When Your Sunday School Class Talks About Race

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Racism

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28 NRSV)

Today at my church we had our first adult Sunday School class since before Christmas. We turned from a rather feel good Advent study to a really tough, thorny topic: race and race relations. We’re exploring this topic through Rev Jim Wallis’s remarkable book “America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America.” The study is being led by a biracial couple that attends our church and has been active in the race discussion here in Northern Utah.

It started with a bang, as there was no shortage of people who wanted to talk. One of the most poignant moments came when Dennis, an African American man and one of the leaders of the study talked about the first time he encountered explicit racism. Dennis is originally from Houston, Texas. He described a job he had down there in high school, working with a trucking company. One day he and two coworkers, who were also black, decided to go get a bite to eat at a nearby restaurant while the truck was being loaded. The two coworkers wandered off, and Dennis waited until the loading was done, then he headed to the restaurant. Alone, he walked through the front door of the place and sat at the front counter.

A black man.
In Texas
In the early 60’s.

He quickly felt something was wrong as all the other patrons (who were white) were staring at him. Then one of the wait staff came up and told him “We don’t serve n*ggers here.” Dennis said flippantly, “that’s fine, I don’t eat n*ggers either!” That, needless to say, ratcheted up the tension. A couple of minutes later one of his coworkers came and grabbed him, and hauled him out back, where the black people ate. He asked Dennis if he was nuts and asked him if he didn’t understand the “way things are.” Shortly thereafter the cook came out and talked to him. The cook, who was also black, told him “Hey, I’ll fix you the best steak in my kitchen and only charge you for a hamburger as long as you EAT IT BACK HERE.”

Dennis joked that he kind of sold out his Rosa Parks moment right then and there, but he ate the best steaks in city all summer long! The joke cut the tension in the class a bit, but people were stunned. Really stunned.

You see, it’s fairly rare to encounter a lot of overt racism in Utah. There are very few African Americans here, and for the most part the religion of the area does pretty good job instilling in people at least a basic sense of human worth. Still, while that is tested more and more each year as the Latino population grows, it’s relatively rare to come across an overt racist who will throw out words like the N word and various slurs about Latinos, at least in public. So it was absolutely startling to hear about Dennis’ experience for many in the room.

Not for me though. I’ve had other experiences.

Back in the early 2000s one of my best friends, Jeff, and his wife Andrea were living in Memphis while Jeff went to Optometry School there. I went down to visit them one summer and they took me to see all the sights: Graceland, Beale Street, you name it. We went to BB King’s blues club, heard some legendary music and had a bit too much alcohol and BBQ, but we were young and had a designated driver.

The next day, a bit hungover, we went to the National Civil Rights Museum, which is housed in the Lorraine Motel, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. We bought our tickets and went in. After awhile we each started to have a distinct feeling of discomfort that had nothing to do with amount of alcohol consumed the night before. We went through the museum and finally up to the room where Dr. King died, which as been preserved. As we looked around we noticed that we were the only white faces in a crowded little room.

I can’t speak for Jeff and Andrea, but did I feel uncomfortable and maybe a bit guilty? You bet I did. But why should I? After all, the three of us were the epitome of liberal college students. We all had degrees and considered ourselves on the forefront a new multiethnic movement. Were were TOLERANT, damn it!

But we were like caged animals in a zoo.

Why? I struggled with that for years. In 2007 I moved to central Florida and found out why. One day I was walking our dog not far from our house and older black man came towards me on the same side of the street. I went to touch my ball cap to say hello to him and he crossed to other side of the street. I was stunned. (I’ve told that story on the blog before.)

I asked my father in law about it. I wanted to know if I had done something I shouldn’t have. I was perplexed and you bet I was thinking about that day at the Lorraine Motel. He explained to me that it was just the way older black people in the area had been brought up, to be distrustful of white people, and to cross to the other side of the street when they encountered a white person. Their experience in life was vastly different than my sheltered life in Utah.

I still didn’t quite get it though, but over time it came to me. I mean, it’s the 21st century, why should they still feel like that?

Then I started to pay attention to the way many white people behaved and spoke.

“I love black people, I think everybody should own one!”
“Why don’t they send more n*ggers into space? Because they already sent a monkey!”
“Look at those little n*gglets over there, playing in that filth.”
“I don’t know why we had the civil war (or War of Northern Aggression), them blacks were treated just fine and knew their place until the yankees showed up.”

You get the picture? If not, imagine a family walking into a restaurant for dinner but then leaving because there were too many black people in there.

So no, I was not stunned to hear Dennis’s story today.

But what does it say about our society that I can still hear those jokes in this country 50 years after Dennis had his experience? And guess what, I left Florida in 2008. I’d place good money on the thought that those jokes became even more prevalent in the last election cycle.

Many of us, myself included to an extent, are guilty of thinking that we largely moved on from race after the election of Barack Obama. Nothing is further from the truth. Much of the hate and anger that fueled the last election is a direct backlash to that thought. Many, MANY poor white Americans have always thought that it was ok to be poor, because at least they weren’t black. Better to be white trash than black. Now you have a black man as the President with a beautiful family and a successful career, and the hate machine fires up. Many on the right latched onto that idea and figured (correctly) that it could help them get back into power. However, now the genie is out of the bottle and who knows where we go from here.

I look forward to more discussion in this class, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on the blog about it. However I hope everyone will pray that God gives us strength to overcome a lot of the nastiness going on right now. Don’t just do that though. Take a look at yourself. Look at your own experiences with race, and think about how you use those experiences to start making the world around YOU a better place.

 

Reconciliation Without Repentance

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Church, Galatians, History, Issues, Racism, Social Justice

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28 NIV)

I need to make a confession to begin this post. I’m white. I’m Joe White Dude. I like all those stereotypical things that us white bread types like: Starbucks, wine, sea salt, Moleskine notebooks, and ugly sweaters. Yep, I’m about as white as they come. I’m so white I have a “driver’s tan.” I’m white, and I’ve screwed up, bad. If you’re reading this and you’re white, you probably have too.

How have we screwed up? Look around. We live in a country that is marred by racism, violence, and anger. Our history is chuck full of overt racism and yes, even genocide. If that’s not bad enough, many, if not most, of the societal systems and institutions we have set up are inherently racist.  If you want to dispute that, I can’t help you. Look at the criminal justice system. Look at who is sitting in jail. Look at what the history books in schools teach about Native Americans, slavery, Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, and Jim Crow. Look at the schools themselves, even though we have “integrated” public schools, in many areas of the country the under-funded public school system is often the home of minorities while the white kids go to “private academies” or “charter schools.” Look at our churches. Martin Luther King Jr once said that the 11 AM worship hour was the most “segregated hour in America.” He wasn’t wrong then and he’s not wrong now. I thought about that a little bit, and I thought “You know, I think my church is pretty diverse!” Then I thought back to when I preached a few weeks ago and I thought about the faces I saw in the full sanctuary at the 9 AM service. A couple of black people, maybe one person of Hispanic descent, a person from India, and a couple of gay people. Everybody else in our fairly large sanctuary was white and straight. It made me check myself a little bit.

Yeah, we’ve kind of screwed up. We’re not as diverse as we tend to think we are. You thought that after the election of President Obama that we were entering a “post racial society?” Uh, well, you might want to rethink that, after all, it’s the year 2016 and we still have a pro sports team named “The Redskins.”. But man, it’s easy for us white people to just sit back and dismiss all of what I’ve just said by trotting out many covertly and overtly racist arguments. “Well, if they just worked a little harder.” “Well, if they didn’t try to just depend on the government and welfare.” “All of that happened so long ago, they need to rise above it.” “Don’t they know that #AllLivesMatter?”

I wretch just typing those things here on my screen, but the plain fact of the matter is that you can watch a Trump rally, pretty much any newscast, or hit up social media and see those and other arguments playing out over and over again everyday. These are symptoms of a major issue in our society: We still don’t “get it.” While I’d hazard a guess that most people who read this blog don’t entertain overtly racist thoughts or ideas, we still don’t get it because as much as we try to empathize, we can’t put on black skin or brown skin and experience what they do. Never in my life has anyone looked at me sideways, refused to serve me, or made derogatory comments to me because of the color of my skin. There’s no pro sports team called “The Honkies” or “The Whiteys”

So what do we do about it? If you’re like me, and you’re like an awful lot of good people in this country, you’ve recognized that the status quo is unacceptable and things need to change, but how do we go about that? There are many pitfalls for us to fall into here, and we tend to stumble into them right and left. It’s not that we don’t mean well, it’s that we just don’t understand. Many churches, especially many mainline protestant churches that have a quality record for supporting civil rights are trying to reach out, but as Robert P. Jones, author of the book “The End of White Christian America,” points out, many of these efforts have met with limited success at best.

Why is that? I think there’s three reasons that we can start off with.

First, I think it’s because we have a hard time sitting still and LISTENING. For many of us our hearts are in the right place, but we perceive the injustice and just immediately jump into a flurry of action without learning about the injustice that has been done. Look at it like this: a friend of yours gets shot and you get upset, but instead of treating your friend’s wounds you get up and go after the person who shot him while leaving him bleeding to death in the corner. Yes, we should seek justice, but we must have healing too. We must seek to understand as much as we can, and that starts by LISTENING to people tell their stories and seeking what is important to them.

Second, we have to be really careful that we don’t encourage more racism by acting like it “It’s ok, we white people have caught on now. You just sit there and do your thing while we try to fix this.” That’s condescending. Again, our hearts may be in the right place, but we run the risk of making all of this about us instead of them if we’re not careful. So many of us think that we need to advocate “for” people when what we need to be doing is advocating “with” them. In other words, if we’re all on the reconciliation football team, we shouldn’t always insist that the quarterback and leader of the team be a white person.

Third, and perhaps more importantly, we can’t just jump straight to reconciliation without repentance and perhaps even penance. This is a big one that Robert P. Jones points out in his book. It’s kind of like knowing that you’ve really hurt a good friend, but you just try to patch it up and gloss over it by jumping right to repairing the relationship without acknowledging your culpability.

So what do we white people have to acknowledge, repent of, and maybe even do penance for? Here’s just a few things:

–The theft of land from American Tribal Peoples
–The purposeful genocide of American Tribal Peoples
–The extermination of the cultures of American Tribal Peoples
–The continued poverty and poor living conditions on Native Reservations
–Slavery
–Ignorance of slavery and the consequences of slavery
–Jim Crow as he existed previously

–Jim Crow as he exists today

Seems like a tall order, doesn’t it?

In his book, Jones believes, and I agree with him, that the church can have a huge role to play here. No other social institution is as well positioned to help deal with these issues as the church. If we jettison our ill-advised quest for political power then perhaps we can truly take up the mantle of Jesus, listen to others, and work with people of all races and creeds to stamp out these things and make this a better place for everyone.

I’m thrilled to hear that over the coming weeks and months my church is going to try to take some concrete steps to begin repentance and reconciliation in our community.  I’m a little nervous because there are all those pitfalls we talked about, but I’m optimistic. We’re purposefully seeking out black voices and leaders to tell their stories. These ideas are in the infant stages, but I pray that Christ brings them to fruit.

For the rest of us, see what maybe you can start in your churches, even if it’s having someone come speak or doing a pulpit exchange where a minister of a different race comes to speak at your church once in awhile. Maybe we could take a Sunday and go to a different church.  Last year my family went to my sister’s church just outside of Washington DC, and it was great. I was surrounded by people of different ethnic backgrounds and races and I loved it! The style of worship wasn’t what I am accustomed to, but I really felt like yes, I was sitting in a little mini model of God’s world and that yes, these were my brothers and sisters, as Paul says in the verse above.

If you have a story to tell about these things, I’d love to hear it, and maybe post it here on the blog or point to another forum where you might be more comfortable telling your story. Only through interaction can we seek to understand.

Dear God, give us the strength, grace, and love, to work together to face these problems head on.

We Have Forgotten Our History.

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Gospel of Mark, History, Issues, Racism, Violence

And those who passed by derided him, wagging their heads and saying, “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!” So also the chief priests with the scribes mocked him to one another, saying, “He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.” Those who were crucified with him also reviled him. (Mark 15: 29-32 ESV)

It’s an unfortunate fact of life in our country that this specter of African Americans being killed by law enforcement has raised it’s ugly head again. It’s also unfortunate that before a writer can go into a post like this he has to make a disclaimer: No, I don’t condone violence against or the killing of police officers in response to these incidents. No sane person condones that. However, there are many people out there who will tell you that you have to pick one side or the other. That is a lie straight from the Accuser, and anyone who tells you that is just promoting a sideways agenda.

But I’ve been disturbed by other things I’ve read on social media and real world discussions that I’ve had and witnessed. Many people, and by this I mean privileged white people, just don’t seem to understand why so many black people in our country are so distrustful of authority and law enforcement. It’s almost like for a lot of folks, the election of Barack Obama was the signal that racism is over in our country and we don’t have to worry about it, so then they view the concerns raised by the African American community and unfounded and unwarranted.

Well, it’s obvious that racism hasn’t gone away. Just take a gander at Twitter, Facebook, and 2016 election coverage and you’ll see it plain as day. After all, tonight a United States Congressman went full on White Supremacist on  national TV. It’s getting harder and harder to tell where the politicians end and Kluckers begin.

But even more than that, the history of the United States has been savage to people of African descent pretty much forever. We have largely either forgotten that history or swept it under the rug so we don’t have to see it. We look at slavery as something that happened so long ago, but yet when I lived in Florida members of my ex-wife’s extended family would often crack the joke: “I love n*gg*rs, I think everybody should own one!”

Let that sink in for a minute. Those kinds of jokes are not rare in that part of the country.

But slavery and racial injustice are not just artifacts of the distant past. This has been brought home to me this week as I’ve read Shane Claiborne’s book “Executing Grace” with passages of James Cone’s “The Cross and the Lynching Tree.” The photo I posted above was taken in 1920 at the lynching of a black man in Texas. Look at the white people gathered around posing for photos. No, really, scroll back to the top of the page and LOOK AT IT. Look at the little kids there. LOOK AT IT. This was less than 100 years ago in the United States of America. According to Claiborne, entire towns would sometimes show up to watch lynchings and school would sometimes be dismissed so the kids could go too. They would take photos on the spot and make postcards of people posing with the dead body. In today’s terms it would be like going to an execution and busting out your phone for a selfie. They sold refreshments for heaven’s sake!

Well that was 1920. Really? According to Claiborne, recent studies have shown that there were over 3,959 documented lynchings of African Americans between 1877 and 1950. Those are just the ones we know about. In 2014 the body of a young black man was found hanging from a tree in North Carolina on the anniversary of the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi. He had been dating a white woman.

Next, let me relate to you the story of Mary Turner. I hadn’t heard this story until I read Claiborne’s book, and this afternoon I studied it some online. It is horrifying. In short, I believe it is the most evil thing I have ever read. A warning, the information I’m going to relate is extremely graphic and disturbing. I’m not going to sanitize it. However, I dare you to read it and still wonder why African Americans are afraid in this current climate.

According to Claiborne, and other information I read, in March 1918 a mob in Valdosta, Georgia, went out looking for a particular black man to lynch. This man was suspected of killing his white boss. They couldn’t find him, so they went and got another black man, Hayes Turner, and lynched him instead. Turner’s wife, Mary, protested her husband’s murder and demonstrated with the local sheriff to seek justice. The sheriff arrested her and handed her over to the mob. She was eight months pregnant at the time. The mob hung her upside down from her ankles, poured gasoline on her, and burned her alive. While this was happening, a white man walked up, cut her stomach open, and dropped her unborn child onto the ground. The child cried while the crowd stomped it to death. After this was all over Turner’s body was riddled with bullets. This all took place in front of a spectator crowd that included women and kids. No one was ever charged in this heinous crime.

Yeah, that sounds like even a little too much for Game of Thrones, doesn’t it? And the sad part is, those kinds of evil torture and killing were not all that rare. So do you really have to ask why our African American brothers and sisters are so scared and so distrustful? There are many people alive who remember all this kind of stuff. Do you really have to ask why there needs to be a #BlackLivesMatter movement? If you do, you’re kind of daft. For most of American history black lives haven’t mattered. For somebody like me, a middle class white guy, that kind of horror, that kind of pure fear is impossible to imagine, but I try. I try to understand what my African American friends and neighbors deal with, but I never will be able to appreciate it fully, and neither will you if you’re in shoes and skin like mine. The answer to this dilemma is not to dismiss these concerns by tossing out a platitude like “All Lives Matter,” it’s to sit, listen to, and advocate for these people.

I opened this entry with words from the Gospel of Mark. Christ on the cross has long been a powerful image for the African-American community. In many respects, Jesus was a lynchee as well, a victim of mob “justice.” The people who have suffered America’s racist history have continually looked to Him as one who identifies with their suffering. As James Cone and Shane Claiborne suggest, that gives the crucified Messiah, one hung on a tree, a whole new dimension for people who have suffered that kind of hate and anger.

What can it do for you? What kind of dimension can that add to your life. My prayer is that instead of continuously judging and dismissing these people we can come alongside them and help rid our nation of this scourge of racism, violence, and fear.

It’s a tall order, but nothing is too tall of an order for the Crucified and Risen One, and those who choose to follow His Way.

Justice and Our Shared History

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History, Issues, Racism, Social Justice

There’s been a lot of talk in the last few days about “justice.” Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good thing.  However, sometimes I wonder about the scope of justice that we want to see and who we think deserves “justice.”

Over the last year talk of justice has been spurred by the death of various African-American men at the hands our nation’s police. No question these victims, including the latest, Freddie Gray, deserve justice.

But I wonder…..has “Justice” just been turned into another cable news soundbite or social media buzzword? Hashtag campaigns on Twitter and Facebook aren’t going to bring justice to anyone. The idea that throwing out a hashtag or a Martin Luther King Jr. quote on social media is going to “raise awareness” is insane.  At best, people are preaching to the choir, at worst it raises the possibility that we are reducing complex societal issues to a minor abrasion that can be treated by lobbing a quote or two and shouting down someone who doesn’t agree with you.

It’s not going to work, yet a lot of people, some of whom I respect very much, seem to think that this is the ticket.  We go on Twitter or Facebook during times of great upheaval, drop an MLK quote, get into a couple of arguments, and we think we’re good. I wonder how many of us translate our “passion” on social media into actual action: going out into the world and seeking to make a difference.  Not enough of us, not near enough of us.

There’s no way that 140 characters can address these issues.  These issues have been around as long as our country has, and even before.  These things didn’t begin with Michael Brown, Eric Garner, or Freddie Gray, but we find that these causes are ones we can get behind, at least on Twitter.  I wonder if we’d be as comfortable talking about justice for other folks though, especially when giving that justice might inconvenience us more than stopping to drop a tweet or two.

Let me drop a quote on you that you probably haven’t seen on Twitter:

The United States of America is not rich and powerful because of God’s blessing. We are rich and powerful because we are systemically racist and inherently unjust.

Native peoples know it. African Americans know it. Other colonized nations and peoples around the world know it. In fact, much of the international community knows it.

But most Americans don’t.

This quote is by a man named Mark Charles, the son of an American woman and a Navajo man.  Mr. Charles lives on the Navajo reservation and advocates for his people. His blog is great and highlights many of the issues inherent in our shared history.

That’s right, our shared history. Long before Ferguson, or even Martin Luther King Junior, the United States was not only importing black slaves from Africa, but we were intentionally committing genocide on millions of people of the Tribal Nations of America. As Charles points out, 30 lines below where it says “All men are create equal,” the Declaration of Independence, supposedly one of the greatest liberating documents ever written, refers to Native Americans as “merciless Indian savages.”

That should be a gut check for each and every one of us.

When I was in school 20 or so years ago, history teachers taught this as “Manifest Destiny.”  God had given this land to us that we might possess it and subdue it from coast to coast.  It rings similar to the genocidal accounts in the Old Testament.  Today, local school boards and various states ban the teaching of this genocide at all because it is viewed as “unpatriotic” and against “American Exceptionalism.”

Which brings us to Mark Charles’ point.  Many Americans don’t even know this happened.  Many that do brush it under the rug as we hit up social media for our cause of the day.

The descendants of these people still live on reservations, often in extreme poverty. When was the last time anybody tweeted about that?  Apparently it’s quite en vogue to talk about white privilege when it comes to the plight of African Americans, but nobody wants to talk about it when you look at Native Americans, who have been shoved to the side as we stole their land and destroyed their cultures.

So what’s my point?  My point is that people today seem to think that weighing in on Twitter is actually contributing to justice.  However, we don’t see that these issues ask many questions.  We might be fine with these questions when it’s about a young man who died in a city across the country, but I don’t think these questions are as comfortable when we begin to talk about our country’s history and the systemic racism that our ancestors participated in, and that I think we still do today in some regards.

Understanding and justice can only start to be achieved when we, as descendants of colonizers, start to confront our past and our shared history with those who are descended from the colonized.  It’s uncomfortable, but it’s the truth.  By telling our stories to one another and sharing each others pain, then maybe that can be the first step toward justice, change, and reconciliation. If we can’t do that, I see many more burning buildings and much more extreme poverty in our future.  All the twitter angst in the world won’t change that.

I’ll give Mark Charles the last word:

Historically, our country has a built-in problem with race. But I do not think race is our primary problem. Today, not only are we dealing with the historical trauma of African Americans and Native peoples, but we also have a deeply traumatized white America. The path of healing and the road towards reconciliation will not begin with new laws, or even with an amendment to our dehumanizing Constitution. Instead, it must start with the telling of the truth and an accurate portrayal of our history.

If we want real community in this country, we must begin with creating a common memory.

You can check out his blog here.