Black Lives Matter at Manna House

“I was walking down the sidewalk,” George told me, “when the police drove up along side of me.  I wasn’t doing anything; just walking.”  George has been a guest with us at Manna House for a long time.  He’s a mild mannered, bespectacled, slender African American man in his early forties.  He has also been on and off the streets over the years.  Work is sporadic and doesn’t pay that well and housing is expensive.

“They told me to stop.  So I did.  Then I put my hands up in the air and said, ‘Hands up!  Don’t shoot!’  The cop who got out of the car said to me, ‘That shit’s annoying,’ and then he handcuffed me.”

“Did they arrest you George?”

“Nah, they were just mad because I said, ‘Hands up!  Don’t shoot!’  They had to let me go.  I hadn’t done anything.”

As George told me this story a small crowd had gathered around us.  There was a lot of laughter.  I heard him tell the story several more times through the course of the morning.  Each time heads shook with approval and mirth.

“You showed ‘em.  You’re not gonna take that anymore” one guest said.

Another observed, “I gotta hand it to you George.  You make me want to do the same.”

            I keep learning from our guests at Manna House, about courage, persistence, and the subversion of hatred through humor.  When I heard George’s story this morning, I thought about Miguel de La Torre, a Christian ethicist who has written about an “ethics para joder.”  The phrase “para joder” means “to screw with” as in to mess with the system.  George was doing some “para joder” when he said “Hands up!  Don’t shoot!” in response to the cops stopping him.  A homeless man doesn’t have much power when faced with the police harassing him, but he found a creative way to screw with the system, or as St. Paul put it, to “not be overcome by evil but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:21).

            Later, Valerie Bridgeman, a womanist theologian and friend, shared a James Baldwin quotation that he wrote in 1960.  “The white policeman” Baldwin stated, “finds himself at the very center of the revolution now occurring in the world.  He is not prepared for it—naturally, nobody is—and, what is possibly more to the point, he is exposed, as few white people are, to anguish of the black people around him…  One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.  Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened.  What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like humans.”

            George when he said, “Hands up.  Don’t shoot.” wanted to be treated like a human.  He didn’t want to be stopped on the street just because he’s a Black man and homeless.  His life as a Black man matters.  It is a simple message really, much like what the Sanitation workers on strike in Memphis in 1968 said with their signs, “I Am a Man.”

            Jesus said, “Black life matters” when he identified with those in his society who were oppressed (Matthew 25:31-46).  St. Paul did the same when he urged the Corinthian disciples of Jesus to be especially concerned to treat with dignity and respect those members of the Body of Christ treated as less honorable (1 Corinthians 12:12-27).

            We try to say the same when we welcome our guests to Manna House each morning.  When we practice hospitality, we honor those systemically rejected as dishonorable, we welcome those pushed to the margins, and we affirm “the least of these” as being the very presence of Christ in our lives.  We’re engaged in a mustard seed effort to move toward a Beloved Community in which because Black lives matter, all lives matter.  I’m grateful to George for his “para joder” of “Hands Up.  Don’t Shoot” which witnessed to that Beloved Community.