We as a People Will Get to the Promised Land

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African American, African American theology, George Zimmerman, James Baldwin, James Cone, lynching, Martin Luther King, mountaintop, Promised Land, The Fire Next Time, Trayvon Martin

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land! And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!

-The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mason Temple, Memphis, TN, 3 April 1968

The day after Martin King uttered these words, he was shot dead.

The acquittal of George Zimmerman by a jury of his peers for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida has brought to the fore a divisiveness over race and secular law that has driven us to the edge of civility, and indeed, sometimes into utter fear and madness. Even as protesters calling for justice for Trayvon Martin took to the streets in generally peaceful protests across major American cities, slanderous videos and photos were circulated online alleging that violent riots were breaking out, until some of those videos were exposed to be from Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riots in 2011 and that reports of the Oakland police car burning had exaggerated the extent of the violence in Oakland and failed to report that across the San Francisco Bay in San Francisco itself, the protest had ended peacefully.

Even so, Zimmerman’s defenders went on the defensive. They told those of us troubled by the events, the trial, and the verdict that what happened in the courtroom was the result of a fair legal process that we were arrogant to judge. They said that by bringing up racial profiling and our objections to Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws, we were the ones being divisive. They told us that by calling Zimmerman white, we were ignorant because he is in fact part-Latino. They argued that we ignored the trial proceedings, that it was obvious that Martin had started the fight, that Martin was on top of Zimmerman when he fired, and that what we called the systematic character assassination of Trayvon Martin was a key plank in the case because his character flaws meant that he had a propensity to violence, that he had a tendency to use things like concrete as weapons, and that Zimmerman was well-justified to defend himself against this sort of hooded, thug-like teenager pummeling his head into the sidewalk. They contended that if we did not respect the jury’s verdict, then it was we who were the vigilantes advocating for mob rule.

We are divided. And yet, King prophesied that ‘we as a people will get to the Promised Land.’

Who are ‘we’?

It is tempting to write off King’s final speech by saying that ‘we’ are not being addressed by Martin King. Many of ‘us,’ for example, do not attend African American churches–what King would have called the ‘beloved community’–and even if I lay claim to my father as the only Chinese American to be ordained at Oakland’s Allen Temple Baptist Church (a pillar in beloved communities in America), the fact is that my position in an African American ‘beloved community’ may be seen by many as ambivalent. For those of ‘us’ living outside of the United States, ‘we’ may be tempted even to write this off as an American problem, to pretend smugly that what happens down there–especially in the deep American South–is nothing more than the systemic sin of racism in America with which ‘we’ share no complicity. It is tempting to say that ‘we’ are not King’s beloved community.

It is there that we are wrong. Earlier in the speech, Martin King declares:

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannseburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, George; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee–the cry is always the same: ‘We want to be free.’

Write that off, if you will, as an imposition of American freedom beyond its borders, even though King opposed the building of the American empire during the Vietnam War on the backs of African American soldiers sent to die by white politicians. But if there is and must be, as King says, a ‘human rights revolution…to bring the coloured peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect,’ then being neither African American nor American does not free us from complicity.

The ‘us’ for King is us. All of us.

He says that ‘we’–all of us now–‘as a people will get to the Promised Land.’ If we as a people must get to the Promised Land, then we as a people are not at present in the Promised Land. If we as a people are not yet in the Promised Land, then we as a people are still in exile. If we as a people are still in exile, then we as a people are still in the bondage of slavery. And that is what King says in this speech:

It means that we’ve got to stay together. We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.

If we are still slaves getting together for liberation in Pharaoh’s court, then we are still colonized. This is not American freedom from taxation without representation. This is not African American emancipation from plantation owners. This is a declaration that we–all of us–are not free because we–all of us–remain colonized.

By what are we colonized?

African American theologian James Cone asks this question in a different way: why is it that there is virtually no reflection on lynching in American theology and religious studies? For Cone, the experience of African Americans as they fear a justice system that systematically criminalizes them just for the blackness of their skin makes them Christ-figures in America. This is not because African Americans teach us to be masochists redeeming suffering for personal growth. It is because the lynching tree reveals precisely how America is constituted, especially along racial lines, revealing the things hidden from the founding of the nation: that people of colour, especially black people, are scapegoated for the cohesion of white America.

Cone’s revelation reveals in turn that King’s suggestion that the ‘we’ who are in exile are not just the African Americans who live in perpetual fear of being lynched in America. The colonized are those who have systematically been made unable to even ask the question about lynching even when it is happening before their very eyes. It is those who uncritically buy into the systems of power that perpetuate political and economic injustice against people of colour. It is those who see a mass of people protesting against the unjust conditions that strip them of their human dignity and see only troublemakers rioting in the streets.

This is why King’s references to a global human rights revolution is so significant. The lynching tree may reveal the systems that perpetuate injustice against people of colour in America as ones that exercise illegitimate colonial power, but the references beyond America reveal that this experience is not limited to America. It was also apartheid in South Africa. It is also the treatment of the First Nations in Canada. It is also the cry of the subjugated in Tahrir Square. It is also the protest of those at Occupy Central in Hong Kong. It is that when the oppressed are given voice, the structures of power propped up by the colonized themselves are revealed even as the protesters are scapegoated for wrecking the coherence of the system.

It is in this declaration that the oppressed have the rights of human dignity that King declares, ‘I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land.’ In the face of human rights protests, King declares that he knows where we the colonized are going as a people. We are leaving our exile and going to the Promised Land.

It’s the Promised Land of which James Baldwin speaks in the classic civil rights text, The Fire Next Time. I will talk another day about how reading The Fire Next Time in high school literally catapulted me into research and storytelling about Chinese churches and shaped me into a Chinglican. But here I will emphasize that Baldwin says exactly what Cone says in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, asserts precisely what Martin King declares in the ‘Mountaintop’ speech: we are colonized, and those who refuse to ask the lynching question while uncritically and unintentionally propping up structures of white privilege are to be pitied above all. Writing to his nephew about the pent-up blues of African Americans as they have been systematically taught to hate themselves by white people who don’t know that this is what they are teaching, Baldwin tells his nephew that as much as he is taught that survival in American society is premised on him integrating into white society and being accepted by white folk, this is a lie:

The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it…In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. (The Fire Next Time, p. 8-9)

Following this letter, Baldwin gives us an extensive autobiography exploring why the Promised Land must be founded on this kind of radical charity. He tells us that the church in his experience of African American communities is no better than the brothel, that many pastors are no better than pimps, asking like a pimp, ‘Who’s little boy are you?’ to which he answers, ‘Why, yours’ (p. 29). He recalls his early days as an African American Pentecostal preacher who swayed the churches with the opiate of the masses, blinding them to their colonized state and the economic injustice with which they were subjugated by white America. And yet, as he transitions into a discussion of the Nation of Islam, he realizes from encounters with Elijah Muhammad and the early Malcolm X that the solution is not to assume that all white people are ‘white devils,’ for this too perpetuates the colonized separation of whites and blacks in America premised on racial hatred.

No, Baldwin says, the revelation that the cohesion of white America is founded on the lynching of African Americans must lead us to love. This Promised Land must be love, Baldwin says, unless the fullest conclusion of racial colonization is realized in the apocalyptic bloodbath that will destroy us all in judgment; referencing Noah’s flood, Baldwin quotes the old spiritual that says of this judgment, ‘No more water, the fire next time!’

This is what is so poignant about Trayvon Martin’s mother’s tweet immediately after the ‘not guilty’ verdict was read:

Lord during my darkest hour I lean on you. You are all that I have. At the end of the day, GOD is still in in control. Thank you all for your prayers and support. I will love you forever Trayvon!!! In the name of Jesus!!!

— Sybrina Fulton (@SybrinaFulton) July 14, 2013

Sybrina Fulton is saying the same thing as Dr. King: ‘But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land!’

This blog is titled A Christian Thing. It recognizes that above all things, the church of Jesus Christ as the beloved community is called in its actions to herald the good news that we as a people are leaving our exile to go to the Promised Land. Seeing the face of Jesus in the lynched and the scapegoated, the beloved community calls attention to the ways in which we are all too content to be colonized and declares that the kingdom of God is near. It does so in love, not repeating the scapegoating by calling for the lynching of George Zimmerman in return, but by protesting a system that justifies lynching for the sake of social cohesion, the ‘rule of law,’ and the ‘rights of self-defence.’ Martin King has been up to the mountaintop. He has seen the Promised Land. He declared to us as a people that we will get there, and thus, to attain the love not founded on the violent myth that harmony can only be achieved by burying the murders that undergird it, we must rise as the church in protest against systemic forms of racialization that only end in death.

In that protest and in that lament, we join Martin King as he declares that he is happy tonight, he’s not worried about anything, he’s not fearing any man, because as we head toward the Promised Land, we can say with Martin King and all the saints and angels that our eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. at the Qingming Festival

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Asian American, Benedict XVI, China, Chinese, civil rights, class solidarity, death, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, dissident, Eucharist, exodus, Glenn Omatsu, Holy Week, Hoodie Sunday, human rights, I Have a Dream, Lent, liberation theology, Malcolm X, March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Moses, mountaintop, Promised Land, Qin Shihuang, Qingming Festival, radical, Sam Wells, Spring and Autumn Period, Third World Liberation Front, Tiananmen, Trayvon Martin

清明時節雨紛紛
路上行人欲斷魂
借問酒家何處有
牧童遙指杏花村

The drizzling rain at Qingming time
The rending flesh of the pedestrians
Where to find a pub to drink my sadness?
A cowherd points to Almond Flower Village.

–杜牧 Du Mu

Since before the days when Qin Shihuang conquered the various warring states that came to constitute the imperial Middle Kingdom, there has been the tradition of the Qingming Festival. Originally commemorated in memory of the accidental burning of a Spring and Autumn Period official’s servant, the festival has developed since the Tang Dynasty to be a day to honour the dead by sweeping the graves of ancestors, carrying willows and flowers to ward off evil spirits, and more recently, remembering the deaths of intellectual dissidents in twentieth-century Chinese history.

Typically, Qingming Festival falls on April 5.

But this year’s Qingming Festival falls on April 4.

And incidentally, April 4 is the anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think this warrants some theological reflection, particularly from Chinese North American Christians, about our solidarity in the struggle for human rights.

On the night before he died, King preached at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. His sermon came to be known as, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” and his words that night foreshadowed his assassination the next day:

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t really matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!  And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man: mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

Incidentally, Sam Wells also has a great meditation on death and Steve Jobs through the Mountaintop speech as well.

Asian American scholar Glenn Omatsu protests the domestication of the Asian American participation in the civil rights movement. He points specifically to King and says that the invocation of his tradition of non-violence has overshadowed the radical actions taken by the Third World Liberation Front in 1968 to found ethnic studies departments in California universities. For Omatsu, it’s not the legacy of King that needs to be reclaimed for our solidarity for rights, but that of Malcolm X.

I take issue with Omatsu.

When King said that he had been to the mountaintop, it would be right to think that he’s invoking Moses climbing Mount Nebo to look over into the Promised Land that he wouldn’t be able to enter with the beloved community. Most would remember his dream articulated at the March on Washington that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” For Omatsu, it’s precisely this that has led to a neo-conservatism among Asian Americans who believe themselves to have made it economically as “the model minority.” America is finally colour-blind, say the suburban dwellers; the dream has been realized. Omatsu is disgusted.

But a closer look at King’s sermon complicates things. Sure, King is a Moses figure, but the Promised Land of which King speaks does not refer to a colour-blind nation. Rather, it’s about a global human rights revolution in the second half of the twentieth century, a call to freedom just like Moses called on Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go:

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee–the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”

King had been to the mountaintop. He had seen the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the Albany Movement, the Civil Rights Bill, the March on Washington, the March on Selma, and the action for which he was in Memphis. Like Moses, King had been to the mountaintop, and he had seen the Promised Land of justice and equality for the least of these, the coloured colonized by white supremacy and the impoverished trampled by an economic oligarchy. Interpreting the story of Exodus through the lens of solidarity, he sees that Pharaoh’s tactic for keeping the slaves enslaved is to divide them among themselves, to keep the ministers only thinking about themselves and preaching irrelevant airy-fairy hopes of white robes, milk and honey, and streets of gold over yonder while people here go naked, live in slums, and stay hungry. “But whenever the slaves get together,” King preached, “something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery.”

For King, at that moment, what was needed was direct action for the case at hand: justice for sanitation workers in Memphis wearing black T-shirts and holding signs that read, “I Am a Man”: “Let us keep the issues where they are,” he said. “The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.”  Here, he fuses the Moses tradition with the Jericho Road in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. As he puts it in the speech, just like the Samaritan stopping on the “Bloody Pass,” we too must realize that the plight of the sanitation worker in Memphis is our plight as well. He imagines the priest and the Levite passing up the bloodied robbed man because they fear that he might be bait to lure them to bandits, or worse, he might be a con artist himself. King speculates that they probably thought, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” He then interprets the Good Samaritan as asking: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” King then continues:

That’s the question before you tonight. Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?” Not, “If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?” The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

It was for this that King knew that he was going to his death. He talks about getting on the plane from Atlanta that morning, of the pilot’s voice coming over the public address system saying that because King was on board, they had had to take extra security cautions because of the threats on King’s life coming from Memphis. He remembers that before what we now know as the Civil Rights Movement happened, he had been stabbed while signing books, and the blade had come so close to his aorta that The New York Times reported at the time that if he had just sneezed, he would have died. He knew this because what he was doing was radical because he wasn’t just calling for everybody just to get along in a colour-blind nation. (And by the way, as James Cone points out, King and Malcolm X need not be pitted against each other, but can rather be seen as complementary figures in the black liberation movement.)

He was calling for class solidarity as the rubric of racial reconciliation and social justice. He had protested the Vietnam War, particularly because African Americans were disproportionately drafted, and now he was marching on poverty, calling for economic action on the part of everyone listening to him: “If it means leaving work, if it means leaving school–be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.” He was calling for both marches and outright boycotts on unjust corporations, “bank-ins” to take money out of mainstream banks and put them in black banks, and “insurance-ins” where black people could buy insurance plans from black insurance companies. He was calling for an Occupy movement before there was an Occupy movement; he was advocating precautions for the beloved community before the idea of subprime mortgages targeting African American populations was even invented. And for him, this Memphis case of sanitation workers was the perfect case where the rubber met the road because for King, the measure of a society was how the sanitation workers were treated. Radical? Yes. It’s what got King killed.

Perhaps it’s only right that the anniversary of the assassination of King and the Qingming Festival fall this year within Holy Week in the liturgical calendar. Jesus’ Good Samaritan parable was offensive precisely because as Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it in Letters and Papers from Prison, it focused Christian practice on being “the Man [sic] for Others.” It was told to a lawyer who wanted to justify himself for having fulfilled the commandment of loving one’s neighbour as oneself. Jesus turned the lawyer’s world upside-down, telling him to go and do as a Samaritan would have done to go out of his way to help a bloodied stranger of the wrong geopolitical stripe on the Bloody Pass of the Jericho Road.

This was arguably what got Jesus, Bonhoeffer, and King killed. The offence was a radical view of the neighbour. Will we indeed love our neighbours as ourselves? What if the neighbour is of the wrong nationality? the wrong race? the wrong class? King’s words ring in our ears: The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?” That’s the question.

This is a question for reflection for Chinese North American Christians today. Qingming Festival is a day to honour the dead, yes. But to be Christian is not merely to honour our own dead, those within our own family or those within the diaspora that we call “Chinese.” King’s legacy–one that also garnered us civil liberties–begs us to come out of the convenient labels that we’ve constructed for ourselves–“Chinese,” “Asian,” “Asian American”–and realize that our solidarity with the poor for justice cuts across racial, ethnic, and class lines. There is a saying among Chinese in the diaspora that we should only sweep beneath the awnings of our own homes. The irony of this year’s Qingming Festival is that it calls us precisely to repent of this notion.

Yes, we honour our ancestors today. Some of these, yes, are the Chinese political dissidents that we remember yearly. But one of these is also the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Try that, friends, for much-needed reconciliation between Chinese American and African American communities today. Perhaps our Chinese churches should bring hoodies and a bag of skittles to church too. It is, after all, the Qingming Festival.

But more than that, as the Qingming Festival and King’s assassination anniversary both fall in Holy Week, we also remember as Christians the one who has gone before us from death to life, Jesus Christ. We have hope in King’s vision not because of King’s death, but because the resurrection of Jesus Christ at the end of this Holy Week reminds us that King’s blessed hope is ours as well. Strangely enough, this has been precisely what Pope Benedict XVI has been saying to the faithful regarding charity during this Lenten season:

The Lord’s disciples, united with him through the Eucharist, live in a fellowship that binds them one to another as members of a single body. This means that the other is part of me, and that his or her life, his or her salvation, concern my own life and salvation. Here we touch upon a profound aspect of communion: our existence is related to that of others, for better or for worse.

Qingming Festival and the assassination of King are not the end of the story of solidarity–indeed, of communion–with the least of these. They are the beginning: “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!”