I write for Worldwide, a magazine produced by the Comboni Missionaries in South Africa. My latest commission is a piece about Sr Helen Prejean, the Catholic nun who has campaigned to end the death penalty in America. The movie Dead Man Walking depicts her early struggles.
As part of my research, I read Prejean’s detailed account under the same title. She worked in the southern states of America, in jails where people of colour were in the majority and on death rows where those destined for the barbaric methods of dispatch – the electric chair and later the lethal injection – were more likely to be black than white. Prejean came to realise that it was not just prison talk that the authorities rubber-stamped more black than white executions.
Why have I been asked to write about Sr Helen Prejean now, decades after her original campaign? Because in April of this year, Asa Hutchinson, the Republican governor of Arkansas started to carry out an unprecedented series of eight executions in 11 days.
Prejean, whose name is now synonymous with the US’s anti-death penalty movement, was swift to react. And in her condemnation of Governor Hutchinson’s actions, she said something that four months later may help us get a handle on what has happened in Charlottesville, Virginia.
She said ‘The real practitioners of death have always been the 10 southern states that practiced slavery.’
The motives behind the campaign to remove the statue of the Confederate General Robert E Lee (a campaign approved by the local authorities) are eminently understandable. Robert E, Lee fought to retain slavery. What’s the argument in favour of keeping that monument – unless it comes from those who still see slavery as acceptable, who disdain those they consider as ‘other’, and who are prepared to use lethal weapons to enforce their views?
Disconcertingly, Charlottesville wasn’t only about racism; about the concept of white supremacy that insidiously runs through the DNA of too many in those ten southern states identified by Sr Helen Prejean. The dazzling novels of Paul Beatty (read his White Boy Shuffle or The
Sellout) satirise the layers of prejudice against so many sectors of American society considered to be ‘other’, and highlighting the neo-Nazi element of Charlottesville, Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the Tikkum website (
see our link elsewhere) points out that one of the major groups sponsoring the Charlottesville right-wing rally proclaimed ‘Join Azzmador and the Daily Stormer to end Jewish influence in America.’
Lerner comments, ‘Anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism are out of the closet in Trump’s America.’
Mr Trump finds it hard to condemn the far right. That’s scary – and his ability to manipulate the emotions of those who feel disenfranchised is a quality that should concern us even more than his playground nose thumbing at North Korea’s leader.
The parallels between the Bay of Pigs stand-off of the 1960s and the sabre-rattling between Trump and Kim Jong-un could be far less of a threat than the parallels we see with the rise of Fascism that led not only to a world war but to the ethnic cleansing of millions of Jews, people of colour, Roma, and those whose sexuality offended the sensitivities of the Third Reich.
In condemning the hatred and bigotry, the Catholic Archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, said ‘Racism is a poison of the soul’ and that ‘blending it with the Nazi salute, the relic of a regime that murdered millions, compounds the obscenity’. He warned, ‘If we want a different kind of country in the future, we need to start today with a conversion in our own hearts, and an insistence on the same in others.’
President Obama said in the wake of Charlottesville, ‘No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background or his religion.’ It is a sobering thought that on this side of the Atlantic, too, peace and justice slip out of reach when hate is nurtured.