The past is present: The historical trauma the United States does not want to talk about

Sharon: In my mind’s eye, I see a woman working in a cotton field. It is an oppressively hot day in Lowndes County, Alabama. The woman is young—less than 18 years old. She is wearing a coarse brown osnaburg dress. Her head is wrapped. Sweat is running down her face and back. The sack she is pulling weighs more than one hundred pounds. That is half of her quota for the day. She has been picking bolls since before sunrise. Her fingers are pricked and bleeding. Her mother is working two rows over. Her husband is in the same field, but out of sight. There is a white man on a horse. He has a whip in his hand.

The woman, her mother and husband are real people. Their names are Rhody, Easter and Tom. They are my ancestors. During and after slavery, they and countless unknown siblings, children and other relatives were consigned to a societal dustbin with vicious racial slurs standing as unwritten (but often spoken) epitaphs that colored every day of their lives and mine from those times forward.

Close your eyes and see what I see. Feel what I feel when I try to fathom the moral cost of what slavery wrought. Try to feel the profound historical harm that continues to plague us in the form of racism.

Tom: I see men pull a chair to the rail of the slave ship upon which they are transporting captives from the “slave coast” of Ghana to Cuba. The year is 1790. My ancestor, James DeWolf of Bristol, Rhode Island, owns and captains this ship. He would become the most successful slave trader, and one of the richest men, in the United States. A middle-aged African woman is chained to the chair. It has been determined she has smallpox, potentially lethal to the captain, crew and other “cargo” in the hold below deck. Captain DeWolf orders his crewmen to lift the chair over the railing and push the woman into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. She relinquishes her spirit without so much as a cry, a gag having been tied around her mouth to silence her. The story handed down is that DeWolf lamented the loss of such a good chair. This story sickens my heart.

Stories like these illumine the fact that the past is present. We are the sum of all that has gone before and carry the unhealed wounds of history in our hearts, minds and even our genes. We must confront the past because that is the only way to come to terms with the preeminent issue—racism—that is tearing our society apart today. In this article we discuss slavery’s traumatic legacy, the failure of U.S. society and its educational system to grapple with this historical harm and the Coming to the Table program that seeks to acknowledge and heal wounds rooted in slavery’s legacy.

Every state in the Union—and (by commission or default) every white citizen thereof—participated in and benefitted from slavery. As white people smoked tobacco, sipped rum, wore cotton clothing, drank coffee and ate peanuts, they lost sight of the fact that they were living in an economy based on the stolen labor of enslaved African people on land stolen from Native Americans. The road to culpability wended south from New York to Florida and spread westward under the cloak of Manifest Destiny. Money trumped morals at every step of the way and was resolutely justified by religious conviction.

Well after slavery’s abolition, its traumatic legacy continues to shape the United States, reflected in numerous disparities between African Americans and their white counterparts. People of color fall on the negative side of virtually all measurable social indicators. In 2014, the Pew Research Center reported that “the median white household was worth $141,900, 12.9 times more than the typical black household, which was worth just $11,000.” Poverty rates for African Americans are more than 160 percent higher, while unemployment rates are double. One-third of black males born today can expect to go to prison in their lifetimes. Young black males have a 21 times greater risk of being shot dead by police than whites. Infant mortality is 130 percent higher for black than for white babies.

The U.S. educational system has failed to adequately confront slavery and its ongoing harm. Take, for example, a history textbook written in 1916 by Mary Simms Oliphant. Commissioned by the superintendent of education in South Carolina to update an 1860 history written by her grandfather, Oliphant posited that slavery was a “necessary but benign institution” and glorified slaveholders, depicting their victims as ignorant savages in need of Christian salvation. Oliphant credited the Ku Klux Klan with restoring “truth and justice” after the Civil War. Her retelling of her grandfather’s tome was adopted by the state Board of Education. In 1932, she wrote her own history, a 432-page text that informed the public high school curriculum from that point forward. Will Moredock, a South Carolina native, recalls that his parents “used Oliphant’s books in the 1930s; I used them in the 1960s.” He observes that “Later editions of Oliphant’s book were somewhat toned down, but this was by and large the official history of South Carolina—taught to black students as well as white—until 1984,” with the state educational system thus perpetuating slavery’s historical harm and preventing a serious reckoning with its traumatic legacy.

Poet and environmentalist Wendell Berry argued in a 1970 essay that racism is the “hidden wound” of the U.S.’s political body, asserting that racism involves an “emotional dynamic that has disordered the heart both of the society as a whole and of every person in the society.” Sociologist Joy DeGruy shares this understanding of slavery as a traumatic wound that continues to perpetuate harm, poignantly asking: “What do repeated traumas visited upon generation after generation of a people produce? What are the impacts of the ordeals associated with chattel slavery, and with the institutions that followed, on African Americans today?”

As descendants of slaves and slaveholders, respectively, we encountered one another in 2008 as participants in a Coming to the Table (CTTT) workshop at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Through CTTT we learned about “historical harm” and the transmission of traumatic legacies from one generation to the next: these understanding were deepened through participation in training organized by the Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience (STAR) program. These workshops helped us make sense of our distinctive, yet intertwined, pasts. We learned about “Cycles of Violence,” a theoretical construct that translates to “hurt people hurt people.” We emerged from these workshops convinced that both African Americans and white Americans have been damaged, albeit in significantly different ways, by slavery and its ongoing legacy in the form of systemic racism and that both are in need of healing. CTTT workshops designed to confront this legacy and to foster healing push participants to engage in four main activities in this healing journey:
• Research, acknowledge and share personal, family and societal histories of race with openness and honesty.
• Connect with others within and across racial lines in order to develop deep and accountable relationships.
• Explore ways to heal together.
• Champion systemic change that supports repair and reconciliation between individuals, within families and throughout society.

Breaking free of cycles of violence and healing historical trauma take work. It requires that we transcend what we were taught in misguided history books and embrace the values we find true in our hearts. It calls on us to amend how we view and treat “others” and actively engage in changing ourselves and the society in which we live. We can either continue a legacy of racism and doom future generations to racial conflict and inequality or change the paradigm to make this a better world for all. Our hope is that when, in the words of the psalmist, “Mercy and truth are met together,” then righteousness and peace will follow.

Sharon Leslie Morgan and Thomas Norman DeWolf are co-authors of Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade (Beacon Press, 2012).

Conscientious objection, race and class

Ertell Whigham is a former Marine recruiter and currently serves as Executive Minister of Franconia Mennonite Conference in eastern Pennsylvania. The following is an interview with Whigham about how race and class factor into military recruitment and conscientious objection in the United States.

What are young people who grow up in settings of poverty looking for after high school?

I did military recruiting in both rural and urban settings of poverty. I found that youth were looking for opportunities that would help them advance beyond the low-income status of their parents. With few family resources, many of them could not anticipate going to college. But they wanted to “belong” and to have a position of respect in their community. In some cases they simply wanted to leave a bad situation at home and were looking for a way out.

How do young people in settings of poverty tend to view the option of military enlistment?

As recruiters, we found that it was fairly easy to take advantage of the needs expressed by these young people. In many ways, our pitch to the young people was predatory in nature. For youth who felt like they were on the edges of society due to poverty or racism, we could offer stability. We could provide a job, food, clothing and a roof. We could offer travel, training, sharp uniforms, money for college and status. Compared to the minimum wage jobs with little option for advancement that likely awaited many of them, the military offers looked pretty good.

When you later became a pastor of a Mennonite church in a setting where many families struggled with poverty, how did you work with youth who were looking for post-high school options?

It was a very labor-intensive effort. We set up mentorships for young people as early as middle school. We helped them visit a college campus. We provided modest scholarship money and helped them investigate grants. We helped them make a connection with a business person in the area of their career interest. We created employment opportunities in our child care center that would at least help them earn some money while they were thinking about future options. Several members of our congregation offered a room in their homes for young people who just needed to get out of a difficult home situation. We made sure they knew that they had a church family that they could depend on.

We did all this in addition to helping young people understand that Jesus’ way of peace does not fit with the military mission. For if we wished to persuade our youth that they should not enlist, we had to be able to offer another meaningful option for their lives.

One of the biggest challenges is with immigrant families. Many of them feel a deep debt of gratitude for the opportunity to live in this country, and see military service as a way to repay this debt.

So, how does conscientious objection to war look to youth who don’t have good options for job, school or career?

For someone who doesn’t have good non-military options, conscientious objection exacts a high cost. It may mean being stuck in a difficult environment with little opportunity for financial stability. Military enlistment may also be costly, but this is usually not on the young person’s mind or in the pitch the recruiter normally makes. This is in sharp contrast to youth who have resources for college, travel or skills training. Conscientious objection to war does not exact the same cost from these youth.

Many young people grow up in a context where nonresistance or nonviolence as a way of life is simply not a part of the culture. In many settings, a young person who responds peacefully to aggression is viewed as weak and can become easy prey to bullying and harassment. The church can offer strong, peaceful role models and become a place of sanctuary, but if peace and nonviolence are not reinforced elsewhere in a young person’s life, including the home, the teaching may seem irrelevant. If peace does not seem relevant when a young person is on the street, it may well seem irrelevant when listening to the well-spoken pitch of a military recruiter.

In my recent experience with veterans’ groups, I’ve learned that veterans can be some of the most effective communicators in support of peace and nonviolence when talking with youth.

The challenge to our churches is this: make peace relevant to all of our youth and offer meaningful alternatives to military enlistment.

Ertell Whigham is the Executive Minister of Franconia Mennonite Conference in eastern Pennsylvania. He was interviewed by Titus Peachey, MCC U.S. Peace Education Coordinator.

Learn more by reading the Winter 2015 issue of Intersections – Conscientious objection.

When peace church members enlist

In the historic peace churches, when young people choose military service the impact on family and the faith community can be painful. These contrasting stories challenge peace churches to consider the meaning of community when strong disagreements arise.

Who is my neighbor? (Conrad Stoesz)

In 1939, as the Western world edged ever closer to war, Mennonite leaders in both Canada and the U.S. met to discuss what their response should be. They were guided by a belief in non-resistance, an important thread through many migrations and hardships, as well as a strong commitment to community. It was the community that provided the emotional, financial, spiritual and physical help enabling Mennonites to pioneer in difficult new contexts, overcome hardships and help keep people on the right spiritual path.

In the Second World War Mennonite leaders went to great lengths to advocate for a system of alternative service in Canada and the U.S. as a way of ensuring that drafted young men could uphold the church’s pacifist convictions as conscientious objectors. However, some Mennonite men chose not to enroll in alternative service, but to enlist for active combat. To the church which had suffered, migrated and worked hard for conscientious objection, their actions represented a slap in the face and were contrary to the teachings of Jesus.

In southern Manitoba, Peter Hildebrand was one of these men who did enlist. His parents Peter and Katharina were not proud of their son’s decision, but they cared deeply about him. They quickly learned they would need to carry their burden alone. Their friends and family did not want to talk to them and they felt shunned. When the Hildebrands received a telegram saying that Peter was missing in action, Katharina internalized her grief, sitting in her rocking chair for weeks on end ruminating. No friends or family came to console her. In one month she became hunched and her red hair turned white. The faith community that was supposed to care for the vulnerable failed Katharina, as well as others like her, when they most needed support.

The Hildebrands were overjoyed when they learned their son Peter had been found alive in Europe. But the deep physical and emotional scars were with Peter for the rest of his life. Like many Mennonite war veterans, he never did return to his Mennonite church.

A Mennonite parents’ journey with a marine son (Dot and Dale Hershey)

As we were preparing to leave for church one Sunday morning in February of 2000, our son, a high school senior, asked us, “Would you disown me if I joined the Marines?” He quickly made it clear that he had already signed with the Marines and had every intention of following through with that commitment. We were shocked, but sensed it was a time to put aside differences and give him all the support we could find within ourselves. He saw himself being a peacemaker in the Marines, so the day he left for boot camp we together planted a peace rose to symbolize our differing views of peace.

We attended his boot camp graduation as a way of showing our parental support for him. He was then sent for further training just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Our son would sometimes call in the middle of the night because he was also concerned and fearful. He would ask if we would be able to honor and support his sacrifice if he were sent to Iraq. Would we be able to accept the flag from his coffin if he were killed?

Meanwhile, we were not comfortable discussing our son’s military service with our Mennonite congregation, where teachers and pastors taught peace and nonresistance. Children from the congregation went to Botswana, Nepal and Bolivia to serve others and did not train to kill. Despite this, many people in our congregation provided us with love and support. Some sent notes to our son, letting him know they were praying for him and that he was loved and missed.

Once while on leave our son told us he was going to attend church with us. We hoped he would not come in uniform, but that was exactly what he did. He wore his Marine dress blues and was ready with his holy war arguments. He expected things to go badly. However, much to his surprise, two hours later he was still talking to members of the congregation. He was being received with warmth and compassion, hugs and handshakes, and genuine acceptance as a child of the church. This was an important event for him and an important event for us.

Fourteen years later we have a strong relationship with our son and we can agree to disagree on the role of the military in our society. This past year, for the first time, we were able to call him on Veterans Day and let him know we were thinking about him.

Conrad Stoesz is Archivist for both the Mennonite Heritage Centre and the Centre for Mennonite Brethren Studies in Winnipeg. Dot and Dale Hershey live in Manheim, PA and are members at Akron Mennonite Church.

Learn more by reading the Winter 2015 issue of Intersections – Conscientious objection.

Conscientious objection: a U.S. veteran’s perspective

Since the U.S. military moved away from a policy of conscription, several generations of Mennonite pacifists have become somewhat apathetic on questions of conscientious objection and military service. The issue of conscience in war—once a key ethical matter central to the Mennonite faith—has lately been labeled as political, a marginal and somewhat irrelevant distraction from the other pressing needs of an active congregational life.

The challenges of war and conscience in war, however, are still very real to many Americans. Many soldiers are struggling and suffering for their new-found beliefs against war and military service. The Mennonite community should not be indifferent to their struggles. Not only does the pacifist church have an opportunity to unmask the ideology of militarism by standing with recent COs, but in helping to secure the rights of supposedly-volunteer soldiers in the present day, Mennonites will be securing those same rights for a time when the draft once again comes knocking to take their children off to the army camp.

The plight of the Iraq War CO

In late 2006, my friend Amy was deployed to Iraq with the U.S. army. She was a sensitive and educated person, but she was also a good soldier and a professional linguist. While in Iraq, Amy experienced the soul-crushing violence of military occupation and war. Like many thousands of fellow soldiers in the supposedly “all volunteer” U.S. military, she began reading in her spare time, and she knew deep down that the occupation she was participating in was wrong. In 2007, Amy wrote an essay on why she was considering herself a conscientious objector to war, and turned it in to her commander in an attempt to be recognized for what she was: a CO.

Because Amy had never once loaded her weapon in the war, and because it was a prop required for passage on the base, she did not immediately turn her rifle in to the commander, who then used this fact to deny Amy her conscientious objector status. In effect, the military told Amy that her deep convictions against war and militarism were just passing feelings. She was then punished for daring to waste the army’s time with her frivolous feelings. The day Amy’s unit returned from the war, she was told that she would be re-deploying in six months for another year-and-a-half in the occupation. Soon Amy showed up at the peace center where I was working, AWOL: a fugitive from the military. Based on my own assessment as a soldier in the war, the vast majority of the soldiers who applied for conscientious objector status between 2004 and 2008 were turned down like Amy.

Pacifist appraisal of modern conscientious objection

So what does it mean for Mennonites that during the middle stages of the occupation of Iraq, hundreds or even thousands of American soldiers were ready to jettison their careers and explore the nuances of conscientious objection? A lesson to religious pacifists who want to monopolize conscientious objection: that someone like Amy should come to a world-altering conclusion about violence and militarism without a traditional religious conversion demonstrates the universality of nonviolent truth. The nonviolent God moves in a theodicy of grace through the experience of brokenness, war and violence to renew the covenant of wholeness. By failing to engage those soldiers who struggle in a conceptual language different from ours with the transcendent truth of God’s nonviolent way, Christian pacifists share in the guilt and sin of the world that forces young people to do violence against their will and better judgment. War is, after all, really a failure of human imagination. Human violence is a demonstration of humanity’s unwillingness to trust the will of God the Creator, to suffer-with and to love enemies.

Comfortable Mennonites, whose children go unthreatened by conscription and war, sometimes talk of peace as if it were some distant eschatological fairy-tale, and not an urgent, vital need. To people like my friend Amy, peace is tangible and present, what some pacifist theologians have called the “moral grain” of the universe. My deep and abiding hope is that Mennonites will embrace veterans and military personnel in the spirit of Christian love and peacemaking, partnering with us to explore the realities of the God of peace. Together, let us worship the Lamb who reigns nonviolently, and let us proclaim God’s peace.

Evan K.M. Knappenberger is an Iraq war veteran and a Philosophy and Theology major at Eastern Mennonite University

Learn more by reading the Winter 2015 issue of Intersections – Conscientious objection.

For a timeline of peace church and broader efforts to obtain provisions for conscientious objector discharges from the U.S. military, see: http://civilianpublicservice.org/storycontinues/hotline/advocacy

Brock, Rita Nakashima and Lettini, Gabriella. Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

Center on Conscience & War: http://centeronconscience.org

GI Rights Hotline: http://girightshotline.org

Privilege, right and responsibility: peace and Mennonites in the U.S. and Canada

At the core of Mennonite identity in the U.S. and Canada is the practice of peace. It goes by various names, including nonresistance, pacifism and nonviolence. Even within an historic peace church, however, peace has not been a static term. Over their 300-year history in the U.S. and Canada, Mennonites have seen peace, in sequence, as a “privilege,” a “right” and then as a “responsibility.” But the three terms have overlapped, and in some respects all three exist today.

The privilege of military exemption

The story begins in 1683 as Mennonite victims of persecution in Europe sought the privilege of military exemption in Quaker-run Pennsylvania. Deferential to authority, they were “absolute pacifists.” As an English missionary in Lancaster County put it, Mennonites always chose “to leave their Properties and Liberty exposed to the first Invader, than bear arms in their Defence” (McMaster, 229). Local lore recounted the cost of this idea; Mennonites were in some ways the privileged—encroaching on the lands of Native Americans—but as the 1764 murder of the entire John Roads family shows, they came to be known in time as a people who would not defend themselves under any circumstances (Dyck, 200). In 1775, during the American Revolutionary War, Mennonites petitioners declared that because of “the Doctrine of the blessed Jesus Christ” and “finding ourselves very poor [in spirit]” they were “not at Liberty in Conscience to take up arms to conquer our Enemies” (McMaster, 256).

Following the War of Independence, some Mennonites headed to Canada, embracing its 1793 Militia Act offering commutation fees in lieu of military service. The United States adopted a similar policy in 1862 during the Civil War with the first federal American draft. Mennonites, thus, were more worried about youthful volunteers joining the war than being compelled to fight.

In the meantime new waves of Mennonite and Amish immigrants from western Europe in the 1830s and from New Russia in the 1870s bolstered the old idea of group privilege. Both groups encountered modernizing governments who were re-imagining the state as a “nation” and heralding “universal military service” as its handmaiden (Loewen and Nolt, 13). In the New World they found frontier land to buffer them from these changes. Especially in Canada the newcomers found a British system still recognizing group “privileges.” In 1873 a federal Order-in-Council exempted them from military service, an arrangement that remained in effect through the First World War.

The right to alternative service

During the First World War, events in the United States changed the meaning of pacifism. A universal military service act in 1917 granted draftees the “right” to seek personal exemption. But it was only a limited right, lightly enforced by a Secretary of State who declared that “war was the purest mission that a nation ever espoused” (Juhnke, 230). Hazings, threatened hangings and the death of two young Hutterite men, Joseph and Michael Hofer, from mistreatment in a military camp in 1918 revealed the limitation of the supposed right to personal exemption.

World War II enshrined the idea of “rights” for pacifists in both countries. Conscientious objectors now were exempted if they could demonstrate personal religious scruples. COs then joined the Civilian Public Service in the U.S. or performed Alternative Service Work in Canada, mostly as forestry, soil conservation and mental health hospital workers. Even within this system were the seeds of a new view on pacifism. Robert Kreider spoke of being restless as a CO, longing to do work of “real . . . national importance” (Kreider, 19). In both countries some 35 percent of all Mennonite draftees answered the call to arms. Pilot Henry Pankratz of Canada spoke of his service as the “highlight of my life” (Regehr, 36) while Roland Juhnke of the U.S. declared “a sense of duty to my buddies” (Bush, 271). Mennonite COs, on the other hand, faced taunts of being cowardly “yellow bellies” and ethnocentric rural bumpkins (Epp, 110).

The responsibility to peacebuilding

After the war many Mennonites considered more engaged ways of expressing their pacifism. In November 1950, at an MCC-supported conference at Winona Lake, Indiana, Mennonite thinkers overrode the word “nonresistance” for a new imperative, the “responsibility . . . to the total social order of which we are a part” (Driedger and Kraybill, 85). During the 1960s and ‘70s, in the midst of the Cold War, the Vietnam War draft and the Civil Rights Movement, Mennonite thinkers recalled their own “radical” and “revolutionary” Anabaptist heritage (Klaassen).

Reflecting a broadening acceptance of engaged pacifism, MCC opened advocacy offices in both Washington, D.C. (1968) and Ottawa (1975). The first Washington office director, Delton Franz, spoke of the chance to “sensitize the powerful to the impact of their actions on the world’s powerless” (Loewen and Nolt, 316). Later organizations, including Mennonite Conciliation Service and Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), pushed for international justice through action (Miller, 16).

Later, even these ideas broadened. In 1997 one CPTer, Patricia Shelly, challenged the binary of “personal” versus “political” peace, demanding it confront all of life, including consumer greed and the attending “need to protect what we have” (Heisey and Schipani, 39). At the same time, some Mennonites began to re-envision the very idea of conscientious objection. During the Vietnam War, MCC had provided a way for U.S. draftees to perform alternative service in many settings, including Vietnam. However, some draftees chose not to register with Selective Service as an act of noncooperation with and as a prophetic witness to the system. In 1969 the Mennonite Church even went on record in support of such acts of civil disobedience, while Canadian Mennonites hosted draft resisters and deserters arriving from the U.S.

More recently, Mennonites in the U.S. have participated in broader efforts to counsel military personnel seeking CO status as a way of linking privilege and responsibility. Similarly, in the 1990s the Ottawa Office of MCC Canada felt the responsibility to advocate on behalf of soldiers who developed a conviction of conscientious objection while in service. Additionally, some Mennonites began to practice “war tax resistance” as a new form of conscientious objection that aims to address the system, while also asserting the rights of the individual.

Conclusion

After 300 years in the U.S. and Canada, many Mennonites still held to the old “two kingdom” theology and a nonresistance of the “quiet in the land.” Still other initiatives highlighted “responsibility.” Attention to conscientious objection continued, particularly in the U.S., but it occurred within a much larger framework of proactive and “responsible” peacemaking. Clearly a fundamental shift had turned an historic peace church from attending to a question of “privilege” to one of “responsibility.”

Royden Loewen is Professor of History and Chair in Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg.

Learn more by reading the Winter 2015 issue of Intersections – Conscientious objection.