It isnt just on MLK Day that we watch it unfold. It happens with national race incidents. It happens in heated conversations. It happens in tweets and Facebook comments. If you are someone who regularly hosts dialogues on race, this has surely happened to you. Being MLK'ed. 

"MLK would never condone those rioters." 

"MLK would tell all of us that we just need to seek peace and unity." 

"MLK said... [insert quote taken entirely out of context]" 

"MLK would promote racial healing- not your words of anger/division." 

I could probably fill a whole page with this, but you know what Im talking about. Its what happens when people want to retreat to easy answers, feel-good quotations, and rely on MLKs work instead of our own. 

This behavior is awfully convenient and void of authenticity and understanding. If we truly valued the life work of Martin Luther King Jr we would stop trying to predict "what MLK would say now" as if he died of old age. Whatever wisdom we think MLK would bring to this moment in 2016 seems to often discount that he was assassinated on a balcony, taken from his wife, his children, his friends. Why do we think MLK would say anything to us other than an indicting statement of fact, "You killed me"

But that doesnt make us feel good. Its so much easier to think of Martin Luther King Jr's death as inevitable, as that of a martyr, a heroes end to a life of public service. We'd rather not consider the bullet that ripped through his face. We dont like to talk about how his spinal cord was so severed that his death was rather quick. We dont talk about his blood spilling from his body onto the concrete balcony. We like our pictures in black and white.

Because to feel what his wife felt

To feel what his children felt

To feel what his friends felt

To feel what his supporters felt

is to invite pain over celebration, rage over rousing speeches, devastating loss over convenient platitudes. 

We do this because we dont really like to think of Martin Luther King Jr as a person, a husband, a father. We like to think of him as the stone statue in DC- large, strong, unmovable. While Martin Luther King's legacy may be all those things, it turns out he was human. He was a human who read lots of books, listened to lots of preachers, worked on the craft of writing and speaking. He was a human who laughed and cried. Who felt great pain and experienced great joy. Like most of us humans, Martin Luther King Jr evolved in his thinking over time. He took a stand for racial justice, and realized he could not talk about racial injustice without also talking about economic injustice. The more he talked about economic injustice in America, the more he recognized the underpinnings to military injustice around the world. Martin Luther King Jr was not one note. He didnt have just one thought. As he traveled, as he gained access to powerful, political spaces, as he read more and more... Martin Luther King Jr continued to grow in his thinking and his passion for the disenfranchised. 

So truth be told, we dont know what Martin Luther King Jr would say in this moment in 2016. Because had we not killed him, he would have continued to evolve, to grow, to connect the dots, to ask questions, to dig in the Bible, to be a human committed to a cause. Thats how it works. We learn to interrogate our language, our assumptions. We learn to speak truth to ourselves and to power. We learn to confront, to organize, to write, to speak, to seek greater change. We grow. But Martin Luther King's ability to speak into the modern moment of white supremacy was violently interrupted. We cant keep taking that for granted. 

So the next time we are being MLKed, we could respond by giving context to a random quote thrown our way. We could offer a differing, lesser known quote in response. We can extrapolate and postulate, for sure. (Ive certainly done all the above.) But dont hesitate to also take a moment to acknowledge the real man, made of flesh and blood, who was murdered at the age of 39 because his leadership represented such a threat to the status quo. 

This is the period at the end of every sentence MLK ever spoke. America had a chance to mobilize, to follow the immense leadership of Civil Rights leaders, to decide white supremacy needed to die a violent death. But thats not what happened. And here we sit, celebrating the life of Martin Luther King Jr, but never without acknowledging how his assassination is also our legacy until we decide that white supremacy has finally taken one body too many.    

*photo from The King Center (thekingcenter.org)

I dont know about you, but the sense of "waiting" this Advent season is feeling much more palpable than in past years. I have certainly had seasons when reflecting back over the year increased my sense of longing for our awaited King to return. But this year, it is not only the reflection that feels heavy but the present moment. 

The other day as I sat at my computer listening to Christmas music, my husband turned on the news which played in the background. The voices formed a dichotomoy that was hard to ignore as the San Bernardino shooting unfolded in the other room. 

O Come, O Come Emmanuel

Confirmed at least 14 dead in the latest mass shooting, today in San Bernardino, California. 

And ransom captive Israel

This scene unfolding before us is taking place at an agency that supports people with developmental disabilities. 

That mourns in lonely exile here

You are seeing pictures here of the wounded; those who have escaped or were evacuated from the building

Until the Son of God appear

We believe there are two or three shooters. We are still waiting for more information to confirm, but officers do believe this was not just one shooter. 

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

Wait! Wait! We believe this is the car of the shooter or shooters. They seem to be a in a shootout with police! 

Shall come to thee, Oh Israel

Just in recent days we have been rocked by the murder of Laquan McDonald and been outraged by the level of corruption trying to hide it. We experienced back-to-back mass shootings, having only recently mourned attacks around the world. Just yesterday I learned of the death of Mario Woods and cant quite express the depth of my anger at the police chief's explanation of why its justified. 

And my soul keeps singing: O come, O come, Emmanuel. 

The truth is I want to turn off the news. I want to turn away from pain and death. I want to turn up the music and tune out the mess. I want to wait without the heaviness, to acknowledge Advent only with cheer. And yet I am reminded of the way Christ stepped into the world- hated and scorned. Reminded of the immense injustice Christ's very body suffered. Reminded of the loneliness, the weeping, the betrayal Christ experienced. Reminded of the many ways Christ reached toward death, toward sickness, toward the demons. 

And I remember that Emmanuel, who came to take away the sin of the world, is coming again. 

When I was just a kid in elementary school, I remember being warned that those who aren't Christian would accuse me of believing in Christianity only because I was weak, because I needed a crutch in life. I dont remember what remedy or response was handed to us; I can only recall the warning. The older I get, the more I realize that statement is of no offense to me. I am weak. My body is exhausted. My mind is overwhelmed. My spirit is too often crushed, limping through each day. My passion flares up, driving me forward, but isnt sustainable as raging fire. I am tender and sensitive, able to be hurt. I am incapable of carrying the full weight of the news. I hold it for as long as I can, and then I must let it go. I need the force of Love in my life, need to believe in hope. This is no shame to me. I am not just a sinner in need of a Savior, I am a human in need of a better future. 

And so this Advent season, I am embracing my weakness. I am lighting candles as a symbolic way of letting the Light hold onto the grief, the pain, the death when I cannot bear it. As I wait, I will work as Love compels me, knowing it is not my work that will save the world. Emmanuel shall come to thee, Oh Israel. 

You wouldn't think a symbol or a collection of words and phrases would have so much power. You would think that after all these years, so many generations of use that they would wear off, unable to produce any level of potent emotion or perhaps wear down- like an old, tired, floppy coat kept around only because you're too lazy to throw it out. It just always amazes me that hatred so effectively disrupts the harmony of the soul. 

Lately, I have had a couple encounters with symbols of racial hatred. And each time, they hurt like hell. The most recent made its rounds on social media last night- "white power" and swastikas written into the snow on the windows of parked cars on our campus. Here's the honest truth, yall. When I first saw the pictures pop up I wondered to myself, "Is that my car?" I wondered if my own students had decided to find my car and intentionally inflict pain for being at Calvin, for speaking about racial justice, or just for being black and easily accessible. It wasnt my car. No one's car in particular was targeted. But that was my first thought. 

And my students, as they learned of this, had a range of emotions. Anger. Disappointment. Frustration. Fear. Exhaustion. Rage. Most of them cycled through all these emotions at different points during the day. I am proud of many of them for being resilient, creative, present, honest. I am so proud, but I cannot protect. I cannot protect them, nor can I protect myself. 

And thats why I have been thinking for the last couple weeks about this thing called a "casual racist". You know that uncle who is always telling "those" jokes? You know the sister who is always using coded language to talk about "those" people. Or how about the folks at church who pull up with a confederate flag on their truck because free speech. And of course the "silly" kids who tag homes and cars and streets with messages that disrupt all that was peaceful about your day. As I was writing about supporting students last week, I stumbled on something that I only fully grappled with this week: There is no such thing as casual racism because the only thing standing between a causal racist and an infamous one, is a dead body. 

It was one thing to write that when discussing other schools. It is another to internalize the realities of that statement as I look into the eyes of the students I adore. 

The weight of this is the weight of white supremacist ideology. White supremacy is and always has been for the subjugation of black bodies even unto death. And any "casual" nurturing of that ideology easily grows into violence that a body like mine will have to endure. That is why hateful rhetoric remains so violent to the soul. Because white supremacy is a promise of violence to the body.  

But we have been convinced that there is a difference. That there is a casual racist and true racist. That there is a passive racist and a violent racist. That there is a regular racist and an extreme racist. We want so much to believe that racist ideology can remain in our hearts without turning folks into monsters. It is a convenient understanding of racism for those whose bodies are never targets. 

White supremacy grows. It encompasses as much space as we are willing to give it. It is all-consuming by design. It is never satisfied. It chases after power in its conception: the power over the hearts and minds of slave owner, enslaved and all those who were disinterested enough to let slavery thrive. And this desire for power, for control over the will, control over the body has been witnessed again and again and again and again in our present day.  We are about to watch it once more with the release of the video of #LaquanMcDonald. Time and again we are watching the snap decision, the snap inclination to brutally overpower black bodies. We saw it with Dylann Roof- a desire that he just couldn't squelch despite the hospitality he received. We watched it in how the resource officer responded to a black girl sitting in her desk. We watched it when an officer wrapped his arms around the throat of Eric Garner. We watched it as an officer callously shot Walter Scott in the back. We heard about it in the case of Jordan Davis who died because of "loud rap music". Loud rap music, yall. That was all it took to make a man take out his gun and shoot at a car of teenagers. All of these cases (and there are so many more) are just a handful of cases that put on display the shallow cause and required overreaction that unchecked white supremacy demands in the treatment of black bodies.  

So those of us who are committed to racial justice, can no longer afford to think of racism in categories- the painful and the painless. Those categories aren't real and we cant endorse them. We must name the depths to which white supremacy reaches. We must take every act, every sound bite, every joke, every message written in the snow seriously. We must. 

The terror is all around us. It always has been. Our own country was founded on terror, on genocide, on dehumanization and mass murder. The bodies who've had to bear the weight of terror have been many- First Nations tribes, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Black Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, and the list goes on. Even some European Americans experienced harsh dehumanization before racing through the escape hatch of whiteness. And while America has an uncanny ability to proclaim freedom and democracy while simultaneously excluding entire groups of people from the same, the US is not the only country with its feet caked in the blood of others. 

I know very little about the world outside the US. I say this with no amount of pride. The truth is I have been dedicating myself to learning the truth of America's own history- wading through books, movies, lectures, and essays to separate fact from fiction, to fill in gaps of missing information. So I will not now pretend to know enough about the relationship between the Middle East and Europe to give any sort of political insight to the recent attacks in both places. I will simply say that I was profoundly saddened by the attacks in Paris and profoundly ashamed to not have known about the attacks in the Middle East until Twitter asked me why I didnt know. 

As we all sat engrossed by the pain, fear, and confusion unfolding on our televisions, many of us noticed a curious thing happening on social media. There are people out there who decided it would be an appropriate moment to "teach" student activists about "real oppression". The problems with this statement are many: 

1.  It ignores the history of white supremacy in institutions of higher education. We, in the US, dont have to twist ourselves into a pretzel to identify the history of racism in public institutions. There is a desire of so many to interpret events of today, a-historically, to pretend that some veil dropped out of the sky, clearly separating past from present. There have been plenty of articles outlining this history specifically for #Mizzou, and we have access to the history of many more. We must take seriously America's history of segregation, animosity toward integration, and considerable lack of support for students of color in years since. Contrary to popular belief, Black people didnt fight for civil rights because we desperately wanted to hang out with white people. We didnt seek integration into previously white schools because we wanted admission; we wanted equality. We wanted an equal education. If there are still forces, rooted in history, prohibiting an equal education for black students, than we all have a duty to stand with those students and demand the fulfillment of that civil right.       

2. It minimizes the online threats being leveled at black students in the wake of their protests. Our students have every right to be fearful about a gun threat. I was a freshman in high school when the Columbine Shooting changed everything. I turned on the television and watched kids just like me racing out of their high school away from peers who decided to take as many lives as they could. Since then mass shootings have almost become common place. They are no longer unimaginable. And therefore, it is absolutely ridiculous to suggest that black students shouldn't have been afraid on yik yak postings started threatening their lives. Our students dont just have school shootings to be fearful of; just 5 months ago they watched breaking news of a white racist who walked into a church building for the express purposed of killing black people. There is every reason for black students to take these threats seriously. And so should all the other students on campus, and so should their parents, and so should the professors, and so should the staff... Because when the safety of one group is threatened on a college campus, everyone is at risk.     

3. It perpetuates the myth of the casual racist. There seems to be this idea that casual racism "isnt that bad". Its a luxury of white privilege to think that there are some white people who just havent caught up to the modern age, or that folks who still say the n-word or 'colored' wouldn't actually hurt anyone, or that people who just dont want to be politically correct should be laughed at for their ignorance, or that those who use swastikas, nooses or confederate flags for intimidation would go no further. What black people know is that its only our bodies that separate a casual racist from an infamous one. We cannot assume that casual racism wont evolve, wont churn into hatred, wont become a plan, wont result in violence. Until we are fed up with "casual racism" students will continue to be concerned about their safety, and they should be. The desire to not be a hashtag is strong, and they have no crystal ball to tell them who to fear and who not to fear. They need university officials and the police to take their concerns seriously.    

4. It suggests that black students must wait for terrorism. It is appalling to even suggest that students have no right to advocate for themselves unless they are experiencing absolute terror. How dare anyone suggest that oppression takes only one form, as experienced by Paris, and make that the standard for having the "right" to protest mistreatment. Students of today know all too well the potential for being terrorized (see #2) on their own campus. I will not tell them they must wait for that terror to arrive. 

We live in a frightening world. Our students are well aware of this fact. Rather than berate them, judge them, scold them... perhaps we could try a different approach. Perhaps we could try standing in solidarity with them, encouraging all systems of protection to do just that... protect them.  Their black lives matter while still alive.