Unusual Allies: The Episcopal Church, two lawyers, and a girl from Prichard
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Alabama Institute for Social Justice
Written by
Lenice C. Emanuel, MLA
Executive Director
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Knowledge is
Power
is a blog by the Alabama Institute for Social Justice offering information, stories, and thoughts to inspire, educate, and empower.
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Unusual Allies: The Episcopal Church, two lawyers, and a girl from Prichard
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What do you get when the Episcopal Church, two lawyers, and a girl from Prichard, Alabama, come together? The answer is: the beginnings of a movement for racial and social change.
Last month, I was asked to spend an evening at the St. Paul Episcopal Church in Daphne, Alabama, as a guest speaker, and then spend the next day with the attendees for “Grounds and Rounds,” a post-event dialogue over coffee and doughnuts to discuss what they heard the previous night. Honestly, my initial thought was that I would speak that evening and then engage in some light process dialogue on the next day. The most I expected was that the group would learn a bit about our work at Alabama Institute for Social Justice (AISJ), make a few connections, and then return to Montgomery. Typically, that’s the way it works when I am asked to engage with a predominantly white group of interested, potential supporters. But this time, it was different. The people were different. More serious. More open. More ready to listen, to learn, and then contemplate change - real change.
For the past year, retired attorneys Gary Moore, a former Civil Rights attorney who served under the Obama administration in the district attorney’s office in Mobile, Alabama; and Joe McDaniels, Jr., a former New York Wall Street lawyer, have been ardent leaders in the creation of the Commission for Racial Reconciliation and Healing, an entity established under the Episcopal Church out of Daphne, Alabama, to begin the work of addressing white privilege. I first met Gary as he began traveling from Fairhope, Alabama, to Montgomery to attend a number of AISJ Racial Healing and Reconciliation events this year. I was intrigued by his interest and commitment to driving the nearly three hours to attend these events. He introduced himself at the end of the first event he attended, which featured anti-racism practitioner Tim Wise, and from there we began cultivating our relationship. I formally met Joe at the Daphne event last month and found him to be as authentic and committed as Gary. I was moved as I learned more about these two retired counsels, one white, one black; in particular, their driven passion at this season of their lives to engage in this difficult work. Without question, it would be a simpler existence for them to avoid the challenging effort required to address race and racism in our society.
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Let’s face it: we are living in an America that is not living up to its highest ideals. While accepting and dealing with this reality is not new for most minorities and marginalized communities, the pattern in Alabama is to seemingly ignore the facts – namely, that over 800,000 of its citizens live in abject poverty without adequate health insurance, a viable education, and livable wage opportunities. Historically, we quietly live with the fact that, as a state, we are rated at the bottom of nearly every quality-of-life indicator. At best, there are the rare occasions that we are able to say, “Hey, at least we’re not Mississippi,” which is a sad indicator of how complacent we have become with our commonly accepted low expectations. Not to mention that we are living in a state that is proudly taking the lead in reversing laws designed to empower women and people of color. From our recent, outrageous abortion bill to our outward insistence to not expand Medicaid, Alabama is single-mindedly on the trajectory of continuing to be a state where political, social, and economic equity does
not
exist for all of its citizens.
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In retrospect, however, perhaps the sole good that has resulted from our increasingly regressive political climate is that
unusual allies
are coming together. They are coming together across race, gender, class, and sexual orientation, because deep in our souls, we know that the world we are experiencing today is not one that values humanity. Again, it is not with naïveté that this statement is made. As both a woman and African-American, this reality is not an awakening for me. It is, however, the observation that this is a newly heard call to action, that others are becoming inspired and motivated to make a difference and return our country to a place of decency, as a result of the dearth of morality being played out on the world stage; where it is understood that a respectable quality of life is desirous for all people, and not just for an entitled elite. To this end, the significance of the Episcopal Church rising as a leader to address the implications of America’s legacy of slavery, and more specifically white privilege, is that it reflects a church’s desire to more fully live out its faith – one that is rooted in love, civility, and a high moral compass. This type of leadership is increasingly critical, particularly in Alabama, where faith-based zeal is often ill-used and misguided to maintain a deeply divided and racist political agenda.
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The demographics of Daphne, Alabama, which is 80 percent white, is not the typical group AISJ engages at the grassroots level. By design, our work and base-building efforts have primarily focused on low-income, African-American communities when it comes to organizing. As part of our racial healing and reconciliation work, however, it has been our goal to engage a more diverse group of individuals with the goal of building allies in justice work. Similar to successful strategies implemented during the Civil Rights Movement, AISJ has long understood the need to implement multiple approaches to advancing systemic change. More specifically, we understand that we must work to empower disenfranchised communities at the grassroots level while simultaneously engaging in conveying the truth and inspiring others from diverse backgrounds to join us in the movement for racial and gender equity for our core demographic; that is, women and people of color.
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T
he work of racial healing and reconciliation is not for the faint of heart, mostly because it requires truth telling as a precursor to any growth and evolution. Our country has not always been the holistic bearer of truth, particularly as it relates to our country’s history of chattel slavery. The path to reconciliation and healing can be painful, shocking, and emotionally devastating, especially for those whose life experiences have been devoid of victimization based on race and structural oppression. However, the issue of race is one that we must face in Alabama, where we are dealing with a political climate that seems determined to regress our state and country to a pre-civil-rights era, when women and African-Americans had few or no rights. The seemingly unbearable and growing efforts to strike down laws that have been established to ensure a society that embodies the core Constitutional values of liberty, freedom, and justice for all are swiftly fading away at the hands of both men and women determined to sustain a patriarchal system of race- and gender-based subjugation. The folks attending the event last week understand this, clearly. They are keenly aware, abraded by how our state continues to operate, and above all, like Fannie Lou Hamer, they are simply “sick and tired of being sick and tired” and stand ready to be a part of the solution.
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I, a girl from Prichard, a community that is 88 percent African-American with a poverty rate of 35 percent, am all too familiar with the implications of race, poverty, and shared candid truths about racism, white privilege, and how internalized oppression plays out in African-American communities. While individual racism still exists, the work of AISJ seeks to address structural racism, which manifests itself severely in the communities we serve, from the racialized poverty observed in Alabama’s Black Belt counties, where African-American families continue to live with high levels of lead-contaminated water and inadequate waste management systems, to the way race is played out in professional and political settings, where efforts to fight and advocate for Alabama’s poor and minority families are thwarted.
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Alabama is quintessentially southern. Southern culture is traditionally one that dresses up our sins, makes fancy our flaws, romanticizes our history, and focuses on how we want to see things versus how things really are. Explicitly, we have mastered the ability to ignore truth. However, on the backdrop of the current state of our country and the primitive mindsets of the dominant powers that be in our state, many Alabamians are beginning to acknowledge who we actually are versus who we pretend to be. The truth is, we are a state with a poverty rate of 17.2 percent, which is larger than the national average of 14 percent. We are a state that refuses to use Medicaid expansion to augment health-care options for the disenfranchised and create more jobs where employment opportunities are scarce. We are a state that continues to reel from the dire, racialized poverty that exists in each of our eighteen Black Belt counties. We are a state where there are child-care deserts, which impedes the ability of families to work outside the home. We are a state that is deeply divided by race and politics.
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This is who we are. But this is not who we are destined to be, and there is a growing cadre of Alabamians who understand this and are becoming empowered to change what are presently the hard-cold facts about our state. It is the coming together of
unusual allies
like the Episcopal Church, two retired attorneys, and a girl from Prichard who will ultimately transform Alabama’s culture of oppression. The truth is, as Victor Lee Lewis of
The Color of Fear
has stated, “While black folks are predominantly the victims of racism, racism is essentially a white people’s problem and it will take white people to fix it.”
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Photo credits: Robbie Runderson
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