Jeremiads and Justice for Jacob Blake

Today, I’m listening to gunshots.

I’m listening to my wife gasp as a policeman 66 miles away mercilessly shoots 29-year-old father-of-three Jacob Blake in the back seven times in front of his young children. I’m listening as his body falls onto the horn of his car, causing it to cry out as he no longer can.

I’m listening to my heartbeat accelerate. I’m trying not to cover my ears as shrieking injustice grows to define the land of the free.

Today, forced into rage-writing and praying for Jacob Blake’s life, I am imploring you to listen to each of the items that follow, and to share them with others. Not because I know best, not because you should listen to what I say. But because a Kenosha police officer needs to listen, someone in your family needs to listen, and an old friend on Facebook, climbing uphill out of an entrenched echo chamber, needs to listen.

Jeremiads

The Hebrew prophet Jeremiah famously accused the Jews of breaking their agreement with God and correctly predicted their demise at the hands of the Babylonians. He accused the Jewish leaders of corruption and lamented the social injustice they oversaw.

To stay accountable and functional, every society needs its own historical catalogue of Jeremiahs – “to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jeremiah 1:10). America is no exception – the list of prophets issuing grave warnings about the future of our society continues to grow. But this week, two speeches stood out to me as jeremiads of their time, worthy of a close watch and listen – one from James Baldwin, one from Barack Obama.

James Baldwin debates William F. Buckley, Jr., at Cambridge University, 1965

Baldwin admits that he finds himself in the position of a “kind of Jeremiah” in 1965. He passionately asserts, amidst throngs of white Cambridge University students and faculty, that the American dream comes only at the expense of Black Americans, and that this harms both Black and white Americans.

Taking on Baldwin is the conservative National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr., whose potent intellect is plainly outmatched by the experience-based lamentations, at once improvised and eloquent, unleashed by Baldwin.

Baldwin begins at 14:25, but it’s worth watching the whole video below to fully absorb the experience of Cambridge in the 1960s and grasp the context in which Baldwin makes his case. He speaks of police brutality, yes, but he defends the notion that the American Dream occurs only at the expense of Black Americans by arguing for a more deep-rooted cruelty. He speaks of the systematic dismantling and warping of reality that occurs within the minds and hearts of Black children in America.

“The most private, most serious thing” oppressing a Black American achieves, Baldwin says, “is to destroy his sense of reality.”

“In the moment you are born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone and every face is white, and since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are too. It comes as a great shock, around the age of 5 or 6 or 7, to discover the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you.”

He continues:

“It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved any place for you. The disaffection, the demoralization, and the gap between one person and another only on the basis of the color of their skin begins there and accelerates throughout a whole lifetime – until you realize you’re 30 and having a terrible time managing to trust your countrymen.”

Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention, 2020

Last week, President Barack Obama delivered a speech at the Democratic National Convention that prompted historian David Blight to dub him “an American Jeremiah.” He warned that the re-election of Donald Trump could represent a kind of Babylon moment for America – a domestic exile, not from our homeland, but from our values and and our free and fair elections.

“This president and those in power – those who benefit from keeping things the way they are – they are counting on your cynicism. They know they can’t win you over with their policies, so they’re hoping to make it as hard as possible for you to vote, and to convince you that your vote does not matter. That is how they win. That is how they get to keep making decisions that affect your life, and the lives of the people you love.”

He went on, and as he said these words, tears welled up and pent-up anger surfaced:

“That’s how a democracy withers, until it’s no democracy at all. And we cannot let that happen. Do not let them take away your power. Do not let them take away your democracy.”

In delivering their Jeremiads, both Baldwin and Obama called their listeners to action and appealed to them with both logic and fear. But Baldwin was at Cambridge to educate, to explain, to enlighten. Obama, on the other hand, spoke last week to entreat, to plea, to urge.

Two More Voices

Protests will swell response to Jacob Blake’s killing, as they should. To add fuel to their fire, protesters should explore the range of voices revealing and detailing the many manifestations of America’s cruel, imagined racial hierarchy. Two of the sharpest, most crucial voices speaking persuasive truths and rewriting modern American history are Isabel Wilkerson and Richard Rothstein.

Isabel Wilkerson on America’s caste system

India is justifiably the first caste system to come to mind for many Americans familiar with the term. The system in India focuses on religion as a means of dividing groups of individuals into fixed classes of wealth and status. Wilkerson, the trailblazing journalist behind The Warmth of Other Suns and now Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, explains that if we attempt to fit America into the framework of a caste system, the clearest means of division is race, not religion. When we view America through this lens, Wilkerson says, it gives us a fuller view of our long history of racial injustice.

“Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions that undergirds the more visible delineations that we make among ourselves,” Wilkerson says. Drawing a metaphor to the human body, she continues, “Caste is the bones [of our division], race is the skin, and class is the diction and the accent and the education and the clothing – the things that we can control as we present ourselves to the world.”

Castes hold people in place, just as casts hold limbs in place. In America, members of the lower caste, including Jacob Blake, lives their entire lives swimming upstream against prejudice, injustice and the warped reality James Baldwin described in 1965.

Listen to Isabel Wilkerson’s 15-minute conversation with the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Richard Rothstein on residential segregation

Richard Rothstein puts it plainly. His clear, factual prose lands first in the head and then in the heart, when you read The Color of Law and realize the scope of the system of residential segregation created and perpetuated by city, state and federal government agencies to this day.

“Our system of official segregation was not the result of a single law that consigned African Americans to designated neighborhoods; rather, scores of racially explicit laws, regulations and government practices combined to create a nationwide system of urban ghettos surrounded by white suburbs,” Rothstein writes.

Listen to a segment of The Color of Law below.