two different videos; two different realities

It happened in the middle of the day. Two videos set the internet ablaze this week, for very different reasons. One, filmed in broad daylight, shows Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year old black man, under a canopy of trees, jogging around a stopped white pickup truck near Brunswick, Georgia. Two men emerge from the truck, one with a rifle, one with a handgun. There is a brief struggle. Ahmaud is shot, twice, stumbles, and collapses onto the concrete , under the glare of the afternoon sun. The men, 64-year old Gregory McMichael and his 34 year-old son, Travis, much later claimed they suspected him for a break-in earlier in the week. It took a national outcry months after the murder for the two men to be charged with the crime and taken into custody, just before I published this. Early reactions to the viral video ranged from shock, horror and outrage, condemned as a modern lynching — while other white Americans, per usual, urged caution, restraint, warning against a rush to judgement. Perhaps all the facts aren’t in yet, they said. After all, we cannot always trust our eyes, even in the bright of day.

It happened in the middle of the day. It happened in the middle of the day, like those armed white protestors with semi-automatics storming the Michigan state capitol building, along with other images of heavily armed protesters screaming in the faces of police last weekend, taunting, clearly “very good people” (who would still live to tell the tale). In the middle of the day, like when Tamir Rice was gunned down for carrying a toy gun. It happened in the middle of the day, like Terence Crutcher shot unarmed in the middle of the street. In the middle of the day, like that afternoon in Charlottesville, in which 32-year old Heather Heyer was killed by a car at 1:45pm and 28 people injured, while peaceful protestors and neo-nazis were called, “very fine people on both sides.” Philando Castile, didn’t die in the afternoon sun, but the world saw him bleed out from the glow of a cell phone on facebook live. Even when injustice has happened at night, it has been a long middle of the day kind of moment for America: Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson, on and on it goes.

But while one video circulating on my timeline was the raw, unvarnished trauma of an afternoon murder, captured under the unsparing gaze of a merciless southern sun, the other was late night fare — cloak and dagger stuff. For some Americans, while it is difficult to believe that black people are murdered in cold blood, even when you watch it happen in the bright of day, it is easy to believe that scientists, epidemiologists, global health professionals, and educators, are part of an elaborate conspiracy meant to undermine their personal freedoms. For other white evangelical Christians, already given to gnostic thinking about the end of days, this may be bolstered by reading current traumas into their Bibles by doing elaborate crossword puzzles in Hebrew and Greek. It is evidently easier to take the word of youtube comments, cut and paste facebook posts without sources, anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, and certainly cable news than it is trust the near universal witness of people who have experienced the underside of America, even those that share their faith.

But what about when white Americans are actually able to witness these events for themselves? To a point, I can understand why conspiracy theories have a kind of appeal, especially in a time when the world feels out of control. But in a digital age, given the sheer amount of access we have to shocking, real-time acts of racial violence, what accounts for the ways in which people can see these things first hand over and over, and yet not believe their own eyes? My answer may sound too primal and woo-woo for many progressives, and many conservatives will not appreciate the usage: but I believe it is because white supremacy is a spirit. Not just an ideology, though it is that, not just a set of policies, though it is certainly embodied within systems and structures. White supremacy, America’s true founding father, and racism her founding sin. A 450-year old principality cannot merely be voted in or out, only exorcised. It is not new, it never left, and thus did not make a comeback in 2016.

However, I do believe that under the current administration, white supremacy has been embraced not as a peripheral feature, but as the central, galvanizing energy of the regime. The language of white supremacy has been increasingly normalized, and via social media and cable news, taken from the fringes and injected into the main artery over and over again of our shared discourse and common life. And it is dangerous, deadly, destructive.

I do not claim that any of our leadership would take pleasure in the kind of terror we witnessed in that video. I tend to think a lot of them are perfectly content with soft-core racism. They use white supremacy like a fire to keep them warm, thinking they can contain it, wanting to maintain a certain level of privilege and control, not understanding the spiritual force of that which they conjure, nor the spiritual power of the racially charged language they so recklessly use. But white supremacy is not a campfire, but a wildfire. So while I do not expressly place the blame for any particular incident of racially motivated violence in a one-for-one way, with each new story I grow more infuriated and more impatient with an administration that coddles extremists, refuses to classify white domestic hate groups as terrorists and has defunded fighting them (we know plenty about this in Oklahoma City, here in this 25th anniversary year of the bombing), and consistently uses demonizing, vilifying speech in a way that has real implications for real lives on the ground. Words matter.

This is not a partisan claim. I am not engaging the whataboutism nor going through the list, both because I’ve done it all before, and because all of this too…has been in broad daylight. If you haven’t seen it for what it is, I am not likely to convince you. Nor would another video on your screen. That spirit is stubborn. If you don’t like it, you’d just find a different video. God has sent us many great prophets to speak to our founding sin in its historic and current manifestations, and if you have not believed them by now, you would not believe even if someone rises from the dead (riffing on Luke 16.31). Besides, lament is not entertaining. What passes for a lot of people now as “news” is really somewhere between reality television and the ritualized storytelling of professional wrestling. There is no way the pain, pathos and nuance of actual humans will actually compete with the moral simplicity of that universe, for people who want it badly enough. The narrative of white supremacy will never sell well, because it is a narrative in which we are all complicit, demanding both corporate and individual repentance.

By contrast, it is curious that conspiracy theories are common ground for certain kinds of right and left wing types to converge, because it is a place that requires no serious self-reflection. Any narrative in which we can easily identify a scapegoat for all our problems takes on an all-consuming religious significance; it is in fact a powerful simulation of righteousness by which we feel cleansed. But we are clean at someone else’s expense. The Christian story is a pesky one, because we always have to be aware of the ways we may be the ones who are doing the crucifying. And America is still very much a place where we make black and brown bodies suffer for our sins.

In a time in which we are experiencing collective grief and trauma for the ways our world is changing during the pandemic, the tiny little screens in our pockets are portals that offer us an escape. You can plug in to an alternate reality in which you can be the victim, you can be the martyr, you can be the hero— you can be one of the few who have the secret knowledge that sets you apart from the rest! You can live in the echo chamber, you don’t have to interact meaningfully with a story unlike your own. It is more than possible than to embrace the kind of soul death that does not carry with it the “threat of resurrection.”

But maybe these little screens, also yet carry within them the possibility of revelation. Perhaps these screens could become mirrors in which we could behold our true selves. This is, after all, apocalyptic time, revealing time, not because it is the end of the world — but quite literally the end of the world as we have known it. It is a time of judgement, in which we are granted the grave mercy to see ourselves for what we truly are, that we might repent and change…if we have eyes to see. It is grave, because to see truthfully is to see the end of ourselves. It is mercy, because the One who makes seeing possible is the One who makes all things new.

Meanwhile, our structures are failing us all. Per usual, even suffering during the pandemic is radically disproportionate. Black Americans represent 13.4% of the U.S population, but new studies show that counties with higher black populations account for more than half of all COVID-19 cases, and almost 60% of deaths. Bound up in this is a whole narrative of disparity, including in healthcare.

At the same time we are grappling with all the ways our systems have failed us, when the illusions of security the oppressed never had to begin with are failing even the powerful now, this terrible thing came along that reminded us of the truth. What happened near Brunswick, Georgia was vile. It was grotesque. But the evil that happened was also the truth, not just of that moment, but of a larger story. This is our our most basic, foundational sin, upon which every other injustice and evil rests. The story the plandemic video (and others like it) tells offers salvation through an escape from reality. The terrible story the other video gestures towards, like so many others, offers salvation through an immersion into reality: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” (John 8.32) But the truth does not offer escapist entertainment, only an opportunity for repentance. In the words of the late James Cone, “Until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify Christ with a “recrucified” black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of Christian identity in America, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.”