24  MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS

IN 1995 I DECIDED I WAS A JESUS FREAK. I remember the moment it happened: in a huge stadium filled with people gathered together to hear Billy Graham, well into his seventies by then but still considered a rock star in my world. DC Talk was the opening act, playing an intoxicating mix of rock with a hint of hip hop, the lyrics all about being outside of popular culture and celebrating the fact, even if it meant facing persecution. I remember the altar call at the end of the evening, the thousands of people streaming down to the stage to say yes to Jesus. As my family got in our car and headed home, the line of cars waiting to leave the arena seemed endless, as many headlights as there were stars in the sky. I was eleven years old but I already knew I was a part of something special, true, and worthy of joining, but I was also prepared to fight for it, to expect to be on edge for the rest of my days as I battled to convince the rest of the world of the rightness of my cause.

In the ensuing years I embraced this mantra wholeheartedly. One of my most on-brand moments occurred when I was thirteen years old and started an evangelistic punk rock band, conscripting my older sister and several boys from the youth group to tour Northern California to try to convert people. I cut my hair short and bleached it blond and wore dog collars around my neck, but inside I was as pietistic as a Puritan housewife. When we were interviewed by the local paper, I was thrilled to see a photo of myself, looking seriously into the camera, with a quote: “Christians can be punk rockers too.” With every simplistic bass line, with every tortured lyric about God (which maybe could have been interpreted to be about my sister’s boyfriends), with every show we played in church basements, I was thrilled. I was a freak for Jesus. And I would do my part to be in the revolution without caving in to the identity of the world.

In an age of increasingly secular states (as opposed to the religious empires of previous centuries), professor Matthew Kaemingk suggests that there are four responses available to religious minorities when it comes to approaching power in a pluralistic society: assimilation, moderation, retreat, and retribution.1 I grew up believing we were retreating from the world, but now I wonder if it wasn’t really all about retreating in order to come back and be in charge someday (retribution). I was raised in a time of American evangelicalism where though we held enormous enclaves of power, we believed we were exiles in our own land. We were Protestants from a line of people who felt they had lost the culture war way back in the early twentieth century, we had retreated into our sanctuaries and seminaries and arena concerts and crusades (all places of power, it should be noted) to lick our wounds and shore up the faith.

This underdog theology remains powerful today, even as it is patently untrue. White evangelicals in particular regularly bemoan how the liberal media or Hollywood or social media is against them. I often think about what our situation would look like to the early followers of Jesus. The disciples, the writers of the Gospels, Paul himself would never be able to conceive of a world or society like America where (mostly White) Christians owned so many businesses, homes, wealth, institutions, and held the highest level positions of power in the government. We might be considered freaks in a different regard. We might be seen as the most preposterous of all: the people with power constantly stoking the fear that we will lose it, claiming the blessing of a Savior who urged us to do just that.

When you are raised to fear the loss of power, it can twist how you approach lament. I will never forget how someone I loved very much once calmly explained to me why an unarmed Black boy deserved to be killed and why his killer deserved to be acquitted by the legal system. This person told me this with very little emotion in their voice, speaking to me as if I was a child. And in a way I did feel like a child at that moment, a child who realizes in an instant that the world is not fair. I tried to argue my points in a cool and calculated manner, but instead I found myself crying almost to the point of screaming. I wailed as if I were at a funeral, and in a way I was. In a time when the television news seemed to show an endless succession of Black bodies left bleeding on the ground while their murderers walked free, I wailed as I watched so many people around me dismiss the sufferings of other people, time and time again. I watched as the people who raised me to expect injustice against our religion calmly accepted the systems that targeted other people. I wailed as I realized that people who loved God can also love systems that lead to death, especially if they remain free from those same terrors.

I have come to this realization later in life because of my own privilege: my white skin and middle-class upbringing, being surrounded by other people who felt safe expressing their religion constantly. But still I am puzzled over this juxtaposition: Christians who believe in the fall and yet when it comes to institutions like the American legal system or Christian universities or the police force, they act as if they are beyond the corruptions common to us all (depending on who is in charge or what issue is in question). William Stringfellow, a Harvard-educated lawyer and lay theologian in the 1960s, experienced his own conversion in this area. He had long thought the American legal system was both civil and fair. Even when he was prosecuted for helping his friend, the Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan, evade arrest (for burning draft cards during the Vietnam War), he gave the system the benefit of the doubt (Stringfellow eventually had all charges dropped, confirming his trust).

But as Stringfellow went through life, as he entered into relationships with people who were different from himself, he started to question his trust in the system, the system he had dedicated his very life to. He learned about people like George Jackson, a Black man who went to prison due to a contested charge against him for stealing $70, served twelve years, and died there. Stringfellow soon learned that George Jackson wasn’t an aberration. In fact, Stringfellow wrote in 1965, he now realized that “for blacks in the USA the law, in a quite overwhelming sense, in the legislature, in the courts, in law enforcement, and administration is now, as it always has been, an enemy: a harasser, an invader, an oppressor.” Stringfellow takes this conclusion one step further and asks a question, one that I believe more people from privileged backgrounds need to ask themselves. “If the American legal system seems viable for me and other white Americans but is not so for citizens who are black, or for any others, then how, as the dual commandment would ask, in the name of humanity, can it be affirmed as viable for me or for any human being?”2 In other words, if a system works for you but not for everyone, then how can we continue to view that system as just? Once we begin to understand that we have benefited from the same system that has crushed others, how can any follower of Christ accept this reality as a part of God’s plan? We can’t, says Stringfellow. We must recognize it for what it is, a principality and a power, a demonic system that leads to death. And we must learn to resist it. We pay attention. We listen to others. We tell the truth. And we learn to lament the reality in order to make way for a better future.

I was in a room lined with glass jars, each one filled to the brim with brown and gold and mahogany soil, jars on shelves that stretched all the way up to the tall ceiling. It was visually striking, and when I leaned in to look at the jars more closely I saw a date and location etched into each one. I recoiled slightly in horror as I realized what these jars were. They were soil collections from just a sampling of the known lynching sites on record in the state of Alabama. They were a testament to the earth and the blood that was spilt, an image of a history that had been made invisible to me.

The room was just one part of a museum and monument in Montgomery, Alabama, put together by the Equal Justice Initiative. The Equal Justice Initiative is led by Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard-educated lawyer who worked for decades with wrongfully convicted people on death row, the vast majority African American. After doing this work for decades, Stevenson realized that nothing would change if the underlying narrative of White supremacy didn’t change. And he believes that the best way to change the narrative is to ask America to engage with its history of racial terror in meaningful ways: to lament the past in order to move forward into the future.3

Those jars of soil I saw in a room in Montgomery changed me. I went back to my beloved Pacific Northwest wondering what stories had been buried, wondering how I might need to connect myself to them. I discovered that there was only one lynching of a Black man on record in Oregon, in a coastal town in southern Oregon. His name was Alonzo Tucker, and he was lynched for allegedly having a relationship with a White woman. One bright summer day my entire family—my husband, two kids, and me—went on a pilgrimage of sorts to find the spot where the lynching happened. I combed through records online and visited the local history museum. The incident was well-known to local historians, but there were no monuments or memorials. In fact, as we put together the pieces of geography we realized that the bridge where the lynching had taken place was no longer in existence. Instead, the marshland had dried up and become firm ground. The lynching spot was now a road next to the one high school in town, in between two sports fields.

My husband had built a white cross that we had put in the trunk of our car, and we wrote down the name of the man who was killed decades before our own parents were alive: Alonzo Tucker. We tried to hammer the cross into the ground, to make a small, permanent, and stubborn marker of remembrance. I envisioned high schoolers on their way to track practice taking pictures and googling the name, learning the history they were walking past. But the gravel was hard and we didn’t have proper tools. We leaned the cross against the chain-link fence, said a prayer and left, spooked by the police cars patrolling the area. Had we done something wrong? I wondered. Had we broken some sort of law? I don’t think we did, but for some reason it felt like trying to make a memorial to a victim of White supremacy was a transgression of sorts. The first rule of empire is that you never, ever expose the ways it retains its power.

The threads of this narrative reach everywhere, into every state in our country. As Soong-Chan Rah suggests, we need to get to the larger narrative or nothing will change. White supremacy is a foundational element of the myth of the American Dream—it is a belief that has been internalized and absorbed, passed down by the European conquerors and how they tried to make sense of their world. Without addressing this larger narrative, structures that oppress will continue to pop up: slavery gets changed into Jim Crow laws, which get changed into the mass incarceration system (indeed, there are now more Black men in the US prison system than were a part of slavery).

It’s the same reason why Bryan Stevenson eventually transitioned his career from working to exonerate wrongly accused Black men on death row to trying to change the larger narratives in America. His most recent project, the monument and memorial to peace and justice in Montgomery, is the first ever monument to America’s history of lynching. As Stevenson is fond of pointing out, it took only a decade for there to be a monument to the victims of 9/11. Why has it taken our country so long to mourn other tragedies, to lament the loss of life and violence inflicted on so many within our nation?

Perhaps it’s because up till now the monuments and memorials have not been made for or by exiles. Instead, they’ve been placed by people in power, by people who have a lot to gain by upholding the way things have always worked. Empire loves to create statues to itself—think of the bull on Wall Street, the statues of Confederate leaders littering public parks in the South, the four men carved into Mt. Rushmore. They all keep the narrative intact. But as writer Ta-Nehisi Coates says in regard to the history of racialized violence in this country—including 250 years of slavery, ninety years of Jim Crow, sixty years of separate but equal, and thirty-five years of racist housing policies: “Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.”4

The day I made a pilgrimage to the site of Alonzo Tucker’s lynching was one step in a journey toward learning how to lament. I was starting to pay attention to those bodies that have been crucified here in my own country, those bodies that most closely resemble Christ’s own body. We will never be liberated until the true exiles are the ones making the memorials, the monuments, the songs we sing, until the systems are dismantled that have worked for me but imprisoned others.

Growing up, I was prepared to be persecuted; I was prepared to be labeled a freak, an outsider. I was prepared to be a proud exile, certain of my outsider status. But I was not prepared for the opposite: to learn to how to mourn the systems and sins of my community, to learn how to live as a member of a society that benefits from unjust systems. In arenas packed with people, in the halls of government buildings, in churches large and small, in universities and conferences, I was not taught to learn how to lay down my power willingly. I was taught to fight for it, which dulled and tarnished my ability to mourn the reality of those who truly were being oppressed in my midst. And if I can’t learn to lament and repent, I will never be able to envision a world where resurrection is truly possible.