Our sermon this morning is brought to you by the show Klepper, which debuted last Thursday on Comedy Central. This week’s episode is about Freedom University, and will feature the guests who are going to speak during our call to the offering. So get your autographs and your selfies today, before they hit the big time! The host, Jordan Klepper, was on one of my favorite podcasts this week, it’s called With Friends Like These by Ana Marie Cox. His awareness of the privilege he brings into activism spaces is admirable.
What’s happening here in Georgia that is attracting national attention? The Georgia Board of Regents has exclusionary policies that prevent undocumented students from attending the three best public universities in Georgia, and forces them to pay out-of-state tuition at other state schools. To be blunt, these policies are segregationist. As one of our esteemed guests this morning, Emiko Soltis, put it in an AJC op-ed:
“Georgia is widely considered the most punitive state toward migrant youth seeking higher education, as it is the only state in the country to ban undocumented students — as well as DACA recipients — from admission to selective institutions of public higher education. Georgia is also the only state to pass an “Anti-Sanctuary Campus Bill” to punish any private university that declares itself a sanctuary of learning for undocumented immigrant youth.
…We must send a strong message to Georgia that banning young people from school had no place in the Jim Crow era, and it certainly has no place in the 21st century. Educational policies that violate international human rights laws need to be repealed so that every young person, regardless of where they are born or what papers they have, has equal access to higher education.”
On February 12th, I got arrested with eight other ministers and community members for interrupting a Board of Regents meeting to protest these policies. We volunteered for that role of being arrested because we weren’t at risk of detention or deportation, but the planning, strategizing, media outreach, logistical coordination, and group support were all done by the Freedom U students. We were there in solidarity, following their lead, taking on roles they asked us to fill. The students at Freedom U are some of the most remarkable young folx I’ve ever met. They’re super smart and hard-working, academically accomplished, and they made me feel welcome right away. Preventing them from attending college isn’t just shameful, it’s harmful to our job force and our economy; we’re telling some of our most talented and resilient teenagers there’s no path to higher education in our state, and for reasons purely of discrimination. When there are opportunities to collaborate with Freedom U students in the future here at Northwest, I encourage each of you to make a point of participating. And, if you’ve got your own stories about civil disobedience and other forms of activism you’ve engaged in in the past, please send them to me so that we can share them with the congregation.
I’ve gotten arrested four times now, and it’s become a spiritual practice for me, because it’s a chance to see the systems we operate in, from a slightly marginalized point of view. One of the first things I noticed during our action was that it helped to look like I belonged in the room. As the current campaign has gone on, the police at Regents meetings have begun to racially profile the crowd for demonstrators, and pay closer to attention to young people who appear to be of Hispanic descent. As a white guy in a suit, no one gave me a second look for being there.
Before moving to Georgia, I had never been arrested without warning, and never been physically pulled or pushed by police officers. But that’s happened both times I’ve been arrested here; there seems to be a different culture of police conduct in Georgia. That having been said, there was no harmful police violence when the nine of us got arrested, a form of privilege no doubt aided by our status as professionally-dressed meeting attendees, and the fortuitous presence of a legal observer.
We then spent about fourteen hours in police custody. The first hour my colleague, the Rev. Dave Dunn and I were zip-tied in the back of a police car. I had brought a protein bar with me, knowing it was going to be a long day, but with my hands zip-tied behind my back, there was no way to feed myself. Luckily, Dave and I are good enough friends that I could ask him to hold the protein bar in his zip-tied hands while I leaned over and took bites. As the story goes: in the Beloved Community, the people feed each other.
(Slow)
When we got inside the jail, the police strip searched us. They told me to squat and cough. We waited some more, and then they processed us medically. The police gave some in our group TB and pregnancy tests. We waited and waited and then there would be a burst of instructions. Some of the instructions were contradictory, so that our status as violators and criminals was reinforced by the impossibility of following their orders. I was grateful that at least I had my hearing aids in, and could understand their instructions some of the time. I asked to use the restroom, and was directed to one of the holding cells where only plexiglass separated me from the main waiting area. The guard who searched me took my migraine medication. Again and again, I felt like less of a person with basic rights. I felt dehumanized, because all parts of our criminal justice system are designed to dehumanize everyone that we jail or imprison.
To be embarrassingly frank, I struggle with how to describe this experience. Being in jail for a day was the most eye-opening experience I have had in terms of cultivating a sense of empathy for folks with marginalized identities. On the other hand, I experienced the most mild possible version of jail-time, no matter how you measure it. But I wanted to risk putting this out there, because if we let fear of making mistakes stop us from having difficult conversations, we will never grow as a community and as a movement. Perfectionism is a trait of white supremacy culture.
The truth is none of this work is easy. If it were, we would have done it already by now. Education is a human right, but our state seems to be in the business of denying human rights lately. That is a situation that should be unacceptable to all of us, regardless of our own immigration status or whether we personally have uteruses. It’s time to put our bodies on the line as allies and accomplices to the degree that we are each able to. That doesn’t have to mean time in jail. Brief and simple acts can make a world of difference, whether it’s attending Immigration Court to support a migrant detainee and their family, participating in a meal train for those families, or offering sanctuary at your church to refugees who are at risk from political violence. Bryan Stevenson told us at the General Assembly Ware Lecture a couple years ago to get “proximate” to those in need, saying “if you are willing to get closer to people who are suffering, you will find the power to change the world.”
We are called to help end segregation in Georgia. To do this, we must get close to those who are suffering. None of us can win this fight alone. And because we cannot do this alone, let us move forward together, in im-perfect solidarity.
May it be so, and may we be the ones to make it so.
Delivered at Northwest Unitarian Universalist Congregation
May 19, 2019
© Rev. Jonathan Rogers