I have been working over the past several years with the Anti-Racism Program of the Episcopal Church. One of our most popular exercises, prior to September 11^th, was a hypothetical terrorist attack. The premise was that your group is a special civil defense committee that has the task of picking six individuals from eleven persons to be granted shelter in order to survive an imminent terrorist attack. We usually give the groups working on this 15 minutes, and then ask each to report back their lists, and how they made their decision. The trick in the exercise is that insufficient information is given about the eleven individuals so that an unwary group will make assumptions based on stereotypes and prejudices to fill in the missing information.

For example, one person is a fifty-year old priest, another is a 20-year-old prostitute and a third is a Black militant with a gun. You will note the gender of each person is not identified and the information regarding one of the persons of color is suggestive. Needless to say, there are many learnings that come from this exercise relating to matters of race, gender and sexual orientation, especially if the primary criteria for survival is reproductive capacity. The problem is made more difficult given the final caution to the group that the future of the human race may depend on their decision.

Every now and then a group will challenge the premise and seek ways in which all eleven people can survive. Rarely does a group use the criteria of the most vulnerable being given preference first. For example, others in the list are an eleven -year old mentally retarded boy, and a twenty-five year old person with AIDS. The trick is to recognize that when we are put under pressure or subject to a crisis situation the tendency is to revert to our subjective and often repressed feelings and attitudes about people different from ourselves. It is also true that traumatic events such as 9/11 slow down our thought processes and push us in the direction of identifying the other as evil and ourselves as good, thereby allowing no room for a diversity of opinion or shades of gray.

Recently I had the opportunity to do a training for the Anti-Racism Committee of the Episcopal Diocese of New York as they were preparing for a training event for the 23 deans of that diocese. The first task was to debrief a group of people who had been directly affected by the events of September 11^th.

In the course of that debriefing, it was noted that several of the deans who were to participate in the upcoming training had been in Trinity Church (Wall Street) at "Ground Zero" at that time. We continued to discuss the appropriateness of even attempting an anti-racism training so close to such a traumatic event, and it became increasingly clear that the group saw this as an opportunity to go much deeper into the process. This emerged as a result of the real-life survival issues that they all had experienced. I then raised the question of whether or not they felt that the above-mentioned exercise would be of any practical use, given this context. To my surprise and wonder the group worked through that question with an integrity and clarity that I had not experienced in my six years of anti-racism training.

The upshot was that they decided to use the exercise. But they decided to modify it in the wake of the disaster — in terms of the actual experiences that people had had in regard to the role of race in the selection for and availability of support to persons of color and other vulnerable members of society. I later learned that this worked extraordinarily well.

I recently took my first trip on an airplane flying out of Logan Airport in Boston after 9/11. While this was some weeks removed from the immediate hysteria that surrounded matters of security at airports, it was certainly indicative of what is becoming "normal" for this new time. As I walked into Logan, not only did the long lines strike me (it was the Sunday evening of Thanksgiving weekend), but there was an aura that I had experienced before and could not immediately put my finger on.

Following a minute of reflection, it dawned on me that this was the way I had felt when I first entered Walpole State Prison in 1972, or the feeling I had in New Haven, Connecticut in 1969 when the 101^st Airborne Division was deployed in that city in full battle gear prior to the infamous May Day demonstration. Not only was the evidence of high security a physical reality, but the deeper sense of resignation, fear and repression mixed together in that peculiar aura of a police state. The trepidation that I felt about this trip was transformed into a profound sadness related to the prospect that this was our future.

It was, therefore, a minor thing to be (as I expected) searched three times, stopped twice, and had all of my possessions including my wallet thoroughly searched. The only irony was that my security agent was of Middle Eastern extraction. There was a wry, unspoken communication between us that relates to a fundamental truth about racism, and that it is related ultimately to who has the power. In this case, my agent was backed up by one tactical State policeman with an automatic weapon, and a National Guardsman with a larger, semi-automatic weapon. Thank God for my training in nonviolence and my experiences of being hassled by prison guards. It permitted me to endure with a smile.

The point of these stories, ultimately, is that in times of crisis and fear the fundamental fault lines of distrust and repression are exposed, and the human tendency to revert to our basic instincts and learnings about difference are brought to the fore. While it may be true that the spotlight of racial profiling may now be placed upon young Arab-looking men, it has not been removed from other people of color who "fit" the "profile" as defined by the powers that be. (I might add that my experience coming back to Boston from Atlanta, where the majority of the personnel of all types were of color, was remarkably different.) As was noted in the 1960’s — when the FBI was heavily into the infiltration, subversion and provocation of Black and anti-war organizations — the shorthand phrase begins to ring true again: "If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you at night." America’s amnesia with regard to the origin of this fundamental hysteria and fear may be our undoing as a people.

To be blunt, America’s subjective and repressed attitudes and memories borne out of the fear of slave rebellions and Indian uprisings provides one major leg in the table of repression. Another leg began with the Alien and Sedition Acts following the Revolutionary War, and was strengthened throughout the 19^th and early 20^th centuries by the fear of radical immigrants, labor organizing and the success of the Russian revolution.

It is a fact that the same J. Edgar Hoover who oversaw the repressive COINTELPRO subversion of anti-war and civil rights groups in the 60’s and early 70’s first came to prominence as the right-hand man of Attorney General Palmer in 1919. The excesses of the Palmer raids, directed toward dissidents of all stripes, was fueled by a rash of mail bombings at that time. This led to the formation of the ACLU and encouraged civil rights groups of the era to begin the task of criminalizing lynching. We forget that these two abuses of government power — its repressive use and its ignorance of human rights abuses — are part and parcel of the fear and hysteria that comes from a deeper recognition of the injustices that have been done in our name. The excuse every time has been that we were under attack or were being threatened by an attack.

The sad reality is that we are all now living out the profound truth of the exercise called "The Terrorist Attack." Based on insufficient information, old prejudices and stereotypes, and the power to use them in the service of the above-mentioned fear, it is being played out daily before our eyes. Whether it is the blatant abuse of the mentally ill or other vulnerable people in the cutbacks made necessary by the "decreased revenues to the State"; or the choices that the Congress and the President are making regarding which industries and workers get bailed out, and who gets protected by unemployment and healthcare; or who gets detained and ultimately brought before the military courts — the fundamental question to ask is: Are we to relive the excesses of J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Palmer?

It has not been lost on Black folks, in particular, that the cavalier manner in which the anthrax threat to postal workers was handled led to the tragic death of two persons of color, as contrasted with the rapid and thorough protection of members of Congress and their staff.

Finally, the justification for the racial profiling of young "Arab-looking" men stands on the shoulders of that which has been routinely done to young Black and Latino men. The final straw is the suggested use of military tribunals, which, like maximum security prisons, will put out of sight and mind the degree to which "we" will go to protect our "way of life."

It was Maya Angelou, in her poem at the first inauguration of President Clinton, who noted, "History with all of its unending pain can not be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again." Do we have the courage to face our history of racism and hysteria borne out of "our" fears of those who have been excluded, or will we succumb to them? Can we act on those lessons from our past and resist the mentality that is returning to a "my country, right or wrong" attitude? Are we doomed in the words of a Greek philosopher to live out his observation "that history is first repeated as tragedy, and then repeated as farce"?

It is up to Christians who understand Christ’s admonition "to be in the world and not of the world," and to speak out against the reflex of repression and revenge and stop the potential farce that is looming before us. The price for speaking out will be no less daunting than it was in 1918, 1942, 1952, or in 1972. The difference is that if we do not speak out, they will come for me in the morning, they will truly come for you at night. Let us ponder deeply our response to the so-called war on terrorism at home and abroad. And like the anti-racism committee in New York, let us have the courage to use this real-life terrorist attack to summon our better natures, acknowledge our fears, and face them with courage.

The Rev. Canon Edward W. Rodman is Professor of Pastoral Theology and Urban Ministry at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A long-time anti-racism consultant in the church, he also serves as Canon Missioner for the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. Ed can be reached by email at erodman@episdivschool.edu