c. 2004 Religion News Service
(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.)
(UNDATED) During my youth in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was common to hear African-Americans speaking of “The Struggle.” Broadly speaking, The Struggle referred to the pursuit of social, political and economic equality being waged by black Americans.
As such, every court decision, legislative action or social accomplishment that affected black people was viewed through the larger prism of The Struggle.
These, of course, were tumultuous years, influenced by a generation of baby boomers frustrated at the apparent gulf between the nation’s purported Judeo-Christian ethic and its unjust policies both at home and abroad. Thus, activism and protest became the order of the day, as the Vietnam War and women’s rights (including abortion rights) joined civil rights as the nation’s cause celebres.
However, for many African-Americans, if not most, The Struggle continued to be rooted in the race issue. And there it remains, even to this day.
And therein, I suppose, lies the rub. For even as I seek to remain faithful to the cause _ engaged in what some are calling a “second” civil rights movement _ I am bemused by the continual presence of The Struggle. Even as I, and thousands like me, continue to wrestle with issues that have a disproportionate effect on the black urban poor _ substance abuse, crime, unemployment, incarceration and the like _ I remain fascinated by their intransigence.
As a student of the Bible, I am aware that Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you and you can help them anytime you want” (Mark 14:7). But why is it that, in America at least, the poor (which includes the illiterate, the homeless and the imprisoned) remain overwhelmingly black?
Of course, greater minds than mine have wrestled with this question. For example, New York University law professor Derrick Bell argued that “racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society.” The reason, he postulated, was that since racism is endemic to America _ rooted as it is in the traditions of slavery and Jim Crow _ American society cannot function without it.
As a result, any strides made against racism, such as the aforementioned court decisions, civil rights laws and social advances, are doomed to be only symbolic in importance and temporary in effect. And thus, like the Hebrew patriarch Isaac in the biblical book of Genesis, we blacks are forced to re-dig the wells of water that our fathers dug because they have been stopped up by our enemies (Genesis 26:12-18).
To the degree that Bell is correct, it suggests that something pernicious, something pervasively evil is at work in the hearts of many Americans. It is an evil that, in its ability to shatter dreams and destroy lives, is matched only by the venality and criminality exacted by its victims on others. For such, indeed, is the way of the world: those who are victimized, victimize others in return.
The Bible has a term for such all-encompassing evil. It is called sin.
DEA/JL END ATCHISON
