Читать книгу How Can I Live Peacefully with Justice? - Mike Angell - Страница 7

2 If We Don’t Get No Justice . . .

I first heard the name Michael Brown from the pulpit of Christ Church Cathedral the day after he was killed. The Very Rev. Mike Kinman told the congregation he had to throw out his original sermon the night before, after he had heard about the young man who had been shot by a police officer. Michael Brown’s body had been left in the street for five hours in the hot August sun. Rumor had it that Michael’s hands were up in surrender when he was shot.

That morning, the news of a young Black man killed by a police officer struck me as an unusual reason to rewrite a sermon. Black men were killed by police officers with frequency. (I hadn’t yet registered the problematic nature of my own surprise.) As I heard Dean Kinman preach, as I heard the anger in his voice, I didn’t yet know that his anger reflected the emotion in the streets. The dean had lived in St. Louis much longer than I. He was a priest with deep roots in the community. Before he rewrote his sermon, Kinman went up to Ferguson and gathered with the young activists who were planning action in response to Michael Brown’s death.

I mentioned parenthetically my surprise at the sermon. I want to pause a moment in that surprise. By the time I moved to St. Louis, I thought of myself as reasonably aware of dynamics around race and power. As you’ll read in a later section, I had done work around listening to the fears of my friends who were Black. The thing about unconscious bias is that it is unconscious; it requires uncovering. My in-built assumptions about policing and power were going to be challenged.

Until I heard Dean Kinman’s sermon on that hot August morning, until I had gone with my fellow clergy to “pray with our feet,” as the Rev. Traci Blackmon said of our first march, I didn’t really understand the systemic dynamic. I knew intellectually that more people of color were incarcerated. I knew the courts often failed to hold folks accountable for racial violence. But I grew up with the assumption that you could trust police officers. My limited interactions with the police before Ferguson had reinforced my impression, that the police were folks who chose a career to serve and protect. I was initially surprised that my neighbors could not make similar assumptions. I discovered I could make two responses to my surprise: I could resist the new information, and explain that I had only known good and kind police officers, or I could listen to my neighbors and believe their fear was credible.

For many of those first months my new Midwestern city felt sleepy, especially after the relentless news cycles of Washington. The sleepiness obviously didn’t last. At the time, I was working on the staff of the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church as Missioner for Young Adult and Campus Ministries. Dean Kinman had also invited me to serve as a volunteer priest associate at the St. Louis Cathedral. August 10 was a Sunday when I did not have duties to preach or to celebrate, which is why I sat in the pew with my spouse to hear the dean’s angry rewrite, to hear him reflect the discontent growing in the streets of Ferguson. Later that week, I traveled with the Cathedral clergy just a few miles up the highway to my first protest in my new city.

National news reporters I recognized from Washington started showing up in Ferguson. As I had done in the capital, I found myself asking, “What does it mean to do ministry at the center of the nation’s attention?” I figured, like in most ministry, you start by showing up. I accepted the invitations of colleagues, lay and ordained, to come to Ferguson to pray and to march. I wasn’t the only one. People started turning up from around the country to march in the streets of my new city.

“If we don’t get no justice, then you don’t get no peace.” I had heard the chant in protests in other cities. Before I came to St. Louis, I had marched with young Black activists in Washington after the killing of Trayvon Martin, and again after the acquittal of his killer. But I had never heard as many voices shouting the words. I had never heard the words chanted with such conviction, such a sense that the stakes were so immediate. Something changed in Ferguson. Something was uncovered. The words were spoken with new urgency.

I’ve preached sermons about the poetic possibilities I find in this chant. The shortened version of “If we don’t get no justice, then you don’t get no peace” is simply “No justice; no peace.” I have said from the pulpit, more than once, that when I hear the words, “No justice; no peace,” I imagine an alternate spelling: “Know justice; know peace.” The threat becomes a prescription. “If you want peace, work for justice”⁷—those words from Pope Paul VI were quoted often in my undergraduate courses on theology. I became used to making my own translation for the chant. I was comfortable with my role as a preacher. I knew how to spiritualize protest.