I’m grateful to The Chatham News + Record for its coverage of the Black Lives Matter billboard in Pittsboro. The owner of the land along the highway wished to fly a Confederate flag but not lease his property for this particular sign affirming Black lives.
I think about this controversy in light of a brouhaha in Briar Chapel, a residential community where I live in north Chatham. The Briar Chapel board of directors wishes to adopt a rule that limits permanent signs in residential yards to realtors and security systems.
I do not think it is a coincidence that this rule was advanced after a neighbor made Black Lives Matter signs available for widespread purchase.
To give the Briar Chapel board members the benefit of the doubt, they defended their actions “to promote and protect the character of the community.” By their own words, then, the signs that display our “character” read For Sale and Alarm.
I believe that a community’s value concerns other values.
To be transparent, I do say “Black lives matter” as part of my stand for anti-racism. But I am vehemently against the proposed signage restrictions in my neighborhood because I believe that the free expression of speech is a value that helps to create meaningful conversations.
The willingness to engage in dialogue is increasingly rare in our culture. Defending his decision to remove the Black Lives Matter billboard, the gentleman in Pittsboro claimed that BLM stood for “burn, loot and murder.”
The pushback against Black Lives Matter signs in my neighborhood is couched in more diplomatic terms. Some have argued that such a political statement focuses on our differences at the expense of what we hold in common. To again quote the Briar Chapel Board of Directors, the goal of the signage restrictions reflects “the overall intention for the community to be cohesive.”
“Cohesive” means “to join together,” and the Latin root was originally a medical term in reference to a procedure to heal the body, such as binding a wound. We can safely say that our body politic is hurting, even bleeding. For people of color dying in the streets, this is not a metaphor.
A body is not joined together by denying the differences of individual parts. Cohesion is the incorporation of those differences into a system of harmony and wholeness. Instead of silence and denial, a sign that makes known a moral position can be the first step toward a proactive conversation with respect and care.
Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore (not exactly a bleeding-heart liberal) characterized the sign of our times: “One of the great problems that we have in American life across the board is that we don’t ultimately believe that we’re going to be able to persuade one another of anything. And so, we assume all we can do is push one another into their categories and to speak about them rather than to them.”
Or we quietly retreat into our homes and pretend that everything is fine.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church and author of Gently Between the Words: Essays and Poems. He is currently working from home with his wife and three children.
