by Roland Wrinkle
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” Bishop Desmond Tutu.
I went to school with Kareem. He cut a striking and unforgettable figure walking through (and distinctly above) the crowded Romanesque quad loping from one class to the next. Me…not so much so. He was taught and mentored by the legendary “Wizard of Westwood,” John Wooden, and went on to become one of the three best basketball players of all time. I attended John Wooden’s basketball camp, on the way to becoming a stunningly mediocre JV basketball player. Ten years ago, I sat next to him while eating breakfast in a Manhattan Beach café. Kareem has authored 15 books brimming with heady insights, reflecting a lifetime of social activism. I spit out a column for a small church in Newhall. Yes, the parallels are uncanny.
Before returning to Kareem, I pause to give myself at least a crumb of credit. A more than-significant chunk of my career was spent pioneering and championing the cause of women who had been abused and battered as subordinates in the workplace. But it seemed like it wasn’t changing the culture. It took time. Then, with the sudden onslaught of the #MeToo movement, I was shocked and amazed to witness the speed and effectiveness of such a massive cultural transformation. In the blink of an eye, it was no longer okay for male superiors to sexually harass and then retaliate against female underlings. Where I had been winning civil rights lawsuits and changing the law, #MeToo had changed peoples’ hearts (“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” Jer. 31.33). And it happened so fast!
Now, once again, we find ourselves reaping the whirlwind (Hosea 8.7) of racial injustice…and Kareem stands tall in the front ranks. The death of George Floyd ignited a racial justice firestorm unseen since the ‘60’s. Yes, we’ve come a long way, but consider where we started. The country was founded on the constitutional enshrinement of black slavery.
That anti-Jesus abomination was reversed a century later…. courtesy of a full-scale civil war which killed 618,222 Americans, more than any other war. Slavery was replaced by Jim Crow laws, the KKK and a pandemic of lynchings of black Americans. Then we moved on…to legally mandated segregation, in schools, housing, voting and marriage…all memorably well within my lifetime. Now that those laws have been formally changed, what has endured is systemic racism which infects and affects much of black life today.
So…will current conflagrations now suddenly rid us of this perversion of, and trampling on, God’s will for New Creation in the body and work of His son, Jesus? Will racial injustice take a sudden and sharp turn towards biblical justice similar to workplace equity? Boy, I hope so. It kinda feels like things aren’t going to go back (or can’t go back) to where they were. (“Lord, how long must I wait?” Psalm 13.) That the Kingdom of God will significantly advance in the midst of this fallen creation, LA Times columnist, Sandy Banks, is skeptical: “The speed and degree of this evolution both delight and puzzle me. I’m heartened but still heartsick, encouraged but unconvinced.” My friend Kareem has been disappointed before, hesitant to envision his country keeping its promise “that all men [and women] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” He recently wrote, “[I]n my 60 years of social activism, I’ve heard these gospel songs before and my fear is that once the spotlights go down, the sympathetic audience—now moved to tears by the chorus—simply goes home, the words to the songs quickly forgotten.” Yet, he goes on to say, “you can’t be in the business of social reform without a deep reservoir of hope” and he grounds current hopes in examples of real progress such as the #MeToo movement. And, with one eye trained on the scriptures, it’s important to remember that the civil rights advancements of the ‘60’s were launched and realized by the efforts of Christ’s church, and its clergy. From the pulpits to the public squares, we heard the promise that God makes no ethnic distinctions among those who are in Christ, “you are all children of God through faith.” (Gal 3.26) and that, in the Kingdom of God, “God himself will be with them and be their God. ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Rev 21). I hope (and hope is the indispensable currency of the followers of Jesus) that, just as the bonfires ignited by the civil rights movement became the crucible for tangible measures taken towards the yetunrealized goal of racial justice, that current crises will serve to advance the Kingdom and promises of God, for He is “making everything new!” (Rev 21.5). I see scripture wafting above the flames. “And I will give them one heart, new spirit I will put within them. “I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh….” (Ezekiel 11:19; Ezekiel 36:26; Jeremiah 31:33; Hebrews 8:10). We need the church, and its leaders – once again and even more forcefully – to preach the gospel of New Creation and call for the beast of racial injustice to be “thrown into the lake of fire.” (Rev 20.14 and 15). Dietrich Bonhoeffer, no stranger to injustice, warns, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
Kareem quotes the Baptist pastor, Martin Luther King, who opened his “Letters From a Birmingham Jail” by expressing his disappointment with “the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” Jesus, fulfilling Isaiah, claimed he would never rest “till he has brought justice through to victory.”
At the time, I wrote an article entitled, “#MeToo: WHERE WAS THE CHURCH WHEN THE CULTURE LOOKED AWAY FROM SEXUAL ABUSE IN THE WORKPLACE?” The church in America is dying… while exploding worldwide. It was silent then. If it is silent now…I fear it may never be heard from again. My hope is in God’s predisposition towards resurrection,
knowing that death is the necessary condition precedent to resurrection.