A New Psalm for America’s Racial Uprising
Building a theology of lament in a breathless & racialized land
God calls us to lament, then love.
My dear friend recently shared a story with me. A woman she knows was bringing water to peaceful protestors demonstrating outside St. John’s Church after George Floyd’s death. Officers tear-gassed the crowd to clear these bodies so Donald Trump could get the now viral photograph of himself holding up a Bible. This woman saw a man who had been hit in the neck with a tear gas canister. He was gasping for air and in critical condition. She took him to the hospital herself and placed him at the hospital’s doors to receive care.
The protestors were gassed, they were unable to breathe, and the man on the scene was struck by the gas canister in the neck, all echoes of George Floyd’s asphyxiation.
Educator and activist Alicia Crosby even tweeted before the June 1 protest in D.C., “I really can’t shake how profoundly evil it is to tear gas folks protesting the suffocation of a man by the police during a pandemic driven by a respiratory disease.”
