Rhetoric Race and Religion
The events in Ferguson and Forney have made more visible to more people the divisions that many of us have long known are present in our society. This time of heightened visibility offers us an opportunity for a sustained response across our subdivisions and invites reflection on some recurring and enduring patterns and, the potential for their disruption and transformation.
The response evoked by the title of this teaching— turning tables — is a holy, wholly prophetic, kinetic, theologically justifiable, violently disruptive response to state sanctioned violence against historically subjugated peoples. A modern day womanist corollary to tuning tables is snatching wigs, the rhetorical practice of exposing that which poseurs and perpetrators want to keep hidden under the cosmetic veneer of respectability.
Today I am snatching the wig of the white supremacist infrastructure of institutional America including and particularly the framework of policing, citizenship and the institutional church including the patriarchy with which it colludes. But perhaps it is not I but God who, through the scriptures, is the real wig-snatcher.
Because I’m a biblical scholar and a priest, and because I’m a preacher who learned my craft in the black community, I look to the scriptures of Jesus, the Hebrew Scriptures, for a word in response to the blood of black women and men crying out from the ground, from even their own homes, crying out from the asphalt, crying out from the sidewalk, crying out from the pavement, crying out from the streets where some of their bodies were left to lay in disrespect for hours upon hours.
The word I hear in and from the scriptures is justice.
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