Why I Fear The Post-Trayvon Martin Sermon

[cbayer]

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/7196/why_i_fear_the_post_trayvon_martin_sermon/

July 16, 2013Why I Fear The Post-Trayvon Martin Sermon By ELIZABETH DRESCHER



The following was written on Sunday, the day after the verdict was announced. –eds.

I’ve been up since about four in the morning with pictures of a sweet-faced African-American boy and his family swimming in my head, and this has made me hesitant about going to church today. The pictures aren’t of Trayvon Martin, but rather of Timothy Burrows, the two-and-a-half-year-old son of the Reverend Jennifer Baskerville-Burrows, who posted this on Facebook in the aftermath of the verdict:

The Zimmerman verdict won’t keep me up at night. I get it: “not guilty” doesn’t equal “innocent.” What keeps me up at night is being the mother of a son who is lauded by strangers as “cute” at 2.5 years but by in just over a decade may be perceived as a threat by the same just because he is male and black. In the time it takes me to post this status another young black man is shot in this country. I can’t change the Zimmerman verdict but we can all do something to change the world we live in.

Can we? Can we all do something to change the world we live in? The question strikes me in particular this morning, this Sunday morning, as I contemplate dragging myself to the almost all white, suburban church I attend. Will anything change—will anything even nod in the direction of change let alone press toward any sort of action (and what would that be?) that might invite change—during “the most segregated hour of the week,” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously put it?

Now, the priest at my church is a fine preacher. I am certain she was up through the night retooling a sermon on the week’s gospel reading, the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), to make clear the links between the Trayvon Martin case and Jesus’s teachings about who our neighbors are—who merits our unconditional compassion and care—in a culture rigidly segmented and stratified on the basis of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and other social categories.

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[Jim__]

1. What can we do?

Can we change history? US history is saturated with racial hatred and racial violence. That being so, people are bound to be aware of the history, and, if only a few act based on that history of hatred and violence, those few acts reverberate and make the history current. It's still here. And, as long as that history is here, the tragedy will continue.

What can we do? I'm not sure. I thought that when the races lived together, people would get to know one another, and race relations would begin to improve. But Trayvon Martin was shot in an interracial housing development; almost definitely because of his race, and the shooter was acquitted. Has living together really changed things?

I believe that, given our history, as long as we remain 2 separate races, the history of the violence between those races remains current. I believe that one way this can change is through an increase in intermarriage and interracial children. Children who have ancestors on both sides of the divide will be less likely to choose one side. There won't be this stark division between two races. Maybe through living together there will be more interracial marriages and a softening of the lines between the races.

The shooting of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of the shooter shows that we have a long, long way to go.

[cbayer]

2. Great post, Jim.

I think there is some lessening of tensions along racial lines as more people can claim a variety of heritages.

The same thing seems to be happening as more GLBT couples (and singles) raise children.

It's so much harder to hate indiscriminately when you personally know and value individuals from a certain group.

But, I agree, we still have a very long way to go.