A man pulled out his beach chair and umbrella and sat down to enjoy the view in front of him. A turquoise blue ocean, framed by palm trees, lay before him as far as his eyes could see. He pulled his sunglasses onto his face and took a sip out of a straw stuck into a coconut and smacked his lips in satisfaction at the taste of the milk. He gave a contented sigh of happiness at his lot in life.
He was disturbed from his reverie by the arrival of another man.
“Why are you still here?” the visitor said. “I told you, this is no place for you to live. This place is deadly.”
The man rolled his eyes at his visitor and grumbled. “Don’t start rambling on and on about the past. The past is gone and done. I’m not responsible for the decisions of people who lived before me. Now we are in the present and, right now, this place is beautiful and has everything I want in a home. I’m not going to change anything.”
The visitor hung his head and left the man to enjoy his idyllic beach. The man happily stayed in his place on the Bikini Atoll, the testing site for the detonation of 23 atomic blasts that left the water and soil and animals poisoned for generations. The man took another sip of his cesium-contaminated coconut and closed his eyes to take a nap.
………
Do you know what you see if you visit the location where the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg was fought? A lovely field. There are trees and flowers and tall grasses. It doesn’t look like anything special. Do you know what makes it important? Cultural memory. A group of people attach symbolic historical and cultural importance to the location.
If a different group of people moved into the area and decided it was a good location for a parking structure, what would stop them? Without knowledge of the history, the culture, and the symbolism attached, it’s only a field.
How many times do I walk through a field, a neighborhood, a city park and miss the symbolism attached to that location because I am an outsider to the battles fought and the identities forged there? It’s only when I start digging that I find out what layers of meaning are buried deep in the soils of history or which locations are etymologically haunted by those who have walked there in the past.
I’ve been on a long journey of excavating my own worldview and learning about what others see when we look at the same field. It is not an easy journey, nor is it a complete one. It’s a messy work-in-progress that I don’t think will ever fully be complete.
Back in 2012, I accidentally attended a protest in Indianapolis. Crowds of mourners donned hoodies and carried signs in solemn remembrance of the death of Trayvon Martin. It was a somber affair and filled with layers of symbols, cultural memory, and shared griefs that I could only hope to scratch the surface on. From the vantage point on which they stood, their eyes saw a field scattered waist deep with lives lost through unrestricted violence. They keep a record of names, places-memories of tragedies and loss that are too often forgotten or erased from the cultural memories of those looking upon the same field from a different angle.
I’ve spent the last few days
mulling over the emotions the Ahmaud Arbery tragedy have elicited for me. What stands out to me the most are the
reactions people have on social media and in commentary around articles
posted. “Black people kill black people
all the time”….or “white people get killed by shooters too”….or “the shooters
thought they were protecting their community.”
What is being said (or hinted at) is still the same:
This wasn’t about race.
I am not here to debate the details
of this particular case or to prove/disprove if it was racially-motivated. However, I can’t help but pause and wonder what
evidence would prove that race played a factor?
How does one prove that an action is racially-motivated? Especially
in light of the reality that our views of race tend to mainly be unconscious (or
a history of lynchings that were merely “punishments for social transgressions and not racially-motivated”).
They weren’t racist.
This is another thing I read a
lot. The shooters weren’t racist people
therefore their actions weren’t racist either.
It’s a common sentiment I’ve read lately. People proudly post, “I’m not racist” and
share their own journeys with racial identity.
I appreciate the sentiment. I
mean, compared with the guys tatted up with swastikas and leading white
supremacy groups that my husband sees in the jail, I guess it could be
worse.
But I think the sentiment fails to
recognize one important fact: Everyone
in the U.S. is racist.
Yes. You heard me.
Everyone. Black and white. Brown or blue. We are all part of the same flawed historical context. It impacts us in different ways, but it still impacts us all.
The construction
of race in the U.S. precedes the Declaration of Independence by over a century. Ideals of a racial hierarchy are older than
ideals of democracy and freedom. It’s so
ingrained in our history, our laws, our values that we can’t even see it’s
there. It’s more integrally American
than the Bill of Rights. If you were born in or grew up in the U.S., you have been immersed in a cultural context that has a racial hierarchy as one of its cornerstones and defining elements. Consciously or unconsciously, we know "our place" and the "places of others" within the hierarchy and this impacts how we see ourselves and others, whether we admit to it or not. This classification by race is not global and is unique to polities with a history of slavery.
Soon-Chan Rah writes in The Next Evangelicalism that “racism is America’s original and most deeply rooted sin.” From the petri dish of the American colonies, the construction of race grew and evolved until it contagiously spread on a global scale with more evangelical fervor and long-lasting repercussions than even our experiment with democracy.
The only way to actually bring
reconciliation and change is by recognizing both the shared heritage of and the evil
of the concept of race. Pretending it’s
not there and maintaining taboos about speaking about it won’t fix it.
Practically, on an individual
level, unless you can list off all the ways race has impacted your worldview,
your family line, the history of “your people,” and the ways you have been
(intentionally and unintentionally) caught into the ideals of a racial hierarchy,
then you are captive to the lies inherent in racial ideology. Racial and ethnic identity have got to be
redeemed by Christ and freed from lies just as much as every other part of our
identity and without bringing it before the cross, it hasn’t been brought under
Christ’s authority.
Wait-the only way to stop being racist is to admit you are racist? Ummm, yeah. You can’t cure cancer until you first
diagnose it and then seek the proper treatment.
"Wounded people wound other
people." Even hidden wounds and hidden
unforgiveness can have repercussions for generations. Both those who have oppressed and those who
are oppressors need repentance and to forgive and ask for forgiveness. The Irish, who experienced such blatant
racism as immigrants, then were outspoken in their attempts to disallow Chinese immigration. African Americans can be
blatant in their racism towards Africans.
And “white” people of European descent have been killed in retributive,
racially motivated violence for the sin of their skin color as well.
Innocence does not come from skin
color and a history of oppression. One
is not exempt from racist thoughts or attitudes by having experienced
racism. One is not innately free of
prejudice. If you read this and say, “I
am not prejudiced,” my answer is, “no, you have let your prejudice influence
your actions freely and without you knowing it’s even there.”
Until we all can sit down and excavate our own backgrounds, talk about
what we all see when we look at that green, grassy field, and recognize the
ways our history is still poisoning our coconuts, we won’t get anywhere.
There was a time in my life when I
never thought about race. Now it’s a
weekly, if not daily, topic of conversation.
I could go into an extended history lesson on this. I could give facts, figures, and
statistics. I could speak about research
I have personally conducted around race.
I could give personal anecdotes and first-hand experiences I have
witnessed. Do you know what I’ve
found? It’s not enough to prove to some
people that racism exists and is still a problem. There’s always a way around
it. The
data is skewed, the population sampling inaccurate, the researcher was
biased. That person didn’t mean it. They had a bad day. They were not in their right mind. It must have been a misinterpretation. You don't have authority to speak on this.
These still share the same common
theme: racism isn’t a problem anymore.
It’s really hard to prove
something exists that “doesn’t exist.” “That’s in our past,” they
say. As long as we believe it’s only “in our past,”
I guarantee you, it will continue to be in our future too.
In the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis writes, “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.”
I find this to be equally true in
conversations people hold on race in the U.S.
On the one hand, some argue racism is a thing of the past, no longer
relevant to modern conversations and they decry all others who use the
irrelevant “race card”. On the other
hand, there are those who see racism in every word and deed, every action and
mis-action and it holds them captive in fear and bitterness. Both are just as equally right as they are wrong and both can be as equally as damaging to real healing until redeemed, forgiven, and forced to kneel to Truth.
People like to remind me that
things are better now than they used to be.
Thank the Lord, they are. I will admit, I am overjoyed that not only is
my marriage currently
legal in all fifty states. I will
neither lose my citizenship, my state of residence, nor my freedom through my
marriage. My children are no longer considered illegal
and classified as “abominable mixture and
spurious issue” who will be taken from me and raised by the church, sold as
slaves, or forcefully sterilized.
That is definitely improvement and I will not ever take it for granted or cease
being thankful for how things have changed.
However, a partial recession of
cancer is different from a full recovery and I want to see my children and
their children and their children be able to say: Look at
how things have changed. I’m so glad I live when I do. I’m thankful for the battles my ancestors
fought on my behalf.
The construction of race, like the
testing of atomic bombs in the Bikini Atoll, has seeped into our national soil
and poisoned our water. Before we can
seek to cleanse our land and heal our brokenness, we first have to honestly
face the ways our past impacts our present (even if we can’t see it or recognize
it now). We also have to recognize how
two people can look at the field of Gettysburg and see completely different
pictures. One sees a field of
grass. Another sees a field of fallen
soldiers.
It’s both.
…….
“We can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not
hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have
consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will
little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what
they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It
is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us”.
—Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg Address
For more on this, check out the articles our mighty ministry team compiled last year: here and here...and a side note I won't go more into here-I think ethnicity is a much healthier, more sound concept to work with than the hopelessly flawed, intrinsically evil concept of race.
One more article I came across that I found useful is on the concept of microagression here.
