A Consequential Week

“Her humanity was invisible to him.” Jenisha Watts in The Atlantic

Sometimes nothing much happens in a given week.  We go along with our basic routines of chores and errands and meetings.  We awaken and go about the day and then we go to sleep and do it all over again the next day.

And sometimes everything happens in a week.

Last Sunday, a lifelong politician who started as a New Castle County Councilman in Delaware and will finish as the 46th President of the United States made an announcement that turned a regular week into a consequential week. 

It was a week that propelled a woman of Jamaican and Indian ancestry who started her own political career as an Alameda County district attorney in California into the weighty role of leading Democratic Party Candidate for President of the United States. 

And this was also the week when “The Worst Police-Shooting Video Ever” was released. In the words of The Atlantic Senior Editor Jenisha Watts, there is no great movement behind Ms. Massey, perhaps because “the same week the footage of (Sonya) Massey’s killing was released, we saw Kamala Harris take the mantle of the Democratic Party.”

“One Black woman has the chance to win the most powerful position in the world, while at the same time, another Black woman, even at her most vulnerable, wearing her nightclothes and headscarf, is perceived as a threat – and shot to death in her kitchen.”

“Her humanity was invisible” to the man who swore at her and then shot her in the face. 

What. Is. Wrong. With. Us? 

Our failures as human beings have everything to do with the fact that we do not see each other’s humanity. 

Aggressive comments about childfree women, unspeakable violence against Palestinians, heartless measures against refugees and asylum seekers at our borders, vile acts of anti-Semitism, turning on former friends for the sake of political favor.  These are examples of failing to see each other’s humanity.  I am stunned that God allows the earth to keep turning.

And at the end of this tumultuous week, a baby girl was born on this same earth weighing in at 8 pounds, 7 ounces.  20 inches long.  Gray eyes and black hair.  I’m her Grand Jan.

Our prayer is that she will be a friend to strangers and a neighbor to those in need, that she will love “the least of these” as Jesus taught, that she will relish her West European and South Asian ancestry and see those of other ancestries through curious rather than judgmental eyes, that her self worth will be based on knowing that she is a child of God.

And I deeply hope she will grow up in a world that always sees her humanity.

Image of Sonya Massey. There’s a Go Fund Me for her teenage children here.