From Padawans to Poety
If I think of myself as anti-war and anti-violence, if I believe in gun control and I don’t want my country to be sending troops to other parts of the world to damage and be damaged, why is it that I so admire and aspire to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Ahsoka Tano, the padawan of Anakin Skywalker? They fight all the time. Buffy is constantly battling an onslaught of vampires and other demonoids. The animated series that features Ahsoka actually has the word “war” in its title. Why aren’t the words that come out of my mouth and the recently-viewed cue on my television screen simpatico? I am drawn to Buffy and Ahsoka because of their courage in the face of the truly evil behaviors of their opponents, but I’m not so ignorant as to assume the reasons U.S. troops are sent out into the world are easily explained or totally repugnant.
Nothing is as simple as either of the shows I have enjoyed present it to be, but the concept of vanquishing evil is important. That construct has been with us since fairy tales and the annals of King Arthur were first shared. There is something visceral about combating evil. When it accosts you, standing up and fighting back is important. Even if you only get to do it vicariously through a cartoon, or with the magic you imagine when you read about Harry Potter. There is something to seeing justice prevail in a mighty way.
Recently, the call for justice has sounded loudly as our national discussion has turned toward the topics of healing and unity. So very many people of color are saying: there may not be true healing—or unity—until there is justice. In response, a lot of white people are filled with fear. In this country the road to healing that first travels the path of justice has been and will continue to be difficult. It is neither smooth nor well-marked. The evil that we must eradicate does not present itself in the form of vampires or battle droids—or even particular white people, although there are probably some I do perceive as more tempted by the dark side than others. The evil we must eradicate is systemic and difficult to target with a well-placed karate kick. A light saber isn’t much use either. Locating the practices that sustain white privilege along with other discriminatory castes in our communities is similar to finding new planets. The gravitational fields of hidden planets tug at known planets, creating wobbles in the orbits of the known planets. Astronomers take note of wobbles and the wobbles give the hidden planets away.
Currently, statistics are our wobbles. They point to the existence of discriminatory biases in our systems and beg us to look more deeply at what is driving these discrepancies. In the U.S., people of color and are much more likely to be homeless than white people (NATEH (2020), (ICA (2020). Native Americans youths are incarcerated at triple the rate of white youths, and black youths at fives times the rate (Rover, 2021). Drug and alcohol use among Native American males aged 15 to 24 is three times greater than among their peers in the general population. For Native American young women and teens of the same age group, drug and alcohol use is six times greater. (SAMHSA 2017) Among homeless youths, 20 to 40 percent identify as LGBTQ (youth.com, 2020). There are tons of similar studies. I have referenced a much-less-than tiny few of them. And none of these studies speak to the acute crises that evoked the Black Lives Matter movement, perhaps the strongest voice that currently cries out for justice today. None of the studies I have recorded addresses the excessive and deadly force police officers have inflicted upon black citizens in the U.S. Fodder to feed the cries for justice in the United States lies around us like kindling on a forest floor that has not experienced a fire in decades. We cannot expect this fire to burn out. We cannot expect to extinguish it. Our forest needs clearing.
In the circles of Christian faith, seminarians and clergy persons like to explain how the Greek verb λαμβανο (lam-ban-no) encompasses both the English verbs “to give” and “to receive.” In the act of giving one also receives. In the act of receiving one also gives. There is mutuality and connectedness in the two acts. I believe justice and mercy, or justice and forgiveness, a form of mercy, have a similar relationship. They are two sides of the same coin. Forgiveness and mercy must have a full awareness and comprehension of the evil involved in bringing about the need for their application. Justice has to occur for true forgiveness and mercy to thrive. Otherwise, forgiveness and mercy become a sort-of empty niceness that perpetuates the status quo. Without the correct currency, a coin minted with both justice and forgiveness, our purses will be empty. There will be no healing and no unity. True forgiveness is not polite civility any more than turning the other cheek is looking the other way. The blindness of justice refers to the equity with which it is administered to all of our citizens, not to a refusal to see the evil it reveals.
The lawyers, the vampire slayers, that bring cases directed at untangling racially biased knots in our systems are very smart, but they themselves, the judges and juries that hear the cases, the court recorders, the bailiffs—all are a part of the biased systems being investigated and brought to trial. Even as those committed to change may attempt to uncover the mechanisms of the biases and make appropriate adjustments, the biases will be working against them, and quite possibly through them. But that a hand spring and wooden stake were sufficient.
Sometimes it is very scary, as a white person, to think about relinquishing a privilege you may just be beginning to understand that you have, but that kind of thinking assumes routing out the evil in our systems is going to flip things upside down. I don’t think that’s the case. I believe the fire that burns through our forest will allow new things to grow. What emerges will be quite different from what was. It will be like nothing we imagine—certainly not what our fears conjure. It will be something more like a giant food court filled with a myriad of scents so delicious and tempting, full of many opportunities to delight one’s palate—maybe there will be a few tastes you’ll want to avoid—but all-in-all—what a wonder to explore and draw sustenance from. While lawyers and judges, grand juries, supreme courts, legislatures, and senates hash things out, we might take time to get our own visions straight and ask ourselves whether the future we see is based upon fear of people who are different from ourselves, or whether it is time to broaden our concept of neighbor. Who we recognize as neighbor may no longer be limited to the person who lives next door, that person who dresses and speaks as we do, practices exclusively religious and social customs that are familiar to us, shares our preference for landscape plants and yard art (or absence thereof), and uses the exactly same three seasonings our grandmother always did. The Golden Rule admonishes us to treat whoever we may find to be our neighbors as ourselves. It does tell us to look around for people who are like ourselves and determine them to be our neighbors. It is not an adage supporting exclusionary practices. It is a challenge to reach outside our comfort zones.
While we struggle to digest all of this real-world stuff, in books and on screens large and small, Buffy and Ahsoka and the kids from the TV show Friday Night Lights, the characters in Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath, Hermione Granger, King Arthur, and even Jo March continue their struggles to make their ways from the dark side into the light. They do so with varying degrees of anger and violence, defeat and success. I am guessing many of us have these stories, fictional though they are, that bolster our hope. We need them. Though often it is much easier to escape into the tales we love than it is to transfer what we gain from their heroes and heroines to the much less simple, headache-inducing knots we find ourselves attempting to untangle in our actual lives. However, so very many people, citizens of our country, were moved to tears by Amanda Gorman’s poem on Inauguration Day, this also gives me hope. Amanda seems to fit right in with all my heroines, wielding her light-saber poetry. Perhaps she is our padawan Jedi, come to help us. There is one difference however—Amanda is real. She walks in our world, and we would do well to re-read her inaugural poem—to take up her challenge to be the light.
Endnotes
ICA (2020) “Racial Disparities in Homelessness,” Institute for Community Alliances.
NATEH (2020) “Racial Inequities in Homelessness,” By the Numbers,” National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Rover, Josh (2021) “Racial Disparities in Youth incarceration Persists.” The Sentencing Project,
Washington, D.C.
SAMHSA (2017) “Suicide Clusters in American Indian and Alaska Native Communites,” US Department of Health and Human Services: Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Rockville, Maryland.
ICA (2020) “Racial Disparities in Homelessness,” Institute for Community Alliances.
youth.gov (2020) “Youth Topics: Homelessness and Housing,” Youth.gov.