Alice Walker Feature Documentary "Beauty in Truth" Premieres

Back in October 2011, I told readers of Bilgrimage about a film being made to celebrate the life and work of Alice Walker--"Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth." Pratibha Parmar is the writer, director, and producer.

Another Reader-Requested Piece: Reflections on Alice Walker's Significance for Me

I blogged recently about my response to Rembert Weakland's book A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, noting that I was doing so because a reader of a previous posting about Weakland had invited me to read Weakland's memoir and then write about my response to the book.  Today, I want to fulfill another promise to a reader of this blog whose feedback I also value.

Alice Tells Her Chickens about Dharamsala: The Song on Which Everything Depends

Alice Walker, writing (to her chickens) about what she encountered when she went to the monastery of Dharamsala, in The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories: Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, the Gladyses & Babe: A Memoir (NY: New Press, 2011):

Alice Walker on Chickens, Spiders, and the Human Species as a Test

From Alice Walker, The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories: Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, the Gladyses & Babe: A Memoir (NY: New Press, 2011):

We Have a Multicultural Meal, and Think of Alice and Her Chicken Angels

So Steve and I go a Vietnamese restaurant in Houston, and as we're happily slurping our bowls of pho, the two attractive young Mexican women at the table next to ours are chatting about recipes.  Brownies.  Jalapeño cornbread, the ultimate Southernization (some might say bastardization) of a Tex-Mex dish that's not Mexican in the least.  Except that it contains jalapeños.  And cornmeal.

Alice and Her Chicken Angels: Still Learning, After All These Years

From Alice Walker, The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories: Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, the Gladyses & Babe: A Memoir (NY: New Press, 2011):

Of Men, Women, and Capital Cities: Listening to Women's Word and Witness

I’ve been thinking about gender lately. And cities.

Capital cities are, of course, overweeningly masculine for the most part. Anywhere in the world that you encounter them, they’re likely to be dominated by men, since they were built by men for men. Men for whom playing power games is important: hence, places to play out the games of power.

I would not go to Washington, D.C., if I were seeking spiritual renewal. I might head to Albuquerque, Amherst, even Anchorage. But not D.C. Real power—spiritual power—does not thrive where men gather to play power games.

Certainly women can do well in capital cities. They can even enter into the male power games and play them with great skill. When they do so, they choose, of course, to play by the rules of the men who make the games, and for whom the games continue to be crucially important. And if their goal is not to make fundamental changes in those games—to open them up for more players, so that they begin to represent more adequately the complexion of those for whom the games are ostensibly being played—they sometimes find their souls desiccated after years of game-playing.

I’m thinking about these matters, in part, because of a conversation I had recently with my youngest nephew. He was telling me about the books that intrigue him lately. We’ve had a long spell of Noam Chomsky and Che Guevara. He’s now moved onto Malcolm X. He listens incessantly to old clips of George Carlin and Johnny Cash as he reads his mentors.

For the first time, as Pat and I talked about his heroes, it struck me: they’re all men. I suspect that, for many folks, that would not be worth remarking. Patrick is himself a man, raised in a culture that glorifies manhood. He played football a while in high school. Like his brothers, he watches sports—male-dominated sports—for hours on end.

What strikes me as I think about my nephew’s reading list is how different my own life has been, for reasons not always easy to identify. I would not—could not—be the person I am today, had my life not included, from early on, female heroes, female mentors, a list of female writers so long I can hardly begin to enumerate all of them in a single posting.

When Mr. Obama went on vacation this past summer and released his vacation reading list, Huffington Post invited readers to post suggestions about other books the president might read. I logged in to say that it struck me as significant that every book the president had chosen to read was by a male author—about mostly male subjects, about male historical figures, for instance.

I suggested that the president broaden his reading list to include books like Jane Smiley’s 1000 Acres or anything at all by Audre Lord. And, of course, it’s presumptuous for me to recommend reading lists to the president or to assume he hasn’t read and doesn’t read works by women on a regular basis.

Still. It strikes me as worth noting that many men, many powerful men, seem to go through their lives reading works written by men and avoiding books authored by women for the most part.

For my part, I can’t imagine having gone through my life without Jane Austen, Teresa of Avila, Mary Ann Evans/George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Lady Murasaki, Lillian Smith, Catherine of Siena, Marguerite Yourcenar, Mary Renault, George Sand, M.F.K. Fisher, Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Willa Cather, Isabel Allende, Nella Larsen, Edith Wharton, Julian of Norwich, Pat Barker, Muriel Spark, Phyllis Whitney, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontë sisters, Mary Doria Russell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Geraldine Brooks, Alice Walker, Ruth Benedict, Mary Douglas, Hildegard of Bingen, Constance Perin, Dorothee Sölle, and . . . well, you get the picture.

The world might look very different if women had more of a voice in making it in the halls of power where the games of power are played. And if more women stood in the pulpits and the bemas and minarets. If the scriptures were in the hands of women as well as men, and if women’s interpretation of the scriptures carried the gravitas of any man’s word about the holy books.

And if the moral debates of our times were infused with even a touch of the insight many women have about key moral issues, as men continue to talk on and on about them, laying down the law and dictating the solutions.

Three-Fifths of All Persons: An Examination of the Effects of Dehumanization

In the wake of the ruling by the California Supreme Court upholding the choice of voters in proposition 8 to amend the state constitution by removing from gay citizens the right to marriage, I asked myself on this blog, “I wonder what it feels like to be told that one is three fifths of all other persons?” When I asked that question on May 28, I noted that, at the time, I felt too raw to write about it.

I still feel raw, but I want to give a try to answering that question now. I’m asking the three-fifths question in light of the conclusion of the California Supreme Court that denying gay persons the right to marry represents only a “narrow” and “limited” exception to the full range of human rights that all other citizens enjoy. It strikes me that this conclusion is very similar to the “three-fifths” arrangement of article 1, section 2, paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution.

When the Constitution was ratified, there was controversy about how to apportion representation in states that held some citizens in bondage. As a compromise, a decision was made to apportion representation and tax burdens in slave states by counting slaves (which is to say, in most circumstances at the time, African Americans) as three-fifths of a person.

What does it do to human beings, I wonder, to be told that one is three-fifths of all other persons? That one’s humanity counts for something (particularly when it comes to society’s willingness to take the gifts one brings and use them for its own benefit), but that it counts for something less that that of other human beings?

What does it do to the psyches and souls of a group of human beings to be told that their humanity is less than that of other folks? That the group should be content with “narrow” and “limited” exceptions to the full range of human rights others enjoy, simply because of who one is? That the majority should have the right to pick and choose among the human rights it takes for granted, as it selects rights to accord you and your group, offering you some but not all of the rights the majority takes for granted?

This question remains pertinent. Yesterday, the president signed a memorandum granting a limited number of gay citizens rights that other citizens freely enjoy without question or fanfare. But even that action recognizing the rights of same-sex partners of federal employees made limited exceptions (and they are hardly narrow ones) to the rights those citizens could enjoy under the memorandum.

Though same-sex partners of federal employees can now enjoy some partner benefits, they will continue to be excluded from others that all heterosexual employees of the federal government take for granted. These include healthcare benefits.

As an editorial about this in today’s New York Times notes, it is “deeply unfair” to provide full benefits to one group of workers while denying them to another (on the basis of innate characteristics that have nothing to do with job performance). As the editorial states, this is tantamount to paying members of a stigmatized group less than their peers for the same work. The editorial concludes that Mr. Obama still has work to do in this and other areas to keep his promise of equal rights for gay Americans.

The exclusion of a group of citizens from the same rights others enjoy, without any rationale for that exclusion other than an innate difference that should make no difference when rights are allocated, affects not only individuals but families. I’ve been following an interesting discussion about this at the America blog lately. This is a discussion about the gay marriage debate in the American Catholic context.

Some of those contributing to the discussion have made an interesting point. This is that what we conclude about the morality of gay marriage has legal (and economic and social) implications for heterosexually-headed families with gay members as well as for gay families. And some of those implications demand attention from the standpoint of Catholic morality: in opposing gay marriage, Catholic pastoral leaders may also be undercutting heterosexually headed families that have gay members, as well as gay families. In doing this, Catholic pastoral leaders may be contradicting their own teaching about the economic and social justice that families deserve.

For instance, when a heterosexual couple decide to give guardianship of their children to a gay family member who is in a same-sex marriage, should the straight couple die, the children of that heterosexual couple will suffer all the disadvantages of the same-sex couple, as long as the marital unions of gay couples struggle with the “narrow” and “limited” exceptions that go along with denial of the right to marry.

No one has noted the following in the America discussion, but I think that one could also note that denial of marriage to gay couples—with all the other “narrow” and “limited” exceptions that flow from that denial, including exclusion from partner healthcare benefits—also affects large numbers of heterosexual elderly Americans. Gay couples often end up taking care of aging parents and other aging family members. We’re sometimes expected to do so. Studies suggest that an increasing percentage of elderly Americans are now being cared for by their adult children, and many of those children are gay—and some of them live in partnered relationships.

When our lives are made difficult due to prejudice and injustice, and when we are caring for aging parents or aging relatives, those family members suffer along with us. Steve’s and my experience of caring for my mother up to the time of her death in 2001 became a horror story due to legally permitted, legally protected prejudice on the part of the Arkansas judge who oversaw my guardianship of my mother.

This is a story that, I have reason to think, is replicated in many places, but which does not receive sufficient attention. I have been completely unable to get media attention for this story, insofar as Steve and I have lived it. It's apparently just not noteworthy.

Yet this story is part and parcel of the story of how “narrow” and “limited” exceptions to human rights targeting a particular minority also inevitably target, and trouble the lives of, other citizens who are not even in the targeted minority. What we permit to be done to gay citizens and gay couples affects many more citizens than gay ones.

What happened yesterday, with the presidential memo, puts the lie to the claim of some opponents of gay marriage (and of many Catholic bishops)* that gay civil unions are equal to straight marriages, and that gay couples in civil unions enjoy all the rights and privileges of heterosexual couples in “traditional” marriages). That’s just not the case. Gay citizens continue to experience three-fifths status in manifold ways in our society, and the erection of a separate category of marriage for gay citizens, with “narrow” and “limited” exceptions to the rights those who are legally married enjoy, compounds and does not solve this problem.

So, to return to my initial question, what is it like to be told by one’s fellow citizens that one is three-fifths of a person? What is it like to be told this by an administration one has elected, which has promised to level the playing field and combat discrimination, but is not doing so? What is it like to be told this by churches whose statewide meetings vote in huge majorities against welcoming you to their churches, even when those churches display signs saying that they have open hearts, open minds, and open doors?

What’s it like to be told that one is three-fifths of a person by a state supreme court which informs you that the rights from which you are excluded for no rational or defensible reason are merely “narrow” and “limited” exceptions? What’s it like to be told by court authorities as you and your partner of many years care for an aging mother suffering from dementia that you are not a fit caregiver, and that a court-appointed ad litem attorney needs to make visits to your home to supervise the quality of care you are providing—even when all of your mother’s siblings, your father’s siblings and their spouses, and your own siblings have written to tell the court that you are providing care of the highest quality for a family member they love?

What's it like to deal with such demeaning nonsense when you're working around the clock to care for an aging loved one who has to be supervised every moment, since she has no idea where she is or who she is? What’s it like to go through life being told in every way possible that you are three-fifths of all other persons, and should just get used to it?

As I think about that question, I think of what I have learned in a lifetime of reading African-American writers, who struggled with the Constitution’s legal definition (long upheld by popular consensus) of African Americans as three fifths of all other persons. I think of all I have learned from James Baldwin and Ralph Ellision, W.E.B. Dubois, Malcolm X, Jean Toomer, James Cone, Cornell West, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, Eldridge Cleaver, Langston Hughes, and countless other writers.

I think also of what I’ve learned from Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Maya Angelou, Sojourner Truth, Phyllis Wheatley, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Mary McLeod Bethune, Lorraine Hansberry, Marian Wright Edelman, and many other courageous, deep-souled women of color.

Here’s what I hear gifted black artists and talented black writers saying over the course of American history, about the struggle of African Americans to cope with society’s definition of one group of citizens as three-fifths of all other citizens, because of the color of that group’s complexion:

▪ Only a: struggle, assert yourself, live with dignity, work hard, but in the end, you will find yourself only a fill-in-the-blank.

One of the most persistent effects of defining the humanity of one group as three-fifths of the humanity of all other groups is that the group so defined finds itself constantly tagged and dismissed as “only a.” Only a faggot, when all is said and done. What else do you expect from those people? That's how they are. That's how they behave.

As long as social groups are permitted to tag some groups in this way—permitted to do so by legal codes, by government leaders, by preachers expounding the bible from pulpits, by educational systems that disseminate misinformation, by media that invent texts and images to distort the real humanity of a stigmatized group—those who are members of the demeaned group will find themselves unable to move beyond the “only a” tag. No matter what they do. No matter who they are. No matter how hard they work or with what dignity they live.

▪ The only thing that matters in the end: as I listen to gifted black artists and talented black writers describing the African-American experience, I hear a persistent refrain about how all that society sees, all that matters in the end, is that single stigmatizing characteristic society has chosen to see as the ultimate thing to recognize about the group.

They don’t see me. They don’t see inside me. They see only what they have chosen to see, that single external characteristic to which they attach ultimate significance, and on the basis of which they make other invidious assumptions about what’s inside.

All that matters in the end is that I am gay. Once you have that key, you have the key to my entire soul, to my nature, to my worth as a human being. You don't need to look further.

▪ Living split: the experience of being classified as “only a” whose definition hinges solely on one unchangeable fact about oneself, a fact irrelevant to one’s human worth, splits people. African American writers tell stories of the horrific struggle of a group of people to live with that split.

What do you do, when you find yourself defined as “only a” whose skin color is all that matters in the end? Do you fight? If so, how does one live decently while fighting constantly, particularly when almost everything in the legal and social structures of the society in which one is conducting that fight conduces to one’s disempowerment? How does one fight constantly when the fight itself will be used to confirm the stereotype that one is only a?

But how does one live with dignity and self-respect when one does not fight? Where does one go to find people and places that do not reduce one’s human nature to “only a”? Should one look for someplace that appears to be more humane where one does not have to fight continuously, where one can fulfill one’s multifaceted humanity that is about so much more than that one characteristic?

Social groups that turn one group of people into three-fifths of a person on the basis of differences that ought not to matter as we allocate human worth and human rights, produce horrible quandaries for those defined as less human than everyone else. Those quandaries run through the entire lives of members of that group, and through all that they do. These quandaries sometimes split the psyches and souls of those defined as less human than others. They hamper the ability of the group to contribute to the rest of society, even when the stigmatized group clearly has much to offer.

And these mechanisms continue today in American society, not merely in social attitudes, but in social institutions—in the workplace, the legal system, the government, our churches, and so on. And they will continue as long as they have legal sanction, and those charged to lead the country and safeguard its democratic structures do not address the institutional legitimation of such behavior.

* It should also be noted that, despite attempts of some apologists for behavior of the current leaders of the Catholic church in the gay marriage debate today, Catholic pastoral leaders have not supported or promoted civil unions anyplace in the world. The typical, unvarying stance of Catholic pastoral leaders to any and all civil rights for gay citizens is to oppose those rights whenever and wherever possible. Faced with a growing societal consensus in favor of gay marriage in some areas of the world, some bishops are now willing to entertain the option of civil unions. Given the history of most bishops and the Vatican in opposing all gay rights relentlessly, one has to wonder about the sincerity of this sudden willingness to support gay civil unions.

Barack Obama and Post-Homophobic Models of Black Leadership

Unlike many other African-American leaders, Mr. Obama has been willing to confront the ugly homophobia of many African Americans (especially African-American churchgoers) head on.

In the posting I just made on Barack Obama and the LGBT community, I chose to highlight the preceding statement for the following reason: the way in which many leaders of the African-American community have treated gay issues (and gay human beings) in recent years is a litmus test of leadership. The homophobia of many contemporary African-American leaders, both of the left and the right, has profoundly negative consequences for the black community and the nation as a whole.

It is time for a new generation of African-American leaders. One of the most significant ways in which Mr. Obama can illustrate his new paradigm of leadership is by fostering within the African-American community a new paradigm of inclusion and justice for LGBT persons—and thus by modeling a form of leadership that transcends the ugly exclusion and injustice currently practiced by not a few African-American “leaders” whose claim to leadership is totally vitiated by their willingness to practice injustice and exclusion towards gay human beings.

I realize that in saying what I have just said, I am treading close to a line carefully guarded by many African Americans—and for historically understandable reasons. I am a white male. I am, in fact, the descendant of slaveholders. I may well have no business “intruding” into the inner affairs of the African-American community.

And yet I live in a democratic society that professes to be moving towards participatory democracy. No community in a participatory democracy is or can be completely shut off from other communities. It is our willingness to interact, to share the unique gifts of our particular community, to call each other to accountability, to learn from one another and the particular experiences of other communities, that makes for vibrant and strong participatory democracy.

And no one belongs to a single community. I am a white male (and a white Southern one at that), but I am also a gay male. And that fact makes all the difference in the world to many of my fellow citizens. It automatically places me within a community from which I see the world in a different way than do many other white males—and many other white Southern males, in particular. It gives me an optic on oppression that opens my eyes to other forms of oppression.

The African-American community is also not monolithic. It comprises churched and unchurched folks, as well as gay and straight ones. All of our communities have ties binding us to other communities, ties that cross the dominant affiliative line of a single community to link us to other communities. I may not be black, but my experience intersects with (and differs sharply from) that of black men who also happen to be gay.

We become a healthy participatory democracy to the extent to which we entertain free discourse across the affiliative boundary lines of our communities of origin and communities of choice. I offer the following perspective on the promise of Mr. Obama to revive models of leadership—post-homophobic leadership—in the African-American community, as an outsider to that community.

But I offer these perspectives, as well, from the vantage point of someone who has had the opportunity to study at close range a number of significant contemporary African-American leaders, particularly in the world of higher education, in the almost two decades in which I taught and did administrative work in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). As I have noted on this blog, my life journey has been decisively shaped by my choice at the outset of my teaching career to work in an HBCU, by my interaction with African-American colleagues and the wealth of cultural riches they freely shared with me—and, unfortunately, by scarring experiences with several homophobic African-American women whose injustice to me and my partner has disrupted and burdened our lives.

I speak out of my experience in HBCUs. I speak as an outsider who was, despite my skin color and historical background, invited “inside” for some years—and then expelled not because of my skin color or gender, but because of my sexual orientation.

Now to get to the heart of the matter: as my previous posting notes, earlier this week, Rev. James Dobson, founder of the homophobic Focus on the Family organization, lambasted Barack Obama for what Rev. Dobson calls his “fruitcake interpretation” of scripture and the constitution (see AP release at www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/jun/23/dobson-obama-distorting-bible-constitution). Dobson accuses Obama of “dragging biblical understanding through the gutter” and “deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology.”

In the past, when leaders of the Christian right such as Rev. Dobson have pontificated about the bible and gays, African-American church leaders have frequently risen to the defense of their white evangelical colleagues.

But not this time. Soon after Rev. Dobson issued his declaration about owning the correct interpretation of the bible (which is to say, owning the bible and God), several key African-American religious leaders quickly distanced themselves from what Rev. Dobson said.

For instance, in a CNN interview with Anderson Cooper following the Dobson blast, Rev. Al Sharpton noted that though we bring our personal convictions to the public square, within the public square of a pluralistic democratic society, no one has a right to impose his/her personal convictions on others in a way that oppresses them. As Rev. Sharpton observes, he may not agree with how Mr. Cooper lives his personal life, and may believe Mr. Cooper is headed to hell. But he defends Mr. Cooper’s right to choose to go to hell, if he so desires (a clip of the interview is at www.towleroad.com/2008/06/al-sharpton-def.html).

Well. This is a start. The underlying vision of democratic society reflected in Rev. Sharpton’s comments is far healthier (and far more traditionally American) than is that of Rev. Dobson.

One understanding of society is theocratic: churches led by the Dobsons of the world should dominate the public square, interpret the scriptures for all of us, and impose their particular religious and moral views on the rest of us. The other is, well, democratic and pluralistic: let each hold her or his own views, including religious views; but let us choose to live together harmoniously, respecting each other’s rights, including the right to make different choices insofar as these do not destroy the body politic.

Another noteworthy development following Dobson's fulminations, with important implications for the African-American community and its churches: a coalition of pastors led by African-American United Methodist minister Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell has just set up a website to counter Dobson’s claim to own the bible. The website is at http://jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme.com.

The theology promoted by this website is in marked contrast to that of Rev. Dobson. It stresses social justice rather than personal pelvic morality. It underscores the obligation of Christians to build a just and inclusive society, not one in which those driven by hatred police the personal lives of others when this behavior poses no threat to their own pursuit of liberty and happiness.

It is, in key respects, a black evangelical, rather than a white evangelical, statement of core evangelical values. Just as Mr. Obama’s own interpretation of scripture and theology is. In short, what we are seeing in the rise of critiques of white religious right leaders by black evangelical leaders who have previously been silent about the shortcomings of their white colleagues is the resurgence of a black evangelical theology that exposes the theology of the religious right as biblically unsound and driven by animosity towards targeted wedge groups (many of whom already suffer marginalization and exclusion), rather than by a vision of the common good that includes everyone.

This is a development that deserves encouragement. It does so because the willingness of far too many African-American political, educational, and church leaders to cave in to the religious right in the past several decades has been noxious not merely for the nation as a whole, but for the black community as well.

The homophobic injustice in which too many African-American leaders have been willing to participate in recent years deprives the African-American community of good leadership. When it comes to the lives of gay human beings, far too many leaders of the black community in the recent past have been willing to sell out the agenda of human rights that is at the very heart of the struggle for black civil rights.

And in doing so, they have brought shame to themselves and have undermined their claim to be effective transformative leaders.

I place primary blame for this sell-out not on the African-American community itself, or even on its churches and church institutions (including many church-affiliated HBCUs). I place primary blame on neo-conservative politicians and their religious right backers, who have cynically sought to exploit divisions between the black and the gay community to try to gain power within the African-American community.

I know quite a few African-American ministers, theologians, and scholars who have known perfectly well the name of the divide-and-conquer game neo-conservatives and the religious right have been playing with the black community. These African-American leaders have courageously named the game for what it is. They have often suffered marginalization within their own community as a result, particularly in communities dominated by the black church (as well as by white churches promoting homophobia).

I know a number of African-American leaders who have seen first-hand, as I have done, some of the extremely negative effects of the moral sell-out of homophobic black leaders to the “values” of the religious right. These leaders note, as I do, that the massive transfer of federal and state-level social services to faith-based institutions, which has been eagerly promoted by many black ministers, has resulted in a deprivation of services to minority communities.

Though money trickles into churches and church-based institutions through faith-based programs, it is entirely inadequate to meet the social needs these institutions are now asked to address—needs the government previously met and should continue to meet. In some churches and church-based institutions (let’s be brutally honest), the faith-based seed money that has been trickling in benefits the pastor and a select group of his supporters, or the church-based institutions' leaders, far more than it benefits those to whom it is ostensibly directed.

In far too many cases, the price that African-American churches and church-based institutions pay for their political alliance with neo-conservative political leaders is a moral price: these churches and institutions are asked and expected to discriminate against gay persons as part of the price for receiving faith-based funding.

Too many African-American leaders have been willing in recent years to play this immoral political game. Their choice to do so has harmed their community, both in a moral sense (we cannot justifiably demand rights for ourselves that we forbid to others), as well as in a material sense: the pitiful prizes the right wing has been handing out for the allegiance of the black community are inadequate to the real needs of the community. And those prizes have gone disproportionately to those playing the homophobia game, in any case, rather than to the communities themselves: the prizes have been trinkets for good behavior that have ensnared and corrupted not a few African-American leaders.

Ultimately, their choice to bloody their hands by unjust treatment of gay persons has harmed, most of all, African-American leaders who have participated in such injustice. When we turn a deaf ear to the cries of other hurting human beings for justice and fair treatment; when we actually participate in the injustice that causes those cries to become louder: we hurt ourselves. We dehumanize ourselves. We totally undercut our claim to leadership, because leadership always has a moral component.

History will look back, I am afraid, at the generation of African-American educational, political, and religious leaders who have been willing to trade the birthright of powerful African-American thinkers promoting social justice for the mess of pottage of faith-based homophobia. Historians will ask, regarding this generation of African-American leaders, how anyone seeking human rights for herself or himself could possibly justify denying human rights to other oppressed human beings. Historians will be interested in the blindness and self-deception, the willingness to collude with oppressive ideologies and oppressive and immoral politicians and church leaders, that lies beneath this sell-out.

In conclusion, I certainly do hope—and strongly so—that Mr. Obama represents a new model of leadership not merely for the nation as a whole, but for the African-American community as well. That model is sorely needed. It has everything to do with a resurgence of the black church’s commitment to justice for all and uplifting the least among us, protecting those whose rights are trampled on, defending the powerless, and speaking truth to power.

I have a vested interest in this resurgence not only as a gay man, but as someone whose life has been immeasurably enriched by African-American culture. What would I be—or who would I be, is the better question—without the witness and daunting intellectual insight of Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Mary McLeod Bethune, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, James Cone, Cornel West, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde? What theologian worth her salt in the U.S. could do adequate theology today, without reading and re-reading these canonical authors?

I have a vested interest as a Christian, a theologian, and a plain old human being in seeing the African-American community repudiate leaders who have been all too willing to sell out the profoundly transformative social-justice tradition of those prophetic thinkers and of the black church at its best for the mess of homophobic pottage.

I certainly do hope that Mr. Obama will keep leading the way to a different future . . . .

And the Pilgrimage Continues

Readers, brothers and sisters on the journey with me, thank you for your patience during the few days I have been silent. I appreciate the messages on the blog (and will respond to them) as well as several emails asking about me, and a query from a friend who saw me at a party this weekend and asked when my blog would return.

Because I’ve been silent for several days, this will be a lengthy posting—my apologies. I want to make some connections between my own pilgrimage in faith, my journals from a year ago, my vocation as a theologian and educator, and some specific questions I am encountering at this point on my pilgrimage. The questions are at the very end of this blog posting, for those who don’t have time to slog through the entire entry below.

The question I am asking there does, however, connect to what I am posting today. So for those who have time to read the posting (and those who don't), and who may have information to provide in response to my question, I will definitely appreciate feedback. And so for my posting as I resume this pilgrimage:

This is an important day in my life. As readers know,

was a communion Sunday for this Methodist church, and the day following, something happened to me that so grossly undercut the meaning of communion, I now find myself estranged from a church that has meant much in my life. I find myself estranged from my own Catholic church for the same reason.

My very belief in the sacred meaning of Communion (and communion: it is impossible to celebrate Communion as sacrament—and mean it—without intending to live in communion with those with whom one breaks bread) makes me abhor the thought of returning to churches where I encounter those who celebrate Communion on Sunday and break communion Monday through Friday. What can the Lord’s bread mean when we intend to shove anyone from the table of daily bread even as we partake of the Lord’s bread?

I speak very specifically out of the gay Christian experience. What I have experienced in churches is no different from what other gay Christians experience. Because some other Christians do not consider us human in the same way that they consider themselves human, we are often savagely expelled, with the expectation that we will simply accept our chastisement and be silent.

Our humanity is not obvious to those who frame our human lives as less than human. Thus, our feelings of pain, exclusion, diminishment, anguish at the injustices dealt to us—some Christians overlook these as emotions that don’t really count, as if they are not the same kind of pain these Christians themselves would feel, placed in similar circumstances. Many Christians proclaim mercy while practicing injustice to gay brothers and sisters because they are, simply and shockingly, oblivious to the pain they cause us. They just do not hear us and our cries of pain, having relegated us to subhuman status and shoved us from the table.

What I experience as a gay Christian is more than that, though. It is more than pain. It is blessing and calling. When I am excluded, I grow stronger. When those who practice injustice while preaching mercy try to stop up my mouth, I speak all the louder. I believe, with Oscar Romero, that any attempt to silence me—even one that results in my ultimate silencing—will never truly silence me.

Who we are and what we do live on in the world even after we leave the world. When we live for what is right, true, and good—when our lives flow in the river of divine love through our attempt to love each other—all that we have done remains as testimony and constructive influence, even when we leave the world. Not long before he was assassinated while celebrating the Eucharist at the altar of his church in El Salvador, Oscar Romero stated, "I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people."

And so it is. The soldiers who murdered Oscar Romero did not succeed in silencing him at all. Because of what they did to him, they released his words to go around the world with a power the words did not have prior to his martyrdom.

As I reflect on these themes in light of this anniversary, I turn to my journal to see what I wrote last year at this time. I find that I did not record an entry on 3 June, but I did record the following reflections early in the day on 4 June, a day with great significance for my life as a theologian reflecting on the connection between spirituality and social justice.

The dream mentioned in the entry is one I had had a few days earlier, in which I had returned to my grandmother’s house to turn her entire yard into a garden:

So the dream is about how I continue planting the grandmother's garden—à la Alice Walker? Those female virtues run strong in my life, Bridget (Tobin) to Kate (Ryan) to Hattie (Batchelor) to Clo (Simpson).

What are they? Determination. Determination to survive. Determination to thrive. To keep on keeping on.

To live humanely under inhumane conditions. To plant a garden, regardless: famine, five children dead, exile to a strange new land; 16 children borne, 5 died, and still containers of moss rose on the porch; husband dies as one has the 6th child, Depression hits, one raises 7 children, and one plants prize-winning peonies; husband's an abusive, philandering drunk who gambles away a family's livelihood, and one plants coxcomb. I have a heritage to live up to . . . .

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[I then record a different dream from the night of 3 June]: And then I awoke, thinking, "[Name deleted; someone with the ability to make decisions that affected my life] dislikes me because I have a canopy over me. She can't harm me. And she resents that she doesn't have a canopy."

And the word "bima" came to mind. I looked it up and found it's "bema," Greek for a ceremonial stand in Greek gathering places. In Judaism, it's a bimah, and is where one stands to read Torah in the assembly.

In Shavuot—this year, May 23 and 24—it’s covered by a canopy with flowers. It was on May 23 that I wrote my essay re: my grandmother . . . and the contemporary academy.

The reference to a May 23 essay is to something I had been asked to write at my workplace in response to a workshop about transformative leadership in the academy in a journal-type reflection. Here are some excerpts from that essay:

“As I begin this ‘journal entry,’ I’m aware that I am writing it on the anniversary of my grandmother’s [Hattie Batchelor Simpson] death in 1968. My grandmothers—but, in particular, my maternal grandmother—played key roles in my upbringing. Since my immediate family’s life was often turbulent because of my father’s propensity to drink (and sometimes to abandon his family), my grandmother played an important role as a point of stability and comfort: she was always there. With its familiar smells and beautiful garden, its assortment of relatives, including my beloved unmarried aunt who provided care for her mother and brother while teaching school full-time, her house was the focal point of family gatherings.

My grandmother’s death in 1968 was not entirely unexpected, since she had long suffered from crippling heart disease. Nonetheless, it came as something of a shock to me, since it occurred three days before my high school graduation.

I last saw my grandmother the Sunday before her death. She died the following Thursday morning. As I left her house, I begged her to come to my graduation. She called me back to talk to her as I walked to our car. As she stood inside her kitchen’s screen door, she told me, ‘When you were born, you had eyes that were looking for something—always looking, peering intently. I hope that you find what you are looking for in life. Remember that Mama expects great things from you.'

Those were her final words to me. Her calling me back was out of character. This was something she had never done before. I have to believe she knew her death was imminent. So I have always regarded her final statement to me as a kind of ‘commissioning’—to do precisely what, I am not sure, but what is very clear to me is that she affirmed me and called on me to do my very best in life. Her legacy to me was a request to become the best person I am able to become.

When I gave my salutatory address the following Sunday, I did so with my grandmother’s words ringing in my head. Though I felt loath to stand up and speak before that large group of people, I did so with conviction and passion because, in my mind and heart, I was doing so as a tribute to my grandmother. The text I chose as the basis of my address—Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, with its insistence on not merely enduring, but prevailing—seemed entirely appropriate, as I pondered the commission my grandmother had given me.

Why go on at such length about these personal memories? Because a major thread of the workshop was the need for faculty to build a learning community that engages in dialogue that reaches the affective domain of learning. We can mentor students in forming learning communities only to the extent that we are successful in forming such communities ourselves.

We call on our students to risk much as they learn: to expose their inmost thoughts, to dare to be vulnerable in sharing life experiences, to put painful life experiences on the table and discuss them in a communal context. But we don’t often follow suit, as colleagues in the academy.

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For me, the workshop lit a fire in my soul. It brought me back to the passion that informs my vocation as an educator—a passion for social transformation, a passion to understand the world in transformative ways, a passion to build a community engaged in such transformative learning in order to create an academy that becomes an agent of transformation in the world at large.

Though the experience of walking in the valley has diverted me from that passion in subsequent weeks (even as it smolders inside), I continue wondering about the heart and soul of American higher education. I wonder what it is in our worldviews and practices that predisposes us to talk about collaborative learning, about reaching the affective domain, about sharing life experiences—but to retreat to the safety of liberal managerial practices of academic life after we’ve had such discussions, when those discussions threaten to change the way we do business. I wonder why it is that we seem unable to see that we cannot be agents of transformative change without being transformed ourselves, and without transforming the academy, so that it conforms in practice to the rhetoric we proclaim.

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In the postmodern period, there is contestation of the rules of liberal managerialism—an agonistic approach to truth that recognizes the need of those shut out to struggle for their voices finally to be heard. The postmodern academy struggles against the dominative model of liberal managerialism bequeathed to it by modernity, in order to become something new—a new space for dialogic interaction of many different voices, proceeding from many different perspectives, in which no voice and no perspective is valorized over other voices.

I find many parallels between this postmodern worldview (and its attendant view of the academy) and the vision of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune. Dr. Bethune’s insistence on the inclusion of African American and female voices in the dialogue constituting American democracy was based on the contention that democracy contains within it a logic of inexorable extension: to include any marginalized group, on democratic principles, is implicitly to recognize that all marginalized groups must eventually be brought to the table.

Martin Luther King articulates the same understanding of American democracy, and prefigures the postmodern world (and postmodern academy) with similar brilliance and force. As a scholar of the American social gospel, it interests me that both Dr. King and Dr. Bethune depend in many respects on the social gospel’s reading of the American experience and of the logic of American democracy.

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How do we form that safe space for dialogic interchange in an academic context still often dominated by liberal managerial concerns and techniques of control? How do those of us who are within church-affiliated institutions deal with these concerns and control techniques, when they dominate the behavior of the churches with which we are affiliated? In both church and academy today, a pressing question is how to build anew within the crumbling foundations of the old. The commitment of both institutions to liberal rhetoric has not allowed for a happy or fruitful transition to the postmodern world.

In a world in which it is increasingly difficult to shut out marginal voices and the information they offer us—because technology makes such transmission of knowledge much easier everywhere in the world today—how do we struggle to reinvent the academy? Within the ruins of modernity, how do we form a new safe space for the interaction of many different voices incorporating many different perspectives, none of which can lay claim to objectivity and ownership of the truth?

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I am moved as well by questions arising out of my solidarity with gay and lesbian persons. As M. Paz Galupo notes in an article entitled ‘Advancing Diversity Through a Framework of Intersectionality: Inclusion of LGBT Issues in Higher Education’ (Diversity Digest 10,2 [2007], 16-17), though the modern academy commonly pays lip-service to diversity and inclusion of all voices and perspectives, it lacks systematic or thoughtful strategies for integrating lesbian-gay concerns under the rubric of diversity. The academy still resists first-person testimony by its gay-lesbian members, and disallows such testimony as biased, self-interested, or distasteful.

Galupo (who is bi-racial) speaks expressly of HBCUs. She notes that HBCUs ‘typically have no institutionally recognized LGBT student groups’ and that ‘structural barriers’ in HBCUs prevent the successful integration of lesbian-gay persons into the academic community.

Galupo calls on the academy (and the HBCU in particular) to ask the following ‘hard questions’ about such structural barriers, if the academy wishes to be truly inclusive:

Why do we advocate for LGBT inclusion in general, but remain afraid to challenge homophobia within our racially diverse communities? How can a dialogue about the experiences of LGBT persons of color inform…our work within the larger African American and LGBT communities? How can our successes in advancing racial diversity and gender equity inform our advocacy for LGBT inclusion? And conversely, how can arguments for LGBT inclusion be used to shift our discussions about race and gender to creative and more effective directions?”

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And so, dear readers, the pilgrimage continues. You will note that I have added to this blog some ads. I’ve done this at the suggestion of a reader who suggests that this will enhance my site for a number of reasons. Traffic has increased dramatically on this blog in recent weeks, both in the U.S. and in places around the world. I take heart from the increased traffic. I interpret it as an expression of interest in the questions this and other blogs are pursuing—questions of great importance to people interested in spirituality and justice throughout the world. I am trying the ads not to commercialize my discussion, but to assist in making the blog accessible to more readers who may be interested in these issues.

And, finally, a question: if any readers anyplace know of instances in which churches or church organizations have ever sought to use legal threats to shut down blogs discussing theological issues and issues pertaining to social justice, I’d appreciate hearing about this attempt to suppress free speech. I’m gathering information about the claim of churches or church institutions that they have the right to buy the free speech of scholars, theologians, or citizens in general, and in doing so, to censor what a scholar, theologian, or citizen might write on a blog.

Thanks to any readers who can assist me in this quest for information.