Trayvon, Oscar and Sean On My Mind

While reading The Cross and the Lynching Tree, I couldn’t help but think back to this summer and the anger, frustration and sense of hopelessness I felt after the Zimmerman verdict was announced. A young black man on his way home was killed by a white looking Hispanic man because he seemed suspicious. We all know the painful details of the circumstances surrounding the murder of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent trial of George Zimmerman, but what I remember most was the haunting feeling of vulnerability and concern for the black men I called father, brother, friends and lovers. What was proven to black people once again, in the new millennium, in case we thought the election of the first black president had elevated our status as people, was that black life would always be tenuously held at the mercy of those who more resembled honorable whiteness.  Those with black skin would always be considered less worthy of honor and justice and more susceptible to violence at the hands of the “righteous.” I wonder what a study comparing incidents of depression, violence and drug and alcohol abuse among blacks before and immediately after the Zimmerman verdict was announced would reveal?

The trial and its racially polarizing effect on the country were fascinating phenomena. What seemed a clear-cut case--a man killing and unarmed innocent boy--was considered complicated, because while he was unarmed, the innocence of the boy could not be assumed, in fact proof of innocence became the prosecuting attorney’s burden, because the boy was black. This is no doubt a result of the criminalization of black men, an age-old agenda of a resentful American public who have still not reconciled the freedom of blacks in their mind. This same inability to see black life as sacred and worthy of justice led the jury to acquit George Zimmerman and for many in the white community to celebrate with painfully familiar revelry to those that participated in the lynching of black people on the Sabbath. Cone speaks of the spiritual blindness of white people, even those who are markedly Christian in other matters. In his discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr, Cone remarks, “Niebuhr has eyes to see black suffering, but I believe he lacked the heart to feel it as his own. Although he wrote many essays about race, commenting on a variety of racial issues in America and in Africa and Asia, the problem of race was never one of his central theological or political concerns” (Cones, 41).  Tying Niebuhr’s neglect of blacks specifically to lynching, Cone offers, “During most of Niebuhr’s life, lynching was the most brutal manifestation of white supremacy, and he said and did very little about it” (Cone, 45). Such disregard suggests that even Jesus could not heal white people’s inability to see the value of black life.

With no spiritual advocate that could penetrate the racism of those in power, or so it seems, how did black people of the past generations people deal with the kind of trauma my friends and I experienced this summer, everyday? The feelings of despair, fear, anger and defenselessness had to have been stifling to their ability to live. Cone writes, “Hope in black possibility, in the dream of a new world, had to be carved out of wretched condition, out of a world where the possibility of death was always imminent” (Cone, 15). This state of fear and hopelessness can give rise to a great many catharses. Of course there was and is the church, the place where blacks believed the could be “wholly themselves,” but as the years rolled on and the conditions of black people to some degree remained the same, it is understandable that many black people would abandon their faith and seek alternative means of relief and release. Cone’s treatment of the juke joint was particularly interesting to me, because of its similarities to today’s hip hop culture. A space where black people could lament through the blues, and dance and laugh in celebration of their embodiment and existence beyond the gaze of white people, the juke joint offered refuge, merriment, if only for a short while, and made meaning in their lives as a result. Cone argues, “Dealing with nearly four hundred years of ongoing suffering in African-American history is enough to make any black person lose faith and roam around in a blues-like way, trying to make meaning in an absurd world of white supremacy” (Cone, 28). The juke joint, and the blues blacks engaged in served as a space and practice of defiance, and a stubborn refusal to be defined by white supremacy (Cone, 28). In the nineties, Cornel West spoke of the great nihilism that plagued the black male community. This sense of hopelessness and meaninglessness was the result of inner city neglect; where resourceless, the spirits and livelihood of black people died a slow death. Hip hop emerged as an art form, much like the blues that offered escape, defiance and self definition, but like the blues, this movement rarely provides any organized political resistance (Cone, 28).

In the midst of injustice and oppression, historically black people relied on more than just faith to maintain their sanity, however as time passes the secularization of relief and release increases. Today many black people’s place of worship has become the club or hip-hop in general. Confounded by theodicy black people are in a crisis of faith and have taken a YOLO (You only live once) approach to existence. The juke joint mentality has now spilled over into every day life through the social segregation of a post civil rights generation, who expected more from America, and rest in the ubiquity of Black music and its symbolic power. Unfortunately, the revelry that the juke joint and now hip hop culture offers is the least productive in the pursuit of progress.  Moreover it has supplanted the church as the means by which black people maintain sanity and obtain the ability to endure. Consequently, in an effort to gain some psychological distance from culpability on the part of whites, and hopelessness and fear on the part of blacks, Christianity, and the message of the cross is engaged less and less frequently by both communities in issues of racial discord.  The Cross and the Lynching Tree suggests that both black and white people can glean hope and healing from a comparison between the lynching tree and the cross. For black people it provides a sense of solidarity and meaning in that as the black community has suffered, so has Christ, and through his suffering he transvalues human values, turning them upside down and making sovereign the kingdom of God in an unjust world (Cone, 35). For white people it is a remedy to their spiritual blindness. Cone says every time a white person lynched a black person they lynched Jesus. Recognizing the injustice of unmerited killing through the story of Jesus’ passion and correlating the sacredness of Jesus’ body to the bodies of the black men and women who were systematically lynched in righteous indignation ought to solicit repentance from white people and make way for the possibility of reconciliation between black people and white people.