Chapter Two: Drum for justice
“When I thought about what I would have done when I was sixteen years old or nineteen or even twenty-four, I was scared to realize that I might have run. The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became about all the young black boys and men in that neighborhood. Did they know not to run? Did they know to stay calm and say, ‘It’s okay’?” Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy, p.43
In chapter two, the author of the book has an experience that surprises and angers him: police officers hold him at gunpoint and illegally search his car for no reason. Except that he is a black man in a neighborhood where a black man sitting in a car for 15-minutes at night leads to suspicion and a call to the police. When confronted with the police, Bryan has an impulse to run. His age and experience override that impulse, but when the encounter is finished, he reflects on how such an event might play out for other black men and boys in his neighborhood.
Fight or flight. This basic human instinct has helped us survive for thousands of years. But this instinct in modern life can lead to death, not survival, for many of our youth. Instead of a wild animal or a true enemy, the fear that leads to this instinct is stimulated by those who are supposed to be our protectors. Protectors who make an automatic presumption that a black child is doing something wrong by being present in a particular place at a particular time. Protectors who make an interpretation that a black man looks menacing or dangerous or suspicious. Protectors who are blinded by the racist structure of our world and do not protect all of God’s children. I wanted to write “do not protect all of God’s children anymore” but in reading this book, I realized more definitively that we have never protected all of our black and brown and native brothers and sisters. The ways in which we have stimulated the fight or flight instinct for these children of God have changed over time – slavery, post-Reconstruction terrorism, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. We have never really protected these marginalized children.
At the end of this chapter, an elderly man who has scars from standing up for voting, civil and children’s rights, tells Bryan that he is “beating the drum for justice!” Many of us are part of the dominant white culture that has caused fear and great harm to our black brothers and sisters over the course of our country’s history. How might we join Bryan to “beat a drum for justice”?
Lisa Hirsch is a member of the Social Justice Ministry leadership team. She and her husband, Tom McDonough, have 3 children and are long time resident parishioners of St. Mary.
