Anthony Ray Hinton

I’ll have more to say in time, but before too much time passes, I’d like to express my joy over having had the honor of introducing Anthony Ray Hinton in my capacity as the First Year Seminar Ambassador a few days ago. Our series continues. But for now, I’m sharing my introductory remarks for all who’ve requested them.

Good evening, all. 

I’m David Dark, associate professor of religion and the arts here at Belmont. I’m so grateful to be here in the thick of this lovely and thoughtful learning community. 

We’re here to learn. To learn by listening. And to bear moral witness to what we have each seen & heard and experienced up till now and especially now, right now, a sacred now in which we will attend to the testimony of our honored guest.

Before we introduce him, we’d like to offer some context. Freshmen at Belmont experience a course called First Year Seminar: Ways of Knowing. We consider together what it means to know (or claim to know) something. If you’re like me, you believe and suspect and feel intensely all kinds of things. This is the joy and difficulty of holding within our minds a swarm of opinions. If you’re like me, some of your opinions aren’t as well examined as others. 

In First Year Seminar, we undertake the essential and, to my mind, holy work of examining our opinions in light of incoming data across disciplines. We read and study together an anthology common to every section of the seminar in the hope of being people who don’t settle for or succumb to unexamined opinions. Unexamined opinions have a way of becoming unexamined decisions which have a way of becoming unexamined policies. To not slow down, check ourselves, or poke around to research whether or not what we’re saying, sharing, and getting worked up over is true is to be the target market, the easy prey, of disinformation culture. One of the voices in our anthology provocatively asserts that that life, the unexamined life, is not worth living.

First Year Seminarians are offered the more beautiful, just, and integrated path of an examined life. We read James Cone and Octavia Butler and Plato. We ask questions like this: Am I responsible for the lies I let others voice in my presence unchallenged? Mulling that one well means thinking hard about context, looking around the room, reading the room and hearing from people whose experience differs from our own. In First Year Seminar, we learn to read and listen to ourselves and others with care and curiosity.

This brings us to our honored guest and our theme. The theme is Transformative Justice. Transformative Justice is the alternative to retaliatory justice (most famously summed up in the phrase “An eye for an eye”). Retaliatory justice is based in the myth of restorative violence, the mad vision according to which violence, applied strategically, can heal and killing can bring wholeness, as if hurt and humiliation serve health and torture and trauma bring peace. I believe Jesus of Nazareth rejected the myth of restorative violence, grounded in fear, delusion, and anxiety, and offered, with his words, his righteous witness, and his very life, the imaginative, prophetic, artful alternative of transformative justice. 

All justice is relational. Transformative justice responds to conflict with candor and conscience, courage and curiosity. Injustice, after all, isn’t an accident. It’s a set-up. It’s orchestrated.  Our keynote speaker, Anthony Ray Hinton, speaks with authority, because he speaks from experience, as one horribly wronged by a cascade of lies, of knowingly false witnesses, of unexamined opinions backed by bars and armed force. He speaks as a courageous and movingly candid survivor of our state violence, an alive and signaling example of what’s wrong with our so-called criminal justice system, a profoundly inspiring model of what a genuinely examined life looks like, and an agent of hope among us. In his open-handed, good-humored and persistent intellectual hospitality under duress, he stands with Fannie Lou Hamer, Mandela, Gandhi, and Socrates, creating a space of inquiry for interlocutors and aggressors alike. At the heart of his method is a conviction he picked up from his mother that, with enough compassion, empathy, and imagination, some form of family can be made to exist anywhere. As Mr. Hinton put it, “My mother gave me enough love to feed the world.”

His jarringly thorough memoir, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life, Freedom, and Justice, is very good news for those invested in the dismantling of taxpayer-funded, white supremacist terror and the lived pursuit of transformative justice in the here and now. As a New York Times Bestseller, an Oprah’s Book Club Selection in 2018, and a winner of the 2019 Christopher Award, Mr. Hinton’s book is just one part of the tasks he’s undertaken as the Community Educator of the Equal Justice Initiative of Montgomery, Alabama. 

And better news, we get to pay heed as he honors us with his time and his witness now. Please welcome Anthony Ray Hinton.