The document is a sermon discussing racial injustice in the United States. It summarizes how slavery gave way to Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation. While civil rights reforms promised equality, mass incarceration has emerged as the new system of racial control. The war on drugs disproportionately targets African Americans, and the U.S. now imprisons more black people than were enslaved before the Civil War. The sermon calls Christians to work towards transforming institutions and achieving true justice and equality for all.

1. Notes for a sermon preached for Grace Church Van Vorst, Jersey City, New Jersey, on 21
October 2012 (Proper 24B), by the Rev. Dr. J. Barrington Bates, Interim Rector.
“Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever
wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.”
Jesus’ words in today’s gospel story are very challenging, aren’t they?
They are about putting ourselves and our needs after those of others—something we
are often reluctant to do and something our society quite simply abhors.
Throughout the course of human history, it’s been pretty rare for people to seek to be
a servant or a slave of others.
There are those rare and wonderful exceptions: not only Jesus, but—just to name a
few recent examples—Mohandas Gandhi and Mother Teresa come to mind. People
who believed that helping the poor find a leg up was more important than acquiring
things or money or power. People who sacrificed of their own lives in order to help
others.
But they are the exceptions, right?
Most of the time, let’s face it, we humans have done quite the opposite. Our ancestors
sought ways to demean and devalue others, to control their lives, and to use their
labor to contribute to our wealth.
Consider the abomination of slavery in this country.
This great democracy, founded on the principle that all persons are created equal and
are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, … among these are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I was quoting from our Declaration of Independence, of course.
In spite of this, let’s look at the record.
In 1860, just before the outbreak of the Civil War, fully 83 per cent of nonwhite
persons in this country were slaves.
Just 360 thousand out of a total of 2.1 million were free. And that 360,000 would have
included a large proportion of Native Americans.
Our past is a scandal, really.
So, you’d think things would improve after the war ended in 1865. We passed the Civil
Rights Act of 1866, bestowing full citizenship on African Americans; we adopted the
Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution, prohibiting states from denying citizens
due process and equal protection of the law; we adopted the Fifteenth Amendment,
providing that the right to vote cannot be denied on account of race; and we adopted
federal Ku Klux Klan Acts, which declared interference with voting a federal offence
and the violation of civil rights a crime.

2. It all sounds so good—and many people benefited from these changes. By 187o, at just
a few years into the Reconstruction Era, at least fifteen per cent of all Southern elected
officials were black. All was finally perfect, put right. God’s justice being done.
Except that what we now categorize as Jim Crow laws mandated racial segregation
and prevented many people of color from exercising their right to vote through poll
taxes, literacy tests, and felon-disenfranchisement laws.
And racial segregation—whether legislatively imposed or enforced through implicit
social covenant—rendered the experience of most black folks invisible to whites,
making it easier to maintain racial stereotypes and to ignore their suffering.
So we had another wave of legislation, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
This barred unequal application of voter-registration requirements, outlawed
discrimination, and led to the desegregation of our public schools.
It all sounds so good—and many people benefitted from these changes.
All was finally perfect, put right. God’s justice being done.
Except that something else happened. I am indebted to author Michelle Alexander
and her masterful book The New Jim Crow for my statistics and insights here.
President Lyndon Johnson argued during his 1964 presidential campaign against Barry
Goldwater that antipoverty programs were, in effect, anticrime programs.
But, following him, President Richard Nixon called on voters to reject the lawlessness
of civil rights and embrace “order” here in the United States. He served two terms—or
most of two terms.
And in his campaign for the presidency in 1980, Ronald Reagan mastered the excision
of the language of race from conservative public discourse. Instead of making explicit
reference to race, he referred to “welfare queens” and “criminal predators.” He ran on
a platform of restoring “law and order” to our nation, and he declared the federal
government’s “war on drugs” in 1982.
At the time, fewer than two per cent of the American public viewed drugs as the most
important issue facing the nation.
Nevertheless, an extraordinary expansion of the federal governments law-enforcement
activities and power followed.
Just so we are clear: between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from 8 to
$95 million, while Department of Education antidrug funds were cut from 14 to $3
million.
And, as law-enforcement budgets exploded, so did prison and jail populations.
By 1991, the number of people behind bars in the United States was unprecedented in
world history, and one-fourth of young African American men were now under the
control of the criminal-justice system—in jail or prison, under parole or probation.

3. To put this in perspective, there are now more people in prisons and jails just for drug
offences than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980.
More African American adults are under correctional control today than were
enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
We tell ourselves that they “deserve” their fate, except that whites are just as likely to
commit many crimes, especially drug crimes.
According to Project America, a nonpartisan organization providing easy access to
information about our country, black males are incarcerated at a rate more than 6½
times that of white males.
“The War on Drugs is the vehicle through which extraordinary number of black men
are forced into the cage.”
It is a caste system no less insidious than slavery, no less immoral than Jim Crow.
Like those demonic systems of human oppression, the mass incarceration of African
Americans in this country has created a closed circuit of perpetual marginality.
And all three systems—slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration—arose from a
desire among white elites to exploit the resentments, vulnerabilities, and racial biases
of poor and working-class whites for their own political and economic gain.
We can no longer say a black man is four-fifths of a white man, or sanction the sinister
doctrine of “separate but equal,” or use certain terms that demean and degrade whole
segments of humanity—but, by God, that oppression continues.
And, according to Ms. Alexander, “The genius of the current caste system, and what
most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose
to commit crimes, and that’s why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This
feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the
system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make
mistakes. All of us are sinners. … In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed
ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at
more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living
room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time
drug offences, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.”
Read the book: The New Jim Crow.
Become involved in the political process.
As Martin Luther King, Jr., cautioned us, racial justice requires the complete
transformation of social institutions and a dramatic restricting of our economy, not
superficial changes that can be purchased on the cheap.
So let us commit ourselves to become servant of all, and slave of all—working
together to see that God’s justice is done, on earth as in heaven.