It’s been awhile…
At the beginning of 2020, I wrote a blog series entitled “We Are Not OK”, addressing the cloud of darkness and hatred that seemed to loom over our nation as we transitioned into this new decade. After Lent, I took a break because life was turned upside down by the Pandemic, in which I had to figure out how to shift my entire ministry online while simultaneously attempting in vain to help my kindergartner do school from home and continue my own doctoral work online. At the same time, we are in a season of transition as I am moving to a new church as of July 1. With all of that, regular blogging simply fell off the top of my priority list.
So why am I breaking this season of silence now? Because, friends, we are STILL NOT OK! We never were. Honestly, I’m tired of pretending we were. I am doing what I can to listen to my brothers and sisters of color and educate myself more deeply on the systemic / structural racism that is so deeply embedded throughout our nation’s history. I know this is only a small start, but I want to offer my personal confession of a particular instance of privilege that hit me hard this week.
As a white male with a comfortable life, I acknowledge that I have no place to speak to the gut-wrenching experiences of my brothers and sisters of color in our nation. When it comes to George Floyd I am inundated with two extremely contradictory narratives. One from people like right-wing activist Candace Owens who paint the man as a heinous criminal and another from sources like Christianity Today which present him as a “person of peace” who spent much of his life working to break the cycle of violence in Houston’s Third Ward. From these two accounts alone, it is hard to believe we are talking about the same person. Only those closest to him know the whole truth, but no family deserves to watch their loved one slandered on national media as they grieve and process their great loss, no matter what they may or may not have done.
Bottom line…
When it comes to issues of justice and a person’s humanity, it doesn’t matter whether they were a sinner or a saint. Spoiler Alert… we are all sinners and saints to some degree. The bigger problem is how our privilege as white people makes us so comfortable with social amnesia and willful ignorance when it comes to systemic racism. (I know I just triggered most of the white people I know by using words like privilege and racism, which many still believe to be a myth. I pray you will hear me out and that you will be intentional about educating yourself on the bigger issues of racial injustice in our nation. I recommend The Myth of Equality (Ken Wytsma) as one possible starting point. I have included a few other helpful resources below. Listen to your black friends, the ones you always bring up when you want to defend against racism. Ask about their honest experiences with systemic injustices throughout their lives. It’s not all about police brutality. That is only a more widely visible aspect of a much larger landscape of racial injustice).
Back to my main story…
This week I was doing some research on some of the platitudes that we as white people often give in crisis moments like this, things like “All Lives Matter” or being “colorblind,” for example. There are clear problems with this kind of thinking which I won’t detail here, but I encourage you to study and listen to some different perspectives on your own. In my research I came across a great TEDx Talk about the problem of colorblindness given by social psychologist Phil Mazzocco. At the beginning of his talk, he referenced the story of Tamir Rice, a 12-year old African American boy shot by police in Cleveland, Ohio, while playing in a public park on November 22, 2014. Yes, he had a toy gun, but honestly, at least for those of us who were boys, who among us didn’t play with toy guns that looked a whole lot more real than the ones they make today?
The point is this. I had forgotten about Tamir Rice.
That amnesia is part of the subtle and unnoticed privilege that I want to confront in myself and in our society. Black people don’t have the luxury of “forgetting” incidents like that. They live everyday worried for their kids’ safety not because they are afraid of their kids getting in trouble, but because their kids (of any age) might be misconstrued as a threat because they are black. I have personally known several black people who have had the experience of being pulled over, handcuffed, and forced to the ground at gunpoint while their cars were illegally searched without warrant, all because they ran a stop sign or because someone thought they were in too nice a neighborhood. This does not happen to a white person in a traffic stop.
When I realized how easy it was for me to forget about that 12 year old boy, my heart broke. I have thought long and hard about how I could overlook such a horrifying injustice and I realized that this is the way the system is designed. When people like George Floyd or Ahmad Arbery or Breonna Taylor or the hundreds of others show up on the news, white people act shocked, like these are one off incidents involving a few bad individuals. And then the news cycle moves onto something else and when the next name pops up, we treat it like another isolated incident. The problem is that racism is not about isolated incidents. It is not about how many black friends I have or how well I treat people of color personally. It is not about a few bad people that make the rest look bad. It is about a deep rooted culture in which we easily move past horrendous things that happen to people of color that we would never let slide if a white person were involved. Imagine the outrage if Tamir Rice had been a little white boy shot in the park by an officer. Imagine if George Floyd had been a white woman whose neck was crushed by a black police officer. We would never hear the end of it, no matter what crime they may or may not have committed. Being fired or even standing trial would be the least of their worries. They would have been lucky to get away from the scene with their lives.
This is not about George Floyd and whether he was a good or bad person. It’s not about Tamir Rice and how he might have been treated differently if he were white. It’s not about bad police officers and it is certainly not to discredit the countless good officers who are working hard to fight injustice themselves. It is about how easy it has become to view all of these as isolated instances and forget about the hundreds that came before. It is about the cultural amnesia that we are so easily sucked into because we don’t have to see it and feel the threat in our everyday lives.
Friends, until we start to see and experience the real pain around us, nothing will change. Scripture calls us to weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15), but I confess, I have not shed nearly enough tears with my brothers and sisters of color who face such agony and fear everyday, and I would dare say that none of us have.
Don’t let this just be another season of protests that ebbs and flows in and out of your news-feed until the next bad thing happens. Look around. Stop talking. Stop making excuses. Stop defending yourself and listen to those who are hurting. Hear their stories without interjecting your own. If it is more important for you to defend why you are not personally a racist than to listen to someone’s story who is suffering, ask yourself, why? What is stopping you from listening? Why are you afraid to hear their stories?
White people… people of faith… I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know how we solve this problem or even if it can be solved. But I know this. WE ARE STILL NOT OK!. And at the very least, it’s time to shut up and listen to our brothers and sisters of color. It’s time… no, it’s past time… to quit hiding behind our personal defenses and self-righteousness and stand with them in their grief. It’s time to deepen our relationships with people who look different and think different than us. It’s time to open up our news-feeds to sources that are not “approved” or “endorsed” by our favorite political candidates. Just because we don’t agree doesn’t make it “fake.” We have a lot to learn. We have a lot to repent of. And we have a lot of hard work ahead.
As a friend of mine said this week, if things are ever going to change, we are going to have to hurt for awhile. And so let us hurt together, side by side, with those who have been hurting far longer than we care to admit. Let us hear their stories. Let us create space for healing. And let us “fumble together in love.”
We all need to educate ourselves more on this. Here are a few resources I have found helpful just to get started. Watch and read with an open mind and an open heart.
