THE GRAINY, STUTTERING surveillance footage shows police milling about, offering no medical assistance to the 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, one of them has just shot. They only spring into action when the boy’s older sister runs into the frame toward her brother. An officer tackles the girl, knocking her back in the snow, then cuffs her and puts her in the patrol car, only a few feet from her dead or dying brother.
Extended footage, released in January, and bystander cell phone footage from a few minutes later with audio of the sister wailing over and over “they killed my brother,” brought into my head the Good Friday spiritual “Were You There?” It was another moment, in months of unrest over police killings of black adults and children, when the question pressed in on me as a white person. “Were you there? Were you there when they choked my father dead? Were you there when they shot my son? Were you there when they killed my brother? Were you there?”
While books and other cultural works are no substitute or shortcut to the spiritual work of true repentance and detoxifying from cheap grace, they can be means of deepening understanding and finding the resolve to take action. Along with the film Selma, following are some of the artistic resources I’m turning to this Lent.
Jamaican-born poet Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press) is a brilliant and disturbing extended meditation on being black in the United States. She builds on short scenes of the offhanded racism she has experienced in the supposedly liberal and genteel middle-class academic world:
Standing outside the conference room, unseen by the two men waiting for the others to arrive, you hear one say to the other that being around black people is like watching a foreign film without translation.
The more deadly consequences are explored in the poem-scripts for “Situation” video essays she produces with her photographer husband, John Lucas—on topics such as Hurricane Katrina, Trayvon Martin, the 2011 hate-crime killing of James Craig Anderson, and racial profiling (“And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.”).
Citizen, a 2014 National Book Award finalist for poetry, evokes the double weight of daily encounters with racial prejudice—the weariness of accumulating small psychic cuts, indignities, and deaths multiplied by a dominant culture that doesn’t believe they are real.
Rankine assembles a calmly devastating case against the myth of a “post-racial America.” Art and news images referenced in her poems are scattered throughout the book—a photo of Danish tennis player Caroline Wozniacki, blonde and grinning, towels stuffed into her top and shorts in mockery of Serena Williams, is particularly cringe-inducing. Several of the powerful “Situation” video essays are viewable at Claudiarankine.com.
JASIRI X is a Pittsburgh-based hip-hop artist, community activist, and founding member of the anti-violence group One Hood. His track “Strange Fruit (Class of 2013)” is in memory of Renisha McBride and Jonathan Ferrell, killed in separate incidents seeking help after car accidents, and Kendrick Johnson, a teenager who died under mysterious circumstances in his high school gym, with incompetence or intentional cover-up marring the investigation. Jasiri X challenges mainstream rappers and black leaders for being more concerned with money and fame than these deaths—but begins and ends with a broader indictment: “Another Black body lynched is not unique to us” and “Strange fruit but now they cock and aim shoot yeah.” The video ends with Jasiri X holding up Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Twin Palm Publishers; withoutsanctuary.org), a collection of images made as souvenirs of mob violence during the Jim Crow era.
As Rankine writes, “The world is wrong. You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard.”
LAWYER BRYAN Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, Ala., has spent his career working with those who have been denied fair treatment in the criminal justice system because of poverty and race: death row prisoners, the mentally disabled, poor women, those given life sentences while still children. In Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (Spiegel & Grau), Stevenson, who has rightly gained internet fame from a powerful TED talk about his life’s work, brings you in close to outrageous travesties against people with little or no means of defense, trapped in a “costly nightmare” of mass incarceration. He focuses especially on the story of Walter McMillian, a black Alabama man sent to death row on the basis of false accusations; Stevenson and EJI eventually get him freed.
Stevenson offers an eloquent analysis of how our justice system has gone bad, infused with insights relevant for anyone wrestling with despair, injustice, and complicity. “My clients were broken by mental illness, poverty, and racism. ... In their broken state, they were judged and condemned by people whose commitment to fairness had been broken by cynicism, hopelessness, and prejudice. ... I’m broken too.” But he hopes this might make us hunger for mercy and reform: “[I]f we acknowledged our brokenness, we could no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in executing people, in our deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable.” And he testifies to the “traces of hope and humanity” that linger in many condemned and incarcerated people, “seeds of restoration that come to astonishing life when nurtured by very simple interventions.”
Finally, incorporating awareness of the civil rights movement and the legacy of Jim Crow with a child’s growing sense of self and her creative gifts, is the 2014 National Book Award winner for young people’s literature, Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulsen Books/ Penguin Group). Jacqueline Woodson’s memoir in free verse of growing up as an African-American girl in the 1960s and ’70s gives a child’s-eye view on divorce and death, an uncle’s imprisonment, a loving family, and the TV news:
Angela Davis smiles, gap-toothed and
beautiful,
raises her fist in the air
says, Power to the people, looks out
from the television
directly into my eyes.
JAMES H. CONE writes in The Cross and the Lynching Tree that African Americans “found in the cross the spiritual power to resist the violence they so often suffered.” May this Lenten season be one where we all look clearly at the brokenness of our souls and our systems—and cultivate a new commitment to mercy, justice, and resistance.
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