The Story Complex: Social Justice

Astute readers will notice a new link on my blog for the Virtual Global Taskforce. This initiative dovetails perfectly with the intent of AMG: to bring the grace of God to the world in tangible, practical ways, whether by serving our fellow humanity through social justice, creating beautiful art, or declaring the Gospel and making disciples.

Recently the topic of racial injustice, human trafficking, and systemic sexual abuse has pushed its way to the forefront of my consciousness. A few weekends ago I toured the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, Alabama, and felt the weight of slavery, social injustice, and extreme racism settle over me with horrific intensity. With my own two hands I grasped the same bars that once caged Martin Luther King Jr. I shook the bars and vowed that my actions symbolized shaking the entire structure of hatred and bigotry and ignorance.

Then that evening I watched the heart-wrenching film Blood Diamond and stared in horror as I watched evil overwhelm an entire country. The suffering of illegal trafficking, smuggling, conscripted child soldiers, and large-scale genocide hit me like a punch in the gut.

Several days later I attended a lecture about human trafficking. The speaker graphically described the rampage of evil in the world today, and talked about what she considers the eight faces of human trafficking/abuse (more on that later). Sobering to the extreme. The next morning she presented information that again left me feeling emotionally drained, as well as deeply responsible for what I'd learned.

The next weekend I attended the Nashville Film Festival, where the documentary Banished showed to broad acclaim. The film cataloged several cases in the early part of the last century when white members of a town or county banded together to lynch Black people and drive them from the area. The worst case was Forsyth County, Georgia, where the population of Blacks plummeted from over one thousand to less than thirty in only one year; by the following year, Forsyth County had an entirely homogeneous White population.

Last night I slept in a huge field in Nashville with a thousand other people, all gathered together for Displace Me, a fantastic event organized to raise awareness for the child soldiers in Uganda. I had the opportunity to write a letter to the president of Uganda and attach a picture of me wearing a white t-shirt with a large red X spray-painted on the front. All across the country, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of over a dozen cities for the same purpose—even if only half of us write letters, the public outcry will be so great that neither our government nor theirs can fail to take notice.

All these forces have converged at once to bring this topic of social justice to the fore. Although I'd planned for some time to discuss the issue here, I can no longer put it off in favor of more 'artistic' pursuits.

I will not keep silent anymore.

The truly ironic thing, however, is that social injustice is largely a matter of bad art. Stop. Reread that sentence. Ponder. Seems insensitive and even destructively naïve, yes?

Do not misunderstand me. I do not wish to trivialize racism and injustice in any way whatsoever. Rather, I want to identify one of the root problems that perpetuates the systemic abuses I so strongly decry: the misuse of art as a destructive medium has powerfully perpetrated the abhorrent idea that certain races are inherently superior to others, and as such are justified in abusing those inferior to them.

When over the years the myth of White Superiority, often spearheaded by its most visible proponents, the Ku Klux Klan, embedded itself firmly in the minds of Southerners, they instituted Jim Crow Laws to connect story (art) and life (reality). Once again we see that the perceived truth of a story led to a resultant shift in action; concepts and beliefs embodied into deeds—almost in a grotesque parody of the Incarnation, in which the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.

This injustice flourishes still today, both through caricatures and stereotypes of race and the insidious myth of racial superiority/inferiority. The troubling moral ambiguity in response to this injustice should serve to pull the blinders from our eyes: for all the progress made in America and around the world, these false stories continue to promote linguistic violence. Until we consciously choose to change our portrayals of race and to season our interactions with impressionable young ones to reflect reality—that we are all equal yet different, with rich diversity and heritage—the blood of those slain by injustice will continue to be upon our heads.

The time has come to redeem the arts and to recapture the beauty and truth and goodness of story. With Martin Luther King Jr., I too dream of a world in which we are judged by the content of our character, not the color of our skin. I envision a world in which we one day all stand side by side, arms linked together, and sing joyously of our common humanity. Come on. Stand with me.

Grace and peace,
Andrew <><