Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nimi Wariboko: "And Jesus Wept: Let Us Weep with Black Mothers"

I've known Nimi Wariboko for three decades, and he has consistently epitomized excellence. I proudly celebrate (with) this extraordinary scholar and deep human on the occasion of his installation. 

Okey Ndibe 

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 28, 2016, at 4:27 PM, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

Installation of Nimi Wariboko as Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics

Boston University School of Theology

Wednesday, September 28, 2016, 11:00-12pm

Marsh Chapel

Sermon by Nimi Wariboko

 

 

And Jesus Wept: Let Us Weep with Black Mothers

Text: John 11:35

The woman you have just seen and heard, wailing in a gut-wrenching voice, was trying to re-present the mournfulness Jesus encountered as he walked into the family home of Lazarus, who had just been declared dead. More importantly and poignantly for our gathering today, her performance symbolizes the agonizing pain, the sadness, and trauma black mothers experience on hearing the news of the death of their sons and daughters at the hands of police and gang members. Her haunting voice that pierced our hearts—at least, my heart—is only a pale echo of the voices of lamentation that are heard too often in black homes.

Voices, lamentation and bitter weeping, are heard in Sanford, Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Tulsa, and Charlotte. Like Rachel in the book of Jeremiah, Sybrina Fulton, Lezley McSpadden, Gwen Carr, and Joey Crutcher are weeping for their children and refusing to be comforted because they are no more. Jesus weeps with them. He is moved by the pain of black families in grief. The Shekhinah, blue and barefooted, is wandering in black neighborhoods, bitterly crying for God's lost children. Indeed, the pain of black mothers ripples through heaven and earth. Are you moved by the deep anguish of black mothers?

When last did you weep like these mothers when they heard the news of yet another son or daughter killed at the hands of the police? Did you cry when you heard that a young woman walking to school to register her children was cut down in her prime, an innocent victim of gun violence? Where was your witness to suffering when you learned that a little boy, playing with a toy guy in a public park, was gunned down by police? Have our hearts grown so hard and callous that we are no longer moved by human pain? Perhaps, we are still moved by the suffering of human beings, but just not that of black mothers. Are black mothers not human?

Why as American citizens have we not torn our clothes, put on sackcloth, and poured ashes on our heads to lament for the sufferings of blacks? As a people, have we lost the capacity for empathy? What is happening in this country to black people, what is happening in this country to the poor, and what is happening in this country to all marginalized and oppressed people should make us weep. What veil has blinded us from seeing the suffering of black mothers? What evil being has devoured our capacity for empathy?

Tell me, why have Americans rejected empathy as the point of departure for ethical action when it comes to the senseless taking of black lives? In moving away from empathy or compassion as the foundation of our ethos we are walking away from being human. I think to be human means to be humane. I believe you and I were not raised to turn our backs on our own flesh and blood. Our mothers nurtured us to be sensitive to the suffering of our neighbors and to help them come out of it, help them find a place of healing and solution.

While growing up in Nigeria, I was taught a lesson by my Kalabari community: that empathy is an ethical mode. Empathy connects, reveals, and shares the particularity of pain, and speaks the language of singular-plurality of human mutuality. Empathy is one of the ways our shared humanity weaves and tells its travails silently across the fabric of being, touching, awakening, and caressing the edges of the invisible threads that form our common garment of existence and destiny.

Another lesson I learned from my Kalabari people is that empathy may begin silently but it does not always remain incognito. It will often take command of our eyes and we shed tears. Men and women weep not because they are weak; they weep because the other's suffering and pain touch them. Weeping as a mode of empathy enables those whose hearts have not shriveled to pay close attention to particulars in the life of individuals struggling under a (social) problem and to respond to such persons with sympathetic understanding and mercy. Weeping invites immersion into the other's situation, nudging the members of the community to put themselves in the place of the hurting soul, and thus enabling everyone to see similar possibilities between their own experiences and the grieving person. The practice of weeping nudges the community to bring the grieving person to its center and to make necessary changes that will protect and care for her or him, and hopefully better protect others from experiencing this pain in the future. This kind of moral imagination and response is highly relevant to community building in any society.

Thus in the Kalabari community of my upbringing, those who grieve are encouraged to call forth and re-energize communal empathy, to express their pain and thus share it with the supreme being, the gods, the ancestors, nature, and the whole village. When one person is hurt, the Kalabari believe that the whole of creation and the Creator is hurt. Weeping or shared weeping acknowledges that they are all together in the pain and together they will find a solution. Such weeping is not a demand for some goods of existence, but for justice, which as the Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin once said, is a state of the world or state of God, it designates the ethical category of the existent, the living person.[1]

In my teens, I saw at close quarters this tradition of weeping. In 1979, my mother lost her own mother in January and by early April she lost her only brother too. One way she responded to these crushing blows was to wake up every morning at about five, walk to the back of our home where she could look at the open sky directly, as if to have a clear view of God, and wail, weep aloud, lament the unbearable loss of her brother. She would call on God, her late mother, her saintly forebears, and the town, which was still sleeping or arousing itself from the night rest, to hear her pain and to bear witness to the extreme unfairness of life to her. As she wept she would tell the story of her brother: proclaiming his accomplishments, joys, and pains in life, while announcing her own pain over and over again. She would question God and the ancestors, probing them for answers to the cruel mysteries of life that seemed to envelope her too often. This was a 46-year-old woman who at that time had buried five of her own children. In the midst of all the wailing and laments, she would call on the same God to spare her another loss and sustain hope for the living, to guarantee her existence and those of her loved ones.

Her haunting voice in those early morning sessions took me to the depth of the human soul, the abyss of human suffering, and the height of human capacity for fierce hope in the midst of excruciating pain. The lessons I learned from this Kalabari tradition of weeping have stayed with me since then. I have come to realize that at the root of all ethical care for our loved ones and society is empathy, to share others' pain with them—and to rejoice with them when the occasion demands. I have learned that the starting point for ethics is empathy, compassion.

The co-joined twins of empathy and compassion start their lives in the womb of sorrow. Before we "learn the tender gravity of kindness," we must know, experience, or share sorrow; feel the size of the wet blanket that ever so often covers humanity.[2] The Arab-American poet Noami Shihab Nye puts it this way in her poem, "Kindness":

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth

…

 

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

 

 

If as a society, as a people, or as a scholarly community we no longer imagine ourselves being in the other's situation, when we no longer imagine some community between ourselves and our fellow citizens, and when we no longer inhabit a sense of similar possibilities and vulnerabilities, then there is no ethics left to speak about. There is no longer compassion in our social life, only abstract arguments, mere social activism, and proliferating public policies. You might be working hard for the oppressed, the excluded, and the despised, and even giving money to them, but are you connected to them at a very deep humane level? Compassion serves as an important bridge between persons and between persons and community.

As the philosopher Martha Nussbaum puts it, compassion broadens, educates, and stabilizes elements of concern that we already have. It widens one's own circle of concern. She explains at length that compassion expands the boundaries of the self as it is often set in motion by "painful emotion occasioned by awareness of another person's underserved misfortune."[3] Compassion is a process in which the suffering of one citizen is shared by another; hence the co in com-passion. This co-sharing, which can and often does prompt us to treat others justly and humanely, is based on an evaluative judgment of the sufferer's condition. We determine that the loss is not trivial, the sufferer does not deserve it, and the scale of suffering affects her flourishing, as well as our own.

Today, the sufferings of black mothers do not collectively move us as a nation. Alas, their fellow citizens do not share their pain. We have turned our backs to them in their moments of need and desperation. Perhaps, deep down we are thinking the possibilities and the vulnerabilities of black mothers are not similar to our loved ones and us. We have become so "developed," so advanced, so "successful," that we have lost our capacity to weep with those who weep. We are so emotionally evolved that we now consider the capacity to share the pain and suffering of our fellow citizens as primitive.

I am afraid that in this country we have succeeded in making ethics and morality only about logical, philosophical, and conceptual arguments. I am afraid that ethics for many have become only activism on the street. I worry that most of our citizens now think that ethics is primarily about correctly formulating the next public policy paradigm to address blacks who are always the "problem."

In all these worthy endeavors America has not answered the vexing question: Do we really care for the lives of black children? Where is our empathy for them? Where is our compassion for young black males, an endangered group of people in this country? Where are our sense and structures of justice fed and powered by the streams of compassion? Our ethics, activism, academic arguments, and policy frameworks are empty, no-thing, without the deep feeling of connection to other human beings, especially those who are suffering.

The ongoing evacuation of fellow feeling from the collective being of Americans makes me weep, keeps me up at night. African Americans are paying a heavy price for it. The cost is so exorbitant, the weight of blackness so crushing it is time to weep with black mothers. It is also time to mourn America for having lost its capacity for empathy in the midst of monumental suffering. It is high time to rebase and reorient our national ethos toward a practice of weeping, that is to deeply share the pains of black mothers and say to them as one community: "We hear you, your warfare is over, and your peace is won."

As an ethicist, I believe that weeping (literally and figuratively) is an ethical disposition, a protest and resistance against the rough edges of life and society, an habitus against the unbearable pain of existence. My friends, tears are not a sign of weakness. They signal that justice is about to roll like a river, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Tears mean that the primeval waters of creation stored in our souls are flowing to repair the broken edges of our relationships and mutuality. Weeping is a manifestation of our capacity for empathy, an indication of our connection to other human beings and their sufferings, and a desire to change the world. Weeping teaches us to care for our world and our neighbors. Weeping says that night will not last forever, for the new day will break forth with joy.

This joy that comes in the morning after weeping in the night of our sorrows does not abide with shriveled hearts. Too many of our hearts in this country are turning to stones and dust insofar as black lives are concerned. But all is not lost; there is great reason for hope. I believe in the great potential of the good people of this country. I know that once we wake up to weep, our tears will clear the veils, wash away the scales that blind us and prevent us from seeing the deep racism, classism, and callousness that daily beset our institutions and us. Once we are able to see again we will stand up and transform our nation. In the meantime, let us weep for America in solidarity with black mothers, so that we may see and feel again. Let us gather our strengths and gifts to work for a better tomorrow; let us work real hard for a nation where black lives and livelihoods matter. For I sense God is saying: "I have surely seen the affliction of my people in America. I have heard their cries of distress because of their dead children. Yes, I am aware of their suffering and I have come down to deliver them." In partnership with God, let our deeds of mercy and justice say to black mothers: "Come forth out of your affliction."

         And let somebody shout alleluia!

---

[1] Walter Benjamin, "Notes Toward a Work on the Category of Justice," trans. Peter Fenves in his The Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 257.

[2] Naomi Shihab Nye, "Kindness," in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1994), 42.

[3]  Martha Nussbaum, "Compassion: Tragic Predicaments," in Upheavals in Thought: The Intelligence of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 301.

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