BIGFOOT & BALTIMORE and the riot in all of us
One of my closest friends has a very real belief in the possible existence of Bigfoot, or as he likes to put it, in “an unknown species of furry upright bipeds native to the woods of the northern hemisphere.”
In all other respects my friend is pretty solid and sober minded. He’s a history teacher, a photographer, and holds to no conspiracy theories about Apollo 11 or Elvis’s death. But he really does believe that we might meet Sasquatch one day on a hike through the Ozarks or the Redwoods.
About five years ago I told him: “Buddy, the game is up. It’s over. The time has now come that we can say with convincing certainty that Harry and his tribe are a legend.”
Why?
Well, with the release of the camera phone in the late 2000s, suddenly everyone in the Western world was walking around with a video camera in their pocket. All the time. Anywhere and everywhere. No more stories without the potential of proof.
The myth of the yeti vanished in an insta-instant. "Pics or it didn’t happen!" Sorry all you Bigfoot believers out there.
But the myth of a post-racist America hasn’t vanished, in spite of all the footage.
Like my furball-frenzied-friend, this really confuses me.
Maybe we used to be able to claim ignorance. Some of us don’t really get out into the world all that much, and when we seem do we hang out with the same few friends. But now the world is captured by everyone all the time and is conveniently fed to us to be scrolled through on our devices. This monster has been caught on tape, but has been ignored.
We all seem see what we want to see in the footage of Eric Garner and Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, or of Ferguson and St. Louis and Baltimore. They’ve been dismissed as captured incidents of non-race-consequences. But the footage really isn’t all that blurry. The monster can be clearly seen and is very real. The riots in Baltimore are absolutely in response to a nation that’s ignoring a monster.
Now, to be clear, "I’m still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice… but at the same time, … I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.” Thanks Dr., that was clear.
The reason we don’t want to give up our belief in the myth of a post-racist America is because it would mean acknowledging that we are all rioters.
We don’t want to look clearly into the belief of our hearts. There’s a riot there.
The civil rights movement has changed America to some degree, but it hasn’t changed the stuff in our hearts.
So the footage is there. The myth of a post-racist America has been disproved. Easily.
And to my brothers and sisters that desire to continue to be changed by Jesus, the riot we need to be paying attention to is the violent indifference towards the marginalized and how it contradicts what is true about the kingdom of God and God's restorative purpose in the world.
Let’s all learn to look carefully and listen well.