Healing racial divides starts with dialogue, black bishops say

[rug]

Family members comfort Diamond Reynolds, the girlfriend of Philando Castile, as his casket arrives July 14 for a funeral service at the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul, Minn. (CNS/Eric Miller, Reuters)

Carol Zimmermann Catholic News Service | Jul. 18, 2016

The threat of being pulled over by police and arrested for something that even "hinted of going beyond the status quo," was very real to retired Bishop John Ricard of Pensacola-Tallahassee, Florida, when he was growing up in segregated Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The African-American bishop, president of the National Black Catholic Congress, said he and his friends "lived under constant threat of being arrested" during his teenage years.

Now decades later, he said that "like everyone else, I was very dismayed" by the recent fatal shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge July 5 and Philando Castile a day later in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, by police officers, followed by the sniper shooting July 7 in Dallas which killed five police officers.

After this surge of shootings, he said, many people have been asking: "Where do we go from here and what does all this mean?"

https://www.ncronline.org/news/justice/healing-racial-divides-starts-dialogue-black-bishops-say

http://nbccongress.org/

[Turkey Manhatten]

1. The Snowball is Growing

If dialogue is a substitution for the fog of violence that this country seems to be lost in then I'm all for dialogue, but I feel myself becoming less and less inclined to believe that engaging one another is helpful instead of harmful.

First off, dialogue between whom exactly? Black citizens and cops? The NRA and congress? Should I, a white citizen with an opinion, try to participate or just stay out of the way? I think the type of "dialogue" that is happening right now consists of mostly empty rhetoric that makes each side more distrustful of the other than before a dialogue started. I'm worried that without inviting literally everybody with a viewpoint to the talking table, that a feeling of dis ingenuousness will swallow any constructive headway and replace it with a growing snowball of hatred and mistrust.

It really makes me quite sad that I've become so jaded to see constructive dialogue as a destabilizing force.

[rug]

2. "Fog of violence" is a good way of putting it.

It does take more than simply dialogue. We have to realize we are all, uniquely, the same, that we are not simply defined by attributes. If we do not register the pain and the anger others feel, a part of our own humanity has gone dead.

If not, the dialogue will be no more than, "You're bleeding."

Cheer up. Like it or not, we're all human beings. Our labels don't define us. That's why we were all naked in Eden. The shame came when we sought clothes to disguise ourselves.

[Turkey Manhatten]

3. Shame as a Unity?? But wheres the end game?

Its funny that you would use an analogy to Eden and the shame that came with seeking clothes. That shame was only brought about by thirsting after forbidden knowledge. The whole concept of having a dialogue is to leave each participant more knowledgeable about the others.

Maybe in the context of the article, a dialogue on racial and police violence should lead to shame. If every party goes away from a dialogue feeling an enduring shame of where race is then in effect everyone has been reduced to "the same", an ashamed mess.

The problem is, where do we go from shame? Adam and Eve didn't wind up doing so hot after there shaming, they had (presumably very painfully born) children (one of whom was a murdering sociopath) and then returned to dust.

[rug]

4. The whole story is about pride, the elevation of oneself over others.

The other in this case being God.

As soon as that happened, they noticed differences between them. They had lost their ability to recognize themselves in each other.