Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(53)

The greatly stepped-up harassment of people of color, and Muslims, and immigrants in the wake of Trump’s election points to the sea change in our naked tolerance for such assaults, in the permission granted to diabolical forces that rob us even more of comity and support of the commonweal.

Donald Trump harms our nation’s positive racial future.

Yet, beloved, there remains, after all, the blackness that is prophecy, the blackness that is inexplicable hope in the face of savage hopelessness. The great black prophet and mystic Howard Thurman says it best.

At the time when the slaves in America were without any excuse for hope and they could see nothing before them but the long interminable cotton rows and the fierce sun and the lash of the overseer, what did they do? They declared that God was not through. They said, “We cannot be prisoners of this event. We must not scale down the horizon of our hopes and our dreams and our yearnings to the level of the event of our lives.” So they lived through their tragic moment until at last they came out on the other side, saluting the fulfillment of their hopes and their faith.

Beloved, if the enslaved could nurture, on the vine of their desperate deficiency of democracy, the spiritual and moral fruit that fed our civilization, then surely we can name and resist demagoguery; we can protest, and somehow defeat, the forces that threaten the soul of our nation. To not try, to give up on the possibility that we can make a difference, can make the difference, is to give up on our past, on our complicated, difficult, but victorious past. Donald Trump is not our final, or ultimate, problem. The problem is, instead, allowing hopelessness to steal our joyful triumph before we work hard enough to achieve it.





IX.

Closing Prayer

Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.

—Alice Walker, The Color Purple


Oh God, the hour is dark. The suffering is great. But we will not give up. We will not surrender.

We will not surrender because we have endured the lash of spite and the whip of hate on our backs.

We will not surrender because we know that faith is greater than fear, good triumphant over evil, love more noble than hate.

We will not surrender because our mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers, and their mothers and fathers, too, believed in you, believed in us, believed that no obstacle put in their way could stop them. They believed that the grace you gave them for their journeys would outlast any challenge to their hearts and minds.

We will not surrender because your enduring and indestructible Word feeds the souls of our people.

We will not surrender because blackness is a gift that has blessed the world beyond compare. Our minds and hearts, and our tongues and bodies, too, have made Earth a better place to live. We will not surrender because we have survived.

Oh God, we are not na?ve. We know, just as white America knows, that our legion, multiple, complicated, adaptable, triumphant blackness threatens whiteness.

Oh God, you placed a paradox in our midst like a rainbow at the end of a storm: if we are to understand America we must understand blackness.

Oh Lord, black folk are everything; we are every possibility of American, even human, identity made real. That means we are everywhere, just like our white brothers and sisters.

We are going nowhere. We are your children too. We will survive. We are America.