REBORN or TORN ASUNDER

America’s 240th birthday was bloody, like the war that birthed it. After we doused the vestiges of our fireworks with water, we were baptized, again, by blood. Are we being reborn? Or torn asunder?

First there was Alton Sterling, shot dead by police on Tuesday, July 5, in Baton Rouge. The pain of another black man killed at the hands of police eclipsed our national psyche. All the questions about officer training and procedure and reasonability will, necessarily, have to wait.

At least until the mourning ends. When will that be?

Then there was Philando Castile, shot dead by police on Wednesday during a traffic stop in a St. Paul, Minnesota suburb. Video shows him bleeding to death. He, too, is black. He, too, is gone.

Because of a broken taillight.

And, again, the Twitter-sphere doesn’t care about police training or procedure or reasonability. We are in pain.

While the human mind is not equipped to absorb the tragedies of all of our villages, we Americans do it anyway. The agony emanates from America’s Original Sin, something so deeply embedded in our body politic that we dare not ignore it.

On Thursday evening, a sniper or snipers ambushed five unsuspecting police officers on duty at what was supposed to be a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest. They killed law enforcement officers Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Michael Smith, and Lorne Ahrens. They wounded seven more law enforcers, and two civilians.

Now our grieving and bloody body politic has had its breath knocked out. And as we crumble to our knees, we barely have the strength to utter “No!” when bloodshed is met with bloodshed. A police robo-bomb, remotely controlled by human hands, destroyed the confessed assassin.

But white America’s hands are no cleaner than the hands of Pontius Pilate.

For my fellow whites who think blacks should “just get over it,” please read the research. Being black matters in horrible ways that white privilege blinds us to. In a 2015 The New York Times piece, Harvard professor Sendhil Mullainathan doesn’t exclude officer racial bias as a factor in police shootings. But, he says, we’ve got much bigger problems.

The very way our society is structured, he writes, leads to vastly more encounters between police officers and African-Americans. More encounters, Mullainathan says, increases the risk of lethal police actions. He notes that although 13.2 percent of the U.S. population is African-American, 31.8 percent of all individuals shot by the police are African-American.

Mullainathan methodically traces the phenomenon back to facts about economic opportunity in our country. He quotes University of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig about who exactly is poor in the United States, “Living in a high-poverty neighborhood increases risk of violent-crime involvement, and in the most poor neighborhoods of the country, fully four out of five residents are black or Hispanic.”

The long and the short of it is that “poverty” still overlaps “minority” way too much in the United States.

But last century, as we rightfully beatified the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we made a grievous mistake. In our fear-based rush to elevate non-violence over everything else, we ignored his message about economic justice. He was assassinated while on a trip to assist union organizers, after all.

How do we, as white people, atone for whitewashing history? How do we begin to atone for allowing institutional racism to proliferate like weeds over the graves of civil rights leaders like Dr. King?

How do we as whites live with the knowledge that we have benefitted from turning a blind eye?

Only after we admit our problem, to God and to each other, can we begin to heal.

Only after we understand the generational effects of centuries of stolen labor, withheld resources, disparate treatment, and the hateful projection of our own evil, can we begin to atone.

We can’t get back the centuries we have lost to disease any more than the daughter of an alcoholic can relive her childhood with a newly sober father. We can’t erase the pain, but we can commit to healing.

And more important, atonement.

Are we being torn asunder? Or are we being reborn?

Excruciating as it is, we get through the pain of childbirth one breath at a time. And it’s white America’s turn to bear the labor.

Our nation’s rebirth depends on just that.