and thank my wife, Leslie Eleanor, whose pursuit of the truth and whose commitment to justice have discipled and guided me. I respect her more than words can say and I am so thankful for her love in our shared journey. My two sons, Aidan and Alister, are supportive beyond their years as our family seeks to follow the Way together. The path is often circuitous and I am so thankful that we do not walk it alone.
Introduction
The Racial Imaginary at Work
On February 26, 2012, an unarmed African American teenager named Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was detained by police, questioned, and then released claiming self-defense under the state of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws, which justify the use of lethal force in an altercation if believing one is in danger. Zimmerman did admit, however, that he had followed Martin, and that he had initiated the contact between the two, as evidenced by a call he made to the 911 emergency operator, who had instructed him to cease following Trayvon.1 Exiting his car after speaking to the dispatcher, Zimmerman initiated the altercation that ended in Martin’s death at the hands of Zimmerman. Zimmerman was charged with murder six weeks later only in response to public outrage. On July 13, 2013, Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges, including those of second-degree murder and manslaughter.
This case received international media attention and the judgment sparked intense debates in American society surrounding the intersection of race, violence, gun laws, profiling, and the criminal justice system. It served to make visible a slew of killings of unarmed black males, many by police. Names such as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray became part of the growing list of the deceased. These killings were often accompanied by a lack of indictment or prosecution of the officers responsible. Riots in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 and in Baltimore, Maryland in 2015 hearkened back to the civil unrest after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. In a supposedly “post-racial” twenty-first-century society, strongly-held and often unstated assumptions about race boiled just beneath the surface of American public discourse. Many citizens and activists saw in the Trayvon Martin case a clear-cut example of a white man profiling an unarmed black youth. Resistance to this view was swift, most often pointing to “black-on-black” crimes or cases in which a white person had been the victim of violence at the hands of an African American person. Four and a half years after the inauguration of the first African American president of the United States of America, the public discourse of the nation was embroiled in tense disputes about the role of race in societal relations and commutative justice. Paradoxically, the election of Barack Obama served to strengthen the resolve of those who contended that there was no longer any such thing as a “race problem” in the United States. Such voices presented the media coverage surrounding Martin’s shooting as a ploy to stoke the flames of racial discord anew or to covertly advance anti-gun or other “liberal” agendas.
During the days of Zimmerman’s trial, my wife Leslie, in her position as School Leader of an urban public charter school, attended a civil rights learning expedition in Little Rock, Arkansas, and was privileged to interview Ms. Thelma Mothershed-Wair in her home. Ms. Mothershed-Wair was one of the leaders of the Little Rock Nine, the group of African American students who in 1957 integrated Central High School in the face of intense persecution by community residents, students, faculty, administration, and government officials. The entrance of the Little Rock Nine to the school was aided by armed protection from the National Guard under mandate from the federal government. As Leslie entered the home of Ms. Mothershed-Wair, she was greeted by a man who subsequently excused himself in order to continue watching “the Trayvon Martin case” in the next room. While Martin’s death and Zimmerman’s trial were not discussed during the interview, Leslie could not but recognize the parallels for this man between his care for Ms. Mothershed-Wair, who as a teenager had been subjected to violence because of her ethnicity, and his interest in the proceedings surrounding the violence committed against Trayvon. When reflecting on this parallel in her portion of the report about the civil rights expedition, my wife was encouraged by several of the “progressive” staff who had planned the expedition to refrain from referring to the Martin case. While their primary concern was that Leslie not form connections not made explicit by Ms. Mothershed-Wair, the staff leaders did not seem to want to draw attention to the contemporary political ramifications of an interview with a member of the Little Rock Nine being conducted with the sounds of the Trayvon Martin case playing in the background. While both staff leaders preferred that she remove the reference altogether, the African American staff person “did not disagree” that the two events may be related while the Caucasian staff person did not seem to recognize the correlation. Leslie persevered in including the reference but was obligated to leave it as an observation about the interview’s setting and to draw no conclusions about its significance.
My reflection upon the shooting of Trayvon Martin is intrinsically linked to the place in which I live and the community of which I am a part. I am a white pastor living and ministering in an urban community that is primarily black and white.2 The primary focus of our church, our lives, and our education has been reconciliation across ethnic lines, particularly across the black–white divide, or what W. E. B. DuBois called “the problem of the color line.”3 We are a community struggling to experience Christ’s reconciliation as it is embodied in a new sociopolitical order in which old kinship networks give way to new and unlikely claims of familial connection. Joining to one another is not something to be “had” or “accomplished”; it is a journey, fraught with difficulties, messiness, misunderstanding, and beauty. After a decade of fostering deep and intentional connections with “unlike” others, I am still often perplexed about what to say or what to do when faced with ignorance in myself or others, misunderstandings in relationships marked by a historical power disparity, and injustice within societal systems.
Being mentored by a prominent African American Bishop in our community and pastoring a church which strives to be representative of the diversity of our community at every level of leadership brings abundant opportunities for correction, redirection, and affirmation. As I write this, I am reflecting on being confronted recently by a fellow leader in regard to a set of assumptions that I had unwittingly displayed through my comments at a board meeting. While at times it would undoubtedly be more comfortable to not place oneself in a position of displaying one’s own ignorance and prejudice, a continual journey of repentance and growth entails having sisters and brothers who participate in one’s salvation.
I am introducing myself as narrator neither to indict nor to pardon myself. I do not intend my reflections to be an exercise in self-flagellation or in self-referential exculpation. While I am aware that positioning oneself is a common introductory move within various works dealing with identity politics, I read the majority of said statements as displaying a self-conscious hermeneutic that may tend to confine the author within his or her own perspectivism.4 While a full Christian doctrine of creation necessitates that we view ourselves as bounded creatures shaped by particular contexts, the doctrine of redemption affords transcendence that can deliver us from being sealed in static identity silos. I introduce myself to make apparent how I have been led to interacting with the works of the theologians who ground my research into a theology of race and place and how my questions have led to the constructive heart of my thesis: the lived problem of racial reconciliation. Before I introduce their works, however, it remains to articulate the difficulty I faced when reflecting upon and explicating the racial vision that animated the death of an unarmed teenager and the acquittal of his murderer. I was convinced that a similar racial vision had enabled the exclusion of particular children from specific schools fifty years earlier. How could it be that what was taken for granted by Ms. Mothershed-Wair’s caregiver could ostensibly be hidden from so many others?
The resistance my wife faced to drawing seemingly obvious parallels between Martin’s death and
