What Will we Say to Our Children?

I don’t know who posted it. But on Feb. 2, as I customarily do, I checked into Facebook to see what my friends were talking about. A post popped up about 86 children slaughtered in Dalori, Nigeria, by Boko Haram, the terrorist group that kidnapped upwards of 300 girls on April 14, 2014. The children, the post dated Jan. 31 noted, were burned alive.

I reflexively shuttered. How was is possible that is was Feb. 2 and I had heard NOTHING of children burned alive, not on any news network? So I scoured the Internet, checking to see, first, whether it was an old news story, not something that had happened less than 48 hours earlier. I checked snopes.com to see whether it was a horrible and horrific, but false, rumor. Once I verified that the news was from the reputable United States military news agency and that, indeed, it had not been reported, I felt the hot tears on my face grow hotter.

As we celebrate Black History Month, I wonder: What will we say to our children about how we respond to violence against black children in the United States and in other parts of the world? I wonder, how is it possible in 2016 that 86 children can be burned alive and it not get even a mention on national network and cable news? Oh, sure. We’re in the middle of an election cycle and Tuesday was the day of the Iowa caucus. But 86 children. Burned. Alive. I posted on my Facebook page that day that “as a society, we don’t care about black children dying no matter where they are in the world. And ‘race deck’ alert: HAD THOSE CHILDREN BEEN FRENCH, OUR ELECTORAL COVERAGE WOULD HAVE BEEN MUTED TO TALK ABOUT HOW AWFUL, HOW EVIL, HOW … ”

Of course, I would not wish such horror on any one, anywhere. My point, which may be obvious, is that we don’t care about black children. And to me, this fact is a moral, religious, spiritual, and ethical deficit in our culture. And several articles suggest that we lack an “empathy” for people “not like us.” But as a Christian, I don’t have to “identify” with France, or be French, to experience grief and horror that human life was summarily snuffed out by evil machinations when 128 people are killed at restaurants and a theater in Paris.

And as a Christian woman of faith, former pastor, and now professor who preaches regularly, I don’t need anyone to connect the dots for me between the terror that kills in France or in Nigeria or in the United States. The impulse to harm and to deny liberty and flourishing, I believe, comes from the same cesspool of evils. To be Christian, and to help the church be the church, I believe means that we help one another see that we are all a part of that “inescapable web of mutuality” about which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail in 1963. Eighty-six children were burned alive; so were we, or at least some of our very humanity was.

I like to remind by friends that the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1950s ‘60s, and in Soweto, South Africa in the 1960s and beyond, was primarily a youth movement. Young people saw injustice, experienced deep pain, and stood against it, taking to the streets to their peril. They defied pastors and parents and governmental authorities in order to see change to unjust structures and systems designed to cut off their black flourishing.

I think of them as I work alongside and pray for young people taking the lead for justice in our time, from the #BlackLivesMatter movement (The Movement for Black Lives-M4BL), the Dream Defenders, the Black Youth Project, and on and on. Young people are our future in every way. I think of them as I lament 86 children our society had no time to acknowledge. I want to be able to say to the children from 50 years ago, and to our children now, and to the memory of children cut down in death, that we will not let their deaths and labor be in vain.