If we don’t act now, if you don’t address race immediately, there very well may be no future.
II.
Hymns of Praise
What are these songs, and what do they mean? . . . They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world.
—W.E.B. Du Bois
My ten-year-old son Mike was visiting my wife and me in Hartford, Connecticut, during the summer of 1988. I was a teacher and assistant director of a poverty project at Hartford Seminary. One evening we all piled into the car to drive over to my office to pick up some papers. Mike was behaving so badly in the car that I pulled over to the side of the road and gave him three licks on his hands. I was a young parent who had grown up with licks of my own and hadn’t yet learned the damage that corporal punishment wreaks. After I finished disciplining him I drove the single block to my building.
As I neared the seminary, two white cops drove up in their squad car. They signaled me to pull over before they got out of their vehicle. One of the cops approached my door, commanding me to get out of the car. His partner approached my wife’s door.
“Can I ask you why you’re stopping me, officer?” I asked politely and professionally. Like most black men I’d learned to be overly indulgent to keep the blue wrath from crashing on my head.
“Just get out of the car,” he demanded.
As I opened the door, I told the cop that I was a professor at Hartford Seminary, pointing to the school behind me.
“Sure,” he said drolly. “And I’m John Wayne.”
Even before he instructed me, I knew to “assume the position,” to place my hands against the car and lean forward. I’d done it so many times I could offer a class on correct procedure. I could hear the other cop quizzing my wife, asking her if everything was okay, if my son was fine. Mike was in the back seat crying, fearful of what might happen to me.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Mike tearfully insisted. “Why are you doing this to my dad?”
I heard snatches of the other cop’s conversation with my wife. Obviously someone—a well-meaning white person no doubt—had seen me punishing Mike in the car and reported it as child abuse. I was ashamed that I had given licks to my son. I was embarrassed that my actions had brought the fury of the cops down on me, on us.
Just as my wife was telling the cop how preposterous this was, two more police cars pulled up with four more white cops.
Damn, I thought to myself, if I had been mugged, I bet I couldn’t have gotten a cop to respond within half an hour. And now, within five minutes of disciplining my son, I’ve got six cops breathing down my neck ready to haul me into the station for child abuse. Or worse.
The other cops formed a circle around our car. The cop who pulled me from my car still refused to explain why he had stopped me. He forcefully patted me down as my wife and my son explained yet again that I had done nothing wrong and that Mike was fine.
“You sure everything’s alright?” the cop asked my wife while looking my way for degrading emphasis. She angrily insisted that all was fine.
Finally the cop frisking me addressed me.
“We got a complaint that someone was hurting a child,” he said.
“I can assure you that I love my son, and that I wasn’t hurting him,” I said in a measured voice. “I punished my child now so that he wouldn’t one day end up being arrested by you,” I couldn’t help adding. And instantly I regretted my words, hoping my brief fit of snarkiness wouldn’t set him off and get me hammered or shot.
“We have to check on these things,” the second cop snapped back. “Just don’t do anything wrong.”