As for Me and Mine, We Will Serve the LORD: an Interpretation of White Flight

 

AS FOR ME AND MINE, WE WILL SERVE THE LORD: AN INTERPRETATION OF WHITE FLIGHT

Written Fri. Aug. 28th, 2020; posted Fri. Oct. 2nd, 2020

 

"Tout par l'intestin, et l'intestin partout" -- not a French saying.

I looked up the Bible verse which says "As for me and mine, we will serve the LORD."  It is a part of Joshua 24:15.  But I did not remember the context correctly.  I thought it was a template or a permission for the man in a household to make religious decisions for his family.  But it is spoken by Joshua, who was both the war chief and the peace chief of the Israelites.  So it is actually a template or a permission for the king or ruler to make religious decisions for the whole nation.

So, as best I can figure, I will not be working from sources in this essay -- instead, I will be writing from the gut.

To reiterate, my gut told me that the Bible verse in question was a template or a permission for the man in a household to make religious decisions for his family.  But then, my gut suggested to me a new understanding of this Bible verse: that the verse in question was a template or a permission for the man in a house to make decisions for his family concerning who and what was a clear and present danger to the family.

What is that to you, or how does it concern anyone other than me?  Let me try to explain.

Before I looked up Joshua 24:15, I decided that everybody in the United States had made up their mind about Black riots and protests many years before the death of George Floyd.  But I could not understand the conservative white point of view.  Today, I decided to read the Wikipedia article "Watts riots."  I thought maybe it might help me understand, if all of the American people had in fact made up their minds about Black riots and protests years before the death of George Floyd, and no one had bothered to tell me the results of the collective making up of people's minds.

So I read the Wikipedia article about the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965, and I was im­pressed by the methodical way in which the article discussed the subject.  It was like an historian's account of a war.  It covered (1) the causes of the riots, (2) the course of the riots, and (3) the results of the riots.  Under results, it mentioned white flight.  If you are a lot younger than I am, I don't know if you know that term.  It is my generation's abbreviation for "white people moving to a place where they do not live next to black people."

I had not thought about white flight in a while.  It is just one of those things that is in the consciousness of Americans my age, even if we quit talking about it a while back.  I tried to think about white flight in a new way.  This is what I came up with.

What if Joshua 24:15 was a template or a permission for the man in a house to make decisions for his family concerning who and what was a clear and present danger to the family?  Well, that would mean that the white flight (which certainly took place) was the man's decision.

But was it really?  My gut says: No.  I am guessing that white flight was what the woman of the household wanted.

Here is the scenario which I reconstruct, and I speculate that this is how it was:  After the Watts riots, the white Angeleña wife said to her white Angeleño husband, Honey, I'm scared of the blacks next door and the blacks on the next block over.

So the man moved his family to the suburbs.

As for me and mine, we will move to the suburbs.

But riddle me this: who actually made the decision for their family concerning who and what was a clear and present danger to the family?  Was it the wife, or the husband? 

Frank Newton