NEW YORK CITY—Angry demonstrations shook 170 American cities in the days before Nov. 27, Thanksgiving Day, when, according to custom, Americans gather to thank God for the land that received them when they fled hard times in Europe and 100 other places. We may realize that the demonstrators are nearly all Afro-Americans, and we remember that America was not a land of freedom but a place of slavery when they started arriving in the 17th century. Slavery lasted almost 200 years, until President Abraham Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation freeing all slaves in 1863.
All that time while other immigrants were going to school, starting businesses and managing farms, Afro-Americans were slaves in the alien cotton fields of white plantation owners. Then, with the Proclamation, they were thrown into the midst of one of the most competitive societies in the world to sink or swim.
I asked Filipino friends what they thought of the grand jury hearing in Ferguson, Missouri, that resulted in no charges filed against a white policeman who had shot dead an unarmed Afro-American teenager, and the ensuing riots. Almost all were sympathetic to the Afro-American people. They asked why it was taking White America so long to treat all people fairly, and so long to understand the problems of Afro-Americans—a devil’s brew of historic injustice and poverty that has hardened into a culture. For Afro-Americans, the very air they breathe in the cities is poisoned by white bias.
Even as I write this, another wave of protests has broken out, this time in New York City, where another white policeman has been set free by a grand jury of all criminal charges in the chokehold death of another Afro-American man.
There have been breakthroughs, such as Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement of the 1960s, and the election of Barack Obama as president. Not every white American is racist, but Ferguson and the riots show that racism is similar to a great pool of spilled oil that has settled deep into the country’s spirit and pollutes the spirit’s waterways, and kills its birds and fish.
I was fortunate to be involved in a small way in the civil rights movement when I worked in an Afro-American parish in the South Bronx of New York in the years 1964-1966. I went with the other priests and the people of the parish to the rallies in the city and to giant rallies in Washington. I also went with 20 white priests of New York to join Dr. King in his key march in Selma in March 1965. Dr. King had invited white clergy to join him in a march that was intended to show that the beating his people suffered in a previous march and the attack dogs the police used had not broken his people’s spirit.
We listened to Dr. King preach in the small Selma Baptist Church, and then we marched. He put the white clergy up front beside him—none of us had looked for such an honor—and then we were off through crowds of people along the sidewalks, expecting stones, dogs, and police cruisers. The young Afro-American students around us, boys and girls, seemed unafraid. Dr. King was praying as he walked along.
I’ve never forgotten those moments. I think of them whenever I hear criticism of Afro-Americans. There was no violence that day in Selma under the world’s cameras.
Filipinos unanimously felt that the riots in America were counterproductive, and they agreed with President Obama that a solution to racism requires that Black and White America walk a long, patient road of trial and error, dialogue and understanding.
But bias is also active in the Philippines—for example, against our urban poor people. I noticed soon after I began to work with the
urban poor that the Manila government employed the same trucks it used to haul garbage out of the city to carry evicted poor people to distant relocation centers. Garbage and urban poor were treated similarly. The purpose was similar: Haul them both out of the city, garbage and poor, as quickly as possible.
Muslims still face Christian suspicion and hatred, as they have for centuries. The head of the first Jesuit team of missionaries sent to Mindanao after the Jesuits returned to Manila from their suppression made enemies among the Spaniards in the country when he declared that it wasn’t necessary to kill Muslims to have peace in Mindanao.
I think the starting point for all of us in this matter of race relations and poverty—and the two usually go together—is to realize that God has a preferential love for the poor and is therefore with them, Christian and Muslim poor, in a very special way. Despising the poor, we despise God. God is not with the poor in this special manner because they deserve it, but because He chooses to be with them.
The English writer Evelyn Waugh said, “To understand all is to forgive all.” We must learn more about all our poor. What is the history of our Muslim brothers and sisters? Why are there 5,000,000 urban poor men, women and children in Metro Manila? Who is to blame for their problems? We cannot allow ourselves to be biased; we have to overcome ignorance and become part of the solution.
We cannot serve God and bias.
Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates (urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com).