At Mass most days, and especially on Sundays, the readings are what they are and no changes are made. Find your place in the lectionary and there you are. Yet often enough, through some kind of providence, the readings meet us where we are and call us to where we need to be.
Today, they find us on the road to Jericho, where a man was waylaid by robbers, avoided by the good religious people and rescued by a despised Samaritan the whole world has now learned to call “good.”
The connection between the parable of the Good Samaritan and the Black Lives Matter movement first occurred to me a year and half ago as I was writing for The Jesuit Post following the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. Today, the lectionary challenges me with it again.
The scholar of the law, who “wished to justify himself” heard the call to love his neighbor as himself and responded by asking Jesus “and who is my neighbor?”
And Jesus gave one of the great non-answers of the Gospel. The parable concludes instead with a question: “Which of these three, in your opinion, was neighbor to the robbers' victim?”
Not “who is my neighbor?” but rather “Who became a neighbor to the victim?”
This is what the preferential option for the poor means: to pose the questions of the Kingdom of God from the perspective of the marginalized and disenfranchised and to cooperate in God’s work of making its promises real for them.
Who became a neighbor to the victim?
Who crossed that dangerous road to Jericho toward the beaten and bleeding man, rather than away from him?
I have the privilege of pointing this out with words, without being anywhere near that road. I don’t have to cross to the other side to avoid the victim; I can see him, and pass him by, behind the glass of a car window or the glow of a smartphone screen.
If Jesus in the Gospel calls me to become a neighbor, the first step is to get out on the road.
I don’t, at this moment, have a concrete plan for doing that, and all sorts of excuses present themselves to avoid making such plans. Some of the excuses are better than others. None of them are good enough.
Maybe I can start by reading things that challenge my comfortable ignorance. Or learn by example, grateful for the men and women in blue who crossed roads in Dallas, running toward gunfire for the sake of protesters. Honor their courage by not setting it against a call to greater solidarity, and stop being silent when people do.
Taking up the challenge of Black Lives Matter means, at a minimum, choosing better policies to address the disparity experienced by black people in the use of force by police. Those policies—some of which the Dallas police department has embraced—will make a big difference, but it will take more than that to dismantle the structures of racism. Those of us who can ignore those structures have to learn to recognize them for the scandal they are, and we won’t be able just to teach ourselves.
The parable Jesus tells again today confronts white people like myself the same way it confronted the scholar of the law. It forces us, as it did him, to see that we who have the option of crossing the road must not only root out but call out all the self-defensive reactions in ourselves and in others that would silence the robbers’ victim.
Today, in our society, this means paying attention to the threats to black lives as they are experienced by black people. We need to learn that the insufficiency of our good intentions and personal non-racism is not a rejection of their goodness, but a call to solidarity in a struggle led by others.
There are many roads to Jericho in the world today, but our country keeps winding up on this one, and I expect we will continue to until more of us have heard and been convicted by Jesus’ response in today’s parable.
We can’t be satisfied with having the right answer to “and who is my neighbor?” Or even with having the right answer to Jesus’ question about who became a neighbor. The scholar of the law gets that one right, in the end, answering “The one who treated him with mercy.”
And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
I agree that very often police are acting as Good Samaritans. I think that's all the more reason to support good policing and work to reduce or eliminate the use of force that minority communities feel disproportionately (and apparently from the data, also experience in encounters with police far more commonly than whites, even after taking more frequent black contact with police into account).
I also wonder about how that 18.5 times statistic is constructed, especially because in 2015, the number of police who died by gunfire was 42 while the number of people shot by police was 990, of whom 258 were black. Maybe it means something like a police officer who was killed was more likely to have been killed by a black male than an unarmed black male who was killed was likely to have been killed by a police officer? It's a weird statistic, because it compares a lot of non-police-involved situations in which black people get killed with the rarer situations in which police get killed, but treats the likelihood of a black person being involved in each one as if it's somehow meaningful comparable.
The statistics here are complicated, and hard to understand in part because they really aren't systematically collected, so it's almost impossible to say if there's a trend in one direction or another or what could be causing it.
I don't think we have to choose between valuing what the police do and taking seriously the claims of black people who tell us that the negative effects of police use of force are a significant burden on black communities. In fact, I think that the importance of listening to the people who experience the burden is only increased by valuing what the police do.
Actually, after a reading a lot of different analyses of the various (and often conflicting) data, I think the interesting question is how to know which analysis to pick.
But I'll stand by the idea that taking seriously what black people tell us about the experience of racism is a good place to start.
The issue is the disproportionate experience of the use of force by the police in black communities; the death of unarmed black men in police encounters is only the flashpoint. A better way of putting the question—since the two deaths this week that led to the protests in Dallas in which the police were tragically shot involved legally armed black men—might be about unjustified or unnecessary death of black men in encounters with police.
And there we don't know, because the data hasn't been gathered well or systematically and the questions of justification and necessity are fraught.
But it is strange to me that you seem to be so ready to conclude that there's no problem, or that "the narrative of Black Lives Matter is based on lies," when so many people who claim to actually have experienced the negative effects of police use of force in black communities are speaking up about it. Especially when the statistics you cite are partial, complicated, and don't address the whole question that BLM is raising. Not to mention that quoting the multiplier between two rates which are both smaller than one one-hundreth of one percent is strange and not terribly persuasive to begin with.
It can be (and I think is) true both that the police deserve our respect and admiration and also that there are structural problems in how minority communities experience law enforcement activity. Why do you feel like the latter has to be false?
I'll look at the book. May I suggest in turn that you spend some time reading some testimony from activists in the Black Lives Matter movement and considering whether or not the broader questions about disproportionate experience of police use of force are troubling enough to be taken seriously? (And also consider retracting the accusation that the movement is based on lies?)
When you say things like "it is not white racism except with those who refuse to address the root causes," then it seems that you are foreclosing the discussion without having listened seriously to the questions being raised.
I don't doubt that the problems are more complicated than some in the Black Lives Matter movement might portray them, nor am I saying that their protests are beyond reproach. I am saying we ought to listen to them and try to hear their concerns from the perspective of the people who are marginalized and suffering, which is one of the things meant by the preferential option for the poor.
And while I hope I am not being uncharitable here, you seem to have come into this comments thread eager to dismiss and correct the reports of people who tell us they are suffering.
I think we need to take the effects of implicit and structural racism, and the way they are felt by black people, much more seriously than we have—or than you currently are. This piece (which I also linked above) I think does a great job of helping to explain why.
In general, I think it's a better starting place to be less ready to tell black people why the real problems are not what they say they are, and more ready to take seriously the idea that they encounter problems we may not readily see.