“I Am a Prisoner of Hope”
There is an inconvenient reality to which I often allude in my lectures and preaching. In very material terms, my daughter has fewer rights as a Black person in the United States of America than I did at a similar age. Lost is much of the progress born of a society that, at least for a time, was repentant and primed to reset itself in view of historic wrongs. In a similar vein, as a woman my daughter has only a few more rights than my mother did at a similar age, the latter having come of middle age during the blossoming women’s rights movement. Both instances, so it seems, casualties of the backlash of reactionary nostalgia for simpler times when everyone knew their “place.”
Whether Reconstruction 2.0 survives this most recent onslaught or not, it is a bracing and undeniable reality that a majority of white folks are willing to immolate the promise of this nation on a pyre of petty resentments.
These last months have been dispiriting for me. I have felt that we, as a nation, have been in rehearsal to do a summer stock remake of a horrid play that had originally opened to rave reviews. Call it The Death of Reconstruction. With each passing decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to chop away at the edifice of the mid-20th century concordat that enshrined the victories of the modern Civil Rights Movement, I am recalled to the political truth that rights once lost will take several generations to regain—this, because of the simple fact that a political movement of backlash which has built enough strength to roll back these gains is not just a passing phenomenon. It has legs.
A Fine-Tuned Backlash
For at least a decade now, I have been struck that various strands of American life could so easily coalesce around resentment of the fundamental postwar restructuring of our culture, politics, and economics occasioned by the movements for equal rights and racial and gender justice. This coalescence succeeded in such a resonant way that it appeared to be the work of a skilled and charismatic necromancer. Other forces have played their role in creating our current dilemma: previous decades of fine-tuning the deceitful political art of talking about race without ever saying the word; the cultural whispering that created a media ecosphere in which women had just stepped out for a bit before returning home to Stepford; the erasure of Ellis Island as a touchstone for American memory and a symbol of possibility in a nation that could transcend centuries-old ethnic rivalries by the browning of the term “immigrant.”
At least according to most historians, Reconstruction chimed its death knell in 1898 with the overthrow of the Wilmington, N.C., civil government and federal offices by the murderous white supremacist mob. When the U.S. Postmaster was forced to flee and his offices torched, the first blooms of a just multiracial society withered as they encountered the frost of backlash. The ground was prepared two years before, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that citizens of color did indeed have a place in society, but separate from that of their white countrymen. The decision set in motion the chipping away at the building blocks which had given Reconstruction the legislative power to raise Black Folks from the status of interlopers in all public places save the field or the rapist’s bed to the stature of citizens, legislators, and humans worthy of respect. Perhaps it was good fortune that there were still a tragically sufficient number of empty chairs at dinner tables across the North and Midwest because of the recent unpleasantness of the War of Rebellion that the backlash did not gain sufficient strength to erase the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. To the good fortune of history, enough people preserved the legacy that all the bloodshed was in the end about a cause that was noble, even if there was deep ambivalence about the place of Black people in their society.
Who Then is My Neighbor?
In these days, the malevolent forces of backlash against contemporary civil rights progress—against Reconstruction 2.0—stride across the political and cultural landscape of our nation. What we know from history is that once the necromancer’s work has achieved its goal—the resurrection of the “Real America”—he will have his due, and once again threaten the rights of those not male, not white/white adjacent, not patriarchally heterosexual or from the nation’s heartlands.
So, I’ve been thinking: what of Reconstruction 2.0 and its possible demise?
For reasons that remain a mystery to me—the inner workings of Providence and all—God has seen fit to unfold my life in PWIs. From the circumstance of my baptism into Nazarene Congregational Church on MacDonough Street in Brooklyn—a member church of the predominately white United Church of Christ—to being bused to Francis Lewis High School in Flushing, N.Y., to my career beginnings in finance in 1980s New York City, to ministry within the UCC, to my academic work at Yale University, to my career in theological education and to the pastoral work in what will likely be the coda of my career, my life has been entwined in quintessentially white life-worlds. (As an aside, this has been the journey of a self-described race man, from way back). Certainly, my own choices and aspirations have shaped and impelled this journey, but I am enough of a Calvinist to feel that at least some of it was God’s guiding and desire.
What then is a denizen such as I to make of this long political movement of backlash and hostility? Whether Reconstruction 2.0 survives this most recent onslaught or not, it is a bracing and undeniable reality that a majority of white folks are willing to immolate the promise of this nation on a pyre of petty resentments. It appears inescapable that a Supreme Court which materialized out of these resentments will continue apace its work of diminishing the prospects for many of us. These questions had a different existential tenor for my elders, who built life-worlds in which white people were absent save for those hours of employment. The tenor was different also for the religious among us whose vocations unfolded within the nurturing walls of the historic Black Church. And also for those pedagogues in the world of HBCUs. Certainly they all faced challenges because of the racial inequities of our society, but they were rarely left feeling foolish for having invested their lives in what may yet prove to be a fool’s errand to believe most white folks want to do better.
Who, then, is my neighbor when so many want to recreate and extend life-worlds in which a vote for Donald Trump seems the only option? Does one take up the cause célèbre of the kinfolk and “keep freedom in the family and do what you can for the white folks,” as counseled by Purlie?[1] Or …
When Truth Stood Up
These last months, my steps have been dogged by a lingering suspicion. An intuition which I cannot not shake. A haunting sense that there is but one answer for me to Sojourner Truth’s question to Frederick Douglass at a 1852 meeting of abolitionists in the thick of the fight against slavery. Having despaired of divine assistance in the struggle because of majority white Christian support for the institution of slavery, Douglass had concluded that Black people and their allies were on their own.
At that meeting in Ohio, Truth rose to ask Douglass but one question: “Frederick, Is God Dead?”
I now come back to that moment because it is ever the case that the malevolent forces of the retrenchment of iniquity will have their day. And in that day they will rage as if they have had the last word on the matter. Religionists who revel in the worship of a god of brutality and malice will be seduced and rejoice in displays of “divine power” made visible in the suffering of those unlike themselves. In that day stones that had been painstakingly removed from walls of separation to create roads to a better future will again be repurposed to divide. And it will seem to many of good heart that theirs was the errand of fools—fools who had hoped that things might be different, and as Lincoln intoned, we might yet live into “the better angels of our nature” and “build a more perfect union.”
I find that this latest election has invited me to a space of despair about the hardened hearts of so many of my countrymen, whose greatest joy seems to be bringing harm to so many of us. And yet, I find again that I am a prisoner of Hope. The Hope that shaped my life since first answering God’s call. A Hope that will not allow me to give up the fight for a better world in which all of God’s creation might flourish. A Hope that will not allow me to leave my heart unattended so that these times in which iniquity roars it might be hardened by self-righteousness and petty grievances. A Hope that my daughter, her daughter, and her daughter for generations to come might know a world of which I could only dream.
At times, I call this hope damnable—because it may yet be the case that I am proven a fool and spend the rest of my life fighting battles for a place in this society which I thought had long been won. But, because I would answer Sojourner Truth with a resounding “NO, GOD IS NOT DEAD,” I take heart and look to the other side, whatever it may be.
“And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong.
Alleluia, Alleluia!” [2]
Stephen G. Ray Jr. ’93 M.Div., ’00 Ph.D. is senior minister of United Church on the Green in New Haven, and the former president of Chicago Theological Seminary. He is the author of Do No Harm: Social Sin and Christian Responsibility (Fortress, 2002) and co-author of Black Church Studies: An Introduction (Abingdon, 2007), and other books. The immediate past president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion, he was the 2018 Alumni Award for Distinction in Theological Education from Yale Divinity School.