Insights from Reading the Bible with the Poor

Crystal L. Hall

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781506402789
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506402796
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Insights from Reading the Bible with the Poor provides a spirited introduction to methodologies and strategies for reading the Bible "from below"--from the back of what used to be church sanctuaries, from basements, from sidewalks. Drawing on the lineage of various methods of reading the Bible with the poor, the book invites poverty and biblical study into dialogue with real-world organizing to seek justice for those most often treated as "Other." The reading process occurs among the intersections of the "hermeneutical triangle" of Reality, the Bible, and Community.

This book is for anyone curious about how to use the Bible as a resource for liberation. It is for faith leaders and community organizers, as much as it is for biblical scholars, because it draws on experiences at the intersections of academia, the Church and communities of organized struggle. It is written with an eye toward praxis, as the author shares from her own experience with the hope that space will be created for others to reflect on their own contexts.

2

An Incinerator Comes to Naboth’s
Vineyard: 1 Kings 21:1–16

The stereotypes of Baltimore created by the dominant white culture in the US suggest a majority black city that is crime-filled, drug-infested, and to be avoided at all cost. For example, the HBO TV series The Wire (2002–2008) made Baltimore (in)famous by filming much of the series within the city proper, putting its most impoverished areas on display in high definition. The Wire portrays Baltimore as a city full of gang violence, plagued by an ineffectual police department, corrupt public officials, and a broken school system. In 2015 the national news media put Baltimore back in the spotlight during the uprising in response to the death of Freddie Gray, a young African American man, in police custody. Cable news networks played footage of a burning CVS store and street protests over and over again, contributing to an image of Baltimore as a chaotic, lawless city.

These mainstream media portrayals made it easy to assume, from an outsider’s perspective, that Baltimore was a bad apple, an exception to the rule of US American prosperity. They fell squarely within racist assumptions that poverty concentrated among black and brown peoples was a result of their moral failings and pathological tendencies, caught up in an endless cycle of poverty.^[1] Despite these assumptions, Baltimore was typical of many postindustrial cities, by no means an exception to the rule in terms of its political, economic, and sociocultural dynamics.

From the 1860s to the 1950s Baltimore’s industrial economy boomed alongside those of many US cities.^[2] After the Civil War Baltimore’s most important industries were shipbuilding, canning, and cotton mills. From the 1870s to the beginning of World War I, heavy industries such as copper and steel processing were important during the second wave of industrialization. The Bethlehem Steel plant, located southeast of what is now downtown Baltimore, the largest steel plant in the world, was known as the “Beast of the East.” In the 1950s Baltimore’s population began steadily declining through a combination of suburbanization, white flight, and racial discrimination. Many whites fled the city for the suburbs, supported by the incentivization of home ownership in the GI Bill, and in response to an influx of African Americans moving into the city.^[3] Through racist practices known as redlining, banks would only offer mortgage loans to African Americans in certain overcrowded, formerly white neighborhoods. The effects of Baltimore’s declining population were compounded, beginning in the 1970s, by deindustrialization.^[4] Corporations increasingly replaced unionized, family-sustaining factory jobs with precarious, low-wage service-sector jobs hostile to worker organizing. Under industrialization, profits were shared more equally between owners and workers—although by no means equitably^[5]—but deindustrialization fueled growing inequality. Alongside many cities in the United States, Baltimore’s poverty was the result of historical changes in a political and economic system that facilitated a few becoming increasingly rich while the majority struggled to make ends meet. It was not a result of perceived pathological or moral failings among communities of color.

One aspect of Baltimore’s poverty that has largely escaped notice is its environmental factors. For example, news coverage during the 2015 uprising reported on the high levels of lead poisoning among children in the poor neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester, where Freddie Gray grew up. “As populations and employment opportunities shrank in recent decades, poverty and neglect combined with older housing allowed lead paint poisoning to plague the city.”^[6] While not traditionally considered an environmental issue, exposure to lead is toxic in any amount, especially for young children,^[7] and was just one specific example within a larger pattern of environmental injustice in Baltimore. While there has been so much focus in the national media on the city’s violent crime, four times more people die every year from air pollution than homicide in Baltimore.^[8] In light of the historical and more recent trends outlined above, this chapter will focus on a campaign organized in response to Baltimore’s current plight, especially where poverty and the environment intersect, and the ways in which faith communities used the Bible as a resource in the struggle for clean air and a healthy environment.

The Curtis Bay neighborhood in South West Baltimore was ranked one of the most polluted zip codes in the US until 2008, when the only monitor for fine particulate matter was removed. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, fine particulate matter is a type of air pollution, “a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets. . . . Some particles, such as dust, dirt, soot, or smoke, are large or dark enough to be seen with the naked eye. Others are so small they can only be detected using an electron microscope.”^[9] Without a monitor there was no way to determine the actual levels of air pollution in the area, even though they were often visible to the naked eye in the form of the dust that settled on every available surface from cars to porches.

Curtis Bay’s air pollution was caused by the heavy industries that have operated there for centuries, often to the detriment of the community. In recent history, over a period of fifteen years from 1996 to 2011, the entire neighboring community of Fairfield was displaced to make way for heavy industry because the health of the community could no longer be guaranteed.^[10] While the types of industry in Curtis Bay have changed over the years, plants currently operating include a coal terminal, an animal rendering plant,^[11] chemical plants, hazardous waste sites, the country’s largest medical waste incinerator, and a host of other polluting industries, many of which operate in violation of the federal Clean Water and Clean Air Acts.^[12] The air pollution emitted from these plants has caused a range of public health problems from increased rates of asthma to heart and respiratory disease.^[13]

Despite the heavy environmental burden already placed on southwest Baltimore, in 2011 Maryland’s political leaders, including then Governor Martin O’Malley and Baltimore City mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, blessed legislation that elevated burning trash to a “tier one renewable energy source” in Maryland’s Renewable Energy Portfolio (RPS).^[14] An RPS is a type of regulation that requires a jurisdiction, such as a state or county, to gradually transition its energy production from nonrenewable sources such as fossil fuels to renewables like wind and solar. In theory, the RPS incentivized the use of clean, renewable energy, but in practice, according to the Environmental Integrity Project, “WTE [waste-to-energy] incinerators in Maryland typically emit more pollutants per hour of energy produced than Maryland’s largest coal-fired power plants.”^[15] Incineration was dirty energy that relied on the creation of trash when “zero waste” alternatives such as recycling, composting, and “waste recovery” of reusable materials were becoming increasingly available.

The collusion between Maryland’s political and economic elite to incentivize burning trash was a matter of public record. The same day the “Waste to Energy Incinerators as Tier One Renewable” bill was signed into law, Energy Answers, the company that would propose the construction of the nation’s largest trash-burning incinerator in Curtis Bay, made a $100,000 donation to the Democratic Governors’ Association, which at the time was headed by Governor O’Malley.^[16] Labeling burning trash a “tier one renewable” within the Maryland RPS encouraged projects like the proposed Curtis Bay incinerator. It showed little concern for communities that already shouldered a heavy environmental burden by creating the possibility that yet another polluting industry would put down roots in the area.

Within this context in Curtis Bay, students at Benjamin Franklin High School began meeting in the fall of 2012 as a committee of United Workers. United Workers, a human rights organization, was founded in 2002 in an abandoned fire station turned homeless shelter with a commitment to developing and uniting leaders to end poverty. While many might associate human rights with civil and political rights, such as the right to vote, United Workers focuses on the economic and social rights guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes the rights to work, housing, and healthcare.^[17] Its first major campaign for a living wage was organized by day laborers working at the iconic Camden Yards baseball stadium. After this initial victory in 2008, United Workers leaders moved on to another city landmark, the Inner Harbor, a downtown tourist district of shops and restaurants. The campaign there resulted in a major settlement in 2013 against the Walt Disney Corporation, the parent company of an ESPN Zone sports bar that closed without adequately warning its workers, in violation of federal law.

With these first victories focused primarily on workers’ rights, United Workers began to connect the issues of where people work to where they live, explicitly linking work with dignity to affordable housing and environmental justice. For example, how can a family find affordable housing without a living-wage job to pay the rent? Or how can a home fulfill one’s right to housing if it is located in an area with high levels of air pollution that endanger human health? Each of these campaigns, first for work with dignity, and then for housing and a healthy environment, has been fought with a vision toward what United Workers calls “Fair Development.”

Fair Development names the vast majority of Baltimore’s development as “Failed Development,” rejecting the dominant modus operandi when investors attempted to improve the city. United Workers’ own analysis pointed out that

during the last 40 years, city and state leaders have looked to economic development as the solution. Significant public resources have been used to transform old industrial areas into tourist sites, featuring restaurants, retail stores, and other forms of hospitality and entertainment. While this development produced some jobs, work in these sectors is low paying, without health insurance and opportunity for upward mobility, and hostile to worker organizing. Because the new housing has been targeted to the well-heeled, real estate values eventually will be pushed beyond the reach of city residents. Environmental burdens (toxins, waste, etc.) of development have fallen disproportionately on communities of color [and the poor].^[18]

This failed investment has largely taken place in Baltimore’s downtown tourist districts and has produced, as noted above, largely low-wage service-sector jobs. In contrast to the gleaming new shops, restaurants, and office buildings in neighborhoods like Harbor East and Canton in the core of the city, the neighborhoods that need improvement most on the East and West Sides of Baltimore have been ignored for decades through strategic disinvestment. The choice to invest only in certain areas has only deepened the divide between the wealthy and the rest, a divide that in Baltimore also occurs largely along racial lines. Based on the divisions these economic development models have produced over the last several decades, United Workers concluded that the standard models, while they have been profitable for wealthy investors, have not in fact “trickled down” to the communities that need them most and are still struggling to afford basic necessities.

In contrast to development driven largely by the interests of the city’s political and economic elite “from above,” Fair Development called for the large-scale investment of public resources into community-driven, community-controlled projects “from below.” Fair Development projects were focused in the neighborhoods most directly impacted by Failed Development. Fair Development was driven by the principles of universality, equity, transparency, participation, and accountability, as well as the human rights values of respect, dignity, and the sanctity of life.^[19] Any development slated to go forward in Baltimore was evaluated in light of these principles and values and underpinned commun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Insights from Reading the Bible with the Poor
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Series Foreword
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Ideological Groundings and Methodology
• An Incinerator Comes to Naboth’s Vineyard: 1 Kings 21:1–16
• An Empty Tomb and Empty Homes: Mark 16:1–8
• Facilitation and Methodology
• Epilogue: An Invitation
• Appendix: A Lenten Retreat Curriculum on Mark 16:1–8
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index