Why Knowledge of Injustice Without Action Makes One Part of the Problem

By Derek Penwell

Let us imagine that you live in a circle of eight houses, seven of which have fertile gardens in back -- enough to feed a family. Unfortunately, however, the eighth house has a patch of swampy land that makes growing a garden impossible. Consequently, the people that live there spend their lives on the edge of starvation.

In the middle of this circle of houses is a commons that everyone uses to supplement their own gardens. But the gardening done in the commons, split eight ways, is only enough to give each house a little extra produce to sell for “nice things.”

The sharing of the commons is a tradition that has been passed down to homeowners in the neighborhood for generations. Nobody even questions it. The commons arrangement is just the way things are.

However, one-eighth of the commons doesn’t give the family with swampy land enough subsist on.

But that’s the way it goes, right? Life isn’t always fair. There has to be winners and losers.

Then one day, you’re having a cookout at your house with the bounty harvested from the commons. You’ve invited over a friend, who just happens to be a surveyor. She’s interested by the layout of the neighborhood, and the almost perfect solution of a commons. She thinks this is a great idea.

On her way to the bathroom, however, your surveyor friend happens by an antique survey map of the neighborhood hanging in your study. She begins to inspect it closely, as supper is being prepared. As she looks, she notices that the commons isn’t really a commons at all. In fact, the land that the neighborhood has been using freely to supplement each one’s income is actually a tract that legally belongs to the house with the swampy land.

You immediately realize the implications of this discovery: For years, because of a longstanding tradition, everyone in the neighborhood has been fattening their pocketbooks at the expense of the family that lives on swampy land. In other words, you realize that you’ve been getting rich on the back of the neighbor who can least afford it. You have an epiphany: Your neighbor’s family has been starving, while the rest of the neighborhood has taken the proceeds for itself -- the proceeds that rightfully belong to the starving family.

You feel awful. But it was tradition. Nobody knew any better. That you probably should have been more compassionate toward your neighbor all along is beside the point. Now you know.

The moral question is: Having finally realized that you’ve been treating your neighbor’s family unjustly all these years, what are you going to do about it?

You could:

1. Stay quiet about it and keep the arrangement the way it is. It appears to be in your best interest economically just to keep your mouth shut. Why say anything at all if it’s only going threaten your otherwise comfortable existence?
2. You could privately admit to one or two neighbors that -- if it were up to you -- you’d just restore the commons to its rightful owner. You’re humane, after all, you don’t necessarily want to see anyone starve. But then you might continue by telling your friends that, though you’re personally pulling for the family with swampy land, you’re afraid that if you say anything publicly about the injustice, one of two things might happen: 1) your other neighbors might get mad and vote you out of the neighborhood association; or 2) they might just think the whole arrangement is falling apart and vote to disband the neighborhood association all together. And boy howdy! You could never live with yourself if you were the person who submarined such a great arrangement, which seems to meet the needs of so many people.
3. Or you could say, “Now that I know an injustice is being committed, I can’t keep quiet about this practice that threatens one of my neighbors, even if speaking up about it makes everyone else angry.”

Whatever you do, though, now that you know your neighbor is suffering unjustly at the hands of people among whom you live and work, morally you occupy a different place than before the surveyor pointed out the inequity.

So, let’s bring this home for the church folk:

If you happen to be a follower of Jesus who believes LGBT people have suffered injustice at the hands of the church, your response to that injustice -- whether you stand up publicly to speak against it or not -- (as difficult as it is to think about) is a moral question.

If you come to believe as a result of your faith that disproportionately imprisoning and killing young African Americans is an epidemic that is just a public manifestation of institutional racism, how you respond to the shooting of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, et al., makes a difference.

If in the course of your life as a Christian and a participant in the great American commons you become convinced that people arriving to participate in that commons from other countries deserve to be treated with dignity and hospitality, whether you choose to stand beside them in the face of hatred is not a matter of moral indifference.

“What will my congregation/denomination think if I publicly name this injustice?” is certainly a question worth asking. But the more pressing moral question has to do with thinking that that question is more important than “What’s my moral responsibility to people facing an injustice that threatens their dignity, their careers, their living arrangements, their ability to be parents -- and in some cases -- their lives?”

True moral knowledge of injustice without action makes you part of the problem. If you don't think so, ask the folks in the swampy land.

Taking Cues on Immigration from Jesus

I received a call from someone I’ve known since we were kids. Caesar, lived in the children’s home my grandparents established in San Luis Potosí, Mexico in 1964. I’ve also known his wife, Sophie, from the time she was a baby. She grew up in the home, too.

Some years back, Caesar came into the States illegally to work as a painter in Atlanta, leaving Sophie and their son, Caesar, Jr., in Mexico. Hard life, living in one country illegally, while your family lives in another country. Lonely. Anxious. Scared all the time you’ll be discovered, and sent back.

Out of the blue, Caesar called me and asked if I could send him a little money via Western Union, so that he could help bring his family to Atlanta. He explained to me how difficult it is living without the people you love the most next to you; how uncomfortable it is living in a country that takes every opportunity to tell you how much they wish you’d leave … “after you finish that last job for me”; how painful it is to contemplate having to return home to a country where you’re afraid the violence will swallow your family, leaving nothing behind but shattered lives and spent shell casings.

What’s a man to do? He’s got a wife, a son. All he cares about is keeping them safe, and making enough money to create a future he’s sure is unavailable to them back in their homeland.

Where does one start when speaking of illegal immigration?

It strikes me that the best place to start is with people’s stories, and, if you can manage it, with the pictures of people’s faces in your mind. Numbers, ideas, abstractions are a poor substitute for the thick description necessary to make another human being’s fears and anxieties, hopes and dreams intelligible.

But if numbers and abstractions are necessary to discuss illegal immigration, then o.k. Let’s talk about numbers and abstractions for a moment.

Of course, we must contend with the “illegal” part that presumably makes the “immigration” part unsavory to so many.1 “Why,” the thinking goes, “should we embrace people who’ve come to our country in contravention of our laws? That only encourages more lawbreaking, after all. After they get here, why should we expect them to pay attention to the other laws? Moreover, it sends a signal to our own citizens that we as a country don’t have the courage of our convictions about this being a ‘nation of laws.’”

This objection has the virtue of coherence. Incentivizing law-breaking requires us to walk down a fairly dangerous road—or, if you prefer, take a step down the metaphorical slippery slope. We would hate to wake up one day to discover that we had become a nation of outlaws.

However, the rhetoric doesn’t appear to be borne out by the facts. If you take 1986, for instance, the year that Ronald Reagan championed amnesty (“legalization” is the preferred term) for three million undocumented workers, as the base year, you find that crime didn’t increase dramatically in the aftermath. In fact, the following year (1987) saw an overall drop in violent crime—both as a percentage (i.e., number of violent crimes as a percentage of population–.61%, down from .62% in 1986), as well as, more importantly, total number (1,483,999 down from 1,489,169 in 1986). In other words, we had more people in the United States in 1987, but fewer violent crimes–all while working to assimilate three million “illegals” into American life.

In the twenty seven years since the 1986 immigration reform, the country has seen a dramatic decrease in crime–total crime in general, and violent crime in particular. The crime rate in 2011 (the latest year reported) was almost half the 1987 rate (3.29% vs. 5.57%). And the violent crime rate shrank from .75% at the high water mark of 1991 to .38% in 2011.

Now, someone might object that “just because crime fell after amnesty doesn’t mean that there’s a causal connection. They might be totally unrelated.”

True. Admittedly, there are a lot of moving parts in any analysis of why crime grows or declines. Recessions. Gun Laws. Lead paint.

However, if you wanted to make the case that issuing amnesty to those people who came here illegally didn’t make crime go down, you would certainly be forced to say that the argument that allowing “illegals” to “cut to the front of the line” undermines the rule of law, making the prospect of following the law less likely, doesn’t hold much water. It’s hard to take seriously the complaint that if you do X that Y will surely follow, when after doing X, you don’t get Y, but the opposite of Y. Not only is there no bright line of causation between amnesty and a rise in crime (either because of those who are undocumented themselves, or because the “rule of law” has been subverted by “turning a blind eye” to their law breaking), there isn’t even a correlation.

So why all this handwringing about amnesty as a “back channel [way] to reward illegality?” For people who came to this country and displaced whole nations, our talk of illegal entry as the ultimate barrier to citizenship betrays either a short memory or a stunning lack of irony.

More importantly, for Christians, an inability to figure out ways to talk about immigration that sound more like Christian reflection than a cribbed statement from the Minutemen Project is cringe-worthy. Reading Jesus say in the judgment of the nations that one of the criteria for adjudging faithfulness is the way foreigners (xénos) are treated (Matthew 25:35,43), then turning around and saying, as 63% of White Evangelicals have said, that illegal immigration “threatens traditional American customs and values,” betrays a debt to partisan politics that transcends the priority of Christian commitment.

Look, if you love Jesus, you better love the people Jesus loved And it’s difficult to modulate the imprecation to “Get the hell out of my country” into anything that sounds even remotely loving to the stranger.

After all, we’re not screaming at abstractions, we’re not dehumanizing numbers; we’re screaming at real live human beings who want nothing more than a chance to drag themselves out of poverty and keep their children safe.

Christians ought to be taking their cues on immigration from Jesus rather than from Caesar … unless, of course, it’s a painter from Atlanta, trying to borrow a few bucks to reunite his family. That Caesar’s got a lot riding on it.

This article originally appeared on The Good Men Project web site.

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1. I don’t have time to go into the “Yeah, but they take good American jobs” argument, or the “They sponge off the largesse of the American welfare state without contributing to it.”  ↩

When You Run into the Wall of Injustice, I Get Bruises Too

I remember getting my first ministerial call as I prepared to graduate from seminary. Small town in the heart of Appalachia. The church was beautiful, a traditional Protestant downtown county seat kind of church.

The parsonage was nice … big. It had a large yard with an enormous swing set, new landscaping in the front. And to complete the perfect vocational/domestic idyll, the parsonage sat across the street from the fourth tee at the country club—to which the church bought me a membership.

So, back at the seminary I told my buddies about it … saving the country club part for last. Let’s be honest I was bragging. Looking back, I’m not proud of it. I was twenty-six and insensitive in that obnoxious way young people who figure they’ve got the world by the tail can be.

My pride didn’t even make it through that first conversation with my friends at seminary, however. Because after I finished recounting the glories of my new job, complete with the country club audio tour I wanted so badly to share, one of my friends, Marcus, spoke up and said, “Are you going to take that membership?”

I thought surely this must be a rhetorical question, because … really? Are you nuts? Of course, I’m taking it.

“Good for you. But let me ask you something: Can I come visit you at your new church?”

“You’reracis my friend. Of course.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that. Let me ask you another question: If you take me to play golf at your country club, will they let me play? Or will I have to caddy for you?”

Hearing those words hurt my heart. Marcus was my friend. So, it never occurred to me that a country club anywhere, including the South, might accept me but not my African-American friend.

LIke most middle class white kids, it never much occurred to me that a world of injustice exists, one that thrives beneath the horizon of my awareness. I knew about instances of unfairness, but it never occurred to me that those instances were connected on a deeper level.

But what struck me about Marcus’ question—beyond the fact that we still lived in a country where African-Americans could be refused access because of something as uncontrollable as the happenstance of birth—was my casual assumption that if I wasn’t being hurt by it, then nobody was.

For a couple of weeks we’ve watched as the implications of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman fiasco unfold. Without rehashing all the details, it seems clear that Trayvon Martin’s race was more than just a coincidental factor in the confrontation that led to his death.

It would be easy for me to chalk this whole tragedy up to the problem with Stand-your-ground laws, which, as Walter Breuggemann has rightly pointed out, should be unthinkable to Christians—inviting violence as these laws do.

I could very easily look past this case as merely another instance of the breakdown of civility, another rending of the social fabric through an insistence that my life is more important than yours.

But I have dear sisters and brothers who, themselves African-American, see this case as just another illustration of how injustice is embedded in our society. And because they are my sisters and brothers, I have a responsibility to add my voice to theirs in drawing attention to a system that regularly puts a thumb on the scales of justice, disadvantaging people of color.

It doesn’t affect me, though, right? I wasn’t shot. I’m white. I’m generally not in danger of inviting violence because of how I look.

The popular assumption seems to be that we have varieties of injustice, complete with interest and advocacy groups for each. Which interest and advocacy groups dedicate themselves to seeking redress and reform for their particular cause. You take care of your stuff, because I’ve got my hands full taking care of my own.

In such a world, I need not be concerned so much with Trayvon Martin for two reasons: 1) I’m not African-American, so his death doesn’t seem to affect my world, and 2) there are already competent and passionate interest groups taking up his cause.

But beyond the laziness of such casual assumptions about somebody else doing the heavy lifting, the problem with thinking that I don’t have a responsibility to speak out about the racism baked into the American cake is a reality we don’t often name: racism isn’t a thing unto itself, but an expression of the larger problems of injustice and oppression committed by those in power against those who too often don’t have a voice. And that, my friends, affects us all … whether we realize it or not.

“The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you,’” (1 Cor. 12:21) is how Paul says it.

I cannot say to my African-American sisters and brothers, “I have no responsibility for you.”

I cannot say to my Hispanic sisters and brothers, “I know they’re ripping your families apart through deportation; I know they’re slandering your character, calling you unspeakable things for having committed the ‘crime’ of seeking to make a better life for those you love—but you should have thought of that before you crossed the border.”

I cannot say to my LGBT sisters and brothers, “I know you’ve felt like everybody’s favorite punching bag (sometimes literally); I know some of you are living on the streets or dying because you can no longer bear the hateful world we’ve made for you, but I’m straight, so I’ve got no dog in this fight.”

I cannot say to my sisters, “I know many of you live in fear that you’ll attract the unwanted attention of violent men; I know that you have to work harder to find a job that will pay you what you’re worth (or as is the case in my profession, that you’ll find a job at all), but you just need to quit being so ‘sensitive.’”

I cannot say to my sisters and brothers who live in other parts of the world, “I know that many of you cower in your homes, afraid of American bombs falling out of the sky; I know that you shrink behind locked doors, waiting for armed men to come crashing through; but if you’d have been smart enough to have been born in our country, you wouldn’t have to worry about that.”

I cannot say to my sisters and brothers without housing or adequate healthcare, “I know you worry about how you’ll make it through, but you’re just going to have to quit being lazy and get a job.”

It’s not enough for me to look after my own interests. It’s not enough for me to remain ignorant of the pain others experience. We’re connected in ways that make injustice a problem for all of us.

And if you follow Jesus, if you seek to participate in the unfolding reign of God, you don’t get to choose which injustices you care about. Racism, being anti-immigrant, homophobia, sexism, militarism, poverty … these are all presenting symptoms of the much larger disease of injustice that is at odds with what God desires for those whom God created and loves.

Here’s the thing: Since I happen to be an activist for a particular cause, I can too easily forget that I have sisters and brothers suffering from different forms of injustice to whom I need to offer my support. But they ought to be able to count on me to stand by their side … even if the issue doesn’t affect me directly. Because if I claim to follow Jesus, then—all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding—it does.

According to Paul, when you run headlong into the wall of oppression and injustice, I get bruises too.

I think Marcus would agree with me.