Jesus Wore a Hoodie, Indeed

A friend of mine, Michael Reinhart, is a Lutheran bishop in the deep South. The Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast Synod, to be exact.

I know  Mike through my wife, Diane, who served on a music ministry team with him after college. Though we don’t see him often, Facebook is a remarkable platform for bridging time and tide.

Tonight, I saw a picture in my FB feed of Mike wearing a hoodie — as thousands of people across the country have done to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin. Trayvon, of course, was the unarmed African American teenager who was wearing a hooded sweatshirt when he was fatally shot by 28-year-old man named George Zimmerman in Sarasota, Florida, six weeks ago.

Zimmerman’s race has been the subject of quite a bit of dispute in the media. He has a white father and a Latina mother.

Today Zimmerman surrendered to the police, after being charged with second-degree murder for killing Trayvon. HIs claim of self-defense will test the legal parameters of Florida’s so-called “stand your ground” laws.

How ironic it is how many of America's unresolved racial issues have come to be symbolized by a "hoodie," which covers so much of the skin.

And how curious it is that the furor comes twenty years after the Rodney King riots of 1992. Los Angeles then, Florida now. The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same in a country still in need of racial reconcilation.

Self-Selection in the Suburbs on Sunday Morning

After Daedalus devoted its Summer 2010 issue to the phenomenon of mass incarceration, I decided to start subscribing to the journal.

I did it the old-fashioned way, by sending in a check. So it took a while before my first issue arrived.

Now, however, I’ve received the Winter and Spring issues, a two-part exploration of Race in the Age of Obama. The editors have assembled over 400 pages of learned discussion, by some two dozen authors, on many different aspects of the status of race in American society.

Perusing the titles tonight, I was reminded of just how suburban my life has become. At work, I interact regularly with colleagues from diverse racial backgrounds. Yet in my private life, including my church life, I am so often insulated from a proper awareness of racial dynamics by the lulling effect of white suburbia.

Why is Sunday morning the most segregated time of the week? There is nothing new about this reality. But it's important to keep asking the question.

American Apartheid Denied?

The last time I saw Anna Quindlen interviewed by Charlie Rose, it was 2006, and she was urging every American to read Out of Iraq by George McGovern and William Polk.

I did as Anna urged, and even got my copy of the book signed by McGovern through the good graces of my friends Mary and Jack in Mitchell, S.D.

Tonight, as Quindlen talked with Rose about her new novel, Rose alluded to a remark about race and class in America, from a commencement speach Quindlen gave at Wesleyan in 2009. She asserted there that, for too long, America has had "apartheid denied."

I quickly went online to check the quotation and found Quindlen's entire speech on the Wesleyan website. Here's the quotation in question:

"We need you to make this a fairer place, a more unified nation, a country that wipes out the bright lines of class and race that have created an apartheid, an apartheid too long denied."

"Apartheid" is of course a word fraught with history, inevitably associated with the white seperatist regime in South Africa that imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Former President Jimmy Carter can testify to that, after his provocative use of the word in a book on Israel and the Palestinians prompted a fusilade of criticism a few years ago.

Though Charlie Rose did not ask her why she used the word "apartheid," Anna Quindlen's motive may have been akin to Carter's: to get Americans to pay attention to hard realities that are all too easy to ignore.

How about this one? In the wake of the Great Recession, there six million people, disproportionately members of racial minorities, who must get by on food stamps alone, with no cash income.

The Metrodome as a Forum for Recognizing Jackie

As a baseball stadium, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome was notorious for its appallingly poor aesthetics. Built more for football than baseball, it featured a right field fence known as “the baggie” − a plastic wall that looked like a garbage bag. Most Twins fans, including me, look forward to the move next year to Target Field, an outdoor stadium made possible by a sales tax increase in Hennepin County.

The Vikings, meanwhile, continue on at the Dome, still pushing the ball uphill like Sisyphus in their quest to find funding for their own new stadium.

Before the Dome fades into history as a baseball venue, there is one exceptional element in its otherwise flatly functional design that I’d like to record. Among the huge portraits of Twins players hanging high beyond the outfield walls − signature players like Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew, and Tony Oliva − there was one non-Twin: Jackie Robinson.

In 1947, when the Twins were still the Washington Senators and Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down racial segregation in schools, was still seven years away, Jackie Robinson was the African-American man who broke major league baseball’s color barrier. Brooklyn Dodgers’ owner Branch Rickey made it possible, defying other team owners by bringing a black man to his team. But it was Robinson who carried the endeavor through, enduring racial taunts and persevering with dignity, determination, and grace under pressure.

To its credit, MLB has recognized Robinson’s legacy more and more in recent years. His uniform number, 42, has been permanently retired by all teams, and is worn annually on April 15 by many in a Jackie Robinson Day tribute.

Note to self: Be sure to catch the Twins, at least on radio, on April 15. Get your taxes in early and be ready to recognize a laudable American who continues to inspire.

Theresa

I come from White America, and I was in my early thirties before I made my first African American friend — or any friend who happened to be a person of color. In Estelline, South Dakota, where my family lived in the 1960s, the local sports teams were still known as the Redmen, yet I never met any Native people. In Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, where we lived in 1970s, there were Hispanic folks who came to help work the farm fields. Back then, however, most of them were there only for the summer, not integrated into the school system and the community. At St. Olaf College, there were a few black African students, from countries like Ghana, but really only a handful. Valparaiso University School of Law was similarly monochromatic when I was there in the 1980s.

When the Rodney King riots broke out in May 1992, I was living in Iowa City, Iowa, completing a master’s degree in European history. As at St. Olaf and Valparaiso, most of the people I encountered at the University of Iowa and in the community were white. But in 1991, I had become friends with Theresa Riffe, an African American woman originally from Des Moines who worked at the Prairie Lights bookstore and befriended many of the international students who came to the university. When the campus was rocked by a terrible multi-victim shooting by a homicidal graduate student in the fall of ’91, Theresa was at the forefront in helping the community heal. She was a good friend of the wife of one of the victims, physics professor Christoph Goertz, and was there for her in that time of grief.

In the summer of 1992, while I was in southwestern Germany studying at the Goethe Institute, I had occasion to visit Theresa in Paris, where she was making an extended visit. She loved the City of Lights and was very much in her element there. We huffed and puffed up the steps of Notre Dame together, along with a couple of other friends with Iowa City ties, and saw the sites in a city teeming with tourists on the first weekend in June.

Fast forward four years, to late August of 1996. I had just arrived in Boise, Idaho, where my wife, Diane, and I were about to spend a year during her ministerial internship. A mutual friend called with the tragic news that Theresa had unexpectedly died, apparently from a condition related to diabetes. The mourners at her funeral comprised a unique cross-section of Iowa City society, bridging the barriers that so often divide people. All of life is meeting — or should be.