Who speaks for the black community?

[JimFoxvog]

For black people I know, living out the Gospel in black churches, being black is not an illness to be diagnosed and cured. But some of the things I read seem to treat it that way.

I've wondered about that. Hair straighteners and skin lighteners seem to be products that are well stocked in drugstores with many black customers. I had assumed these were an attempt to look more like whites. I guess I was embarrassed to ask the woman I was friends with who used the hair straighteners.

[GaryK]

Why were there still identifiable Jews and Greeks after the church became one?

Why did Paul work so hard at removing the distinctions?

We do want spiritual unity with black churches and black members of our own churches. How is your church working toward that? That would be worth discussing in another thread.

I believe spiritual unity works toward erasing stereotypes and causes us to view each other as one people in Christ.

As I said in another thread - there is a very small black church here in town that I'm planning to check into whether our small group could start meeting with on a fairly regular basis.

Paul did not try to erase Jews or insist they could not have Jewish practices. He said they had to embrace Gentiles. We do not have to abolish Gospel choirs out of a desire for equality. Let's not work to erase black culture or silence black voices. That's not building equality.

Did you notice that Paul says that Christ came and preached peace to those who were far off (Gentiles) AND to those who were near (Jews) thus making out of two peoples one NEW man? If both needed to have peace preached to them by Christ and they became one NEW man in Christ what culture did they now belong to?

I'm sure my bi-racial nephews who have been on the receiving end of some nasty insults recently by their family on my BIL's (from NAB) side, would say that they just wish that everyone would see them, not by the amount of melanin they have in their skin, but who they are as persons.

How do you feel about adopting black or bi-racial children out of their culture? Is that a form of attempting to erase black culture?

[Bootstrap]

How do you feel about adopting black or bi-racial children out of their culture? Is that a form of attempting to erase black culture?

In this thread, I am more interested in polling to see how black people feel about this. But you ask good questions, so I answered in another thread.

http://forum.mennonet.com/viewtopic.php ... 126#p92126

[joshuabgood]

I think it is a great idea GaryK of you exploring doing some small group meetings together.

[GaryK]

I think it is a great idea GaryK of you exploring doing some small group meetings together.

Perhaps you missed that I said that in our earlier conversation.

[Robert]

I am more interested in polling to see how black people feel about this.

I was once stopped by two Police cars with lights flashing. They called out on bull horns to get my hands on the ceiling of the car. They had their guns drawn, I could see one walking up in the rear view mirror with his shot gun out and aimed my way. The other had his pistol drawn and at the ready. I was fumbling around looking for my registration in the glove box. The officer called on the bull horn again to get my hands on the roof of the van. I finally complied to their instructions instead of my thoughts. The pistoled officer came to my window. The one with a shotgun came to the sliding door of the van and opened it. To his surprise, my wife was sitting in that seat as the door opened. He asked her if she was okay and immediately saw three children strapped into seats. They instantly surveyed the inside of the van and realized we were not who they were looking for. They informed us that the bank was robbed just earlier int he town we had just driven through and the robber forced a lady out of her van that was just like ours and driven off. They were in a two county search looking for him. He was a white male.

I do think they profiled me. A white male driving a tan mini van without any seen passengers. My wife asked the one officer to lower his shotgun which was still pointed our way. Our oldest was very afraid of Police officers at the time. He complied immediately, they apologized for the stop and allowed us to be on our way.

If I was black, I would have felt targeted.

My daughter was driving home one night about midnight. Some friends were celebrating graduation and she was joining them. Good group and no drinking or other things were being used. A couple of miles from that house, she was stopped by three Police cars and 6 officers all had their guns drawn and pointing at her. They came up and started searching her car through windows with flashlights asking her a bunch of questions. What was she doing. Where was she heading? Why was she out. Finally, one of the officers walked up and recognized her. They said someone in a vehicle just like hers was driving around shooting. As soon as she was recognized, the one officer let the rest know she was not who they were looking for. They holstered their weapons and let her head on ... it took her several minutes to calm down before she could drive. If she was a minority, it would be easy to feel targeted.

I was stopped at midnight on our way home from Indiana to Michigan after visiting some friends. Small town was pretty empty, no cars on the road. I rolled through a red light turning right. I was tired and we were 1 hour from home. We knew the town well. Police stopped me. He asked for ID and registration. I gave it to him. He asked for my wife's ID. We asked why. He said there was a state law that required him to ID all adults in a vehicle stopped. I felt that was a lie, but we had nothing to hide and I knew if I fought him, I was guaranteed to get a ticket. We gave him her ID. He gave us a warning and we went on our way. If she was black, we would have felt targeted.

Feelings can be an indicator, but they do not always reflect reality. The reality is the law enforcement must use power and abuses power often. Many times there are good reasons for it. Sometimes there is not. We need to be honest that 99% of stops are legit and they have good reason. We do need to work on the 1%. We need to find ways to reveal that many stops are not because of race, but because of situations. I do not think George Floyd was killed because he was black. I think he died because a law officer made a really bad judgement of how to deal with someone on drugs.

[RZehr]

For black people I know, living out the Gospel in black churches, being black is not an illness to be diagnosed and cured. But some of the things I read seem to treat it that way.

This is not what we are ever told. The “left” is always telling everyone about the ills, and if the “right” every would say something close to this, they are bigots.

I think I have read things across the political spectrum that focus on the ills. I'd like to avoid the whole "left" versus "right" framing, I don't think it helps to act like everything is always about the war between the "left" and the "right".

To me, really listening to our black brethren also means being willing to appreciate pig pickings, Gospel music, and joyful hugs that we do not have in our local Mennonite church.

Again, the “left” “cancels” people on the “right” for making stereotypes. Yet apparently the left is the arbiter of which stereotypes are okay.

These are memories, not stereotypes. Here in North Carolina, at least, these are things I experienced quite a bit in church services in prisons, black churches I visited with friends who went to them, black funerals, and black family gatherings. You live in Oregon, is it different there? Have you been to black church services?

I haven’t ever seen a black church here. I guess there might be in Portland. I’ve visited black churches a few times while traveling in the south, that is all. Very few black people here. Mostly white, brown, yellow.

[Robert]

[video][/video]

[Ken]

Feelings can be an indicator, but they do not always reflect reality. The reality is the law enforcement must use power and abuses power often. Many times there are good reasons for it. Sometimes there is not. We need to be honest that 99% of stops are legit and they have good reason. We do need to work on the 1%. We need to find ways to reveal that many stops are not because of race, but because of situations. I do not think George Floyd was killed because he was black. I think he died because a law officer made a really bad judgement of how to deal with someone on drugs.

This topic has been extensively studied. Here is one such study that looked at data from across the country: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1

What do the data show? Black people are, indeed stopped more frequently than white people. Interestingly, the difference vanishes at night when the racial identity of the driver is not visible before the stop is made. They did a detailed time of day study in Texas and found that blacks were stopped disproportionately more during the day but not at night when the behavior of the vehicle is the only reason for the stop as the race of the driver can't generally be discerned prior to getting pulled over.

[Ken]

I haven’t ever seen a black church here. I guess there might be in Portland. I’ve visited black churches a few times while traveling in the south, that is all. Very few black people here. Mostly white, brown, yellow.

The reason for that is that Oregon was founded as a racist "whites-only" state from the very beginning. Portland's daily newspaper, the Oregonian did a story about that exact topic this very morning. The KKK used to be huge in Oregon 100 years ago. My own home town of Eugene once had a large permanent KKK sign mounted below a cross on the hill overlooking the city. It wasn't until WW2 when black shipworkers and ironworkers were recruited to work in the city's massive shipyards that any numbers of black people were allowed to migrate to Oregon. And even then they were restricted to living in only a few designated neighborhoods in north Portland.

https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2020 ... ivism.html

Oregon’s founders sought a ‘white utopia,’ a stain of racism that lives on even as state celebrates its progressivism

Oregon became a state in 1859 as the United States was hurtling toward civil war.

Slavery, the issue that was tearing the young nation apart, was banned in the new state. Many of Oregon’s leaders believed they had a better model.

They wouldn’t allow black people at all.

Oregon consistently goes “blue” in presidential elections, and conservative commentators invoke the name of its largest city as a shorthand for hyper-liberalism. But Oregon is also one of the whitest states in the country -- originally by design. The effects of that history of racism are still felt today.

The authors of Oregon’s constitution declared that no “free negro or mulatto … shall come, reside or be within this State, or hold any real estate.” They relied on precedent for this decree. The territorial legislature had passed a black-exclusion law in 1844 -- dictating regular public lashings until lawbreakers left the territory -- and followed it up with another such law five years later.

The land grants, the black-exclusion laws, the restrictions on voting (the Oregon Constitution barred not just blacks from voting but also Chinese): these actions -- and many more -- sent the clear message to anyone who wasn’t white that “you’re not welcome in Oregon,” says Kerry Tymchuk, executive director of the Oregon Historical Society and the former chief speechwriter for 1996 GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole. “It helps explain why so few moved here, which has repercussions to this day.”

Discriminatory laws in Oregon continued through the decades after statehood. In 1883, an attempt to amend the state constitution’s prohibition of black suffrage failed, even though the ban had been mooted by the U.S. Constitution’s 15th Amendment. In 1923, the Legislature passed laws that kept Japanese Americans from owning property and allowed cities to deny them business licenses. (Twenty-two years later, during the last days of World War II, and with some 4,000 Oregonians of Japanese ancestry held in federal internment camps, the Oregon House pushed a resolution calling on Congress “to deport immediately after the war, all alien Japanese and all Japanese of American citizenship who have indicated dual citizenship…”)