JUDSON MEMORIAL CHURCH GRAPPLES WITH ISSUE OF REPARATIONS

udson Memorial Church, located in the heart of Greenwich Village, has a long and proud heritage of social activism. Therefore, it comes as no surprise to find its ministers, Peter Laarman and Karen Senecal, on the cutting edge when it comes to addressing subjects that aren't so easily received by mainly white congregations: issues such as reparations to descendants of slavery and what it means to be allies to people of color communities.

Take the sermon "A Debt, a Dream and a Dilemma," which Pastor Laarman delivered recently. He began by speaking about reparations as a debt which "is one of those things we who are white and middle class conveniently forget, or, alternatively, we think is so huge and horrible that there is no point in thinking about it."

He discussed how New York City's rise to wealth and power, which it maintains to the present day, was directly attributable to the uncompensated labor of enslaved Africans. He commented, too, that he is "always shocked by the extent to which people have been mis-educated into thinking that slavery was merely a Southern anomaly rather than an American phenomenon that brought wealth and power to the whole country, except, of course, to the Africans who were producing these riches through their uncompensated toil."

He noted that whites are so often ready to dismiss reparations as too hard to bring about. "I do marvel," he said, "at how the things we don't want to do become monstrously difficult to achieve, whereas the things we do want to do - put people on the moon, devise a Star Wars missile defense, create a map of the human genome, etc. - we find ourselves quite able to do."

Laarman showed how current the question of the debt is, stating, "I have a hunch that one reason this subject makes white Americans uncomfortable is that the debt continues to accumulate, and we know it. So morally we can't afford to admit that we owe something, because that would create even more awkwardness in respect to the new debt we create every day by consigning so many African Americans to the prison-industrial system; by disenfranchising even those who have done their time; by pretty much ignoring the raging AIDS epidemic in the African American community; by subsidizing patterns of residential development that now make our Northern schools even more segregated than they were 40 years ago; and so forth."

In the second part of his sermon, Laarman turned to Dr. Martin Luther King's dream, which he stressed is not the air-brushed dream of Black kids and white kids holding hands, but a prophetic vision of American transformed by justice. He quoted from a speech King gave that is directly relevant to the question of restitution and fairness:

"At the same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. Not only did they give them land, they built them land-grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms. Now, when we come to Washington in this campaign, we are coming to get our check."

"This, of course," commented Laarman, "is not the Martin Luther King that conservatives these days like to remember and celebrate. This is the 'bad' King, the abrasive King, the King who became the target of an assassination."

In the final section of his sermon, Laarman grappled with some of the complexities of how race continues to be the looming issue in this country, whether spoken or unspoken, and of how the issue gets manipulated politically, playing race and class off against each other. When the subject of reparations comes up, politicians who don't give a fig about the plight of poor whites are suddenly - supposedly - greatly concerned about their good and welfare and their possibly loosing out to Blacks.

Laarman observed that the situation has guaranteed a permanent hammerlock on this country's politics by the party of wealth. This is why he thinks that, even though it might seem at first to be a blind alley, the best route may be the one Martin Luther King proposed: to meet the burden of race head on in order to finally expose the reality of class oppression. "That is to say, call it reparations or call it restitution or call it whatever you want, but put in place a dramatic program that addresses the legacy of slavery head on," he stated. "Be willing to play the race card dramatically in order to take that card out of play hereafter."

Laarman said he knows that politically such a program seems completely unthinkable in the current environment. "You'd have a very tough time right now convincing white working class or white middle class people that this is ultimately in their interest to resolve through reparations. The money interests that have benefited so long from manipulating race will fight like hell to be able to hold on to their trump card. And you can bet that all the old arguments will be trotted out about how difficult this would be to accomplish administratively--and what about people of mixed-race ancestry--and blah blah blah."

But, Pastor Laarman concluded, "Against all these objections and all these reasons to do nothing, there still stands the reality of the debt and the reality that if left unpaid, that debt will continue to drag us all down and hold us all back - not just those whose ancestors were enslaved. That's the thing about debt. You can conceal it or cover it up all you want, but it never goes away until it is properly discharged."

Pastor Laarman's sermon can be read in its entirety at www.ReparationsTheCURE.org, the website of Caucasians United for Reparations and Emancipation. To learn more about Judson Memorial Church, please visit www.judson.org or call (212) 477-0351.