
Category:
Poor People's Campaign
Rev. Jennifer Bailey is the founder of the Faith Matters Network, a new initiative that is building the power of people of faith to transform their social and economic system across the Southern US. She took part in the Poor People’s Campaign reconnaissance tour of the Gulf Coast in November 2014. These are some of her reflections.
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As the floodwaters receded, the national gaze on the region shifted. New Orleans became branded as a land of capitalist opportunity. Volunteer groups were replaced by ambitious contractors seizing the chance to replace destroyed low-income homes with housing catered to wealthy and middle-class newcomers. Public education was replaced by independent charter schools funded by equally ambitious education reformers looking to New Orleans as a chance to test new technologies and strategies with relatively little accountability. Those New Orleans natives that were able to gather the resources to return home found themselves unwitting participants in a grand experiment, which they had no say in designing.
It comes as little surprise then that as our delegation met with home-grown organizers across the Gulf Coast, we were greeted with caution and in some cases outright suspicion. On more than one occasion, we were challenged to examine the true motivations behind our trip and our long-term investment in working along the Gulf Coast. We were pushed and examined. We were tested and questioned. I would not have had it any other way. During my seminary days, one of the first concepts I learned as a black woman interested in the prophetic tradition of Christianity was to employ a “hermeneutic of suspicion” in my approach to the Christian traditions many unwittingly accept without critical engagement. Those of us whose identities place us on the margins of society do not have the luxury of blind acceptance. History has shown that unexamined religion can be a weapon of the powerful to oppress the vulnerable. Yet history also teaches us that faith can be a tool for liberation for those who test the truth claims of their faith traditions by examining if they can read the truth of their own experiences in the narrative.
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