Words of Dr. King should prepare us for the challenges ahead

As we face the challenges of the months and years ahead, it may be useful, on the day that Americans celebrate his life, to recall his wisdom.  Below are the readings from the Temple Emanuel MLK Shabbat Service last Friday night.  We have used these readings in the past, but they have particular resonance this year.

Martin Luther King is a towering figure of the 20^th Century. Not only did he lead the crusade for the non-violent dismantling of apartheid in our land, but his words and deeds inspired non-violent revolutions which led to successful democratic change in Eastern Europe, Asia, and South Africa. This evening we remember some of his words, as well as those of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, an important ally of Dr. King in the religious community: To quote our prayer book, "Let us learn in order to teach; let us learn in order to do."

In his famous 1963 Letter From the Birmingham Jail to the Clergymen of Birmingham, Dr. King expressed the sense of community that is so essential to a world made one:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

Rabbi Heschel similarly observed that the Civil Rights Movement "is God’s gift to America, the test of our integrity, a magnificent spiritual opportunity. . . . Religion is a demand, God is a challenge, speaking to us in the language of human situations. is within the realm of history that man is charged with God’s mission. . . . To be arrogant toward man is to be blasphemous toward God."

The following are all words from Dr. King:

THE WORLD HOUSE

         

"Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: 'A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.' This is the great new problem of mankind.  We have inherited a large house, a great 'world house' in which we have to live together -- black and while, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu -- a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace."

                          

"If we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. 

"Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. 

"Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools."

                          

 UNDERSTANDING HATE AND FEAR

"Hate distorts the personality of the hater.  We usually think of what hate does [to] the individual hated or the groups hated.  But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. 

 "You just begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things.  You can't see straight when you hate.  You can't walk straight when you hate.  You can't stand upright.  Your vision is distorted.  There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate."      

"Envy, jealousy, a lack of self-confidence, a feeling of insecurity, and a haunting sense of inferiority are all rooted in fear. 

"We do not envy people and then fear them; first we fear them and subsequently become jealous of them.

"Is there a cure for these annoying fears that pervert our personal lives?

"Yes, a deep and abiding commitment to the way of love.  Perfect love casteth out fear.  Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear; only love can do that.  Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it.  Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it.  Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it."

"One day, here in America, I hope that we will . . . become one big family of Americans.  Not white Americans, not black Americans, not Jewish or Gentile Americans, not Irish or Italian Americans, not Mexican Americans, not Puerto Rican Americans, but just Americans.  One big family of Americans.

"God somehow called America to do a special job for mankind and the world.  Never before in the history of the world have so many racial groups and so many national backgrounds assembled together in one nation.  And somehow if we can't solve the problem in American, the world can't solve the problem, because America is the world in miniature and the world is America writ large. 

"And God set us out with all of the opportunities.  He set us between two great oceans; made it possible for us to live with some of the great natural resources of the world.  And there he gave us through the minds of our forefathers a great creed:  'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

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In 1964, after the inspiring August 1963 March on Washington at which Dr. King delivered his "I Have A Dream" speech, but also in the wake of the 1963 deaths of President Kennedy and Pope John XXIII, Rabbi Heschel said:  "Our world, which is full of cynicism, frustration, and despair, received in 1963 a flash of inspiration; 1963 was a noble year, a triumph of conscience, a triumph of faith. It will depend upon us whether 1963 will remain a chapter in sacred history."

Dr. King was able to express to the American community not only the injustice of segregation, but the deeper ways in which it destroyed the social and moral fabric of all those involved in it. In his Letter From the Birmingham Jail to the Clergymen of Birmingham, Dr. King explained:

"All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority, and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an ‘I-it’ relationship for the ‘I-thou relationship, and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful."

Just as legal segregation created divisions which were destructive of the human soul, so, to, are the divisions created by prejudice and fear.  Dr. King’s teachings were a way of stating the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam – humankind’s effort to repair the world. They are lessons for us all.

Let us learn in order to teach.

Let us learn in order to do.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Shabbat Service at Temple Emanuel: Facing Implicit Bias

Since 1987, Temple Emanuel of Kensington, MD, has devoted its Friday night Shabbat service at the beginning of the Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday weekend to a celebration of Dr. King. Over the years, our speakers have related stories and perspectives on the importance of Dr. King, the successes of the civil rights movement, and how that movement spurred so much progress. Now, when there is fear that this progress may be in jeopardy, we decided that it is time to reflect on how we can better communicate with each other so that we may, in Dr. King's words, continue the work of bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice.

To that end, we invited Temple member Will Saletan, a longtime writer for Slate magazine, to speak at our MLK service. A few months ago, he wrote a very perceptive article about how implicit bias has made cross-racial communication more difficult -- not just in law enforcement, but in a whole range of other parts of our lives. Below, with Will's permission, are his remarks from Friday evening. I believe that understanding these issues will help provide a stronger foundation for the work ahead.

(You may view and listen to the service by going to www.templemanuelmd.org, clicking on the box on the left side of the Home Page, and typing MLK into the Archive box.  Cantor Boxt’s wise and timely discussion of this week’s Torah portion starts at 41:50, and Will’s presentation begins at 49:35.)

Remarks in Honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.

William Saletan

When Temple Emanuel was founded in 1952, Martin Luther King, Jr. was just 23 years old. Rosa Parks had not yet refused to give up her seat on a bus. Brown vs. Board of Education, the case that declared segregated schools unconstitutional, hadn’t even come before the Supreme Court.

Today, 65 years later, we’re still not a colorblind society. But we’re in a different stage of the journey. Dr. King lived in the era of desegregation. But he envisioned another era: the age of what he called integration. He talked about it in January 1963, in a speech he titled, “A Challenge to the Churches and Synagogues.” Here’s what he said:

Desegregation will break down the legal barriers and bring men together physically, but something must touch the hearts and souls of men so that they will come together spiritually … A vigorous enforcement of civil rights will bring an end to segregated public facilities … but it cannot bring an end to fears, prejudice, pride, and irrationality, which are the barriers to a truly integrated society. … Here, then, is the hard challenge and the sublime opportunity: to let God work in our hearts toward fashioning a truly great nation.[1]

Those were Dr. King’s words. So how do we do that? How do we overcome fear and prejudice? How do we let God work in our hearts?

This wasn’t the focus of Dr. King’s work. He was consumed by the struggle to desegregate America. But he did give us a few ideas on how to begin the spiritual work that could eventually integrate our country.

The first idea comes from a speech Dr. King delivered in 1957, on the role of the church in healing racial division.[2] He explained that prejudice arose from two sources. One source was “professional hate groups.” But the other source was commonplace. The human mind, he argued, was “confused by certain frictions that arise out of the ordinary contact of diverse human groups.” He summarized the two sources of prejudice this way: “abnormally aroused fears,” and “ordinary antagonisms.”

Ordinary. What a strange word. For many of us, racism means hate. But for Dr. King, hate was only part of the equation. The other part was the ordinary contact of diverse people. It’s almost as though he believed that prejudice, to some extent, was normal. Not fair, not acceptable, but, as a statement of human propensity, normal.

And not always visible, either. That’s a second idea we can draw from Dr. King. In his writing about nonviolence, he addressed not just the prejudice of whites but the anger of blacks. He acknowledged “our natural resentment over the injustices that are constantly heaped upon us.”[3] And he urged young black men not to resort to violence “even though our long years of oppression sometimes arouse an unconscious resentment within.”[4]

Natural. Unconscious. Dr. King wasn’t condoning racial bitterness or distrust. But he was acknowledging it. He was saying that it’s understandable, and that sometimes you’re not even aware of it.

So how do we get at our unconscious prejudices? How can we overcome what we can’t see?

To answer that question, let’s turn to a third idea in Dr. King’s work: humility. In 1957, he delivered a sermon on self-centeredness, and, fittingly, he used himself as an example. By this time, he was a celebrity, and he knew it had gone to his head. “It’s a dangerous tendency,” he said, “that I will come to feel that Im something special. … And one of the prayers that I pray to God everyday is: ‘O God, help me to see myself in my true perspective. … Help me to realize that I’m where I am … because of the fifty thousand Negroes of Alabama who will never get their names in the papers.’”[5]

True perspective. Each of us needs that. We need to set aside our vanity. We need to see ourselves as we really are.

And then we need one more thing: a commitment to change.

When Martin Luther King was a young seminarian, he wrote a paper on theology and human nature. He discussed what he called “the habit of perpetual repentance.”[6] He explained that this habit “helps to keep our conscience awake; it preserves us from the sin of self righteousness; it helps us to concentrate on our sins, rather than the sins of others.” Years later, he wrote that in the post-segregation era, those who had practiced or benefited from oppression “must search their souls to be sure that they have removed every vestige of prejudice.”[7]

Dr. King was speaking of repentance as a cleansing of the heart. But the labor he described—a habit of perpetual reflection that keeps our conscience awake, keeps us focused on our own failings, and searches our souls for vestiges of prejudice—can also be understood as a cleansing of the mind. Over time, we don’t just accumulate sins. We also develop biases. To clean out these biases, we need a regular practice of mental hygiene.

In the age of integration, this is one of our hardest challenges: to root out the unconscious bias that often results from the ordinary contact of diverse people. In social science, there’s a name for this problem: implicit bias. Studies have found this bias, to some extent, in all of us. Every time you’re surprised to meet a black doctor or a gay athlete, every time you interrupt a woman but not a man, you’re experiencing or practicing implicit bias.

And here’s the crucial point: You don’t have to hate anyone to absorb or transmit this kind of bias. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It just makes you normal. If you’re a cop, and you’ve some bad experiences with young black men, you may develop implicit biases against young black men. If you’re a young black man, and you’ve had some bad experiences with cops, you may develop implicit biases against cops. It’s natural. But it holds us back from becoming a better country. It gets in the way of justice and opportunity. And sometimes, in the heat of the moment, it ends with an innocent person being shot to death.

I know how awful it sounds to call any kind of prejudice normal. But it’s really important. To work on implicit bias, we have to tone down the conversation so that we can begin to acknowledge these biases in ourselves. The word racism has become so presumptively loaded, so accusatory, so unthinkable that it’s automatically denied by just about everyone. We have to find a way to open hearts and minds. Not just other people’s hearts and minds, but our own.

When I think about implicit bias, I don’t think of Dr. King. I think of the young civil rights activist who was with him when he died: the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Many people see Rev. Jackson as a flawed man. And he is. But that’s what makes him a model of what we must do today.

In 1993, at the age of 52, Jesse Jackson gave a speech about crime in Chicago. He told the audience, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery -- then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”[8] That is implicit bias. That is a man recognizing implicit bias in himself. That is a man recognizing that nothing—not his religious training, not his progressive politics, not the color of his skin—protects him from the universal tendency to prejudge others.

But that wasn’t Rev. Jackson’s finest moment. His finest moment came a decade earlier, in one of the ugliest episodes of his life. In 1984, in a conversation he thought would stay private, Jesse Jackson referred to Jews as “hymies.” When his comment was reported, he denied saying it. Then he said it was no big deal. As confidently as Donald Trump now denies being a racist, Jesse Jackson categorically denied that anything in his life showed any hint of anti-Semitism.

It took him five months to stop making excuses and face his weakness as a human being. In July 1984, from the podium of the Democratic National Convention, Jesse Jackson spoke these words:

If, in my low moments, in word, deed or attitude … I have caused anyone discomfort, created pain, or revived someone’s fears, that was not my truest self. If there were occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not to my heart. … I am not a perfect servant. … As I develop and serve, be patient: God is not finished with me yet.”[9]

God is not finished with me yet. That is the wisdom we need today. Not self-righteousness, not self-flagellation, but the simple, profound understanding that we are imperfect creatures -- and that by God’s grace, we have it in our power to strive every day to be better. So let us heed the words of Dr. King. Let us let God work in our hearts.

---

[1] “A Challenge to the Churches and Synagogues,” Jan. 17, 1963.

[2] "The Role of the Church in Facing the Nation’s Chief Moral Dilemma," April 25, 1957.

[3] Address at the Fiftieth Annual NAACP Convention, July 17, 1959.

[4] Address to MIA Mass Meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, Nov. 14, 1956.

[5] "Conquering Self-Centeredness” (sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church), Aug. 11, 1957.

[6] “How Modern Christians Should Think of Man,” Nov. 29, 1949 to Feb. 15, 1950.

[7] Address to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, April 19, 1961.

[8] Bob Herbert, “A Sea Change On Crime,” New York Times, Dec. 12, 1993.

[9] Address to the Democratic National Convention, July 18, 1984.

"We are enraged, but engaged": Views from the PFLAG/LGBT Community in the face of the incoming Trump Administration

Rolf Preisdorfer comforts his teenage son, Cyrus. Cyrus is straight, but fears what the Trump administration might mean for his two dads.

WAMU/Armando Trull

           Last month, WAMU reporter Armando Trull contacted the Metro DC Chapter of PFLAG office, asking if we could put together of a group of PFLAGers to talk about the incoming Trump Administration.  He had been interviewing many LGBT people in the D.C. area, and he wanted to include a PFLAG perspective.

            I contacted fellow PFLAGer (and founder of the Rainbow Youth Alliance) Stephanie Kreps, and we assembled a variety of people: White, Black, Hispanic; parents of adult LGBT children; parents of younger LGBT children; a high school transgender girl (and activist within her school); as well as a lesbian who, with her wife, have a four-year old child; and a gay married couple who are the parents of a boy they adopted as a baby 15 years ago.  The audio of Armando’s moving report led with the latter family and was broadcast on January 6.

            We met at Rockville Unitarian/Universalist Congregation on a chilly evening in late December.  All of us live in Montgomery County MD, a place where Donald Trump received less than 20% of the vote in November, and in which elected officials uniformly are supportive of LGBT rights and inclusion.  Since most of us did not know each other, we had our own introductory session before Armando joined us.  

            Everyone spoke lovingly of their families, and of the fact, as a result of hard work by so many, that by 2016, their loved ones have been so much more secure than in the past.  That LGBTQ people are free to be themselves and that, at least in our County and State, free from legal discrimination.  I truly believe that if all the people who voted for a President who is about to set the stage for a potential roll-back of so much progress made over the last decade and a half could have been in the room, most of them would have had second thoughts about what they have done.

            Each story brought me near to tears.

            Janine talked about her journey as a PFLAG mom and sister, and the attempts to reconcile with others in her family. 

            Nancy spoke about the challenges faced by her high school trans daughter Autumn, and Autumn spoke about the progress her school has made, and her role in moving that progress along – with the awareness that there is still work to do. 

            Zoila spoke about her positive journey with her now-first grade trans daughter, who has been welcomed for who she is in her local elementary school. 

            Stephanie, the mother of a young adult bi-sexual daughter and a young adult gay son, spoke about the fears they have (and the fears she and her husband have) for their futures in the new political atmosphere – noting that even in progressive Montgomery County there have been horrible hate crimes since the election, describing the beating of a friend of hers, a 70-year old gay man. 

            Jennifer, a Ph.D clinical psychologist, spoke of the life she and her wife have built, along with their young daughter, and of the process of achieving acceptance in her family.

            Dominic and Rolf spoke of their journey:  they have been together for more than 30 years, and married as soon as it became “legal.”  They spoke of their adoption of their son as a baby, and how proud they are of the young man he has become. 

            I related that my wife and I are the parents of two gay sons, both of whom are married, and that we are now the grandparents of a wonderful little girl who is growing up in an environment in which, at least so far, she sees no discrimination.  I expressed my concern, given the hatred that the campaign had unleashed, that LGBT people would become greater targets than they already are, along with so many other once (and perhaps once again) marginalized groups, even though Trump had not singled out LGBT people for invective.  Moreover, any hope that Trump might be a bulwark – or at least an impediment – to anti-LGBT public policy in the face of right-wing Republican congressional determination to role back the progress of the last dozen years – has disappeared as Trump put officials of the Family Research Council and their allies in charge of the presidential transition and has designated one anti-LGBT activist after another in charge of every domestic cabinet department. 

            Virtually everyone spoke of the fear they felt on election night, and in the weeks and months that have followed.  This fear goes beyond the anxiety people often feel when their candidate loses to someone with whom they disagree.  Rather, it is fear that strikes at the heart of safety and security they and their families have in their homes and communities.  They are keenly aware of how hard the struggle has been to achieve acceptance and equality before the law, and are fearful that all of this could be undone in the next few years.  Sadly, these fears are not unwarranted.

            Through both legislative and executive action and, ultimately, two more Supreme Court appointments, Trump and his allies promise to Make America Great Again by pretending to Make America Totally Straight Again. 

            And that is why, as much as we might wish we need not re-fight all the struggles of the last years, we must be prepared to make our case to our friends and our neighbors, so that we can bring simple humanity back to our politics and our government.  As Dominic said at our meeting, “We are enraged, but engaged.”

            We owe that to each other, to our families, and to everyone’s families.