Justice for Breonna
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS - SEPT. 23: A protester carries a sign in honor of Breonna Taylor on Sept. 23, 2020 in Chicago, Illinois. Across the country, protesters have taken to the streets after the grand jury’s decision to only charge one Louisville Metro Police officer in the raid in which Taylor was killed. Officer Brett Hankison, who was fired in June, was charged three counts of wanton endangerment for shooting into neighboring apartments. Bond was set at $15,000 for Hankison. Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency medical technician, was killed in her home during a no-knock raid on March 13, 2020. (Photo by Natasha Moustache/Getty Images)
It is impossible to perpetually demean a group of people and then pretend that those very people will be respected within that society.
It is impossible for persons to witness consistent maltreatment and then claim it to be hidden from the naked eye, nonexistent by the rational mind, or unacceptable by the discipled heart.
It is impossible to establish an ethos of equality built upon a corpus of legal, philosophical, theological, psychological, biological and medical pedagogies of inequality.
When you continue to treat certain lives as worthless because of who they are, you give permission for persons in and out of power to misuse, abuse, ignore, intimidate, discriminate against and kill those who have been invalidated.
You give permission for them to be raped in custody, beaten while questioned, ignored while standing on line, mistreated within systems, violated by laws, held in contempt while explaining that their lives are not contemptible, and murdered while protesting being murdered, all with impunity.
Arguments will be made to substantiate the abuse because, after all, the persons being mistreated or harmed are “others” – substandard beings, who through their very existence have brought it upon themselves.
It is impossible to produce justice for persons who have been chronically and consistently abused when that nation’s legal system is but a facade, a subterfuge, a well-crafted game to continue the denial of personhood inscribed in the founding documents negation.
It is impossible to argue that persons created in the image and likeness of the God of all creation and pronounced “very good” by that God are inherently unworthy, uncivilized, unholy, ungodly and unequal to every other being created in the image or likeness of that same God.
It is impossible to arrive at a new destination by continuing to travel in the same wrong direction. At some point a change of course is required. At some point, the system will have to scream “RECALCULATING” and chart a new path.
It. Is. Time.
The people cry out that it is past time.
We cannot continue to travel down this road of degradation and claim to be creating a more perfect Union.
It is impossible.
Unless
It is time to:
Reveal.
Repent.
Reconcile.
Reclaim.
Rebirth
Recalculate.
Redeem.
Then the impossible will be possible.
Bishop LaTrelle Miller Easterling
Bishop LaTrelle Miller Easterling
Bishop LaTrelle Miller Easterling serves as resident episcopal leader of the Baltimore-Washington Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished with permission from her Facebook page.