On Being an "Upstander"

In July 1931 Arthur and Edith Lee purchased a home in the Field Neighborhood of south Minneapolis. Arthur was a veteran of World War I and had a job working for the United States Postal Service. Over a decade since the Great War ended, I imagine Mr. Lee living each day within a comfortable routine. Taking care of his property. Like most soldiers, I imagine he had the skills and the wherewithal to complete most of the little projects necessary with being a homeowner. After seeing something as ugly as a war and risking one’s life on foreign soil, I imagine what Arthur enjoyed most was coming home and spending time with Edith and their young daughter. Unfortunately, the Lee’s only lived in this south Minneapolis neighborhood a short while because five years prior a covenant had been drafted and signed by other homeowners prohibiting blacks from moving into this neighborhood.

I’ve owned three houses so far in my life. I’ve been blessed not only with opportunity and prosperity, but a heritage of economic stability. And though I didn’t grow up with a silver spoon, my wife and I have been fiscally blessed because of the freedoms white landowners have always had in this country.

While driving home from class last Friday, I heard Judge LaDoris Cordell’s lecture given to students at the University of Minnesota—replayed twice on MPR—and I now better understand the closed doors African Americans have faced over the course of several generations. After listening to the lecture I see why the current frustrations in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, which have caused rioting and outcry, is an oppression that dates back, and repeats itself, over several generations. Among so many other issues, it can trace origins to neighborhood covenants that prohibited “blacks” from “moving in,” to legislative zoning systematically planned out to create inhospitable ghettos, to bigoted politicians in the 19-teens, 1930’s, and 1960’s who 'red lined' the cities to quarantine African Americans into less desirable areas of town, places that lacked opportunity, places that lacked infrastructure for healthy living, places where home ownership wasn’t an option.

Reflecting back on my adolescent years, I know I was raised in a cloud of suburban, lower-middle class entitlement. Then as a 14-year old I made a series of bad decisions and wound up in juvenile court. After being sentenced to a chunk of mandatory community service hours, my pastor set me up at the local homeless shelter, which our church regularly supported. Up until a few years ago, when I started working with homeless youth in Fairbanks, Alaska, I hadn’t really reflected on the importance those first community service hours had on me. I ended up completing the hours sooner than planned, and stuck around helping at the shelter until my high school years overwhelmed me with other jobs and social events. In 2006 and 2007 I spent fifteen months in Iraq. My platoon of 25 was made up of all men, mostly under the age of 25, mostly from the lower end of the socio-economic scale and racially and ethnically diverse. As the sole officer in the platoon, I was the only one with, and required to have a college degree. Though we were young, we were all highly trained and heavily armed, spending nearly every day of that deployment “outside the wire” supporting the American mission in the Middle East. After surviving the war, there was little more I wanted than to come home and enjoy freedom. The first months after returning I felt naked without my rifle, frequently jerking for it as if it were a ghost whose presence was still felt. And though it’s been nearly eight years since I came home, the war’s something I think about daily. But my thinking occurs within the safety and freedom of my own home. I’m blessed to have a home that has become a place of healing and relaxation, a home to take pride in and invest myself in through small projects and tasks. Owning a home brings clarity and focus. Going about a task and seeing it to fruition not only is a way of caring for my own well being, but also expresses responsibility and security for my family.

I can’t imagine what Arthur Lee must have felt when nearly 4,000 people congregated nightly in front of his home and tried to persuade him to flee. 4,000 people that had stood behind this country through his service in the trenches in Europe now told him he had no right to live where he wanted to live. If we call this history, if we paint this as a picture of the past, we run the risk not only of forgetting, but also of allowing it to happen again. In her lecture, Judge LaDorris Crodell says there are bystanders and upstanders. The bystanders stand by. They throw up their hands and say ‘what difference can I make.’ They don’t necessarily participate in the hate and the bigotry and the oppression, but they aren’t helping to fight it either. While an upstander is someone who ‘stands up,’ ‘sings up,’ ‘lawyers up,’ and ‘speaks when silence is easier.’ Someone who runs the risk of being ostracized for the justice they proclaim. A bystander is passive. An upstander is active. How many community covenants still have repressive language that keeps people away? How many doctrines and charters are still out there oppressing in ways we allow to occur because we are bystanders? 

When I was a child I did childish things and was sentenced to give back to my community. My works didn’t save me, but they did get me out of a possible stint in detention and showed me other ways of the world. My desire for more service became a charity, but charity isn’t good enough. Charity is only giving a part of your self. Being an upstander for social justice is giving all of your self. What I learned working with homeless teens in Fairbanks is when I ate what they ate, shared their rejoices as well as their sorrows, I was giving my whole self. I prayed for them and with them. As the name of our agency detailed, I was being an advocate, working to be an upstander.

Being a bystander makes the world about you, a person who is present, but doesn’t take part. Being an upstander it can’t be about you, it can only be about others. Judge Ladorris Cordell taught me to know history because it shapes the present and inhibits the future. Know history because it’s full of people that have bled, cried, and died writing it.

Post three in a series of five posts for a class at Luther Seminary this semester: "Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr. in Dialogue with Public Theology Today."