In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, the dead bodies of 6 people of color have been discovered hanging from trees in various parts of this country.
In each case, local police are saying the people died by suicide. I don’t buy it.
Below is a video taken by one of several friends who fortunately stumbled upon a lynching in progress and were able to stop it.
No doubt, had these young people not had the good fortune and the fortitude to intervene, we would be hearing the report of yet another black man dying after tying himself to a tree.
The New Testament makes no distinction between confession and lifestyle.
Jesus is clear. “A good tree produces good fruit. A bad tree produces bad fruit. So by their fruit you will know them” (Matthew 7:15-20). And I can tell you right now, There ain’t no bad trees in heaven.
The apostle Paul repeats Jesus’ warnings in his own words. Here is only one example:
Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither…thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).
Our lives, our words, our actions, our attitude towards others and how we treatment them all matter. Our lifestyle tells the tale of whether or not we genuinely know the Lord Jesus Christ.
Recently, I heard three stories that have disturbed me deeply.
First, I saw the news of a young African-American woman in Wisconsin who was set on fire by a carload of strangers. As they drove past, they shouted the “N” word, doused her with lighter fluid, and hit her with a cigarette lighter.
Fortunately, she was able to put the fire out and get to a hospital for treatment. When I saw her photo, her hair and skin tone were an exact match to my bi-racial granddaughter’s.
Second, on my Facebook feed I read the story of a local African-American activist who is now being harassed for her participation in Black Lives Matter demonstrations.
She had pressed charges against a man who verbally assaulted her as she stood on the sidewalk. Now this man has gathered a number of friends from the police department (not the Kalispell police) who surround her home after dark, pounding on the walls, making loud noises, while shining lights through the windows.
She and her family are terrified.
Third, I spoke yesterday with a former student, a young woman of color now pursuing graduate work in the northwest. She is also a foreign student who grew up overseas.
She shared with me how frightening it has become for her to be a visiting foreigner, a person of color, and a single young woman in today’s United States.
She is afraid that the Trump administration will not renew her student visa.
She is literally terrified to walk outside alone, never knowing who might throw something at her, scream an epithet, or do something much worse. Would the police offer any help or protection?
She also said that her all white church has remained silent about the problems of racism and police brutality dominating our headlines. The very few comments she has heard were criticisms of the recent protests, and admonitions always to obey the police.
She did not mention anyone empathizing with her personally.
No one has approached her to ask how she doing, as a foreign visitor with a dark complexion. How does she feel about life in this country right now?Nobody has taken the initiative to ask her about her thoughts and experiences. About how this unrest is affecting her as a woman of color; how they might be able to help her?
All of these stories are about racism and expressions of white privilege.
I have never faced anything comparable. And I know the reason why – I am a white male. This means that in American society, I am privileged.
I have never had to live my life facing the daily possibility that this might be the day – the day that someone calls me another derogatory name; the day that I am denied a loan, even though I have a well-paying job; the day that the police pull my son over for no good reason and put him in a choke hold; and the list goes on…
The church, too, is infected with this cancer of racism and the blindness of white privilege.
Listen to the chorus of “Christian” people who join the common rebuttal “All Lives Matter”; or deny the existence of any such thing as white privilege; or worse yet, twist their brains into a knot and claim (with Tucker Carlson) that the claims of white privilege are themselves a racist view of the world.
All of God’s people must address these problems specifically, clearly, Biblically.
Do you not know that racists will not inherit the kingdom of God?
What else is racism but the attempted theft of human dignity?
It is a greedy people’s way of thieving the resources, opportunities, and expectations from one group of people in order to horde them for another.
Most importantly, it is slanderous blasphemy against the image of God – the divine image borne by every human being, no matter the color of their skin or the shape of their eyes (see James 3:9).
Now is an historic moment for authentic followers of Jesus Christ to stand up, to stand apart, to identify themselves. It is a time to protest, to demand change, to examine themselves, to repent, and to correct their misguided, fellow church-goers, even to rebuke those who refuse to listen.
No, such behavior is NOT divisive. It is moral. It is obedient. It is loving. It is necessary. It is what it looks like to follow Jesus.
For, don’t you know that racists will not inherit the kingdom of God?
Raushard Brooks before he was murdered by the Atlanta police
The way our police officers are trained is not only broken and corrupt, it is corrupting and dangerous.
Ms. Johnstone’s explains how an Atlanta cop shot an African-American man in back as he was fleeing and killed him. I have included an excerpt below:
After watching all these protests against police brutality raging throughout his country since the murder of George Floyd, after being confronted with with all the public outrage about police killing black men day after day in news headline after news headline, after his society forced him to contemplate police violence and his role in it, Garrett Rolfe still decided to kill. After all that, he watched a black man running away from him, posing no threat to him whatsoever, and he decided to kill.
The fact that cops are so thoroughly inoculated against public demand that they change their behavior makes a complete farce of the decoy police “reform” agenda that establishment narrative managers have been actively trying to corral the current protest movement into to kill their support for police abolishment.
Ali Abunimah, author of the book The Battle for Justice in Palestine and editor at The Electronic Intifada, has written a good article explaining why many Zionist supporters of Israel, including groups like AIPAC and the Zionist Organization of America, are not only refusing to support “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations but are actively repudiating the movement.
It’s not hard to understand if we understand the truth about political Zionism and the reality of Palestinian life in and around Israel.
Below is an excerpt. You can read the entire piece here.
As protests sweep the world in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, Israel lobby groups are struggling to appear on board with the Black Lives Matter movement while upholding their support for Israel’s racism.
While some are trying to jump on the anti-racism bandwagon, others are dispensing with subtlety altogether.
Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America, demanded that the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, “immediately put Black Lives Matter on their list of hate groups.”
——
The Anti-Defamation League is also no more credible as a partner against racism, especially US police brutality.
Former police officer Tom Nolan has an article at ConsortiumNews condemning the militarization of US policing, pointing to its destructive consequences on display in the ongoing BLM demonstrations.
Below is an excerpt. Read the entire article here.
I have seen, throughout my decades in law enforcement, that police culture tends to privilege the use of violent tactics and non-negotiable force over compromise, mediation, and peaceful conflict resolution. It reinforces a general acceptance among officers of the use of any and all means of force available when confronted with real or perceived threats to officers.
We have seen this play out during the first week of protests following Floyd’s death in cities from Seattle to Flint to Washington, D.C.
The police have deployed a militarized response to what they accurately or inaccurately believe to be a threat to public order, private property, and their own safety. It is in part due to a policing culture in which protesters are often perceived as the “enemy.” Indeed teaching cops to think like soldiers and learn how to kill has been part of a training program popular among some police officers.
My daughter and I attended the Justice for George Floyd/Black Lives Matter demonstration in Kalispell, MT yesterday. The organizers’ Facebook page
I am the masked man on the right
warned that members of several armed militia groups would also be there.
We both wondered what would happen.
Kalispell demonstrations are always limited to a public park at the end of main street cutting through the city center. The organizers applauded how cooperative the local police department had been in helping to plan the event. As a result, we were all instructed not to bring signs with any type of derogatory, anti-police messages.
Instead, the organizers announced, the demonstration’s intended message was “unity.”
“Unity with whom for what?,” I asked myself.
Demonstrators line main street
o, Kendra and I are going to demonstrate against police brutality in a country where unarmed African-Americans are 5 x more likely than white Americans to be shot and killed by police. The organizers have agreed with the local police department to restrict the protest to the police-approved section of the public park, where the police have also decided that we will experience “unity” with heavily armed members of local militia groups.
Let freedom ring.
On the positive side, I was happy to see the largest turnout for any protest I have yet attended in Kalispell.
Demonstrators lining both sides of the street
The Sunday morning paper estimated there were at least 1,000 people in attendance — including, of course, our semiautomatic rifle-toting, American flag waving, self-appointed, “don’t tread on me” guardians.
A small group of armed cowboys walked through the crowd carrying American flags and yellow signs calling people to repent and believe in Jesus. At one point, as they approached me I loudly reminded them that Jesus is not white.
While my fellow protesters got the point and laughed, the gang of gun slinger
Armed militia
patriot-evangelists remained totally oblivious to the mockery they were making of the gospel they came to promote.
I took time out periodically to talk with the militia members. I picked the guy with the biggest rifle and asked him why he was here? What was the group’s goal in attending this protest?
Each one repeated the same response. I got the impression that they had all been briefed on how to answer questions from the public. “We are here to protect you,” they said.
I probed further.
Armed and ready
“We don’t want to see the kind of looting and property destruction in our city that we see everywhere else these protests happen. We especially don’t want anyone defacing our veterans’ memorial,” referring to a large statue near the street.
“But,” I would say, “There is a large police presence here already. They would stop people from defacing the statue. Did the police ask for your help?”
“No. We just volunteered,” I was told.
The mass of demonstrators would periodically chant “Black Lives Matter”
Guarding the war monument, and chanting USA, White Lives Matter
while receiving a chorus of horns honking in agreement from cars passing by.
But each time we chanted “Black Lives Matter,” the militia members waved their flags more aggressively and took up a counter-chant, usually “USA! USA!” or sometimes “White Lives Matter!”
I took another break, approached a chanting militiaman and asked why he did that. Why did he respond to Black Lives Matter with USA? How was his a counterpoint to ours?
“Well,” he said. “This is America. And in America everyone is equal.”
“But I still don’t understand,” I said. “Why can’t you say Black Lives Matter with us, if everyone here is equal?”
Well, you guessed it. With that the racist damn broke. I was now listening to a heated monologue about how “black people bring all their problems on themselves.”
It was impossible to get a word in edgewise, so I thanked him for his time and said goodbye.
As Kendra and I left the park later that evening, we talked about what we had learned. It was evident that everyone carrying a handgun and a rifle were devotees of Fox News. They had never seen any of the abundant video footage of peaceful demonstrations all across the country, nor had they seen the gangs of police attacking innocent protesters.
They had all arrived believing that every “liberal” demonstration was a riot-in-
How many semi-automatics does it take?
waiting. They stood guard believing that were it not for their armed presence, Kalispell would have been the next city victimized by looting liberals run riot.
I wish I could say that I feel encouraged this morning after Kalispell’s largest (maybe first?) Black Lives Matter demonstration. But I don’t.
I fear that America’s deepening divisions will never be bridged, much less mended, as everyone remains comfortably ensconced in their preferred information bubble. Between the alternate realities of Fox News and MSNBC (not to mention the others), our segmented mass media has destroyed the possibility of any truly national conversation.
We don’t live in the same world. We live in different worlds, different universes separated by contrary “facts,” alternate realities that too many of us meekly accept without challenge, investigation, or alternate, independent thinking.
It’s too easy to grab another beer in a self-assured, reaffirming world where confirmation bias goes unrecognized. Not a one of my armed conversation partners would believe that the vast majority of the nation’s recent protests were peaceful, that the looting was marginal — graphic but marginal.
And why should they? After all, Fox News told them otherwise.
I am too old to be surprised by racism. But it is still depressing to hear the stream of ignorant words pour from the mouth of a man immediately in front of me. I can’t imagine what it must be like for African-Americans to repeatedly hear from ill-informed, prejudiced lips that all their problems are of their own making.
Sure, we all make many of our own problems. But asymmetrical police brutality is NOT one of them.
How often can any person tolerate being told that when the police attack you, kneel on your neck, and choke the life out of you, it is because something is wrong with you; that you create your own problems? That if you were a better citizen, the police would not be murdering your friends and family at 5 x the rate of everyone else?
Racism is endemic to the human heart. I saw that again last night. We will never be rid of it till Jesus comes.
Sadly, the young ensemble of armed patriots qua evangelists provided vivid witness to the fact that “confessing and repenting of sin” is no guarantee of a transformed heart or a renewed Christ-like mind.
The predictable mantra has begun – “we have to maintain law and order.”
Calls for law and order in the midst of nation-wide demonstrations against police brutality and in favor of racial justice are as predictable as the sunset. It always happens.
Well timed calls for law and order always served the purposes of the powerful who pretend to care.
Keith Childress, shot for carrying a cell phone
It is always the great “BUT” working to obscure the issue at hand; to distract from the problems of racial injustice and police violence.
Law and order is the subversive language deployed by people who are not at risk as they feign comradeship with those who are. It allows the bogus compatriot to say, in fact, “I am with you as long as you keep your objections within my boundaries of safety.”
When members of the establishment say things like, “I believe in peaceful protest, BUT…I believe in racial equality, BUT…I support the protests, BUT I condemn the looting…BUT we need to maintain law and order,” they merely repeat the establishment code for defending the status quo.
Defending law and order has always been the message of the establishment,
Bettie Jones, shot and killed for helping a neighbor and opening the door to police
allowing it to maintain its mask of humanity while tacitly supporting acts of inhumanity.
We have seen it all before.
Law and order was the message of pro-segregationist governors and mayors in the deep south who believed that ANY expression of civil disobedience, no matter how peaceful, especially when committed by black people and other civil rights advocates, was a dangerous act of lawlessness demanding brutal, police suppression.
Lester Maddox, the racist, segregationist governor of Georgia, always insisted that he accepted black people as equals. He just didn’t want them living next door. And he would gladly sic the police on any black person who tried to move into his neighborhood. (Watch his racist confessions with Jim Brown on the Dick Cavett show here. I recall watching a different Cavett show where Maddox walked off the set).
It was also Richard Nixon’s Republican party code for keeping black people
Jamar Clark, witnesses say he was shot and killed while handcuffed and unarmed
in their place at the height of the civil rights movement in 1968. It was also a very successful code language that spoke volumes to conservative America and led to his presidential victory that year.
But every reactionary plea for “law and order” must first answer the question, “Whose law, and whose order?”
Because the fact is that, in America today, there are two difference types of law and order, one for white, middle/upper-class communities, and another for (poor) communities of color.
As the repeated, public murders of African-Americans demonstrate, law and order for black people in America is unlike law and order for white people. For African-Americans, law and order means (1) people of color are born guilty; they are always suspect, which means that (2) the police are free to treat them as they wish.
Law and order for black people in America includes breaking down their doors for no good reason; shooting them dead inside their own homes, even when police are at the wrong address; planting evidence while making
Michael Marshall, suffered from mental illness; died after being “restrained” into a coma
illegal arrests; and the list goes on.
That is the “law and order” enforced in America’s black neighborhoods today.
So, whose law and order are the public pearl-clutchers advocating and defending when they condemn protesters for violating the norms of “law and order”?
Where were these easy-street advocates of public order when black neighborhoods were being patrolled by cops who viewed community residents as the enemy to be controlled rather than as citizens to be protected and served?
Where were the white marches launched in defense of black communities when they needed defending against a local, militarized police force eagerly searching for excuses to deploy their new body armor, armored vehicles, stun guns, rubber bullets, 4-foot batons, rubber bullets and tear gas?
George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, and Ahmaud Arbery are only the tip of the iceberg.
Unarmed black people are 5x more likely to be shot and killed by police than
Ahmaud Arbery, shot and killed for jogging in a white neighborhood
are white people in America. That shocking statistic alone tells us that murdering unarmed black people (although possessing a weapon is not a significant distinguishing factor) is completely acceptable and well within the bounds of American law and order.
Concerning the present protests, an overwhelming amount of video evidence proves that the police themselves regularly instigate violence where protesters were behaving peacefully.
The police are masters at escalating violence needlessly as an expression of their own presumption of authoritarian privilege. (Watch this compilation video of cops attacking peaceful demonstrators with impunity). I have personally experienced how the police use excessive force to instigate violence during an anti-war protest in Chicago in 2012. I then watched as the establishment media turned the facts upside down to accuse the demonstrators of attacking the police!
By condemning these calls for law and order, I am not condoning violence.
Sandra Bland, arrested during a routine traffic stop; supposedly (and unbelievably) committed suicide in jail
Rather, I am highlighting the fact that we must learn to insist and to resist.
First, we must insistthat the public spot light remain focused on the central issues: racism and police brutality. We cannot be distracted.
Second, we must resist the power of corporate media to socialize us into (a) complacency and (b) collaboration. The problem being exposed by protesters right now is notsome tendency for peaceful rallies to be exploited by chaotic troublemakers. Don’t allow the media to suggest otherwise.
The problem is white America’s sleepy indifference to the daily mistreatment of our black brothers and sisters – an evil with which God’s people can never collaborate or become complacent.
The problem is white America’s indifference to the fact that a separate code of law and order is applied to communities of color every single day.
The problem is not the disintegration of law and order but the historic
Eric Garner, choked to death by police while pleading, “I can’t breathe.”
application of arbitrary, dehumanizing law and order at the whim of our dehumanized police force.
Here is a basic Christian principle: God’s people must always stand with the oppressed and the disadvantaged, just as we must always stand up for equality and justice. This is God’s way, and it must always be ours.
Thus, the ethics of God’s kingdom demand both pacifism and civil disobedience whenever cultures work to shape kingdom people, both black and white, into ungodly configurations.
Resistance is difficult but essential if we hope to become more like Jesus. Which means that the church cannot lazily mimic cultural mantras, whatever they may be.
Instead, God’s people are obligated to INSIST on justice and to RESIST falling in line.
Over the past few years, The Intercept has produced a series of investigative articles covering questions of police brutality, budgeting, and reform in America.
Most recently Alice Speri, Alleen Brown, and Mara Hvistendahl have written “The George Floyd Killing in Minneapolis Exposes the Failures of Police Reform” giving greater depth to a point I made here.
Below is an excerpt.
“Reform is not the answer, we’ve been trying it for decades, and as you can see,
Neighborhood protest in Minneapolis
we’re just not getting anywhere,” he said. “We need a new paradigm of policing in the United States. It needs to be completely dismantled and reconstructed, not changing a policy here or there.”…
…“And what does it say about the limits of reform that the city of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis police department could be part of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar national project to enhance police community relations, and after all of that, here we are?”
A niece of Jamar Clark protested with a photograph of the two Minneapolis police officers who were involved in Clark’s murder on Oct. 15, 2016, in Minneapolis. Star Tribune via Getty Images
After years of investment in improved policing with no results to show for it, “the conversation has changed,” she added. “There’s much more of a public awareness and conversation about abolition, and what that means and what that might look like. … I think people were radicalized by Jamar Clark and Philando Castile. And then they saw the contradictions around Justine Damond.”
Montgomery, the director of Black Visions Collective, said that organizers are tired of just calling for prosecutions. “We’re moving past a conversation around prosecuting the police and individual officers — that doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t prevent another Philando Castile or George Floyd,” said Montgomery. “To me and many of my comrades, police reform is irrelevant.”
Some demands have shifted to community control. Organizer Sam Martinez told The Intercept that the Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar wants a board similar to a city council or school board to run the police: controlling its budget, approving union contracts, and deciding disciplinary actions. Martinez says the board would have to be fundamentally different from previous civilian police review councils that law enforcement has mostly ignored.
As protests sweep the world in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, Israel lobby groups are struggling to appear on board with the Black Lives Matter movement while upholding their support for Israel’s racism.
