Dean David N. Hempton delivered the following remarks in front of the HDS community on the evening of September 28, in Andover Chapel.
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We are all shocked and deeply saddened by the recent shootings of Black men in Charlotte and Tulsa and California. Given how depressingly often similar killings have happened in recent years—in Ferguson, in Cleveland, and in many other places across our country—it is appropriate and necessary to be angry, frustrated, and even despairing.
Although I am a white male of Irish descent, who can never fully understand what many of you in this chapel are going through, these emotions are not new to me. I have seen before, in another violent place at another time, how historic patterns of deep structural inequality and lack of respect make themselves most clearly visible at the intersections of oppression, inequality, policing, and the criminal justice system. They are most visible there, but that’s not where they start, nor where they end. As with icebergs, the tips are only what you see. What is beneath is deeply embedded in our nation’s most shameful historical roots, our structures of power, our distribution of resources, and our inequalities before the law.
We are here this evening in solidarity with one another, as a community, to remember, to mourn, to extend our sympathy to victim’s families, but also to express our outrage. Above all we gather to show that we notice and that we care and that we want things to change, not as a distant feel-good aspiration, but as an urgent necessity.
That’s why our community’s Racial Justice and Healing Initiative matters so much. At a time when there are few places where people of different races and ethnicities can speak openly about racism and violence, this group enables us to talk about who we are, and what we are (and aren’t) doing to address these problems in our own lives and in our own community.
This work isn’t easy. It forces us to discover biases we weren’t aware of, to confront privilege which we are part of, and to look at the ways in which we exclude the “other.” But it also enables us to speak out about the ways that race operates in our communities, to listen to one another in spite of our own prejudices, and to see that racial justice and healing begin with us.
In a campus lecture on the state of our democracy last evening, the distinguished journalist E.J. Dionne quoted these words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “nothing that we despise in other men is inherently absent from ourselves.” He went on to say that we are still seeking the world Dr. King described when he urged us to speed the time “when justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
We desperately need this water of justice, but it will not come only by pointing the finger at others, but by changing them and the systems they represent, and in the process we will change ourselves and our own community.
I know at times like this it is easy to feel as though our progress is far too slow or even completely nonexistent. It may even seem as though we’re moving backwards instead of forwards, and depressingly the recent evidence in support of that cannot be ignored. This is a moment then to stretch for hope and remember the words of one of our earliest alumni, the abolitionist and Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, which were later so beautifully adapted by Dr. King:
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”
I hope and pray he is right. Thank you for remembering and mourning and caring, and for your ongoing effort to make racial justice and healing a priority on our campus, and in the world. The times require it of us.
—David N. Hempton is Dean of the Faculty of Divinity, Alonzo L. McDonald Family Professor of Evangelical Theological Studies, and John Lord O'Brian Professor of Divinity