2001 UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY MASTERS THESIS

I have been and still am greatly concerned with ethics and ethical practice. Given the milieu I surrounded myself with, seminary, my first inquires related to social, economic, and political practices that I feel go against the basic tenets of our (American, Christian) ideological foundation. I chose several religious philosophers who I engaged (one per) in a discussion about the ethics of 1) America built on the backs of slave labor, 2) capital punishment, 3) the continued prejudice against African Americans, 4) NAFTA and the ills it has allowed American companies against Mexico and the Mexican peoples. These are some of the visuals created for my masters thesis:

Rooted in the scriptural tradition of the Ancient Near East and fortified by slavery practices of Hellenistic culture, the enslavement of others played a crucial role in the blossoming Western economy beginning in the European monarchies and continuing in the new land. Howard Zinn estimates that 50 million Africans were enslaved and/or murdered in the service of building a Western European and American “civilized” economy.

Allen Lee Davis, July 8, 1999, Florida. Davis was the first inmate to be executed in Florida’s new electric chair. When hit with 2,300 volts of electricity, blood poured from Davis’ nose and mouth. Witnesses heard muffled screams from the death chamber. Blood poured onto the collar of Davis' white shirt and oozed onto his chest. By the time he was pronounced dead, the stain on Davis’ chest had grown to the size of a dinner plate and seeped through buckle holes on the leather chest strap holding him to the chair. Florida was roundly criticized for the bloodly executiion.

Though laws were passed in the late 1700’s giving African Americans the right to vote, most African Americans were deterred by White force from ever exercising that right. It wasn’t until 1968 that 60 percent of the African American population was registered to vote, the same percentage as White voters. Still, in 2000, as I was writing this paper, the right to vote was denied to many African Americans. The right to vote is the right of all U.S. citizens, thus the inability to vote denies African Americans the status of citizenship. Mob lynchings of African Americans have been going on for centuries in America. The last pictured here was in 1960. However, as i was finalizing this presentation, in the fall of 2000, a mob lynching of an African American teenager occured because he and a white girl were dating. The couple worked together at a MacDonalds. Both were seventeen years old.

In the late 1990's, the Discovery Channel aired an hour-long program entitled the "Price of Profit." It was about two towns on the border of the US and Mexico. All towns along the border were, and still are, being tragically impacted by pollution caused by U.S. companies who moved, after NAFTA, just a few hundred yards across the border to take advantage of Mexico’s lack of environmental regulations. The "Price of Profit" showed that many of the largely female workforce for the Kemet electronics factory in Matamoros, Mexico were gravely ill. This factory used toxic chemicals without proper disposal. contaminating the water supply on both sides of the Mexican/American border. Birth defects were common in the workers’ children. One particularly horrifying birth defect known as anencephaly, wherein babies are born virtually without brains, and the head is imbedded in the torso, was appearing with terrifying frequency, not only in the Kemet workers, but also in Brownsville, Texas just across the border. In the U.S. population as a whole, this defect has shown up maybe once every 5 to 10 years. In the tiny border town of Matamoros, anencephaly occurs three times in 36 hours.