No more silence about racism: Demanding change after Charleston

Adapted from a recent sermon:

In God’s own house, the Emanuel AME Church, the murder of the faithful quakes the very pillars on which our nation stands. Nine citizens of the United States of America gathered to exercise their constitutional right to free expression of their religion, executed, not by some young outlier from our culture, but from the learned hatred endemic in American society. We cannot afford to sweep this under the carpet like we have the white gunmen in Colorado or Sandy Hook. We dare not pigeonhole these murders as the random acts of a crazed loner.

The racist ideas that filled Dylann Roof’s head did not come from random thoughts – one is not born a racist. Racism is a bred response. Roof’s actions reflect his environment. They reflect the actions of the white policeman who gunned down an unarmed black man running away from him, and the disproportionate prosecution and conviction of African-Americans across the country.

That is not to say that Dylann Roof is not accountable for his heinous actions. The courts will undoubtedly rule swiftly on his guilt. Nonetheless, we have an accounting to make as well. 20th century theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us: “Few are guilty, but all are responsible.”

Ecclesiastes teaches: “For everything there is a season. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to keep silence and a time to speak.”

Nine citizens of the United States of America executed, gunned down in the service of God. It was not their season to die. Another U.S. citizen, not some foreign terrorist, but a 21-year-old, soft-spoken white man sat in Bible study with them for 40 minutes before taking out his gun, shooting and reloading time after time.

Their mourning relatives rightfully bemoan: “It was not their time to die.” God bless America, how we wish we could wash over the pain with bucolic mountainsides and sandy beach shores. How we wish that post-card America were not marred by the racist actions of Dylann Roof. How we long for an America that elevates God’s blessings over man’s curses.

Do not heed the voices isolating the perpetrator, making him sound like a freak of nature rather than a product of American culture. None of us wants to believe that the civic culture of our town could produce the radical racism of a Dylann Roof.

The Wall Street Journal reported that: “At Mr. Bunky’s Market across from Roof’s (father’s) home, Preston Rivers Jr., a 68-year-old African-American bricklayer, said even during segregation black and white children got along: ‘They came to our house to eat, and we went to their houses.’ (Store) Manager Kim Fleming, who is white, said most of the people near the store are black, and she never felt any racial tension. ‘(Roof’s) issues were his issues only. I don’t see (racial tension) in this community.”

No, not in my back yard – no racial tension here. My congregation hosted an African-American church for three years. I sit on the Triangle Martin Luther King Jr. Committee and march with the NAACP.

And I also have a grandmother who was a member of the Daughters of the American Confederacy. My grandfather’s family owned farmland in Mississippi before the Civil War. My grandmother has letters written to her grandmother from a Confederate soldier.

As much as I work for civil rights, as much as my life and my rabbinate have been influenced by outrage at the racist and classist effects of American society, I cannot be silent about my own part in that society. I cannot deny that I too am responsible. I have never spoken about the racist culture that so surely had to be tied to that plantation my ancestors owned in Mississippi.

If we are to have a true conversation about racism, we cannot be silent about our own country, community and family. We have to admit that we live in a country that has harbored and nurtured racists for all of its existence.

We must have these conversations. We dare not pretend that the racism does not exist, just because the Emanuel Church murderer grew up across the street from a country store that employed blacks and whites.

How many more have to die before their time? How many more will not see the next season, because we did not demand change?

“God bless America, land that I love, stand beside us, and guide us.” If we truly love the America that we ask God to bless, then we must seize this moment to speak up and to speak out. To assure that along with God’s blessing it will be our voices and our actions that transform the racism and violence of our nation.

This story was originally published June 30, 2015 at 6:07 PM with the headline "No more silence about racism: Demanding change after Charleston."