The Optimistic Anthropologist Vol. 20

White Lies and Timeless Truths

June 28, 2019

 June 2019, Volume 20View this email in your browser

Dear ,

On Wednesday night, I attended a

listening party at

. If you are not familiar with it, White Lies is a 7-episode podcast series on NPR.  The creators,

and

, are journalists and Alabama natives who spent four years investigating why the 1965 murder of

in Selma, AL, was never (re)solved. Reeb had come to town to participate in the second march from Selma to Montgomery for black voting rights after the violent attacks stopped the first march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He and two friends were beaten by a group of local men in the middle of the street, and Reeb died of the head injury he sustained.

I strongly encourage you to listen to White Lies because it is about more than (re)solving a murder. It explores individual and collective memory, the stories we create and perpetuate when faced with brutal truths, and willful forgetting. It also is about white supremacy and its impact and legacy on people, families, communities, and our country.

The last episode of the series came out this week, and unlike the other six which focused on investigating the murder, this one focused on James Reeb the man.  Selma wasn’t Reeb’s first foray into social justice work. He had been a Unitarian minister who served at All Soul’s from 1959-64.  He left the church to do community organizing in a largely black and poor community in Boston. But, he didn’t just organize others, he became part of the community. He moved his family there, bought a home, and enrolled his children in the local public school. He lived his values, and when he saw the attacks on the Edmund Pettus bridge on tv, he didn’t hesitate in answering the call for clergy and laypeople of conscience to go to Selma. 

Among the crowd in the All Soul’s Sanctuary Wednesday night were Reeb’s daughter and three of his grandchildren, White Lies’ creators, and members of the congregation who had been blessed as children by Reeb. Together, we listened to an excerpt from Rev. Reeb's last sermon:  

“There were many people who seemed to feel that once we'd had the March on Washington and once we had the civil rights bill, things were just inevitably going to be easier, that somehow we'd done it.

And I can say to you only that I think that this is the most dangerous kind of self-delusion, that we have not in any way done it. And that just to the extent that we think we have, we're going to be dismayed when we find out that we have not. And just to the extent that we permit ourselves to be emotionally dismayed, we ourselves as individuals will in some small way add to this thing that is known as the backlash, which is real and, I feel, in many ways growing, and in many ways possibly stronger than we surmise as yet.”

It is 55 years after Reeb delivered that sermon, and it feels just as relevant today. I think back to

.  Now, with concentration camps at our borders, and

– the backlash continues.

We often dismiss the actions of people who perpetuated cruelty, hate, and violence in the past with the phrase that “it was a different time.”  But, I am going to try to heed Rev. Reeb’s advice and follow his example. James Reeb, like many others - whose names we know and don’t - saw the work of equity and justice and humanity as continuous. He not only preached this, but acted on it, lived it. It seems a model of how  to live one's life in any time.

Be well and do good,Alison

P.S.

If you are looking for recommendations on how you can take action on Immigrant Detention

. 

P.P.S.

In August, I will be

Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Montenegro. If you know any local folks who you can introduce me to or have any recommendations,

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