Tom Adams

Progress on racial justice?

As I paused and reflected yesterday on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy, it was hard to avoid wanting a clear report card on the progress made on his mission. As I pondered the question, “How are we doing in becoming a more equal and just nation?”, my first thoughts were all negative.

Faith and Finding Our Voices

Faith is a terribly challenging experience if you take it seriously. It can truly mess up your life. You find yourself picking up the Bible and trying once again to figure out what Jesus meant by his words and actions. Some of them seem so simple and direct. Others seem to put you at risk in standing up for the marginalized and the poor. You know that if you do so it will change relationships. You are challenged to become like a John the Baptist figure and find your voice to speak. John was a “voice crying out in the wilderness!” Many times, that’s where we find ourselves. In church work and on the political scene we are often in some kind of wilderness trying to cry out and hoping someone hears. Finding your voice, whether it is in the spoken word or the written word or in some kind of action, can be a scary thing. You expose yourself for what you believe is important, and for what you believe is being neglected.

Giving, Institutions and Working for Justice

A sermon I heard Sunday got me thinking about a 12-Step friend, Ralph, who would say to me frequently: “Tom, give up, give in, just give.” Ralph was quite a bit older than me, and I dismissed this saying the same way I did when he told me, “Everything is just the way it is supposed to be.” I concluded his was a point of view that came with age and declining aspirations. Yet, I am growing into an understanding of this idea, but more from a sense of acceptance than the loss of capacity to imagine.

How Waiting Nurtures Faith

In just a few short years, my whole way of life has become intimately connected to technology to determine where I go and what I do, to know and even control the routes I take. I avoid going to a certain store when I find online that they don’t have a needed item in stock. I never have to wonder if someone tried to call me as it is all recorded. I don’t even have to own a car thanks to rideshare options.

Faith in Action: Justice for Transgender People

I was not born a Catholic. I was raised with no religious tradition and I didn’t get baptized into the Catholic faith until I was 48. I was born with a female gender identity but because I was identified male at birth. I didn’t come to live as a woman until I was 40. So resurrection, transfiguration and epiphany (the revealing of that which has always been true) were part of my lived experience before I began to understand those words in a faith tradition experience.

Facing Backlash in the Fight for Social Justice? Next Actions?

As the Thanksgiving festivities wind down, I find myself increasingly disturbed by the seeming reversal in attitudes and actions relative to racial justice and equity in the United States. Just a year ago, over half of American voters wanted a return to healing our race wounds and learning to live and love one another.

Progress on racial justice?

This internal debate had started the previous weekend when I saw the new West Side Story in a theatre with mandated Covid protections. This story vividly replays the tragic and violent turf war between poor, left-behind, young white men and recently-arrived young immigrants from Puerto Rico. West Side Story was first seen as a Broadway play in 1957 and then in an adapted movie version in 1961.

Over sixty years ago, the creative team of Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim had the courage to introduce in the story a number of themes that were seen as quite radical at the time. The play was clear about the racism that drove the fierce rivalry. It went head-on at the taboo subject of interracial relationships and marriage. And it depicted how local governments used slum clearance to displace poor people to create housing and cultural venues for middle- and upper-income people.

My first reaction to seeing this movie was a deep sadness that so many of the issues are still front and center six decades later. It is not hard to substitute the current fight by white supremacists to keep control of America for the battle of the movie’s white gang to keep its turf on the west side of Manhattan.

Both then and now, the idea of preserving white control is an apartheid fantasy. This desire seems driven by fear and a desperate feeling of being left behind, left out. A recent conversation with an older friend about why we should focus on “all lives matter,” not Black Lives Matter, reminded me of this fear. While my friend was willing to acknowledge that poor white people did not arrive as slaves and do not face automatic discrimination because of skin color and structural racism, he was unwilling to see Black Lives Matter as a statement of this racial difference and of the need to address racism against Blacks.

Ironically these reflections led me to begin to shift to less hopelessness about the lack of progress some fifty years since Dr. King’s murder. But less hopelessness is a long way from optimism. The murders of Black people and people of color continue. But we do have, for those who want it, much greater access to a more accurate history of the racist practices adopted by the dominant white population that have caused the racial disparities between whites and Black and brown people in educational outcomes, in family wealth and in any other category of wellbeing you want to pick

What gave me some hope was not progress on data points that illustrate that history. No, I took solace in the possibility of compassion and in the fact that the fear and hate are no longer disguised. The ugliness of racism in America is as obvious today as it was when the KKK was lynching Black people. What’s different and gives hope is that there are more eyes open to racism and still more open to considering new ways to make reparations for and end the ugliness of our past. This is slow progress for sure, yet it appears to be progress.

Martin Luther King, Jr. modeled what is meant by working for justice and keeping love in his heart. He hated the deeds, not the perpetrators of the deeds. He and thousands of Black and Brown leaders have taught us all what compassion means. The fact that our nation has survived so many years with this deep underbelly of racial hate and conflict is indeed a miracle. And much of the miracle comes from the generous tolerance of people of color.

As we move through this very divisive and still ugly time, I take solace in the belief that what we are experiencing is necessary to get to a place where the justice and love Dr. King preached and lived are our norm and way of life.

As you reflect on Dr. King and his legacy, what brings you hope or despair? What actions are calling you to advance justice and compassion? Hope and action are connected.

For those inclined to pray, we might consider this prayer from Dr. King: “We are not satisfied with the world as we have found it. It is too little the kingdom of God as yet. Grant us the privilege of a part in its regeneration.”

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/prayers