Chapters 18-19: Finding Hope Amid Violence

Chapters 18-19 are hard to talk about.  You’ll notice that even when John Perkins speaks at SPU, the majority of his conversation isn’t around what happened in these chapters.  In these chapters we see the worst of human hatred and a conscious choice to forgive rather than give in to the dehumanizing desire to seek revenge. 

As he describes being beaten by White police officers, Perkins makes a profound statement that I have overlooked in several times I’ve read LJRD:

“And I can’t forget their faces, so twisted with hate.  It was like looking at white-faced demons.  Hate did that to them.

But you know, I couldn’t hate back.  When I was what hate had done to them, I couldn’t hate back.  I could only pity them.  I didn’t ever want hate to do to me what it had already done to those men” (165).

Miroslav Volf, a theologian who lived through the early 1990s violence in Yugoslavia, writes that violence and oppression damage both the oppressed and the oppressor.  “Just as the oppressed must be liberated from the suffering caused by oppression, so the oppressors must be liberated from the injustice committed through oppression” (Exclusion and Embrace, 23). Oppression seeks to place oneself at the center, excluding and harming those it can separate as “other.”  On the other hand, Volf writes, reconciling relationships place Jesus at the center and understand ourselves and others in relationship to him.  In the process of reconciliation oppressors must repent of their desire to harm and degrade those they have sought to exclude, and victims must forgive and repent even of their anger in order to avoid seeking the opportunity to react and become the oppressors.  It’s tough stuff.

“Though victims may not be able to prevent hate from springing to life, for their own sake they can and must refuse to give it nourishment and strive to weed it out.  If victims do not repent today they will become perpetrators tomorrow who, in their self-deceit, will seek to exculpate their misdeeds on account of their own victimization” (Volf, 117).

Perkins writes that White oppressors look for someone over whom to maintain authority in an effort to feel a sense of power: “You see, there is a kind of white person who has nothing going for him in life except his whiteness and racism.  And too often this kind of person goes out and joins the police force or the Highway Patrol.  It gives him a chance to make himself feel important by brutalizing a black” (176). 

This power dynamic is illustrated in violent ways, but also in subtle, paternalistic ways in other situations.  Eitehr way, the oppressor seeks to maintain power in order to keep himself at the center and define others in relation to his self-centeredness.

Violence and this type of depraved mindset are hard to understand, but sadly, some of this attitude persists even today.  In the news last week JPC teaching fellow Max Hunter ran across this article about a group of white young people in Mississippi who beat, then murdered, a black man.  The report is somewhat graphic – a sad reminder of how ugly hate really is.  http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/crime/2011/08/05/griffin.mississippi.hate.crime.cnn

In all of this, I think the key ideas to keep in mind are our natural tendency to exclude, separate and even oppress others in order to pursue our own self-centeredness.  When we put Christ in his rightful place, at the center, we learn to see ourselves and others in right relation, and there’s hope for reconciliation.

What is your response to these quotes from Perkins and Volf?

What are some ways we might tell the story of reconciliation on campus in ways that would draw people in, help us repent and refocus, then move forward with hope?