Paying the Cost of the Sins of Systemic Racism

Below is my column published in the Grand Haven Tribune this week. 

During our parish’s Lectionary Bible Study this past week, we discussed the story of the deliverance of Israel at the Red Sea in Exodus 14:19-31. This was that moment, memorialized by movies like The Ten Commandments and Prince of Egypt when the Hebrew Slaves were faced with the Red Sea in front of them and an Egyptian army in hot pursuit behind them. God divided the waters so the Israelites could pass through on dry land, finally finding safety and freedom. He then sent those same waters crashing down on the Egyptian army, eliminating the threat Egypt posed to the liberation of God’s people.

There is a somewhat disturbing line near the end of the story, “Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore.” I know I never imagined that picture when I was told this story in Sunday School, bloated and drowned bodies of Egyptian soldiers washed up on the seashore.

The line provoked a discussion among us about how complicit the Egyptian soldiers were in the slavery of the Hebrews and the hard heart of Pharaoh. Did God really need to kill them all? It seemed to some of us to be profoundly violent.

And yet, for hundreds of years the children of Israel were enslaved by the Egyptians. For hundreds of year every Egyptian profited and lived a better life because of the brutal oppression of the Hebrews. Every Egyptian had some culpability, then, in this communal sin. And when the Egyptian army decided to try to continue the oppression even longer, by seeking to take the Hebrews captive once more, they were all killed for their obstinance. Their death in the Red Sea only happened as a consequence of their refusal to let the Hebrews go, their refusal to turn from their sin and oppression.

This all reminded me of one of the most powerful sections in Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. This is a long quote, so bear with me:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him. Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

From Lincoln’s perspective, the horror and violence of the Civil War were the consequences, the justice, because of the centuries of enslavement. And if the violence needed to continue “until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” then that is what justice might need to look like.

And I wonder if in our own time, the violence and unrest we are seeing is a similar truth. The violence we are seeing is the cost of our own sins of racism, of the Jim Crow south, of redlining which perpetuated segregation, of all the ways our country has systemically sought to oppress and devalue the bodies of our citizens of color. I wonder if, to paraphrase Lincoln, these protests will continue “until every drop of blood unjustly drawn by a white person is paid by another drawn by a protestor.”

I hope this is not the case. Indeed, I want to be quick to point out a report came out this week from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) and the Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University which found that 93% of the racial protests since the death of George Floyd have been entirely peaceful and non-destructive. And there is increasing evidence that much of the violence has been either from outside far right agitators (as happened in Grand Rapids) or was precipitated by a violent police response to a protest that had previously been non-violent.

Regardless, though, there is a cost. There is a cost our nation will pay as long as we continue to treat black bodies as inherently dangerous, as long as they are more likely to be imprisoned or killed by police than white people. There is a cost to our nation as long as we continue to draw false equivalencies between far-right racist rhetoric and those who are rising up against increasingly fascist realities in our country. There is a cost to our nation as long as we don’t seek actively to become not color-blind but anti-racist, to actively engage in the practice of identifying, challenging, and changing the values, structures and behaviors that perpetuate systemic racism.”

God will bring salvation. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jrd., said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But there must be justice before there can be salvation; there must be justice before there can be peace. And sometimes that justice is experiencing the painful consequences of our own sin—including the sin of being complicit in systemic racism—so that we might be moved to turn.

Even now, bodies are washing up on the shore of our own proverbial Red Sea as our country continues barely to tolerate protestors, much less be willing to make hard changes to bring justice about. I hope that we, as a country, will turn from this sin soon so that justice can be wrought and peace may yet be found.

The Rev. Dr. Jared C. Cramer, Tribune community columnist, serves as rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven. Information about his parish can be found at www.sjegh.com.