Does public opinion matter?

Well, yes, and no, so says Malcolm Foley at the Anxious Bench. It didn't seem to stop lynching in the 19th–early 20th century. And it hasn't stopped police brutality in the 21st century. What works? Well, according to Foley (and I think he's correct, sadly) this will:

Lynching did not fade because people stopped being racist; it faded because it became bad for American business. Perhaps the only way that racial violence of any kind will fade is if it becomes profitable for no one.

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If that doesn't tell you the true god of the United States, nothing does. Think back 22 years to 9/11/2001. What did the Taliban target? The Twin Towers (finance) and the Pentatgon (militarism defending the capitalists). That, my dear readers, is very discerning.

May true revival grip our hearts so that we hear the cry of the oppressed. God does and he will judge us accordingly!
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But how to fix it?

The new Anxious Bench editor/contributor Malcolm Foley has a very good post up today: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2022/07/but-what-do-i-do-on-race-and-political-economy/

Here's an excerpt, but please, as always, read the whole thing—as a seminary professor of mine used to say, "You owe it to yourself":

The primary historical point that must drive coalitional work for racial justice is this: racism’s foundation is neither hate nor ignorance. Its foundation is the desire to dominate and exploit. Even when we do see racial antipathy manifested in hate, it is often a symptom of deeper political and economic anxieties. Because this is the case, communities ought to consider racism not in terms of thought nor in terms of discrete, hateful actions, but in terms of political economy. For the Christian, that means that recourse to the Apostle’s language about Christ breaking down walls of separation by His incarnation and resurrection is good but incomplete; it must also be coupled with the Old Testament calls to Jubilee and debt forgiveness. It is not enough for me to say that I love my neighbor; I must actually invest in their material well-being.

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I just finished editing an article for this fall’s Vergilius (a Classics journal about all things Vergil—what a surprise!) that takes a look at the reception of the Aeneid in the South via a novella entitled Eneus Africanus (link to Project Gutenberg). I’d never heard of the book before, but it was eye-opening.

Once the article gets published I’m going to be recommending it with evangelistic zeal (I'll post a link to it here). The bibliography alone is invaluable. even though I lived in Kentucky for six years and saw a lot of systemic racism—I worked for a moving company in the summer and on breaks among genuine rednecks (or as they were called in Kentucky, “white socks” because they always wear white socks, even with dress shoes)—this opened my eyes to places I hadn’t noticed it before.

Back to the Anxious Bench post, that was just the first in an installment. I highly recommend that you subscribe to it via your RSS feed or however you keep track of blogs. It should be highly informative, hopefully convicting!

Remember, the North was complicit to much of this—remember "sundown laws"? Basically, get out of town by sundown. And where I grew up, in the Indianhead of Wisconsin, the KKK was extremely strong in the 1920s through 1940s… There are more than a few skeletons in people's closets!
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