Injustice in Adoption - An MLK Jr. Day Reflection

Wightman Chapel at Scarritt Bennett

The photo above is of Wightman Chapel in Nashville, on the campus of the Scarritt Bennett Center. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke here in 1957. Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I am at a training at Scarritt Bennett where the participants are of many faiths and many ethnicities. 

A quote from Dr. King has been on my mind lately:

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” ― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail

I have a colleague that likes to say, "Laws don't change people's hearts. They can prevent lynchings, but they don't change hearts."

One of the biggest misunderstandings about Martin Luther King Jr. Day is that the holiday celebrates the end of segregation and discrimination. That is not it at all. Segregation and discrimination still exist. Violence, physical and otherwise, still exists. Injustice exists in zoning laws, congressional redistricting, church giving priorities, our tax system, and my own personal budget. Justice and the work of God will not be complete until people's hearts are changed.

A way this is personal to me:

My family kept foster children for 20 years. We had over 100 children come through our home. I love babies and I am good with them. I loved having babies in our home. However, one aspect of that experience that always struck me is that the African-American babies always stayed in our home longer than babies of other ethnicities.

It is not inaccurate to say that many potential forever parents were probably racist. They didn't want to adopt a baby that didn't look like them because they thought something was wrong with those babies.

However, many of the potential future parents didn't want to adopt because they knew that they didn't have the personal strength or community support to adopt and raise a child of a different ethnicity. The adoption process forces people to think about what they are doing. One of the early parts of the process, finding a child, is easier if you are open to adopting an African-American child because there are more of them in the system.

There are issues all parents will face when raising kids. However, most of the time they can't predict those issues. Parents who have kids through adoption can foresee some of those issues. In the cases where parents of one ethnicity adopt children of another ethnicity, they can foresee, to an extent, the issues of race in their lives.

This forces parents to ask whether or not they think they can handle those issues. Very often the answer is no. Why do people say no? 

The issue of race is huge for everyone. It is also distant for many white people. So when white people are faced with race in their decision to adopt, they often decide to take the easy route. It is not necessarily that they wouldn't love the African-American child as much as the white one. It is more that they don't feel the strength or support to take on that love.

That is a damning indictment of our communities. People don't feel like their communities are strong enough or kind enough to support them in accepting the challenge to raise a multi-racial* family. They also don't feel like there are alternative communities that can provide that support, or that those communities are just as weak as their own.

This is an injustice. This is a sin. We need to build communities where people can feel the support they need to raise multi-racial families. When a white family adopts an African-American child, they need to have the acceptance and support of their own community, as well as the support of an African-American community to provide opportunities for the child to explore their heritage.

I challenge everyone, especially people who look like me, to spend today thinking about how their own lives and communities help continue this injustice. Have you been prejudiced towards individuals because of the color of their skin, the language they speak, or the way they dress? Have you told potential parents who are thinking of raising a multi-racial family that it will be too hard?

I know I have. I need to do more of the hard work in my communities to make them more supportive of adoption and multi-racial families. I am getting better. I am working towards perfect justice on this because when Dr. King say "Injustice anywhere", that includes in our hearts and minds.

* I say "multi-racial" because I think it is wrong to raise, for example, an African-American child as white when the parents are white. Don't deprive people of their heritage. Don't make the arrogant assumption that their lives will be easier if they are white people who happen to have dark skin. Don't be ignorant about what is problematic with your own ethnicity.

** Don't get me started on the people who think families formed through adoption aren't as real or valid as families formed through traditional pregnancy.

*** There isn't enough space here to talk about why there are more African-American babies in foster care than other ethnicities. Some people may try to steer the conversation in that direction. However, I would say that the reasons behind something shouldn't have a big impact on the actions you take in response to something. Don't try to use the reasons behind something as an excuse to avoid how you can be better in the situation.

Protection from the Wolves

Fargo spoilers below.

I love the movie and television series, Fargo. The writing is excellent, the cinematography is beautiful, and the acting is top notch. But what I love the most about Fargo is the hidden gems that the writers put into the dialogue. 

The TV series is an anthology. Each season is mostly self-contained, with some random connections to the other seasons and the movie. In the first season, Billy Bob Thornton's character Malvo is a psychopathic (different from sociopathic) contract killer. He is traveling through Bemidji, Minnesota, on a job. His car crashes after hitting a deer, his target flees into the cold (and later dies of hypothermia), and he heads into town to get stitched up. 

While he is in town, Malvo causes severe damage. He murders two people, including the chief of police who is a soon-to-be father. It only takes Malvo a couple of days to turn the town upside down. He is a wolf among sheep.

He eventually heads to Duluth for another job. His actions in Bemidji follow him, though. Two small-town Midwestern police officers, one from Bemidji and one from Duluth, eventually catch Malvo's scent. He doesn't like this, and eventually follows the Duluth officer, a widower and father, to his apartment complex.

This is where one of those hidden gems lies. While Malvo is sitting outside the apartment complex, contemplating his upcoming killings, one of the residents knocks on Malvo's car window. The resident tells Malvo to go away. The apartment complex is a community. It cares for each other and protects each other from danger.

Up to this point, Malvo has terrified everyone he has encountered. However, all his encounters have been people who were alone: the man in a bad marriage, the police officer alone in the night. The apartment resident has the courage to stand up to the wolf because he is a part of a community. He isn't really alone. This minor, 2-scene, everyday guy is the only one in the series to prevent Malvo from creating destruction.

Communities can be dysfunctional. They can be abusive and manipulative, cold, unwelcoming, and harsh. When people don't follow lock-step with the wayward and crooked standards of the community, they are thrown out into the wild for the wolves to devour.

But communities can also be extremely powerful and nurturing. They can provide safety and identity. People who are in genuine, loving community with one another aren't threatened by the wolves. They don't fall easily for charlatans or demagogues.

So I wonder how much of the dysfunction in our world is due to there being too many dysfunctional communities, too many outcasts, and too many wolves. How much of the hurt in our world can be healed by forming the right kind of communities, the ones built on love, trust, and justice tempered with mercy.

It starts with us. In our families, our churches, our schools, our social clubs, and our Facebook groups, how are we treating each other? How are we treating those who are different from us? How about those who disagree with us? How do we treat those who are poor or oppressed? How do we treat those that have made mistakes?

The truth is that communities can transform even wolves. We use wolves as a symbol for wilderness or danger but our dogs, the animals many of us love more than people, were once wolves.

Better Together

Photo by Andrew Greenberg

I had to unfriend someone on Facebook yesterday. He was one of my college roommates. He posted that he was happy that the Affordable Care Act is probably going to be repealed. 

Many of us want to maintain relationships past the point of sustainability. Some will say that it was petty to remove my former roommate from my list of Facebook friends. It is only Facebook, right? Others will say that I should have tried to do what I often challenge others to do: fight for those hard relationships. Do the hard work of persuasion.

However, there are limits. Sometimes specific relationships aren't worth the effort. Sometimes I am not the person to do the work of persuasion with a person. In this specific situation, I have not communicated with him in several years. We do not live close together. Any communication between us would have only served to harden his opinion and raise our mutual blood pressure levels. That's because I have a belief that he and I do not share.

I believe that we are all better together. When we share our burdens and joys with each other, the burdens are lighter and the joys are more powerful. I am a person of faith, a Christian, and this idea is central to that faith. I will do to you what I would want you to do to me. I will not do to you what I would not want you to do to me.

There is another idea in our culture, though. It says that the only thing that matters is me, and maybe my family and friends. Everyone else is a danger. Everyone else matters less. My job as a person to is lift myself up at the expense of you and yours. This is the thought of libertarians and those who follow Ayn Rand. I have another word for it: selfishness.

People will tell you that selfishness is part of who we are as humans, and that we can't get rid of it. They say we have to develop systems to manage the selfishness. They rely on the assumption that people's nature cannot change.

They are wrong. People are capable of enormous growth and change. This knowledge is at the core of my faith, and of many other faiths. The book of Deuteronomy gives us a vision of a sacred society in the vision of Israel, especially in Jubilee. At the core of this society is the idea that we are not our own. Our possessions are not our own. They belong to God and to the community. In the book of Acts, we see the early church giving freely of their possession to those in need. The community of Christ gave freely so that the burden of one become the burden of all, and therefore became light. "Many hands make for light work."

Skeptics, especially those within Christianity, will tell you that Jubilee never happened and that the practice of the early church was unsustainable and unscalable. They will tell you that God is showing us the ideal, but doesn't actually expect it to happen on earth. It will happen in the New Earth, where all evil is banished.

I don't believe that. I take Jesus seriously when he says in the Lord's Prayer, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Our job as people of faith in this world is to work to make this world more like heaven. We are expected to bring about the kingdom, not to survive until God smashes it down on this world.

If those who resist this, who claim the name "Christian", were being honest, they would say, "But I don't want to do that. I don't want to work towards that world. I'm not there yet." If someone said that to me, I'd hug them, because very few people are willing to say that out loud. After I hugged them, I'd say, "We all have to eat our vegetables, whether we want to or not." To do otherwise would be to surrender to selfishness, to greed, to sin. 

Getting People Involved - Why We Should Party

I had the opportunity yesterday to sit down with Bret Wells and Robert Bishop from the Missional Wisdom Foundation. It was a great conversation overall, but the part where I learned the most had to do with the question "Why do people not get involved?"

This is a problem that ministers, organizers, and politicians all face constantly. Ministers wonder why people don't show up to events outside of Sundays and Wednesdays. Organizers wonder why people who come to meetings don't show up to knock on doors. Politicians (the good ones, of which there are many) wonder why people don't show up to town halls, board meetings, or lobby days.

Bret showed me a framework like the one below. You might be familiar with it, but it was new to me:

The idea here is that the reasons why people don't get involved can be broken down into two main buckets: motivation and ability.

These barriers can be personal, social, or structural. A structural ability barrier would be something like lack of reliable internet. A personal motivation barrier would be individuals' inability to see the value in the activity.

Social motivation interests me. If people lack social circles, in which they are invested, that support taking part in certain activities, then people are much less likely to take part in those activities. This is a "duh" moment for me. This is one of the reasons why we have cliques and "scenes" that hang out in different parts of town, take part in different activities, and generally don't interact with one another. I could be a yuppie who also has an interest in goth-type activities, but since my main social circle is comprised of yuppies, I'm probably not going to go to a goth club.

This is also the reason why young professional groups with a strong socializing component are important for the social justice movement. If young people don't have friends that support their social justice work, they are much less likely to do that work. Young people are particularly needed in this work, but often underrepresented.

Many of us who work in social justice have a level of disdain for including socializing in our programs. There is a limited amount of time, and what seems like an unlimited amount of work to do. We feel the need to use every second to do what we view as the vital work of justice.

In reality, part of that work is to create social groups that value social justice work. If we don't, many talented people will fall between the cracks because they don't feel socially supported to do the work. This is why groups like OFA and PICO make sure to lift up the role of "comfort captain" (aka food provider) as equal to phone bank or canvass captains.

So before you pick up the phone or start printing that walk packet, think about planning a potluck or bar crawl.