“Still”

“There are still problems (with racism and inequality) and communities of color aren’t just making these problems up.”
– President Obama, November 24, 2014

One of the most important words President Obama spoke on Monday night was the word “still.” “There are still problems,” he said.

Still.

The Civil Rights era might have seen the dismantling of a segregationist legal code, but changing laws is not enough. There are still problems.

There are still problems when the education, criminal justice, and economic systems don’t deliver on their promises – not just in individual cases, but for a whole subset of the American people. African Americans are disproportionately disadvantaged in our American system. Race bias, and racial injustice, are embedded in our society and its institutions. The laws have changed, and so have many attitudes and structures. Things are better. Progress has been made. But there are still problems.

Still.

We cannot turn a blind eye to the struggles of our sisters and brothers in Christ, our fellow Americans. We cannot congratulate ourselves for changing laws 50 years ago and just think, mistakenly, that our work there is done. No. There are still problems.

Still.

Can we believe it? Are we willing to face the facts that there are still problems, lingering from over 100 years of slavery, and another 100 years of Jim Crow, all legacies of an even longer history of imperialism that objectified and commodified the other? For most of our nation’s history, black people have been outlawed and branded as criminal, threatening, commodities, animals, as less-than. For 200+ years the freedom of black Americans was seen as un-American, as a threat to the American way.

200+ years of heinously racist and dehumanizing attitudes in our society don’t evaporate because of 50 years of better laws and some structural reform. 200+ years of racism are embedded in the very DNA of our society, in its economic structure, in its public policy, in its education system. And while some of racism’s impact has changed, it has not gone away. There are still problems.

Still. 

[On my blog on the church website, I have written about the need to listen to the cries from the prophets and from Ferguson. Click here to view that story: Listening to the Cries – Habakkuk and Ferguson]