{"id":186,"date":"2022-05-25T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-05-25T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calchurches.planetpov.com\/impact\/index.php\/2022\/05\/25\/may-25th-2022\/"},"modified":"2024-05-23T21:16:20","modified_gmt":"2024-05-23T21:16:20","slug":"may-25th-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/churchimpact.org\/index.php\/2022\/05\/25\/may-25th-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"What Part of \u201cAll God\u2019s Children\u201d Will We Ever Observe?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u200bEditor’s Note: Since Libby wrote this piece last week, following the mass murders in Buffalo, we have been horrified to learn of more horrific mass murders at Robb Elem
entary School in Uvalde, Texas.  When will people of faith move beyond “thoughts and prayers” to take substantive action?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u200b<\/span>by Elizabeth Sholes, Director Emerita Public Policy<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The mass murder of 10 Black Americans Saturday May 14 was sickening to all people of conscience. The shooter left massive evidence of his deliberate and calculated intent in his car and on his electronic gear. This was not an act of a mentally-ill person but one who carefully and deliberately planned the attack to get rid of as many Black people as possible.<\/p>\n

We by now have read that he embraced the \u201creplacement theory\u201d propagated by extremists. It is the fear, that has been around since at least the 1960s, that the white race (as if it\u2019s one solid block of people) is being replaced by people of color, especially immigrants.\u00a0\u00a0Why that led the shooter to target Black Americans is unclear, but extremism is rarely rational.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The shooting at a supermarket, TOPS, on the East Side has more than general horror for me. I lived in Buffalo for many years and was the originator of an effort to get a community-owned supermarket into that neighborhood.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cOur Market\u201d was its name.\u00a0\u00a0It did not succeed for a lot of reasons, the TOPS finally came to this food desert area.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad of that, but the effort to build a community owned store was wonderful; it put me in contact with many community members and especially with the Masden District then-Council Member, David Collins who was a man of extraordinary vision and concern for his constituents.\u00a0\u00a0He had a civil rights legacy second to few, and his actions were always principled and concerned for people and their needs.<\/p>\n

Thanks to David\u2019s friendship, I was involved in his campaigns, his activism for social justice, and through him met other good people, some of whom became friends. For years they were my \u201cwarmth of other suns\u201d, anchors in my city to what was good, righteous, just, and downright fun.\u00a0\u00a0I associate all we did as passionate justice coupled with raucous laughter, hard work followed by dancing, unending campaigning and delicious food.\u00a0\u00a0It just doesn\u2019t get better than that.<\/p>\n

To have this area the target of such hate is incomprehensible. To have these people, these good, decent, hard-working, and loving people, cut down so disgustingly is almost more than I can bear.<\/p>\n

How do we end these horrors?\u00a0\u00a0For those of us who are white, where is our voice in all this?\u00a0\u00a0How do our congregations and our voices matter?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

When do we make manifest that \u201cAll God\u2019s Children\u201d does not have qualifiers?\u00a0\u00a0When we hear a congressional representative say children refugees at the border don\u2019t deserve infant formula, when we read of hate crimes on the rise against everyone but especially Asian Americans blamed for COVID, when we see LGBTQ people targeted for simply being who they are, we see that too many professed Christians have \u201cexception clauses\u201d in their hearts.\u00a0\u00a0When people die for the color of their skin, we have well and truly lost our way.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is up to us. We have to bear witness against hate.. We cannot be silent.\u00a0\u00a0These are not political issues \u2013 these are the most profound values of faith and democracy. It takes courage, no doubt about it, but we will not honor either our faith or our nation is we are silent.\u00a0\u00a0Silence is assent. And it is a moral cowardice we can no longer accept.<\/p>\n

We have to challenge bias, prejudice, hate rhetoric, and acts of violence. We have to call out our elected officials who engage in such disgusting lies. We need to write to them, we need to challenge the media both locally and nationally to stop promoting \u201creplacement theory\u201d or any other biased and inhumane propaganda that serves to dehumanize anyone.<\/p>\n

When Asian women were shot to death in Atlanta, the chief of police said the shooter was \u201chaving a bad day\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0A bad DAY?\u00a0\u00a0The public outcry led to an apology from the chief and a renewed effort to investigate the hate-based murders.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here in Sacramento at a public meeting a city council member blamed the meth epidemic on Latin American immigrants. That is absolutely not true; meth is a local \u201ccottage industry\u201d in white communities around the Bay Area per the Department of Justice. I called him out on it for inflaming both anti-immigrant and anti-homeless views here in Sacramento.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Word got back to me that he hates me. Fine. Oddly, I can live with that. Who would I be if that had gone unchallenged?\u00a0\u00a0He can hate me. I bet he never says that again.<\/p>\n

If we are going to sit in our pews on Sunday, we have to live the Word the remainder of the week. No one will stop this hate but us. We must do it with courage and without returning the hate.\u00a0\u00a0But we must do it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We can be silent no more.<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u200bEditor’s Note: Since Libby wrote this piece last week, following the mass murders in Buffalo, we have been horrified to learn of more horrific mass murders … Read More ›<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-rights","category-racism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/churchimpact.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/churchimpact.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/churchimpact.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchimpact.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchimpact.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/churchimpact.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":598,"href":"https:\/\/churchimpact.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions\/598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/churchimpact.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchimpact.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/churchimpact.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}