The Disinherited

It’s said that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. travelled with a copy of Howard Thurman’s seminal book, Jesus and the Disinherited. “Considering the generations-long relationships between the King and Thurman families, Martin likely had the message of these pages etched on his heart,” writes Vincent Harding in the book’s forward.

I’ve been marinating on this book since November’s book club, and keep coming back to its central question, a haunting one which hides itself in the book’s title.

I’ll get to that question in a minute.

The Already and the Not Yet of MLK

MLK Jr. Day has become a special day for me over the past decade.  It was at an MLK celebration over ten years ago that I became painfully aware that the seeds of racism were still buried and growing in the soil of my soul… and my own unawareness of it was hard to accept.  It wasn’t just that I was ignorant; for the first time I saw what a luxury it was to be ignorant.  Being able to ignore race matters is what you might call a privilege.

As I became more aware of the real and subtle presence of racism today – in this country and also in my heart – it led me to learn more.  After all, that was my real offense, wasn’t it, thinking it was all fine because it was all fine in my white world?

The obvious next step was to

Helpless

The MLK march was cancelled – with the police escorts all working the Montecito Mudstorm recovery.  What now?  Warning: when you cannot find a way to help, you will feel helpless.

Helpless is the distance of a dozen miles between me and the disaster