We’re going to start with words that are not my own:
[Recording]:“They say our people were born on the water. When it occurred no-one can say for certain. Perhaps it was in the second week. Or the third. But surely by the fourth, when they had not seen their land, or any land, for so many days that they lost count. It was after the fear had turned to despair, and the despair to resignation, and the resignation gave way – finally – to resolve. They knew then that they would not hug their grandmothers again, or share a laugh with a cousin during his nuptials, or sing a baby softly to sleep with the same
lullabies that their mothers had once sung to them.
The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so completely that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, that everything they ever knew had simply vanished from the earth.
Some could not bear the realization. They heaved themselves over the walls of wooden ships to swim one last time with their ancestors.
Others refused to eat, mouths clamped shut until their hearts gave out.
But in the suffocating hull of a ship called the White Lion, bound for where they did not know, those who refused to die understood that the men and women chained next to them in the dark were no longer strangers. They had been forged in trauma. They had been made black by those who believed themselves to be white.
And where they were headed, black equaled ‘slave.’ So these were their people now.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times Magazine, The 1619 Project Podcast, Episode 1,0.57”- 3’15”, published August 2019.
That’s the story of the founding of our nation. It’s not the story children are told in schools. In any school across the US, children are told that this nation was founded by people seeking religious freedom, that we broke from England because we didn’t want to be ruled from the outside and that instead we created a system of laws based in the idea of self-determination.
We The People Of The United States.
We, the People. Written in 1787 as part of the Preamble to the Constitution. The Constitution is the document of laws, the document designed to create a system of justice and fairness and prosperity. We the People of these United States, in order to form a more perfect union…
We wrote that a decade after the Declaration of Independence. It’s really there that we define what it means to be American, what this new nation is really all about…
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men 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.
But that’s not the whole story. There were ships bringing people in a search for freedom. And there were ships bringing people to a life of enslavement. The nation that was born here was born into a life-affirming, brand-new and transformative vision of freedom that had room to be made manifest. But that vision was far more narrow then than it is now.
The history of the United States is evolutionary. We are Not Yet. We are in process. We are becoming. And we are becoming, not only because of those white folks on the top of the ships with bold ideas about elections and free speech and press and freedom to worship. We are becoming because of those people chained on the bottom of those ships, those people who came here enslaved who had to fight – and whose ancestors continue to fight – for the very life, liberty and pursuit of happiness we claim. It’s the people brought here without access to the America our founders were creating who, in fact, have been the architects of our freedom.
Our founding fathers – and maybe a few mothers – had a vision unlike anything that had before been considered. Because of this vast land with so much space to experiment, the ideals of the Enlightenment had room to take hold. This was going to be a land of opportunity, a place people could think and speak without fear of governmental retribution. This would be a place leaders were accountable to the people, where every person had a voice and a vote, where no single person or even branch of government held all the power, where hard work would mean economic advancement. The strict social moors, infallible monarchs and forced religion of Europe would find no purchase here.
That vision, though, was intended specifically for white men and even more for white men with some means. Freedom may have been radical, but it was also narrowly interpreted. When the Declaration of Independence was first written, that independence was designed to include enslaved people, but the Southern colonies wouldn’t sign it. The decision was to fight that fight another day. And we did.
The ongoing enslavement of people after leaving Britain and declaring ourselves to be children of the Enlightenment, created a moral contradiction white people had trouble justifying. To live in this dilemma, white people told themselves that black people were less than human, thereby alleviating guilt and solidifying a racial caste system we have yet to fully dismantle.
If the Declaration of Independence was the fist step, the second step toward living our ideals of liberty was achieved when slavery was ended and freed slaves were recognized as citizens of this country. That wasn’t a given. One of the original plans was to deport every single person with African heritage. Every person whether they were slave or free, even if they had been born here generations earlier and never knew another land as home, they were all going to be put on ships and sent to Africa. Frederick Douglas led the fight to remain
in this country, bringing his opinion directly to President Abraham Lincoln,
the author of this scheme. The 14th Amendment ensured that all persons born on American soil would be free, enjoying all privileges of citizenship.
With the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 1st and 14th Amendments, we have the building blocks for the American Dream, for a nation that embodies a bold vision of self-evident truths, creating the opportunity for every person, equal under God, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And yet, 150 years later, the vision has yet to be realized. Reconstruction gave us a window into the potential of a new world. From 1867-1879, African Americans held public office, ran schools, purchased land and started moving toward self-determination. That came to a stretching halt just before 1880, but the hope for a better way didn’t die. Over the next 140 years, African Americans have been the people who have called this nation to live into our own ideals, our own vision of who we are. Frederick Douglas forced white Americans to see slaves as fully – and not 3/5ths – human. Sojourner Truth fought for women’s right to vote as soon as the Civil War ended, pushing a conversation very few people were having. Robert Abbott created the first black press, challenging us to live into the promise of the First Amendment and Rev. Richard Allen created the first historic black church, the foundation and source of social and economic liberation for 200 years. Other people who became the embodiment of America include Harriet Tubman who literally walked people from bondage to freedom and The Honorable Thurgood Marshall who codified equality into law. Of course, there’s Rev. Martin Luther King who pushed our nation to end
segregation, and Malcom X who designed a new world of social and economic
independence, while Michelle Alexander has raised our awareness about mass
incarceration, uncovering yet another way America is still “not yet”. This
isn’t a list of influential black Americans. This is a list of people who created this nation. Each of these people are catalysts for the American Dream. Their work moved and continues to move us ever closer to becoming a free nation where its citizens might have access to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
White people tend to think of this as a flawed, but pretty wonderful place to live. We expect systems to work and we celebrate the founding ideals. Black people know the system is broken, that it was created for white people. Frankly, as long as the system is broken for some people, the system doesn’t work.
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I was struggling to write this sermon. I wasn’t feeling like this should be my sermon- that this isn’t my story. My story is white. My people haven’t been here from the beginning, those weren’t my ancestors who imagined this new world. But it’s me they created this country for. White people. My people weren’t white when we first got here, but we were made white like a lot of other people in this land of black and white. And once we were white, we were Americans and this became my story.
But, mine is not the story of the slave or the culture created around living into emancipation or the forging of a real land of the free. I had a hard time writing this sermon because I know it shouldn’t be my voice telling this story. My voice has other stories to tell, but the story of becoming a people on the water, chained in the bowels of a ship crossing the Atlantic- that’s not my story. That’s why I didn’t tell it.
And yet, not preaching a sermon about black history wasn’t the right choice either. This is a history we need to know. The whitewashed history of American history books can’t be the only story told. So, I’m preaching this sermon, aware of my limitations and hoping you will forgive me.
As a white person, I was not taught how to talk about race. I was, though, taught how not to. It was impolite to notice if someone wasn’t white. If it had to be noticed as part of a story, it was best to say it in such a way as to demonstrate your own indifference with something like, “so-and-so, who happens to be black” as if their race was nearly irrelevant. And the truth is, when you’re part of the dominant group, you don’t have to notice other people. We can tell the story of how white men imagined America and we can be proud of our people and erase any other people in the story. I hear it and see it all the
time. I saw it from this pulpit a few weeks ago. I see it and hear it all the
time. I’m sure many of you do too.
So, this Black History Month, we’re telling stories and we’re seeing people. And with that, I’m going to let Nikole Hannah-Jones have the last word:
[Recording]“When I was a kid — it must have been in fifth or sixth grade. Our teacher gave us an assignment. It was a social studies class, and we were learning about different places that people came from, and this was her way of kind of telling the story of the great American melting pot. So she told us all to research our ancestral land and to write a small report about it, and then to draw a flag. I remember kind of looking up and making eye contact with the other black girl who was in the class, because we didn’t really have an ancestral land that we knew of. Slavery had made it so that we didn’t know where we came from in Africa. We didn’t have a specific country. And we could say that we were from the whole continent, but even so, there’s no such thing as an African flag. And so I remember going to the globe by my teacher’s desk — it was on the windowpane along the left side of the classroom — and spinning it to the continent of Africa and just picking a random African country.
So I went back to my desk, and I drew that random African country’s flag, and I wrote a report about it. And I felt ashamed. I felt ashamed, one, because I was lying, but I also felt ashamed because I felt like I should have some other country, and that all the other kids could trace their roots elsewhere, and I could only trace my roots to the country that had enslaved us.
I wish now that I could go back and talk to my younger self and tell her that she should not be ashamed, that this is her ancestral home, that she should be as proud to be an American as her dad was, and that she should boldly and proudly draw those stars and stripes and claim this country as her own.”