MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

Pre-natal health care for immigrants

Nebraska's governor opposes the Parable of the Good Samaritan, or at least doesn't understand it, it seems to me.  The legislature overwhelmingly approved (including many Republicans who said the vote was pro-life) a bill to reinstate prenatal medical care for undocumented immigrants.  The governor says he won't spend tax-payer money on "illegals."  He says,

“I have a very good sense where Nebraskans are at on this issue,” he said.  “They tell me over and over, I play by the rules, I pay taxes, and you're going to use my tax dollars for illegals? That's the issue.”

That's NOT the issue.  It's completely irrelevant from a moral perspective.  We care for each other.  That's true to our Midwestern values.  That's what Jesus taught us, and that's who we are as human beings. 

How can someone so fundamentally misunderstand basically human morality?

UPDATE:
The Nebraska Senate overrode the governor's veto!!!

Fugitive Slave Law and the Trayvon Martin case

A NYTimes column explains the similarity between Chief Lee's reasoning for not arresting Zimmerman (reasoning now disputed by both facts and thorough analyses of Florida law) and the reasoning used in Fugitive Slave Law cases.  The result of Lee's interpretation:

In short, it appears that whites (or other non-blacks) may hunt down blacks with immunity from arrest so long as they leave behind no clue that they were not acting to defend themselves; or, to echo Martin Delany, that Florida’s Stand Your Ground law threatens to render some citizens subject to the arbitrary wills of others.

If it seems a stretch, finally, to paint Zimmerman in the image of the slave catchers of yesteryear, recall that he himself invited the comparison when, while stalking the African-American teenager against the advice of a 911 dispatcher, he complained, using an expletive to refer to Trayvon, that they “always get away.”

 

Power in the Blood

Most liberals and progressives (and moderates probably too) are puzzled by the "blood hymns" popular in more evangelical circles.  Today, reading James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, he discusses their power in the black church.  I can't imagine this explanation, though, is available for those in the white power structure.

Instead of attempting to explain the saving power of the cross rationally, black Christians recognized it as a mystery, beyond human understanding or control.  In remembrance of Jesus' last week, leading to his death, blacks at Ebenezer and other black churches, celebrating the sacrament of "Holy Communion," raised their voices to acknowledge "a fountain filled with blood," "drawn from Immanuel's veins"; "blood," they believed, "will never lose its power," because "there is power in the blood," and "nothing but the blood."

When blacks sang about the "blood," they were wrestling not only with the blood of the crucified carpenter from Nazareth but also with the blood of raped and castrated black bodies in America -- innocent, often nameless, burning and hanging bodies, images of hurt so deep that only God's "amazing grace" could offer consolation.

Kant on Race

The second full chapter of J. Kameron Carter's Race: A Theological Account is a discuss of Immanuel Kant's views on race, which are pretty damning.  As Carter unpacks it, Kant developed a thorough anthropology of white supremacy which is intimately tied with Kant's views on the autonomous individual and his religious views.  Kant, of course, is a leading figure of the Enlightenment.  Which reminds you that they still had much to be enlightened about.

So far the first two chapters, though being very smart and thorough, have not held out the promise of the prologue -- in the sense that they have not captivated me as much as it did.

The Caging of America

Today I read the very disturbing piece "The Caging of America" by Adam Gopnik in the January 30 issue of The New Yorker.

Here are some choice excerpts:

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. 

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

White supremacy is the real principle, this thesis holds, and racial domination the real end. In response to the apparent triumphs of the sixties, mass imprisonment became a way of reimposing Jim Crow. Blacks are now incarcerated seven times as often as whites. “The system of mass incarceration works to trap African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage,” the legal scholar Michelle Alexander writes. Young black men pass quickly from a period of police harassment into a period of “formal control” (i.e., actual imprisonment) and then are doomed for life to a system of “invisible control.” Prevented from voting, legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives, most will cycle back through the prison system. The system, in this view, is not really broken; it is doing what it was designed to do. Alexander’s grim conclusion: “If mass incarceration is considered as a system of social control—specifically, racial control—then the system is a fantastic success.”

No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

 

West, Foucault, and the genealogy of race

The first full chapter of J. Kameron Carter's Race: A Theological Account is a discussion of Cornel West and Michel Foucault's geneaologies of race.  This chapter did not remain a captivating page-turner as the prologue and prelude had.

I zoned out through reading the Cornel West section and was more engaged in the section on Foucault, maybe because I've read substantially more Foucault.  Discussions of Foucault can bog down, as this one does, in a way that Foucault himself doesn't always (but does).

The basic idea is that "race functions to support the coming-to-be and the sustaining of modern society at an inarticulate level."  This I am engaged with,  but this chapter didn't develop Carter's own view, which I think is coming in chapter two.  He treats of West and Foucault to show how they point in the right direction, but don't go far enough in their analysis in that both ultimately bracket out the theological discourse of modernity, particularly around Jewish-Christian relations, in their discussions of the origins of modern racial identity.  Because Carter finally goes beyond their analyses, I'm not sure why he needed to spend so much time on them.  With Foucault it seems that he is offering some new interpretations of parts of Foucault, but this would have been a good journal article and seems finally unncessary for the book (in this way it reads like parts of a dissertation, which the section may well have been).

So, if you're reading this book and already have some grasp of Foucault's analysis of how power and discourse work in the modern state to shape and control identity, then just move on.

Irenaeus & the Gnostics & Black Theology

The "prelude" of Carter's book, Race: A Theological Account, is about Irenaeus' polemic against the Valentinian Gnostics.  Frankly, I've never paid much attention to this debate, thinking it has very little to do with me and my faith in the 21st century.  Carter explodes that idea.  He says that the core of this ancient debate was:

a struggle over the meaning of the body both individually and as a sociopolitical arrangement--that is, as tied to or indicative of the body politic.

In a somewhat complex, though still engaging, discussion of Valentinus and Irenaeus, Carter presents two hermeneutics that he says prefigure competing modern discourses of white modernity and the Afro-Christian church.  The Gnostics divided humanity into three races that were ranged hierarchically, with the fleshy persons on bottom and the spiritual persons on top.  Irenaeus thought this hermeneutic of scripture would lead to death and so attacked it vigorously with his own hermeneutic that embraces Christ's covenantal flesh.  With God becoming particular Jewish, human flesh, these racial distinctions are broken down.

There is much more nuance to the argument than this, and I highly encourage you to read the chapter.  Only on about half a dozen occasions has a work of philosophy been a page turner that I could not put down.  This is one of those.

One of the most interesting points of his argument was around language.  Irenaeus had argued that Christ recapitulates language.  Carter than narrates the story of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs that also included the linguistic conquest of Nahuatl.  In the year 1492 the first grammar of a modern European language appeared -- Spanish.  And in the introduction to that grammar, the author wrote, "Language has always been the companion of empire."  Carter points out that there was also a theological claim involved, as the superior languages were those derived from Latin, the language of theology.  We writes that in 1492 "Theology starts to function in a new way precisely in this moment."

Christology frees us:

In Christ, then, language is liberated from the fiction of purity and thus from every structure of dominance and slavery . . . language itself (that is, creation) is restored to its original freedom to signify its Creator.  Christ enacts this linguistic liberation, the relase of language and thus humankind from the slavery of conquest and tyrannical possession.

He does go into this more than the excerpt can include, but I was also left wanting more than he gave, and hopefully it will come in a later chapter.

The prelude concludes by tying Irenaeus conception of the recapitulation of Israel's story and God's covenant in Christ's flesh, with the recapitulation of the story of Israel, God's covenant, and Christ's flesh that occurred in Afro-Christian religion in America in the 19th century.  I very much look forward to getting to that, which is part III of the book. 

The Theological Problem of Whiteness

According to the Christian Century, one of the best theology books of recent years is Race: A Theological Account by J. Kameron Carter.  My copy arrived today, and I quickly skimmed the contents and then read the prologue and was floored.  I can tell this is going to be deep, powerful, and potentially transformative read.  Here are some excerpts from the prologue:

Modern racial discourse and practice have their genesis inside Christian theological discourse and missiological practice, which themselves were tied to the practice of empire in the advance of Western civilization.

***

My fundamental contention is that modernity's racial imagination has its genesis in the theological problem of Christianity's quest to sever itself from its Jewish roots.  This severance was carried out in two distinct but integrated steps.  First, Jews were cast as a race group in contrast to Western Christians, who with the important assistance of the discourses of Christian theology and philosophy, were also subtly and simultaneously cast as a race group.  The Jews were the mirror in which the European and eventually the Euro-American Occident could religiously and thus racially conceive itself through the difference of Orientalism.  In this way, Western culture began to articulate itself as Christian culture (and vice versa), but now--and this is the new moment--through the medium of a racial imagination.  Second, have racialized Jews as a people of the Orient and thus Judaism as a "religion" of the East, Jews were then deemed inferior to Christians of the Occident or the West.  Hence, the racial imagination (the first step) proved as well to be a racist imagination of white supremacy (the second step).  Within the gulf enacted between Christianity and the Jews, the racial, which proved to be a racist, imagination was forged.

***

Theology's participation in this process is what makes it modern.  Indeed, theology assisted in bringing about modernity precisely in aiding and abetting this process.

I've thought about starting a theology reading group in the autumn, and maybe this would be a good book to grapple with, particularly if we could invite some African-American and Jewish folk to join us.

The Misunderstood Power of Michael Jackson's Music

A marvelous essay on the music of Michael Jackson and the racist criticism of it through the years.  Some excerpts:

Historically, this dismissal of black artists (and black styles) as somehow lacking substance, depth and import is as old as America. It was the lie that constituted minstrelsy. It was a common criticism of spirituals (in relation to traditional hymns), of jazz in the '20s and '30s, of R&B in the '50s and '60s, of funk and disco in the '70s, and of hip-hop in the '80s and '90s (and still today). The cultural gatekeepers not only failed to initially recognize the legitimacy of these new musical styles and forms, they also tended to overlook or reduce the achievements of the African-American men and women who pioneered them. The King of Jazz, for white critics, wasn't Louis Armstrong, it was Paul Whiteman; the King of Swing wasn't Duke Ellington, it was Benny Goodman; the King of Rock wasn't Chuck Berry or Little Richard, it was Elvis Presley.

Given this history of white coronation, it is worth considering why the media took such issue with referring to Michael Jackson as the King of Pop. Certainly his achievements merited such a title. Yet up until his death in 2009, many journalists insisted on referring to him as the "self-proclaimed King of Pop." Indeed, in 2003, Rolling Stone went so far as to ridiculously re-assign the title to Justin Timberlake. (To keep with the historical pattern, just last year the magazine devised a formula that coronated Eminem—over Run DMC, Public Enemy, Tupac, Jay-Z, or Kanye West—as the King of Hip Hop).

Jackson was well-aware of this history and consistently pushed against it.

***

his greatness is in his ability to augment his words vocally, visually, physically, and sonically, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Listen, for example, to his non-verbal vocalizations—the cries, exclamations, grunts, gasps, and improvisatory vernacular—in which Jackson communicates beyond the strictures of language. Listen to his beat boxing and scatting; how he stretches or accents words; his James Brown-like staccato facility; the way his voice moves from gravelly to smooth to sublime; the passionate calls and responses; the way he soars just as naturally with gospel choirs and electric guitars.

Listen to his virtuosic rhythms and rich harmonies; the nuanced syncopation and signature bass lines; the layers of detail and archive of unusual sounds. Go beyond the usual classics, and play songs like "Stranger in Moscow," "I Can't Help It ," "Liberian Girl ," "Who Is It," and "In the Back." Note the range of subject matter, the spectrum of moods and textures, the astounding variety (and synthesis) of styles. On the Dangerous album alone, Jackson moves from New Jack Swing to classical, hip hop to gospel, R&B to industrial, funk to rock. It was music without borders or barriers, and it resonated across the globe.

 

 

Historic Moment in America

Though I don't think it will last, it just dawned on me the historic moment for America in that the current leading candidate for president in BOTH parties is an African-American.