Sermon Archives : 2006/2007
MLK and the Enduring Legacy of Colonialism
The Rev. Jason Shelton · January 14, 2007
A few months ago I was with some colleagues talking about music and culture in our society, and as many of you know we were focusing on the idea of cultural misappropriation, or the reckless borrowing on the part of the dominant culture from a traditionally oppressed group without any consideration for the story and the struggle behind the thing being borrowed. We were talking about the cultural reality of mostly-white congregations singing music that comes from non-white traditions, music that isn’t “theirs” from a cultural perspective.
I noted, however, that since the invention of the phonograph roughly a century ago, people have been able to listen to and in fact “own” music with which they have no personal relationship. Before recordings became widely available, if I wanted to hear the music of the African American church, an Indian raga, or a Ghanian master drummer, I had to be in the presence of that music, and thus in some kind of relationship with the music makers, in order to hear it. Today, with iTunes and other music downloading services, I can have this and so much more without ever leaving my living room. The idea of music as a communal experience shared by both performers and listeners has become the exception rather than the norm.
In some ways this is great, and it is certainly useful for me in my work. But there are ways in which it is deeply troubling. For most of human history music-making has been a profoundly cultural experience, one which has shaped communal identity at its deepest levels. The idea of music being available for consumption by those outside of the community and its struggles seems to betray one of our central theological understandings: the interdependence of all people. Pop records are one thing, but can I really listen to or own the music of an oppressed people, especially music which speaks directly to that oppression, and simply add it to my collection without consideration of the ways in which our world has privileged me over them?
It is this privilege that became the sticking point in our conversation. I noted that my daughter will, because of my eccentric musical tastes and excessive CD collection, be shaped by a wide variety of musical and cultural expressions. Of course she will know American jazz, bluegrass, Gospel and avant-garde choral music, as well as funk, R&B, classical, and rock – with even the occasional hip-hop or country record thrown in the mix for good measure. Much of our conversation had already focused on these styles, their place in American culture and the ways they are used and abused every day. But then our conversation moved out to a more global perspective. Not only will Amanda know a wide variety of American music, but she will also know some Indian ragas and Sufi chants. She’ll be listening to Irish, Israeli and Chinese folksongs, moving to the beat of master drummers from Ghana and Nigeria, and learning the differences between a Samba, a Rumba and a Tango through a wide range of truly Southern musical experiences. They will shape her musical and cultural identity as they have shaped mine.
And I was proud of that fact, until one of my colleagues said, “Yes, but what about colonialism?” The room fell silent. I knew instinctively what she meant by the question, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer it then. It seemed more respectful of the question to sit silently with it, and let its profundity sink in.
Allow me to rephrase her question. Given the historic fact of European and American subjugation of most of the people whose music is found in the “world” section in the record store, are there moral issues that should govern our casual, consumer relationship with that music? How much of the music and culture of historically oppressed peoples exists precisely in response to that oppression? Knowing what many in this town know all too well about the ways record labels exploit and underpay artists, shouldn’t we be at least curious to know that “world” music artists are receiving their due royalties? And what about so-called “traditional” music? Does our not knowing who originally composed a song make it OK to reuse it without compensation of any kind?
The first song the chamber choir sang this morning comes from South Africa. Its exact origin is unknown, but it was “collected” by a Swedish composer who often travels to South Africa to find new songs which he then publishes and records, presumably for his own financial gain – in my research I have found no evidence to show otherwise. Given hundreds of years of brutal oppression experienced by the native peoples of that nation at the hands of European oppressors, this seems at the very least an action which demands some kind of acknowledgement of the delicacy of the situation, with perhaps an pledge that the money generated from these collections would in turn be used to better the lives of the people from which they come.
Now we could argue that this person is no oppressor, and he is simply using his own resources to bring recognition to a people and their music that might not otherwise happen. And this is a good thing – it is in fact a way of preserving the culture and sharing it with the rest of the world. I think this is a valid response, but it’s complicated by the history of colonialism – a history still remembered quite vividly by people alive today who have lived through it. I want to know that this particular white man understands this history, that he is not further exploiting the people from whom he “collects” these songs.
It is a moral question: how are we to be in relationship with each other given the historic inequities between the peoples and cultures of our planet? We are not just talking about a period of time in which people weren’t very nice to one another. We are talking about European colonists bringing guns and ships - as well as disease and other weapons of mass destruction - and proceeding to wipe vast numbers of their fellow human beings from existence, like the San people we sang of in Horizons. And those who were left in the wake of this devastation were generally forced to work for their new masters, who then sent home the spoils of victory so that those European nations, and later Russia, Canada and the US, could amass the kind of wealth never before seen in the history of the world, while the native or imported slave populations lived in abject poverty and squalor. Colonial rule may be over today – for the most part – but we cannot even begin to claim that the playing field between former colonies and their former rulers is level.
Of course, this being Martin Luther King Sunday, one of the highest of holy days in the Unitarian Universalist tradition, we cannot pretend that it is sufficient to examine these issues as solely international phenomena, something that happened “over there.” No, our own nation was founded by colonists, who claimed this already occupied land on behalf of various European monarchs. We have our own San, our own Canaanites, those who lived in this Promised Land long it was “discovered” by Europeans. And we have our own population of forced laborers, of those taken from their homeland and enslaved in this one, so that the wealth of the white elite could grow large enough to last for many generations, passing on their privilege and power in seeming perpetuity. But unlike the British in India, or the Belgians in the Congo, the self-proclaimed masters of this society didn’t go home when the battle for freedom and independence was won. No, here we live in a society where the great-grandsons of masters and the great-granddaughters of slaves are supposed to go to school together, work together, and even worship together. How do we find the way forward given the tainted history of our relationships with one another? As Dr. King asks, “Where do we go from here?”
It may seem odd that much of our music this MLK Sunday morning has come from South Africa. (If you want to sing “We Shall Overcome” you’ll have to come join us at Corinthian Baptist this afternoon.) King was an avid supporter of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1950’s and 60’s, serving on several national committees which led the way in organizing the earliest attempts at trade sanctions against South Africa. King recognized that, “the tragedy of South Africa is not simply in its own policy; it is the fact that the racist government of South Africa is virtually made possible by the economic policies of the United States and Great Britain, two countries which profess to be the moral bastions of our Western world.” (King, 621)
He also saw a kinship between the struggles of African Americans and black South Africans. As with emancipation and the granting of civil rights in this country, the end of apartheid did not come coupled with the retreat of whites to their ancestral homes. A society of legislated inequality was, overnight, expected to be one in which all people were equal. King wrote about the fear such instant change might bring about:
A guilt-ridden white minority fears that if the Negro attains power, he will without restraint or pity act to revenge the accumulated injustices and brutality of the years. The Negro must show that the white man has nothing to fear, for the Negro is willing to forgive. A mass movement exercising nonviolence and demonstrating power under discipline should convince the white community that as such a movement attained strength, its power would be used creatively and not for revenge. (King, 593)
Of course many of us know that forgiveness played a central and awe-inspiring role in South Africa when apartheid was finally ended in the 1990’s. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Bishop Desmond Tutu, offered forgiveness to those who were willing to tell the truth about their involvement in an evil system of oppression and violence. It was a startling image – white policemen reduced to tears, telling the tale of their most heinous acts, and being forgiven by the wife, mother, son of the man they had killed. This scene played itself out over and over again for years; it was perhaps the most profound display of compassion and charity ever seen on a national level.
While I’d like to dream it into being, I don’t believe such a thing will happen in this country any time soon – certainly not as a government-sponsored program. But still our nation is in desperate need of its own process of truth and reconciliation. What we need is a moment of true personal and national integrity, where we have the vision and the courage to embrace long-term good over short-term comfort. In his memoirs about their process, Tutu writes that:
If we are going to move on and build a new kind of world community there must be a way in which we can deal with a sordid past. The most effective way would be for the perpetrators or their descendants to acknowledge the awfulness of what happened and the descendants of the victims to respond by granting forgiveness, providing something can be done, even symbolically, to compensate for the anguish experienced, whose consequences are still being lived out today. It may be, for instance, that race relations in the United States will not improve significantly until Native Americans and African Americans get the opportunity to tell their stories and reveal the pain that sits in the pit of their stomachs as a baneful legacy of dispossession and slavery. We saw in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission how the act of telling one’s story has a cathartic, healing effect. (Tutu, 278-9)
When I was a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I was in a class in which we watched the film Amistad. Many of you have seen it, I’m sure. It is the true story of a slave ship which was taken over by its human cargo, then came ashore in the US, where the question of the status of the slaves-to-be is treated as a legal matter. The film is unflinching in its portrayal of the living conditions these human beings endured, and watching the film in a racially mixed classroom was uncomfortable to say the least.
When it was over, I walked out of the room just behind a friend of mine, an African American woman. She was moving at a fast clip, but I caught up to her, called her name and asked her to stop. She did, and when she turned to me I could see in her face a pain like none I had ever seen before or experienced personally. With a trembling voice I said to her, “I feel the need to tell you that I’m sorry.” The tears began to flow from both of our eyes, and she said, “You have no idea what that means to me.” We embraced, and then sat together for several hours as we shared some of our stories with each other. Our relationship was forever changed in that moment of honesty, forgiveness, and reconciliation. We took a step together on the long road from brokenness to wholeness.
Tutu writes that, “True forgiveness deals with the past, all of the past, to make the future possible. We cannot go on nursing grudges even vicariously for those who cannot speak for themselves any longer. We have to accept that what we do we do for generations past, present, and future. That is what makes a community and community or a people a people – for better or for worse.” (Tutu, 279)
Our world is one world – what touches one affects us all. The songs we sing, the food we eat, the culture we share, the way we build our attitudes, these all affect the ability of our hearts to hear a different call. It is not always clear where we are headed or how we will get there, but still we are called – all of us, regardless of our ethnicity or the extent of our social influence – called to use what power we have to take one more step down that road. On this weekend when we pay tribute to a man who dreamed of a world transformed, of a world where little black boys and black girls would be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers, of a world house where we who can never again live apart will somehow learn to live with each other in peace, let us take that step forward together, with great courage, and with love.
Blessed be, and amen.