Acts of God and Schemes of Men
Our family moved to the South Side of Chicago in the fall of 2009. During the previous year I'd driven Maggie to a train station twenty minutes from our apartment for the reverse commute to her job in the suburbs. On the evenings when I picked her up I often arrived early and sat listening to NPR describe the unfolding financial crisis. Each day it seemed that another layer of loss was uncovered; the uncertainty was thick.
In the vicinity of our new neighborhood the great recession looked, to my novice eyes, mostly like vacant lots and stalled construction projects. Most of the Chicago Housing Authority's high rises has been torn down in the previous decade, an earthquake which had scattered countless people to other neighborhoods and southern suburbs.
What I'd missed, though, was the destabilizing impact of the crisis on long-term residents, mostly African American, on the South Side. Because their wealth was more concentrated in home equity, they lost more than their white counterparts in other areas of the city. These communities were also disproportionately targeted for the riskiest mortgages which contributed to the crisis. As a result, the South Side lost wealth, stability, and dependable residents in the wake of the recession.
It took me a few years to understand this; some of that knowledge came in the form of new friends who were experiencing the racism inherent to our nation's housing and lending policies. My friends didn't have the luxury of not understanding how these things work.
I started thinking about how systemic racism impacts people's homes and bank accounts this week as we began to see how the coronavirus is disproportionately devastating black communities. In cities around the country, African Americans are dying in percentages far greater than their representation in the total population. In St. Louis, everyone who has died is black. In New York City the virus is killing black and Latino people at twice the rate as white people. Here in Chicago, African Americans represent 30% of the city's population while making up 70% of the deaths from the virus. This ProPublica article looks at Milwaukee to show the confluence of racially-impacted factors that make so many black communities vulnerable.
Contrary to how many commentators first described the virus, everyone is not equally vulnerable to COVID-19. It does discriminate.
These two events seem so different: a slow-moving financial crisis, obscured by arcane economic jargon and policies, and a ravaging pandemic which demands all our attention. It's in their wakes that we see the similarity. Those whose livelihoods and lives are most at risk are the same in both of these catastrophes. So-called acts of God and the willful schemes of powerful people both roll over the same communities, again and again.
None of this is news to those who inhabit these communities. But for the rest of the country - for white people particularly - there has yet to be a disaster so great as to force us to see the gravity of race. Most of us, still, reduce racism to its smallest unit: a word, a motivation, a person. All the while, entire neighborhoods were undermined by the financial crisis. Generational wealth disappeared. Public schools in these same new communities were shuttered. Today, on the South Side and in majority-black communities around the country, churches and their pastors wonder how many more deaths they can sustain.
Today is Holy Saturday, a day that has always felt like a prolonged pause to me. I think of the very different futures facing Jesus' disciples, futures dependent on what might happen that Sunday morning. This year the pause is especially pronounced. We're watching the devastation of our racial hierarchy in real time. Unlike the financial crisis, hindsight isn't necessary to reveal the horrible truth to even the most obstinate of us.
It's made me wonder: Is it enough to compel us toward a different future?
I've been enjoying these video conversations with some friends in the lead-up to my book's release next month. If you missed last week's you can watch it here. This coming Friday I'll be talking with Dominique Gilliard, author of Rethinking Incarceration, about, among other things, how the pandemic is disproportionately impacting incarcerated people. Dominique and I lead racial-justice experiences together and he's one of the most insightful thinkers and theologians on these topics of anyone I know. You can register for the call here.
This week's endorsement comes from an intellectual hero of mine, Dr. Michael Emerson.
Rediscipling the White Church is deeply needed, richly informed, wonderfully organized, and profoundly impactful. Framing the issue as a discipleship problem, David Swanson helps us down a clear path to be authentic Christ followers. I will recommend this book often.
Dr. Emerson has written a bunch of influential books about the sociological intersections of American Christianity and race. If you've not read it already, I recommend beginning with his classic, Divided by Faith. Thanks Dr. Emerson!