Repenting from Racism

A big question for me this year has been the question of repentance. What does that look like? If the Kingdom of God is near by, what does that mean for us and the way we live our lives? Particularly in a country where such great wrongs have been committed, how do we continue to live and be in relationship? Repentance is about preparing ourselves to be in intimate relationship with God and each other. If I have learned anything this year, it is that the first step is often admitting you are wrong.  

A neighbor knocked on my door today, furious. “Gabe, I’m going to kill her. My wife stole 10 dollars!” I was a bit shocked, never having had anyone say anything like that to me before. Such an action also seemed out of character for his wife, and after a few minutes of fuming, he admitted that maybe he had lost the 10 dollars (though to be honest, his story was pretty straight). But even though he thought he was right, his willingness to admit he was wrong created the space to make peace with his wife.

Many African Americans have also put down the proverbial sword of vengeance and just want to be treated with respect going forward. Very few demand an accounting back to the time of Columbus. Others are angry about the past and present realities of racism. And they have a right to be. But ultimately, it is not our African American brothers and sisters that we have to reckon with. 

God is angry too. As a nation, we have said through word and deed that African Americans are worth 3/5th's of a person by denying voting rights, housing privileges, and legal protection. America has taken more than 10$ from African Americans and the poor. When we have not paid workers their fair wages, when we have created laws that take money from the poor, when we have created private systems that exclude public benefit, when we fund systems to penalize and incarcerate rather than educate and restore, God is not pleased.

It's not that God is bitter. God does not get angry like we get angry. Our anger punishes and destroys. God's anger purifies and restores. In his desire to restore us, he challenges us to do right. He reminds us that our evil actions have no place in a social order sustained by love. Just as a loving parent does not let a child abuse his siblings, God does not tolerate us abusing one another.

In Crossroads Bible Church two Sundays ago, the pastor preached about forgiveness. To restore relationships, we need to remain in conversation and we need to be open about past wrongs. The pastor asked what might have been different if Adam and Eve had immediately gone to God after eating the fruit rather than hiding. If we are open with God about our failures to do right, he has always shown himself quick to restore.

White Christians need to be open about our past wrongs. God says that if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will cleanse us from all wickedness. First we must be open with him, and reckon with him through the cross. Second, we must confess these sins directly to each other within the body of Christ. Third, we must do all we can to set right the harm caused by disenfranchisement, slavery, exclusion, and incarceration so that no one outside of Christ can slander the Gospel. These steps are similar to the 12 Step program and are a practical way we can live out the gospel. 

The path forward has been clearly marked, though the price remains steep. Martin Luther King Jr. has given us a vision of children growing up together as brother and sister. He taught us the path of loving one another by being willing to suffer for one another. Our brother's cause for justice is our cause, and we cannot be free until our sister is also free. Loving one another will cost us, but it will also heal us.

John Perkins, the founder of the Christian Community Development Association, taught us that some are called to relocate to places abandoned by broader society and share the struggles of the people as if they were our struggles. He taught us to identify with one another, and to plant new churches where youth can grow up together in shared space as one body. 

How do we begin? One way is to join in with the modern movements. Read Bryan Stevenson's book, Just Mercy, and get involved with local efforts for prison reform and police reform. Read Jim Wallis' book, America's Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America, and educate yourself on what it will take to live as a minority in a country of all colors, when whites are no longer the majority population. Visit a church from a different background than your own, more than once, and submit to its leadership. Trust that Christ is at work in all places. 

Repentance will look different for each person and institution, but until we admit that we have a problem, we cannot move forward. My neighbor may not have made complete peace with his wife, but by being willing to admit he was wrong, he created the possibility for peace. He moved from anger and suspicion to willingness to dialogue. Only then can we begin to work out the nuts and bolts of living together. As Christians and people of truth, I hope we can develop the moral capacity to admit failures.  

If we trust God, he will make our paths straight. When we busy ourselves doing right, he will be quick to restore. "Then your light will break forth like the morning and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard," Isaiah 58:8. 

The Grass-Scape

Kentucky Blue Grass fills our empty space. We like it because it locks down the landscape. It looks tidy when trimmed. It’s manageable though it takes a lot of management.

Pleasant Park used to be a parking lot.

Someone has to mow it, which takes a machine and typically gasoline. With such small lot sizes in South Hills, it would be absurd for every house to have a mower. I’ve seen a few houses in the area with push mowers—a throwback to my childhood in Kenya. Growing up, we would share that little contraption with our next door neighbors to mow our postage stamp yards in the city.

If neighbors aren’t mowing it themselves, they are paying others to do it. Many people in the area, mostly men, earn their income mowing lawns. This profession or way of life usually involves owning a pick up truck and doing odd jobs all over town. Through an extensive social network and maintaining good relationships, men make a living doing yard work, fixing things, moving things, shoveling snow, and generally being useful.

But if the city owns a vacant lot covered in grass, they will hire a company to mow it rather than an unlicensed neighbor. We operate within our social networks and within our spaces of trust. We work the most quickly this way and the most efficiently. Deeper than that, we operate this way as an expression of love, but in a strange twist, love becomes exclusion.

Unfortunately, in South Hills, trust is not tied to geography and social networks are not necessarily spatial. Our networks of trust and the geography of our affection has become institutional rather than tied up in the soil. But Jesus asks, "If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?" 

A recent windstorm stripped MLK Leadership Academy's
garden of its straw and distributed it evenly across the grass:
a free mulch job. Nobody had to be paid for that.

When it comes to grass, institutionally determined aesthetics and pragmatism determine the care plan and where the money goes. “Institutionally” does refer to individual people or groups of people making aesthetic and pragmatic decisions, but such concerns are often dislocated from the economic concerns of those neighbors who fall outside the institutional identity or network of trust.

Because of the broader American dislocation from our ecology, individual’s concerns—institutional or not—are often at odds to the health of the soil, air, or watershed. Potential uses of land, such as nutrient building, food production, carbon sequestration, air filtering, water filtering, flood prevention, or water table recharge are not typically considered. Food production is perhaps the exception here, as it constitutes a direct ecological relationship between ourselves and the land. The others are abstract to us. We respond better to beauty and order.

Beauty and order brings us to placemaking, a potential solution to the toil and boredom of grass. By placemaking, I mean designing or gardening a space to give it an identity and utility for the particular people who occupy the space. The utility may be aesthetic, but thoughtful people can be more creative. Placemaking creates a human habitat with cultural resonance. A place becomes a poem with multiple uses and meanings. The term has grown out of the writings and work of Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte in the 1960s, and is used by various groups to describe creating “a sense of place.” I want to be more specific to say that placemaking is done most effectively when the people using the place are active in designing the place. By being agents in creating a place, the cultural resonance is increased. The place becomes part of a shared story and project. The beauty of placemaking comes from the people themselves.

Outdoor spaces have the potential to be welcoming and restful even in the winter. Empty lawns alone do not achieve this purpose, nor do bare parking lots. Rather, spaces designed collectively by neighbors and built with shared sweat become places with more potential to create shared spatial identities and to redefine networks of trust.

An excellent playground at Pleasant Park

Two excellent examples come to mind for South Hills—Pleasant Park and the vacant lots on Thomas Street. Pleasant Park was designed more formally through a process of neighbor input and buy in. What was once a bare parking lot is now a great park with space to play and exercise. Neighbors are still responsible for the upkeep of the property. Such input allowed for great ideas such as a sledding hill and a rain garden. Young trees were planted around the park. Recreational and ecological considerations came into view and became reality.

On Thomas, a more informal re-drawing of place has occurred. The Latino men and Congolese boys on the block have turned this space into a place—a human habitat with cultural resonance—with the use of only two rocks. They created goalposts and play soccer most evenings in the warmer months. They’ve created an informal, international, all-inclusive soccer league. Because the field has been temporarily abandoned, they have turned it into a place of their own.

I contradict myself as the space is almost entirely lawn—flat lawn. A slight rise to tall trees for shade and tall, disheveled grass on the edges gives the space an area to rest and an unmanaged look. A small forest behind it gives it a sense of wildness. Not all grass is bad. This grass is lived in.

Probably just some kids...

On a more personal note, American city spaces—suburban or urban—often seem to lack this human character and leave me feeling placeless. Most urban space is not

designed for people but for cars and for passing through, leading others to re-create unused spaces in positive ways or like the one to the right. In response to a visceral sense of not belonging, humans reach out and make their mark.

Most Americans center their placemaking on the inside of their homes or institutional settings where we live out our lives. An overdeveloped sense of private property and the limitations having to do things according to code creates in me a sense of public sterility.  Nairobi, Kenya where I grew up was hardly an ecological wonderland, but somehow the intersection of the British garden and Kenyan conviviality created spaces I could spend hours enjoying. On the other hand, American city spaces are characterized by a radical democracy compared to the abundant barbed wire, walls, hedges, gates, and fences of many African cities. It just seems a shame that a society with a landscape set for building trust abandons empty grass lots for lives indoors.

Pleasant Park Playground

If you have any thoughts, please feel free to share them. 

Remembering the Past

The 1950s and 60s remain in the living memory of residents and church members of South Hills. This time is frequently described as a vibrant time in neighborhood life. The neighborhood was diverse, and residents threw block parties and hosted cake walks.  Many elderly or older Dutch families lived alongside younger, new African American families.

Many African Americans originally moved to the South East Side in the early 1900s because they could afford to leave the West Side, but even though the Home Owners Loan Corporation of the New Deal clarified in the 1930s that “Negroes in the area are of a better type,” they gave the area the lowest security rating. Such ratings from the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration in the 1930s affected African American access to housing across the country. A low rating affected your eligibility for federal assistance to purchase your home. You can look at some very interesting maps on the subject here: Mapping Inequality

Home Owners Loans Corporation, November 5, 1937.  Clarifying Notes for the D4 area specify: "Negros of the area are of a better type. They are concentrated on Sherman, Bates, and Thomas between Union and Eastern Streets." 

Redlining, combined with realtor practices, deeply segregated our city and affected access to wealth on racial lines. The same New Deal program rated suburban neighborhoods with high security ratings, offering affordable loans for white residents of South Hills to move out to the suburbs. Susan D. Greenbaum’s article “Housing Abandonment in Inner-City Black Neighborhoods: A Case Study of the Effects of the Dual Housing Market” explains how perception of a place can affect the values of the properties: “If a banker believes that a property has less value solely because of the race of the occupant, then the real valuation of that property is less in fact” (140). While many whites were subsidized to invest in homes as population grew and the city expanded, African Americans were steered to buy homes or rent homes where value and safety were perceived to be less because of skin color.

In the last 10 years, the neighborhood has flipped. Many African Americans have moved away and young white families have moved in. We have the opposite of what we had in the 1950s and 1960s, where we have African Americans who have carried this place through the hardest times of the drug crisis living next to younger white singles and families hoping to build a future. Abandoned houses have been bought up and re-built, and rent prices in the neighborhood have been rising.

The story is of course, more complicated than that. More Latinos and Africans have joined the area. Indians and Middle Easterners own many of the stores on Eastern. The neighborhood is rather international, and gives me hope for what America could be. Or rather, the neighborhood is what America is. If we can work together to make sure this is a place that welcomes people regardless of skin color or bank account, perhaps America can too.

Please share your comments on what you remember about the neighborhood and ideas about what you think it will take to keep a neighborhood in which everyone belongs. If possible, be specific and name actions that you or someone you know can take.

Sources:

Greenbaum, Susan D. "Housing Abandonment in Inner City Black Neighborhoods: A

Case Study of the Effects of the Dual Housing Market." The Cultural Meaning of

Urban Space. Ed. Robert Rotenberg and Gary McDonough. Westport,

Connecticut: Bergin and Garvey, 1993. 139-56. Print.

Mapping Inequality: https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=15/42.9507/-85.6532&opacity=0.8&city=grand-rapids-mi&sort=73&area=D4&adimage=3/39/-12

Tatum's Bookbinding

From the outside, the building looks unused, but Tatum’s Bookbinding is still going strong after over 50 years of service on the corner of Wealthy and Henry. The company was originally purchased in 1912 from Powell, making it over 100 years old. Owners and brothers Jim and Mark McMullen still run their family business, binding and printing books for individual and small publishers.

As far as local businesses go, Tatum is from another era. Their property is no longer even zoned for a bookbinding business, but they haven’t left yet and aren’t planning on it. They still print everything from children’s books to specialty business cards, shipping their products to as far as Miami, Florida and San Antonio, Texas. To do their work, they use some machines over 100 years old. On their website, they explain, “We offer quality cover materials including cloth, imitation leather, and bonded leather. We stamp the titles on the cover with gold and silver foil.”

Jim and Mark’s father bought the current building in 1962 and they moved in 1965. They used to be on the 6^th floor of a building on Ottawa St, but Jim was too young to remember the move. “It was not fun my dad told me. They were on the 6^th floor near where the BOB is now, on Ottawa St. They had to disassemble the machines, take them down the elevator, truck them out, and reassemble them.”

Shortly after they moved, the drug crisis struck the neighborhood. “It got bad,” Jim says, “but it’s really improved. We’re not scared to go into the street anymore. At the time, we couldn’t get rid of the building if we wanted to.” Now property values are rising, and Wealthy Street feels a little safer.

Theirs is a specialty trade that not many know how to do anymore. Their grandfather taught their father who taught them. How did they learn? “Family business,” Jim explained. “We learned through the school of hard knocks, the hard way.”

They are clearly committed to their craft, and anyone who wants to learn it better ask them quick. Committed more to the craft than looks, they want the neighborhood to know, “We’re a bookbindery and print shop. We’re not a commercial establishment.”

Jim McMullen with bookbinding glue

You can check out their website at http://tatumbookbinding.com.

Robert Bunch

“I suspect that were kinship our goal—we would no longer be promoting justice—we would be celebrating it.”  --Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart

Several years ago, I was walking to an evening service at First Community AME, and I met a man crying and staggering on Sherman Street. I knew him from community meals at First CRC. His name was Robert, and he told me he was hungry. He told me his sister had just died, and he was deep in the throes of grief. Rarely do I know what to do in these situations, but I was going to church, so I invited him to church. He didn’t want to go into the service, a joint service between Methodist Churches and the AME church. We sat in the basement kitchen, while church ladies prepared the after service snacks around us, and he ate a meal we found in the freezer.

Several weeks later, the same thing happened as I walked to First AME on a Sunday morning. He
kept telling me about his sister and how sad he was. He wasn’t thinking straight. But he stumbled along with me to church and sat down next to me. He smelled of alcohol, and enjoyed the service so much that he stood up at the wrong times and shouted out at the wrong times. None of us really knew what to do with him. Afterwards, he kept telling me, “I want to come back. I really liked that.”

Another Sunday morning earlier this year, Rob stumbled into St. Philips late and sat down near the front, weeping and making a scene. He was still mourning the death of his sister. Someone asked me if I knew him, and I said yes. A lady led him to sit down next to me. Before the service was over, he left. If I remember right, he walked out during the Prayers of the People. They can be a little long.

In October, Rob was killed by a car while crossing 28^th Street. His family and friends have no idea why he was down by 28^th Street as he almost never spent time there. Several short MLivearticles documented the event, but it was important to me to hear a bit more of his story and to hear from his family and friends. 

His nephew, Steve, recently reopened his restaurant, Chicago Hoodspot, just down the street from First CRC on the corner of Franklin and Union. Steve shared a bit of Rob’s life story.

Rob had lived in Grand Rapids for 18 years, but he was from Chicago. He told just about everyone he met that he was from Chicago.

He grew up on the South Side, working in a grocery store. He spent a lot of time with his family and especially his nephews and nieces. Steve has good memories of Rob taking 10-12 of them on the bus to see Bruce Lee movies in the theater. They would sit on his lap on the bus and laugh a lot.

Rob taught Steve how to iron clothes so that “the creases could cut butter,” paying him 50 cents to a dollar for every job.  

After working in a grocery store for many years, Rob found a full-time job working in a factory in Grand Rapids and moved away. He got married and started a family. Three years later, he encouraged Steve to join him in what he saw as a safer environment with better opportunities. Rob knew that Steve had a lifelong dream of starting a restaurant, and Grand Rapids was the place to do it. Within three days of the move, Rob got Steve a job in the factory, and they began making plans to start the restaurant. When the dream came true, Steve taught Rob to grill, and they ran it together.

The restaurant has opened and closed several times over the years, but without Rob, we wouldn’t have an excellent hang out spot in the neighborhood.

In the past several years, Rob had several deaths in the family, which have been very hard on him. He found it harder to keep a job and spent a lot of time grieving. Through it all, he stayed a very kind person.

His friends in the neighborhood describe him as a really nice guy. According to Lamont, “He knew basically everybody in the neighborhood.”

Todd would sit with Rob on the porch, and they would spend the afternoons after work joking and ragging on one another. “It was friendly,” Todd said, “I never knew him to get into it with anybody.”

Doug, who met Rob about 10 years ago at a community event, said, “He was a good guy. He’d help people out if he had the money. He was an all around good person.”

We miss him, and the neighborhood is better because he was here.