“Reparations”

a sermon delivered by Rev. Kimi Riegel
on January 15, 2006 atNorthwest Unitarian Universalist Church

Reading Selections from The Debt by Randall Robinson

During the recent playoff series with the New York Yankees, I focused on Cleveland's David Justice, one of the club's black superstars. I wondered if he or any of his teammates had ever given any thought to their team's name. If any had, I'd never gotten wind of it.

But it wasn't the name that I'd thought about as I focused on justice. It was rather the logo that was stitched into his cap. The grin was hideous. The huge teeth glared from the roof of the head like gleaming convex stalactites that descended from the middle of the crown down to the cap’s brim. The cavernous mouth crowded the nose and eyes into the hairline and strained without success to close around incisors that claimed three quarters of the clownish face. Had the face been black or brown, it would have cited urban riots, so patent was its insult. But the face was red and Justice wore the cap with jaunty insouciance.

The team had used the logo for years and not just on its caps. The grinning face had graced everything from apparel to television promos. I would often find myself watching players talking to each other in the dugout as the monstrous teeth addressed each other from atop the players’ oblivious heads.

On ESPN, FOX, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS, the teeth would appear on the screen as large as the head of the sportscaster seated a safe distance in front of them.

Following the lead of the USA Today, The New York Times broke new ground and began to display the teeth in color on the sports pages.

Not to be outdone, the Atlanta Braves began handing out replicas of their Tomahawk symbol to fans at the ballpark, who would chant Indian style with Jane Fonda, wife of the team's owner, while wielding the Tomahawk into murderous arc - 50,000 partisans wailing in mindless concert: Ay ya ya wa wa. Chop Chop. Ay ya ya wa wa. Chop Chop.

As a child growing up in Virginia during the 1940s the 1950s, I watched the Washington Redskins, the only team we could follow, on the only Channel we had. George Preston Marshall, the Redskins owner, hated blacks and would have none on his team. Marshall likely hated all colors of people save his own, and demonstrated his penchant for irony by emblazoning on his helmets the face of the race he probably disliked as much as mine. I'd like to claim I had reasoned as a child that Marshall kept blacks off his team because he feared that black players would find the Redskins name and logo objectionable, but I can't. The truth is, I hadn't given any thought to this at all. In any case, Marshall needn't have been concerned. No Redskins player, black or white, has ever winced. Not even when the team made a mascot of a middle-aged black man, dressed in the regalia of the indeterminate Native American tribe, who whooped along the sidelines with teeth near the size of the Cleveland Indians.

I'm a big sports fan, and played basketball reasonably well in college. But through the years my spectatorship has largely been conducted via television. Occasionally, between plays, I have allowed myself to imagine certain franchise transmutations. I would change the team's name and logo and then try to gauge public reaction.

The Washington Redskins would become the Washington black skins. The logo on the helmet would look like an old caricatured Aunt Jemima. That Sunday, the black skins would be playing in Atlanta against Ted Turner's renamed football team, the Atlanta Mafia, who were coached by an Irishman named Maloney, but known to all Americans variously as Donna the Assassin. On the side of their helmets was a likeness of Al Capone. Before the game, toy machine guns would be handed to the Turner Field faithful, who would scream throughout, on cue from Miss Fonda, “Rat tat tat. Rat tat tat. Thatsa deada Blackskin. Thatsa deada Blackskin.”

That same Sunday, the New York Jews did not play. One nationally syndicated sports columnist had written that the Jews did not play because they had had a buy. No one seemed to notice. After all, it is all in good fun.

Across town at the George Armstrong Custer Stadium, the New York Genocidists were wrapping up a four-game World Series sweep of the Massachusetts Pilgrim Feeders. The Indians had lost the first three games by large margins. The Genocidists, who wore blue and yellow uniforms reminiscent of the old US horse Calvary, were led by a coach who called himself the General. The team's logo was a halftone of the slightly inebriated Ulysses S Grant. That evening, when the 11 to one score was announced on the evening news that New York announcers said, “The Genocidists have slaughtered the Pilgrim Feeders once again.”

Ay ya ya wa wa. Chop Chop. Ay ya ya wa wa. Chop Chop.

I go to some length here embroidering on racism expressed against Native Americans for reason. As inclined as blacks understandably are by painful experiences to believe the contrary, racism is not black specific. It is like the Hydra, the lethal many headed mythological snake, whose heads regenerated as fast as they were severed. Racism is a social disease that exempts no race from either of its two rosters: victims and victimizers.

Sermon “Reparations”

Racism is a social disease that exempts no race from either of its two rosters: victims and victimizers. And so it is for all of us. We, all of us, are or could one day be subjected to the racism experienced by Africans, Native Americans, Irish, Jews, Asians, or Mexicans. And we are all carriers of the disease.

This service is about the issue of reparations for Africans who were forcibly taken from their homes and sold into slavery. Reparation is defined as paying for or somehow making amends for injustices that have been done. One need but watch the movie, Amastaid, to receive a vivid image of but a small part of the pain and injustice experience by an entire people. (On a side note I have the luxury of not exposing my son to that movie. When we watch Star Wars we can always tell him, “It’s just a movie,” We could not watch Amastaid and say, “It’s just a movie.” Africans in this country do not have the luxury of not exposing their children to such horrors. Those horrors are the stuff of their family history!) But the pain of that movie or any description of the atrocities is only a part, a small and recorded part, of centuries of human annihilation.

Each year I preach on a topic having to do with racism around Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday or during African American History month, February. It’s a token and only a token. I struggle each year, decide a new topic each year. The topic of racism is worth more than a token, but I offer what I can. Last year while I was looking generally at the issue of racism, I came upon the Reparations Movement. I had never heard of it. Of course not; I am white. There would be no reason for me to have to have heard about it. Silence continues to be the major way whites fight the elimination of racism. This sermon isn’t about answers -- I don’t have any. It’s a good thing I am a Unitarian Universalist minister because I don’t have to have answers. But I want to bring some of the questions into the open. There has been enough silence.

When the issue of silence arises I always think of Audre Lorde’s famous quote, "Your silence will not protect you." And if you or your children become victims of racism, then my silence has served to do worse; it has perpetuated the disease. Ms. Lorde also wrote, "I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood." So I launch into this morning, knowing full well this is only a beginning and a shaky one at best.
Perhaps the most powerful words to come to me in my tiny opportunity to look at Reparations are that the Germans, who profited from the Jews suffering during the holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi’s, were required to pay reparations. They were required to turn back the things they had stolen and pay for the lives that were ruined. My guess is that the money and material goods did not REALLY pay for the losses and anguish, but it, at the VERY least, acknowledged that a wrong had been committed.

I have come to believe like, Mr. Randall Robison, author of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, that, “Solutions to our racial problems are possible, but only if our society can be brought to face up to the massive crime of salary.” The healing that has taken place in Germany, what healing there has been, is because people have been able to talk about the cruelty. The hurt and suffering have been and are being expressed. There was some healing because there was some pay back. There is at least an acknowledgement of the pain. We can all begin to heal, heal any wound, when we can honestly look at what happened.

Africans have been abused. They have had their glorious history removed from the world memory. Very few of us realize the idea of black inferiority did not exist before the slave trade. The African continent was filled with vibrant successful cultures that offered scholarship, world trade, wealthy empires, complex traditions, huge physical monuments, and epic achievements that have been completely subsumed under an image of a rough primitive people who could be bought and sold. A lively wealthy continent was robbed of millions of people. The young and healthy were put on ships and taken away. There were far fewer inhabitants of the African continent at that time then the North American continent today, but just imagine if suddenly our young and strong were taken away by the thousands every year for centuries!

And the life they faced here or in Britain did nothing but continue the degradation. Randall Robinson, in The Debt, describes the possible history of one family. I will paraphrase what he has written: Let us picture one male representative of the African-American community in crisis in contemporary America. This person symbolizes the plight of millions. He will likely be in jail or unemployed or badly educated or sick from some curable ailment. Imagine that his great-great-grandfather was born a slave and died a slave. His great-great-grandfather's labors enriched, not only his white Southern owner but the shipbuilders, sailors, rope makers, and countless other businesses that serviced and benefited from the cotton trade built upon slavery. Great-great-grandfather had only briefly known his mother and father before being sold off to a plantation miles away. He had no idea where his people had come from, the language they had spoken, or the customs they had practiced. His days were filled with backbreaking work and physical abuse with no promise of relief.

His son, today's black male’s great grandfather, was also born into slavery. At the end of the Civil War he was no longer a slave, but his future was uncertain. He was illiterate and without skills. He was one of 4 million former slaves, wandering around the defeated South.
There were new measures called “black codes” in the South that allotted white employers complete control of black employees. If Blacks quit their jobs they could be arrested and imprisoned for breach of contract. There was no enfranchisement of backs and no indication that in the future, they could look forward to full citizenship or participation in a democracy.

Two decades into the new century, his son, the modern man's grandfather became a sharecropper. The year was 1925 and neither grandfather, nor his wife, was allowed to vote. His son would join him in the cotton fields. Grandfather had managed to finish the fifth grade before leaving school to work full-time. But now he was trapped and afraid to raise his voice against a system that in many respects resembled slavery, even though more than 70 years had passed. Grandfather drank and expressed his rage in beatings administered to his wife and son.

Grandfather’s son, the father of today’s black male, periodically attended segregated schools first in rural areas near their small cotton farm and later in a medium-size segregated Southern city. He never finished high school. He was not stigmatized for this particular failure because the failure was not exceptional in the only world he had ever known. Thus, he did not to dwell on the meagerness of his life chances. He worked for whites and as far as he could tell everyone in his family before him had. Whites had the best of everything; houses, cars, schools, movie theaters and neighborhoods. He could tell Black neighborhoods from simply looking at them even before he even saw the people. It was not just that the neighborhoods were poor. No, he had subconsciously likened something inside himself to the sagging wooden tenement porches, laden with old household objects.

Father died of a heart attack just before the voting rights act of 1965. Mr. Robinson concludes this description with the words; “parallel lines never touch, no matter how far in time and space they extend.” We are well aware of the cost a single generation of abuse makes on any one family. There is no wonder there is a disparity in the achievement of blacks and whites. Blacks have had their lives removed by many generations of slavery and racism, poverty with its poor nutrition and lack of education, and the resulting low self esteem.

And so we come to the modern day. In 1993 Congressman John Conyers, a black Democrat from Detroit introduced a bill to “acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery in the Unites States.” The bill would have established a commission to study the effects of slavery and make recommendations to Congress. The bill never left committee.
And today in Michigan we have a “Civil Rights” initiative to end Affirmative Action! Will we never stop stepping backwards? It makes me feel ill to even use the words “Civil Rights” in referring to the bill. Sure the wording says that with the passage of the amendment there can be no more discrimination but it quickly follow that with “or preferential treatment” based on race or gender. What about the decades of abuse? Where is the acknowledgement of the wrongs?

I understand that the abuse was not perpetrated by me. I understand that there is no “extra” money to pay out. But what I don’t understand is the lack of doing what we can.

In 1931 the administration of President Herbert Hoover backed a policy that would have repatriated hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans, more than half of them United States citizens.

Amid the economic desperation of the Depression, Latino families were viewed as taking jobs and government benefits from "real Americans." In Los Angeles County, a Citizens Committee for Coordination for Unemployment Relief urgently warned of 400,000 "deportable aliens," declaring: "We need their jobs for needy citizens."

Up to 2 million people of Mexican ancestry were relocated to Mexico during the 1930s, even though as many as 1.2 million were born in the United States. In California, some 400,000 Latino United States citizens or legal residents were forced to leave.

Now California, for its part, wants to say it is sorry.

On January 1 Senate Bill 670 - the so-called "Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program" - became official. It acknowledges the suffering of tens of thousands of Latino families unjustly forced out of the Golden State that was their home.
"The state of California apologizes ... for the fundamental violations of their basic civil liberties and constitutional rights during the period of illegal deportation and coerced emigration," the act reads.

Not to hold California in too high esteem (the governor has vetoed bills that might have looked at reparations), but at least they said they are sorry. We can’t even manage to do that much for horror of slavery.

As a matter of fact we can’t begin to get our minds around the pain we have caused. A gentleman who worked for admissions in a state college writes in support of the “Civil Rights Initiative saying: "In 1994, I immersed myself in the admissions process of the University of California. I met high-school students with bags under their eyes because they had spent all night studying for tests or writing essays to enhance their chances for admission. I met parents who were working two and three jobs and taking out second mortgages on their homes to ensure that their children would receive a quality college education. I read admissions applications that had taken weeks to prepare. I saw the tears on the face of a young girl with a 4.2 grade-point average and a 1480 SAT when she read the letter denying her admission to U. C. Berkeley. I saw the resentment of her parents when they read that same letter and reached the conclusion that the "diversity" objective mentioned in the letter was a code word for "affirmative action." When dreams of attending the college of one's choice are shattered, the effects are profound. I learned (he writes) from those experiences that America will never solve its problem of race by discriminating against high-achieving Asian and white students to somehow improve college opportunities for lesser-achieving black and Hispanic students.

Yes it is sad to not get into the school you want. I am very sorry for that young woman with the 4.2, but NOT as sorry as I am for racism. It is true turning away students is not going to solve racism but giving some preferential treatment to those whose lives have been shattered by abuse might begin the healing. Genuinely looking at the centuries of abuse that have been the family histories of those Black and Hispanic people might begin to solve the problems of racism; for my dear admissions person, it is not a problem of race – there is no problem of race. The problem lies with racism, and we must discontinue our silence.