Beloved Community
No. 7 | 2021
The Beloved Community
Dr. King’s Beloved Community is a global vision in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In the Beloved Community, people do not tolerate poverty, hunger, or homelessness. Racism and all forms of discrimination, bigotry, and prejudice are replaced by an all-inclusive spirit of sisterhood and brotherhood. In the Beloved Community, international disputes are resolved by peaceful means and reconciliation, instead of military power. Love and trust triumph over fear and hatred. Peace with justice prevails over war and military conflict.
In 1956, Dr. King said (in a speech at a victory rally following the announcement of a favorable U.S. Supreme Court Decision desegregating the seats on Montgomery’s buses), “the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community.”
Dr. King named the goal: “Political and economic power are ingredients in the objective that we seek in life. And I think that end of that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community.”
To Believe or Not to Believe?
Here’s what I’ve been hearing:
I feel like all of this craziness—COVID, Black Lives, the election…all of it— is a cover-up for the real thing. They’re trying to make us look over here, while something really bad is happening over there. And I’m scared about the day when that comes out. Because that is going to be really bad.
I hate what is happening to our city. It’s worse here than it is anywhere else. The looters are making what was once beautiful ugly. It’s like we’ve all lost our collective sense of kindness. It was there before. Look at our beautiful city. It’s tragic.
We’re not gonna vote. The President is just a figurehead. We have no control over any of this.
The Neighborhood Association wants us to protest in support of Black Lives Matter. But what will that fix? We can spend our time, but it won’t do anything anyway. They want to defund the police, but they want more protections…it makes no sense.
My first instinct is to call out these folks in a kind of come-to-Jesus” conversation:
“Maybe the thing that is really bad is actually and truly the murder of Black people.”
“Is it possible that the kindness you’re talking about never really existed?”
“I wish you would vote. Trump is emboldening white supremacists who’d like to see me and my Jewish children dead. What do you think?”
“I guess one protest won’t fix 400 years of systemic human rights abuse, systemic poverty, murder, and mass incarceration…but what if it takes a BIGGER solution? And this protest is part of that?”
But a Socratic Q&A seems pointless. Especially if my white friends believe there’s nothing to learn.
Vanity and skepticism aside, there is a lot to be learned to build that danged Beloved Community.
Learn It
from Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal
I’ve been reading Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. In Cara Mia No. 6, I write about redlining, white flight, and the content of Rothstein’s book.
I mention it again because it’s a manifestation of the caste system Wilkerson discusses. Rothstein chronicles the untold story beginning in the 1920s, of explicit racial zoning laws and how those laws bolster the caste system to which Wilkenson refers. Also, not for nothing, the 1920s mark the beginning of the Great Migration, which Wilkerson writes about in her seminal The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.
Wilkerson reminds readers that you cannot fix a problem unless you see it first. So, the primary impulse for her publication is to lay bare the problem of caste. “America,” she explains, “is like an old house with an unseen skeleton, a caste system that is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home. It is the architecture of a human hierarchy that buttresses a 400-year-old social order. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. Thus, looking at caste is like holding America’s X-ray up to the light.”
And this is not easy. Because while many of us are familiar with the millennia-long caste system of India, we are less familiar with the accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste-system of Nazi Germany. And because the Third Reich was America’s wartime nemesis, we haven’t considered the U.S.’s shape-shifting, unspoken structural racism as what it is: caste.
In the American story, the caste system begins in August of 1619 (a year before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock) when a Dutch ship sets anchor in what is now Virginia. Africans are first referenced as merchandise: “20 and odd Negroes which the Governor bought for victualles.” And if not yet formally consigned to permanent enslavement, they were on their way. In the following decades, colonial laws herded European workers and African workers into separate and unequal queues and set in motion the caste hierarchy that would be the cornerstone of our social, political, and economic system.
Here’s the unique thing about America’s caste system: it’s based on the presupposition of inhumanity. For example, by 1630, the colonial census did not see fit to include Africans…even though it did include the majority of European inhabitants, indentured or not. Thus, “before there was a United States of America, there was a Caste system born in colonial Virginia.” And the occupants of the bottom caste were not considered human. In fact, by the late 1600s, slaves were hostages to unspeakable tortures documented with no remorse.
A lot has happened since the late 1600s.
Slavery was abolished in 1865—only after America’s bloodiest war was fought to protect the “rights” of white southerners to torment, rape, hold captive, trade, sell, abuse and batter, kidnap, and kill Black bodies.
Reconstruction laid the foundation for “the organization of new segregated institutions, white supremacist ideologies, legal rationalizations, extra-legal violence, and everyday racial terror.
The Jim Crow era of segregation brought with it the frequent, recurring, and normalized practice of cross-country lynchings, and the legal prohibition of fundamental Black Civil Rights – all lasting until, and sometimes well past, the 1960s.
Modern-day racism shows up in housing legislation, mass incarceration, poverty rates, the education gap, hiring practices, police killings, voting rights, and more.
Despite this clearly connected timeline, slavery gets dismissed as a “sad and dark chapter of American history.” White folks cling to the notion that slavery goes against our perception of our country as just, enlightened, and a model democracy. But, Wilkerson reminds us that “in the same way that individuals cannot move forward unless they examine the domestic violence they witnessed as children or the alcoholism that runs in their family, our country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter but the basis of its economic and social order.”
It’s important to own up to the fact that, as racism has evolved and shifted, so has our inability to see the human-ness of Black people. That disability looks different (as does racism), but it is still right there, for example, in the comments of white folks I recounted above.
So…more history. More learning. More seeing. Much more digging.
More soon.
So. Much. Love
Cara
