Last Week's NYC Rally/March for Racial Justice and Practical Theology, Part 1

In a recent post, I invited updates about how religious communities and other practical-theology-intensive places are making sense of and acting in relationship to the heightened public awareness of violence in/through law enforcement toward communities of color and disprivilege.
I thought I would take my invitation as an occasion to post a note about a rally and march held last Wednesday in New York City, in solidarity with Freddie Gray, his family, all of Baltimore, and ultimately, every place bruised and broken by this ugly history, a history that continues overtly and subtly into the present in my social circles, in my immediate spheres of action (family, friends, university, music scene), and in the way I live my life, such that I too–as a white man–have (before I even choose to acknowledge it) a responsibility to understand and to help shoulder this history in which I am already implicated and which has contributed to making me what I am.
Here are some pictures I took from the rally before the march:



I was reminded of the complex geography of privileges and exclusions that wends its way through persons relative to places, a geography that sometimes goes by the term “intersectionality”, a way of understanding the recalcitrance of privilege to acknowledge itself — and to think through the reality of ongoing oppressions as actively enforced in a social network of actors. I can’t do justice to the idea in a brief blog post, but the rough idea is that differential access to the goods of life shows which (socially generated) dimensions of our identity are occasions for more life for oneself or others, or are factors in being harmed or harming others. (Real life is often enough some mix of these, of course.) Put more plainly, aspects of identity can — relative to the history one inherits, and the freedom one has to rework that history — mutually reinforce increased social access to the goods of life (being white and male and advantaged social class and married to a woman, like myself, for example), or mutually frustrate such access (for example, being poor, a person of color, and female).
The practical theological task then becomes practicing the kind of theories and theorizing the kinds of practice that deepen this research on reality and empowers all actors to do things differently, especially relative to the freedom they have to act — and all with reference to the motivation from (what counts as) theological material.
More in part two…
Tom Beaudoin, Washington, DC