Institutional Evil

Last week, I was honored by the African American members of our congregation who agreed to share some of their personal experiences of institutional racism in our country. I want to share with you a couple of their experiences that touched me and seemed to express the insidiousness of what is both conscious and unconscious behavior.
 
Marsha told of an incident here in "Our Town". She, in her car, was following her son as he drove home. As her son made the turn at a light signal she saw a police car pull out and follow him. Now, she is following the police car. All at once she knew they were going to pull her son over. The crime is called "driving while black." Sure enough another block or so and the lights went on and the police pulled him over. She pulled over behind them.
 
Her son was flustered and got out of his car - not a smart thing to do. Marsha, worried, also got out of her car. Now the police officers (one black and one white) have two black people out of their cars and on either side of them. They are on guard. Marsha knows this is dangerous. The black officer goes to Marsha's son, now sitting on the curb head in hands. The white officer goes to Marsha, who- by the way- is dressed in her full Navy Captain's uniform. "What are you doing here?"
"I am his mother."
"Why did you stop?"
"I am his mother."
"What are you doing here?"
"I am his mother?"
"Oh. Well, what do you want?"
"I am his mother, why did you pull my son over?"
"You stay here, lady."
 
The officers confer, and stand over her son, asking him questions. Eventually they put him back in his car, and come back to her.
"You can go now."
"Why did you pull my son over?"
"Its all right now, you can go."
"Why did you pull my son over?" Marsh is using the power of her uniform, now.
"Oh, well, er, uh, one of the tail lights is out."
"We will take care of that, of course. Any other reason, officer?"
"Er, no, you can both go now." The black officer stifled a smile.
 
Marsha went over to the police car. "Officers, when you stopped his car, my son did everything wrong. If he had been in The City he'd have been shot. I want you to go over there and explain to my son what he should have done and why." The black officer got it. And, so they did as Marsha had asked, beginning with, "Don't get out of the car".
 
What struck me in Marsha's story was that Marsha sensed danger for both of them, that the officers were on guard, and her statement that if her son had been in The City, he would have been shot. Furthermore, the officers recognized that she was right.
 
Marsha had a middle class background, a Navy Captain's uniform and training, the fact that she is a woman and the fact that they were in "Our Town" going for her. What does a young black man driving through The City have going for him?
 
A friend of ours, a colleague, is a tall handsome African American man. He always dresses carefully, usually in a suit. When we knew him he had a beautiful head of dread locks, now his hair is closely cropped. When we knew him he was an Intern Minister in Summit New Jersey. After work one day he was standing on the platform waiting for the commuter train to take him back to New York City, when suddenly he was surrounded by police with their guns drawn. "Get down, boy. What are you doing here?" He said he thought he was going to die. Attacked for waiting for a train, while black.
 
Hank said, you have to start early to protect them. It broke his heart, he said, to see his cheerful, curious, bright eyed, young child of four or five, and have to begin teaching him the facts of African American life.
 
Bernice said that it falls to the women to teach their sons to survive — teaching them how to dress, how to stand, how to speak, how to keep their hands out of their pockets in a store, because they are always being watched, and how not to hang out at the mall with their friends or to get out of the car when they are stopped — for fear of their lives.
 
Bernice, Hank and Marsha spoke of their experiences in the military. Hank was a Marine when no person of color ranked higher than a Warrant Officer. Bernice was a Nurse in the Air Force; it was in the Air Force that she was first called by the N-word. Marsha was also a Nurse, in the Navy, where she says there were no black officers, no mentors, and no role models. People of color were channeled into specific, lower-ranking jobs because they were not believed to be smart enough or to have the appropriate skills to work in other areas.
 
Organizations don't change until they have to. Something must shake up the system. There needs to be public outrage, there need to be allies in the right places, and there need to be qualified people from the marginalized groups to move into positions of power. Marsha says that for the Navy, the race riots and "Tailhook" created the outrage, and Admiral Elmo Zumwalt was the ally who changed the system. Marsha recalls being assigned to a promotion board to monitor the fairness to both people of color and women. She had all the fitness charts in front of her. The voting was done anonymously. As she watched, with each cut the women begin to disappear; even the African American man whose fitness report was only mediocre remained in the running as the last woman, who had a strong fitness report, was cut. Marsha called a halt to the proceedings and explained the pattern she was seeing. None of the participants was aware of what they were doing. They had made their decisions within a cultural norm. They saw no pattern, nor were they operating with conscious intent. After she called their attention to what was happening, they started over, with entirely different results. Still, she says, as late as the year 2000 enlisted men would tell her, "You are the first African American Woman Captain I have ever seen."
 
I call the behavior described by Marsha, Hank, and Bernice "institutional evil." Hank says that he doesn't see it as evil, because the behavior is unconscious. "Evil," he says, "requires intent. Skin heads and the KKK are evil." In part, I agree; skin heads, the Klu Klux Klan, lynchings, and Jim Crow are clearly evil, intentionally evil. But, evil can be defined in two ways: There is Evil, the intent to do harm, and there is Complicit Evil, which is letting evil happen, sins of commission and the sins of omission.
 
Most of us are complicit in institutional evil. Even though we are dedicated to affirming and promoting the worth and dignity of every person; even though we have worked hard to rid ourselves of prejudice; even though we understand that all people, no matter what their race, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or age, should be treated with respect, dignity and justice; even though we understand ourselves to be good, caring people, which we are, we are still part of a society which is not.
 
We live in an evil society. Any society that perpetuates inequity and injustice through the inherent use of authority and power to subjugate or intimidate one part of its population for the pleasure and well-being of another is evil. When people of color are harassed for driving while black in "Our Town" we can see evil. When Gays and Lesbians are denied the right to enter into contracts to protect their livelihood and their families or to marry the person they love, as they are in "Our State," we can see evil. When women's right to use contraceptives is threatened, as it is in "Our State," we can see evil. When day laborers are forced off the street while they wait for a job, we can see evil. When affordable housing is bought up by developers, and low income people are forced out of their homes, we can see evil. When the clothing we buy and the luxuries we enjoy are made in sweat shops here or abroad, manufactured in unsafe conditions or in factories which destroy our environment, we can see evil.
 
I do not call us, or our neighbors, evil; I do not believe that any of us wishes to cause harm or to subjugate or intimidate another person, or to damage our earth, but I do believe that we are complicit.
 
One of the deepest sources of evil and violence is fear. Look at how we responded to the destruction of the Twin Towers. We lived in dread, nothing was safe, and we as a country succumbed to the human reaction to fear — do unto others before they can do unto you. We attacked Afghanistan, we went to war in Iraq and we rounded up scapegoats to intimidate or throw in jail. By exerting our power we could pretend that we were not vulnerable.
 
In far more subtle ways, as a class, we do the same thing everyday. When our security is threatened we use our power to limit the options of others so that they cannot compete and therefore cannot threaten us. We limit access to good schooling, to jobs, to decent housing. Our fear becomes distrust, and we project onto others all the problems of our society. We no longer see people, we see stereotypes, we see problems. In doing so we create a self-fulfilling prophesy; we create large segments of our population that live in shame and without hope. In fact, we create the conditions for violence.
 
Across the nation our solution to the violence is to blame the perpetrators without ever asking why they are violent or how could we prevent it. For our society the treatment of choice has been punishment. So, we lock them away, thus removing them from society while creating more jobs in the prison industry. Our country has more people in jail than any other "first world" country. Instead of "Do unto others before they do unto you." we have "Do unto others to show them I have power." We also have the highest rate of violence.
Maybe the way to deal with institutional evil is to see it as a sickness. We live in a sick society, and while our institutions have been concentrating on the symptoms, the root causes are untouched. Perhaps, what we need is justice instead of punishment — Justice, Equity and Respect. Perhaps, we need to take seriously our covenant to promote the worth and dignity of every person and apply it to our daily lives. We might ask, how do our choices in the cars we drive, the clothes we wear, the food we buy, the luxuries we purchase and the investments we make, impact the lives of those less fortunate. When we seek to hire someone at work, what assumptions do we make when we see the applicants' skin color, gender or style of dress? When we arrange for benefits in our company, whose needs do we consider and whose needs do we discount? When we pull up to an intersection in our cars and hit the automatic lock, who have we seen standing there? What is the source of our fear? When we pass the bag lady on the street or the janitor in the hall, how do we speak to them? Do you think that what we say or do may have an impact on how they see themselves?
 
Trying to bring health to an ailing world may be an insurmountable task, but being the good and caring people that we are, it is a task we must accept. If we are not part of the solution, we are part of the problem. So first we look at our roles. We can ask, "In what way am I complicit?" "What am I afraid of, is that fear misplaced?" and "What can the disadvantaged tell me about the assumptions I make and the prejudices I display that I do not see myself?"
 
Then, step by step and hand in hand with those whom we may have harmed or misunderstood, we can seek justice, equity and mutual respect.