I think that my sisters at Altared helped me understand part of my frustration tonight. We were discussing race, reconciliation, mercy, truth-telling, and our own brokenness. These women have consistently provided a place where I can speak, and where my pain and my joy can be heard. This space is refreshing in a Divinity School which tries to be faithful, but like any other institution, fails miserably at times.
Last spring, I sat through the response of one of our Black Church Studies and Theology professors to Bono's speech at the Presidential Breakfast. I remember feeling like I had never been so marginalized by a member of another ethnic minority. The tears I cried that morning were tears of sorrow and pain. Tonight as we talked before the altar, I was able to share briefly that I consistently feel marginalized at Duke, by both professors and students, and I was able to confess my own fear and reticence to speak truth and mercy to those who consciously and unconsciously perpetuate injustice.
As I walked away from those women and that altar, I realized that a portion of my pain comes from being ignored. In some cruel way, it is better to be abused than ignored. The abuse hurts, and it cuts deeply into the very fabric of your being, especially when the abuser attacks the color of your skin. When we are cut, we bleed, and there are many of us who are limping through these hallways. Our bodies bear the scars of the attacks against us, against our people, and against our identity.
But our scarred and bleeding bodies are at least acknowledged. There is a validation of personhood and of power when you are attacked. People attack you because they are threatened by the power you could wield, or they strike because they hate the person you are. Either way, there is an acknowledgment that you exist, albeit a perception that you are unworthy. There is no such validation in being ignored. When you are ignored, you are not even worth the time for someone to attack you. You possess no power to threaten the institutions and structures of society. You are worthless; instead of being the fly who nags and is swatted, you are the concrete people walk on, not tended, not cared for, not noticed.
My experience at Duke has been the latter. There is no desire to include the latino/a community in discussions of reconciliation. There is no acknowledgement that students may come from indigenous American tribes. There is no attempt to recognize my presence. Attempts to bring other ethnic groups into conversations of truth-telling and reconciliation are systematically ignored. Questions are interrupted or avoided altogether. I am neither Black nor White, so I do not matter.
This is a cry for truth, justice, peace, and mercy in Duke Divinity School. Whether you acknowledge it or not, I am a child created by God, redeemed by his blood, and empowered through the Holy Spirit. I will claim that identity for myself, and I will continue to ask you to claim it for me.
Then, I will proclaim the hope I see within these ivory walls as well. There are small groups of students, like these eighteen women before the altar, who create space to acknowledge pain and stand together as the body of Christ. In that space, I am no longer ignored but live as the member of Christ's body I am. In that space reconciliation begins, and we cry together over our sin and injustice, and we rejoice at grace which covers us all. We seek wholeness and healing and God's merciful touch. As we go from that space, may we all cry together the words carved into that altar: "I Thirst."
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2 comments:
Danielle, I'm so glad to hear you take up these topics. Maybe it's just my irascible nature, but I've wanted to question "black theology" from the first day of my black church class. At that point, we were reading W.E.B. DuBois, an important thinker to be sure, but he was claiming to describe a universal "black" experience. I immediately wondered what black women had said in response to this educated and privileged writer claiming to speak on their behalf.
I also recall the last year when immigration was a front burner issue (having since cooled considerably in public interest). "We" wonder what to do about "illegal immigrants," i.e. Mexicans who cross the border for work and new life. But the issue was brought into a different perspective when I asked myself, "What about Native Americans?" When did Europeans ever ask Native Americans if we could cross their borders to start new lives? What perverse narrative have American citizens told themselves to justify the creation of a nation on stolen land? Can the U.S.A. justly grapple with immigration before we've repented of our abuse of Native Americans and made serious redress of wrongs?
In short, I think you are correctly challenging the myopic concerns of even the wisest among us.
Danielle,
first of all, kudos for following through with your idea and opening the space on the web where theological reflection on these difficult issues is possible.
A little theological -biblical observation on your post: I was thinking about these issues since our first conversation in your living room and I have not been able to put them aside for a single day. Partly because you have articulated the way I have felt all through my year and a half in the States and partly because I have to look the "invisible" people of Durham in the eye just about every day and figure out how to minister with them when I do not have the narrative of my own that would provide me with a theological paradigm for thinking through these issues and when my professors at the Divinity School are no how helpful in thinking through how do we retell the story of the Old and New South so that all people are ingrafted into it...
My answer came from the book of Exodus (OK, only the beginning of the answer). Think of the Hebrew people in Egypt - they grew too numerous, were enslaved, cried out to their God and God delivered them through Moses. I think we are in the beginning of the Exodus narrative here in North Carolina. Here is a large population of Latino/a people who are fleeing physical hunger in their home countries and instead of welcome and hospitality in the Bethlehem - house of bread - of the world they find enslavement and/or the status of "the invisibles." What happens if they cry out to the Lord and the Lord hears their cry? One thing I know for sure, they have been crying out to God - for a while now.
I am not saying that the unfolding of the events will take the same exact form here as they did several thousand years ago; all I am saying is that the oppressed and the invisible people have a long standing history with God who acts on their behalf and as the wheels of history turn, the upperdogs and the blind ones stand accused before their own children and the God whom they thought they worshipped.
So that is my beginnings of a theological and Biblical narrative to think through what is happening in North carolina, Durham, Duke, and my own heart.
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