#TreasuresofDarkness, Day 11 and the punishment for blackness-Lamentations 4:7–8

“Her princes were purer than snow,
whiter than milk;
their bodies were more ruddy than coral,
Now their visage is blacker than soot;
they are not recognized in the streets.
Their skin has shriveled on their bones;
it has become as dry as wood”

These are going to be some hard images.

I read this passage this morning and was like..

Damn.

In the work The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in a Lockdown America, Mark Taylor offers regarding suffering, pain that went ignored, especially when dealing with those who were oppressed and under Jim Crow laws and racist legislation all over this country; that “Suffering is made so holy by talk of a crucified God that, for some minds, glorifying in their own weakness seems itself in itself a kind of sacred worship..resulting in pious worship of suffering which has included quietism”

Remember that word: quietism.

In addition, Taylor further points towards the example of the civil rights movement and Rienhold Niebuhr, who is one of the most quoted dead white theologian, and lifted up as some holy, intellectual being that many of us in Seminary were often told that he was the end all; that we would get far by absorbing ourselves in his theological and academic thought.

Let me say now, I hate Niebuhr.

Taylor shows an example of Niebuhr’s inaction when lynching of Black Bodies was an all time sickening and destructive high. “…and he said little about it. He did little about it. Should we be surprised that white churches, theologians and clergy followed suit?”

Who are these people who call themselves Christians, who have ignored this original sin in America; who allowed this to happen right outside their churches in that Jim Crow area? In those struggles for civil and human rights?

There are those today who cannot understand why we, as African Descent peoples in an U.S. context are still exploring and researching slavery; that we are pushing towards visiting the Motherland, that we venerate our Ancestors and that we are trying to deconstruct the enslavement narrative. They tell us to get over it, that it happened 500 years ago but shy away, or accuse us of lies when we point out, good white Christian folks were itching for lynching us for any reason; that they knew the LAW would cover them. That according to their Bible, it was ordained because Black people did not come from God. That we were animals. That we were hypersexualized beasts, so that they had to protect their precious white women from us.

So, white Christianity and white supremacy okay’ed the electrocution of a 14 year old boy who they claimed attacked young white girls. Remember and honor his name #GeorgeStinney, Beloved Ancestor.

#EmmitTill Remember and honor his name, Beloved Ancestor

I wonder how this text above would read if instead the words for pure and white, would be substituted for righteousness and being in harmony and instead of blackness, the words would be somewhere along the lines of emptiness and bleakness.

Because when we break bonds with one another, when we fall in misstep and stray away from relationships in grace, mercy and love our hearts shrink, into the abyss.

We honor those who were victims of racism and lynching and violence: Ancestors whose names are known and unknown.

“A still white supremacist system disseminates a domestic terror that reinforces corporate power and threatens us all, but predominantly and most brutally those in Black, Brown and other communities of Color”

Ache’