“This board is faced with an important decision this evening,” Mahomet-Seymour School Board member Jeremy Henrichs said on August 3. “It’s been presented with an anti racism resolution. It seems that this would be an easy choice. I think all of us would agree that racism is evil. And that all individuals have inherent value, regardless of their external characteristics. What complicates this matter is an identity crisis. Too many people believe their identity is rooted in these external characteristics: success in school, in success in music or sports, one’s image on social media, social status, one’s occupation, money, or power, and I could go on with many more things.
“None of these things provide any inherent value to the individual. My message to any students who are listening tonight. You are so much more valuable than any of these temporary things. You are a uniquely gifted and talented individual created by God. This is your identity. Ultimately, this is what gives value to your life, and no one can take that away.
“Our Declaration of Independence succinctly describes the inherent value of the individual. It reads: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ What makes these traits self evident? What is the basis for equality? Where do these values come from? Are they solely the product of man’s intellect, or social or cultural evolution? Our founding fathers had it right: these truths are self-evident because they’re endowed by our Creator.
“America’s more than a nation. It is an ideal. It is this ideal that has given freedom to many, not only in America, but across the globe. This has been an imperfect process, but the progress of freedom cannot be denied. I believe that America at its core is good when it espouses to follow those founding principles.
“You might be asking what does this have to do with an anti racism resolution? The resolution that is being recommended for tonight has very little positive to say about America, its people, and especially the people of this school district and community. It uses characters such as implicit bias, systemic racism, power and privilege. The premise of this resolution is that we all have an illness, of which we are completely unaware while it invades every aspect of our lives. This includes our institutions, our words, our actions and our private thoughts. It’s an illness that’s seen in every conversation and wayward glance, no matter what your intentions may be.
“In fact, your intentions have no standing. What matters is the perception of someone who predetermined your intent based on the group or class you are identified with. The only remedy is to admit to this illness and consent to re education. This re education is presented by those who apparently do not possess the illness. They hold the truth, and you may choose to freely submit to their prescribing remedy, or be bludgeoned if nearly until you conform.
“I would prefer to proceed in a more positive direction, using terms such as humility, grace, forgiveness and love. We are humbled and need forgiveness because we have all fallen short. As a result, we are all in need of grace. This gracee has been extended so that we might extend it to others. In humility, we can also love unconditionally by seeking to place the needs of others before our own needs. Realizing that we have inherent value because we have been uniquely created in the image of God, why can’t we all prescribe to the inclusive statement, “love your neighbor as yourself?” Wouldn’t this be a better way of celebrating our diversity and resolving our differences?”
By Dani Tietz
I will be the first to admit that I am not good at math. I can rattle off basic math facts pretty fast, but when it comes to more complicated math, I run my figures past people who are much smarter than me.
One of the easiest math lessons for me, and I’m sure for many other people, is when we learned about what it means to be equal.
I grew up in the day of chalkboards; and in the day when teachers called kids up to the board to do math problems in front of their peers. In the greater or less than unit, she’d write “5 7”, “10 3”, “9.365 9.364” and then the student would make a little gator mouth open to the number that is greater than.
As a kid, sometimes you had to think about which number was greater. But when the teacher wrote “2 2”, the answer was easy: equal.
Equal is good, right? Equal pieces of pie. Equal number of crayons. Equal time on the playground. Everybody everywhere has the same. And that is fair and right.
This framework was also applied in history class. We learned that the Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Yes. Right Even as a kid, you feel that. YEEESSSSSS!
We’ve all got ears and eyes, a nose and a mouth, blood and bones, feelings and thoughts. Of course we are all created equally.
I wonder what would happen if a man and a woman were drawn on the board instead of the numbers. What if we asked a child or an adult if the man or the woman was equal, less than or greater than. What do you think that person would put?
I’d really like to be the person who would put an equal sign between the two. But the truth is that in everyday circumstances, I continually make a man and a woman less than or greater than just by the bias that I have towards the two.
Maybe you could answer these questions along with me. You walk into a classroom and see a man who is the teacher, how do you feel? Is it different from how you feel about a woman who is a teacher? Is it different if that man is an elementary school teacher? Do you feel the same or different if the woman is a college professor of mathematics?
What if I were to tell you that the woman is Latino and is not yet a US citizen? What if I tell you that the man is gay?
As an adult woman, I am strong enough to tell you today that when I think about this man and this woman, each created equally, I have bias. Even taking away the hypothesis that the profession may be a teacher, whether elementary or professor, US citizen or not, gay, straight, bi or transgender, I have bias just on man and woman.
There are a couple things that we leave off the table when we talk about all men are created equally.
Professor of History, Political Science Jack Rakove at Standford University told Melissa De Witte of Standford News Service:
“When Jefferson wrote ‘all men are created equal’ in the preamble to the Declaration, he was not talking about individual equality. What he really meant was that the American colonists, as a people, had the same rights of self-government as other peoples, and hence could declare independence, create new governments and assume their “separate and equal station” among other nations.”
In the same moments that we are taught about the Declaration of Independence and the framework of the Constitution, which guarantees certain basic rights for the citizens, we know that the governed are not being treated equally by the writers of those documents.
According to monticello.org, Jefferson enslaved over 600 human beings during his lifetime. He formally freed only seven, four of which were his children.
The Slavery FAQ on monticello.org states, “Many slaveowners, including Jefferson, understood that female slaves—and their future children—represented the best means to increase the value of his holdings, what he called ‘capital.’ This would have been especially true after the abolishment of the slave trade in 1807 in America, which prohibited the importation of new enslaved people and thus increased the value of the people already living in bondage. ‘I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm,’ Jefferson remarked in 1820. ‘What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.’”
While many founding fathers, like Jefferson, held ideals that they did not practice, there were also men at the table who did. John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Paine did not own slaves, and also spoke out against the practice of owning humans.
Rakove wrote, “After the Revolution succeeded (1783), Americans began reading that famous phrase (all men are created equal) another way. It now became a statement of individual equality that everyone and every member of a deprived group could claim for himself or herself. With each passing generation, our notion of who that statement covers has expanded. It is that promise of equality that has always defined our constitutional creed.”
Still, Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution—1787, 11 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed—stated, “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”
The “three-fifths of all other persons” are slaves. The Natives, who were not taxed, were also not counted because they were not considered citizens of the United States, either on a federal or state level.
It wasn’t until 1865 that slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment. And it wasn’t until 1868 that all persons born or naturalized in the United States—including former slaves—became citizens and were granted “equal protection of the laws.”
For the next 100 years, through the Civil Rights movement, Jim Crow Laws, in both the north and the south, segregated the black people from the white people. The people who were created “equally” had to sit in different seats on buses, drink from different fountains, attend different schools and use different restrooms. The United States military was also segregated.
Of course, anyone who has been through a history class or two probably knows these things. We believe in a system where the ideals are perfect. And we forget to look at the people who are tasked with carrying out those ideals who are not.
Jon Meachum, author of “In the Hands of the People” said that Jefferson’s ideals, all men are created equal, matter because it is “one of human equality. It was not realized then, it hasn’t been realized now. But he did in, kind of, a mission statement for the country, devote the national experiment to an ideal. “
Pulitzer Prize Winning Author Annette Gordon Reed said, “there are many things that people believe intellectually that they are not capable of carrying out emotionally, because of their commitments to a particular way of life, to their commitments to a community, their people. And that’s the fallibility to humankind of human beings to be able to see something; and some things you can do something about, he thought that moving from Great Britain, changing Virginia laws in lots of different ways, those are the kinds of things that he worked on, but this (slavery) is not something that he could bring himself to deal with.”
As we stand in a moment where we can choose to address the ramifications of the unequal practices that have plagued our country since the first European stepped on America’s soils, those who have been always identified as whole, real and countable, cannot just use an ideal as a way to discredit or glance past the inequities that still exist today.
Those who have been counted as less than whole carry the weight and the burden of more than 500 years of practices that have told them otherwise based on their race, their religion, their language, their sexuality or their gender. Those practices, even today, have put those minorities in the less than category in American culture.
Believers of the Christian faith also taught me that our founding fathers had God in mind when they wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Pledge of Allegiance — which actually wasn’t written until 1892 by socialist minister Francis Bellamy; “Under God” was added in 1954 by Congress on the suggestion of President Eisenhower who was worried about communism.
Wading through the founding fathers’ religious beliefs is just as murky as putting together their written words and their practices.
Regardless, Christians also strive for the ideal of “love your neighbor as yourself.”
In Matthew 22:36-40 , Jesus says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
Growing up in the Christian church, we learned that these two pillars, essentially, make up the Christian faith.
What we didn’t learn, though, is that the ones who spoke in the Bible used Hebrew words, and the Hebrew language has a lot of words for love.
English speakers have one word for love, which can be used to describe an action of feelings towards everything from self, to God, to neighbors, to partners, to your dog, to peanut butter.
Growing up, when I read this passage, I believed that I should have the same feelings for God as I do for myself and my neighbor (which is just generally anyone). I believed that love, the same words I used for my parents and my teachers, was an endearing word that relied on an object of affection.
The language Jesus spoke, Aramaic, had many words for love. Those words described everything from brotherly love to erotic love to selfless love. When Jesus uttered what Christians know as the Greatest Commandment, he used the word “rakhmah.” In Hebrew, this word is “ahavah,” which functions as both a verb and a noun.
According to the Methodist Church, “Ahavah is built by its root word ahav, which means, “to give”. Ahavah does not define a love that is earned or deserved. The love just originates from God’s own character. It has no end and no beginning. God’s love is an eternal fact of the universe.”
In attempt to spread the word throughout the land, Jesus’ followers translated his words into Greek where “rakhmah” became “Ἀγαπήσεις (Agapēseis)” or agape.
Agape is the highest form of love. Love is a feeling that God exudes towards the people, but it is also an action for the people. My dad used to say, “God loves us the way that I love you. There is nothing that you can ever do to take away my love for you.”
Throughout the Old Testament, God’s love for the Israelites is unwavering. He walks beside them and clears the way for the people who are enslaved and oppressed.
He calls to the Israelites to make those who are foreigners, citizens, and he tells them to love them as they love themselves (Leviticus 19:34). The Israelites are encouraged to give to the poor and needy in their land (Deuteronomy 15:11). In Psalm (82:2-4), they are to “defend the cause of the weak and the fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed, rescue the weak and needy,” and to (Proverbs 31:8-9) speak up for the rights of all who are destitute and cannot speak for themselves. In Isaiah (1:17) the Israelites are to learn to do right and seek justice.
God never calls on or asks the people to show love to another person by going home and talking about it, he tells them to get in the trenches and serve those around them who are in need.
For me, when Jesus says “love your God” and “love your neighbor,” he’s telling us we can not do one without the other. These two elements had always been intertwined, and Jesus walked the talk as he provided for, spoke up for and walked beside the oppressed.
In my 20’s I had three wooden blocks with JOY written on them. Each Christmas I put them on the mantle. The first year I had them up, my mother-in-law said that the word JOY always reminds her of how we are taught to live our lives: Jesus first, Others second and Yourself third.
Agape love is unconditional. It does not act in hopes or expectation of receiving something in return. It will feed and provide and share and speak and fight so that everyone receives the love of God.
Jesus extends this principle even to one’s enemies. Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…” (Matthew 5:43-44).
Talking about this big love that Jesus cited is one thing, but learning about how Jesus walked the talk is quite another thing. Jesus wasn’t in with the leaders; in fact, he challenged their viewpoints on scripture and humanity while they shunned and even executed him.
As a child, here’s what I learned about Jesus:
- Jesus loved all of the children, no matter what color their skin is. We even had a song about it: “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.”
- Jesus hung out with, listened to and spoke up for all the people who were deemed less than by society.
He didn’t just tell the leper, the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the adulter, the slaves, the poor that God has already fixed everything for them by citing, the Torah, which are the first five books of the Bible.
Instead, Jesus stuck around and formed relationships. He listened to people, believed them and helped them.
I imagine that as he came down from the mountainside and saw the leper who needed medical help, he could have said, ”I’ve already got you covered, ‘my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed’ (Isaiah 54:10).”
Instead, he “reached out his hand and touched the man. ‘I am willing,’ he said. ‘Be clean!’ Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy (Matthew 8:2-3).”
In a time when women had no rights and little value, Jesus could have said, “The women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says,” (1 Corinthians 14:34).
Instead, Jesus spoke at length with a Samaritan woman (Jews had no dealings with Samaritans) who had committed adultery, a widow, a woman with a bleeding disorder and an old woman who had been bent over for 18 years. He even called the old woman, “daughter.”
None of these people could benefit him in return, either directly or indirectly.
What Jesus provided was an example of giving love. It was not one in which he said this system is already set up for your success, but rather, it put the well-being of someone else, actually a whole people, the humans, before himself.
I believe that this is what Jesus is referring to when he said, “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.” (Matthew 7:12)
He is saying that in giving to others, the playing field is leveled. He’s calling on a person to put himself in another person’s shoes. He’s asking them to say, if I were in that spot, if I were in that situation, how would I want to be treated? Then we are called to do that.
Perhaps the way that we want to be treated as Americans is to say “pull up your boots and march on, soldier; there is hardship everywhere, and in America you don’t have it as hard as you did in the past or in other parts of the world.”
But, I’d like to be the type of person who won’t sit back on the ideals.
I used to say, “all men are created equal” and that “we should love our neighbor as ourselves,” and then let everyone try to gamble for a spot at the table. I used to do that. It was easy that way. I could say that from my privileged, but not equal perspective, things were balanced and fair. I could say that there isn’t any more work to do because this whole thing was set up in perfection for us.
I’ve seen things differently for the last decade, though. I’ve sat beside and felt the pang of the inequities that humans full of greed and pride, anger and jealousy produce. I’ve listened to children cry. I’ve watched fathers get angry. I’ve paid attention to the world around me. And so I’ve had a choice to make.
Martin Luther King Jr. said, “In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
This nation, this world, is not yet what it should be. There are injustices and inequalities all over the place. And so the ideals missed if they are not put into practice individually and systemically. The time has come for us to step into the worlds of other people with empathy and action so that we can actually reach the ideals that we tout.
