They called from Spain. They had been watching TV and the
first question that spilled from their lips was: “What the hell is going on in St. Louis?”
My city is broken.
It didn’t break when Michael Brown fell lifeless to the
asphalt. It didn’t break when the first rock shattered the store-front window.
It didn’t break with the first canister of tear gas fired into an angry crowd.
It has been broken for a very long time.
Nobody seemed to notice although it’s painfully obvious,
like a fractured radius sticking out through the skin. In nearly every chain
restaurant, the patrons are white, the servers are black. White people stay in
our hotels; brown people clean them. In a city where less than 30% of its
citizens are white, over 94% of the police force is.
A few months ago, the garage door opener was swiped from my
car, so I called the local police station to report it. I’m not even kidding,
three minutes later there was an officer at the door to take my statement.
Three minutes. St. Louis has statistically one of the highest crime rates in
the country but where I live, the cops apparently have quite a bit a free time.
Of course, I don’t live in the ghetto anymore. All the brown
people in my neighborhood live in my house. Most St. Louisans shrug off the
crime stats when out of town friends and relatives bring it up. It’s no big
deal, we say. Everyone knows where the bad areas are, we say. We don’t go to
those areas.
Those areas.
Where all those black people live.
That’s the part we don’t say. We don’t say it out loud or
someone might notice how racist we are.
And boy are we ever. As soon as the Michael Brown story
broke, black people bemoaned another unarmed young man shot down like a dog in
the streets; white people started lining up to defend the cop. Exactly zero of
these people knew what had really happened yet everyone had already decided
that all policemen are violent gestapo bullies or that gangster thug probably
deserved it.
I don’t blame anyone’s reaction. It is a symptom of our
brokenness.
My city has been broken for a long time and now everyone in
the whole world knows it.
It doesn’t really matter why Michael Brown got shot. It
doesn’t matter if the cop was justified in pulling the trigger. It doesn’t
matter if the courts review all the details of this case and deliver a ruling
with perfect justice. And it will continue to not matter until the next Michael
Brown is born with just as much chance of ending up an accountant or a lawyer
as ending up in prison or dying violently.
50 years have passed since the Civil Right Act but we have
still systematically and intentionally stacked the deck against young black
men. I know, many of them overcome the odds and become very successful. But you
know what’s better than overcoming the odds? Not being set up to fail in the
first place.
Americans don’t like to talk about racism or our less than
virtuous past. Maybe if we ignore it, it won’t be real. Maybe if we pretend it’s
all good, it will give minorities the space they need to get over it. Sure.
I heard a man speak about giving a seminar on the death
penalty to a group of Germans. One German lady told him that they do not have
the death penalty in Germany. With their history, they could never have a State
sponsored system of executing people. The speaker went on to ask us to imagine
if Germany did have a death penalty. And to imagine if they executed a disproportionate
number of Jews. Would that not make everyone really uncomfortable?
We are a country that once owned people. My home state of
Missouri entered this fair union as a slave state. The great grandparents of
the protesters in Ferguson were kept in chains and counted as less than human
(3/5 of a human to be exact). Should it not make us profoundly uncomfortable to
see a white police force and a white mayor as authorities over a black city?
Should it not disturb us that a disproportionate number of black people are
locked up in our prisons? Maybe these things are not inherently problematic in
and of themselves, but with our history…maybe they are.
Racism exists, prevalently; the wounds of slavery, lynchings
and segregation are real and unhealed. That is where we are.
That doesn’t mean we must stay here.
Healing can happen. It begins with forgiveness, asking and
giving. It begins with honestly acknowledging our past. It begins when we stand
up for justice - not fairness, but real, biblical Justice: being a voice for
those who have none.
Healing can happen. Someday my city won’t be broken anymore.
Won’t that be a great day?
