I hated that I said it out loud. I hated that I felt compelled to say it at all.
I had been riding shotgun, while our 16-year-old daughter accrued more hours toward her driver’s license. She had slowed correctly. She had even completed the turn in a reasonable amount of space, but she had forgotten to user her turn signal. Nobody was behind us. Sometimes I don’t use my signal there on that rural road to our subdivision, either.
“You forgot your blinker. You don’t want to give an officer a reason to pull you over.”
We both knew what I meant, what didn’t have to be said. We’d both seen the videos of unarmed black motorists being killed by rogue policemen at stops that started with things like broken tail lights and failures to signal.
I was reminded of that moment this morning. In solidarity with those running 2.23 miles to honor the justice due Ahmaud Arbery, I hiked on some local mountain trails. I cried through the first two miles. My emotions didn’t calm enough to listen to anything but worship music until the 3.8-mile mark—and only then mostly because I forced the issue.
I asked Jesus to forgive me for being complicit or at least ambivalent. Culture programmed me to be a racist, and it’s been work not to follow that trajectory.
During my dawn hike, I remembered seeing a TV interview of an urban mother on a relative’s TV and being told that black people were lazy leeches. I remembered back to high school when a guest at our dining room table told us that the N word was okay to use because “there are black n*****s and white n*****s.” I remember one of the patriarchs of my family sitting on my living room couch a few summers ago and explaining that the slave trade was a net positive for “the blacks” (because it got them out of Africa).
I remembered friends saying they didn’t like President Trump’s tweets but they agreed with his policies—after that same President called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries.” I thought about the other side of the aisle’s bloodthirst for abortions, which disproportionately end the lives of black babies. (28% of black pregnancies end early with a scalpel.) I recalled the lyrics of rapper Derek Minor: “And since we talking about abortions, we ain’t put them clinics in our own hood. Somebody making a fortune.” I didn’t vote for either President Trump or his political foes, but that’s my America. Our America.
I’ve been a regular attendee of ten churches across seven states in my lifetime. To my knowledge, none of them held an African American in leadership and definitely not in the pulpit. I’ve attended more than 5,000 church services, and I probably don’t need all of the fingers on one hand to count the times the teacher or preacher was black. That’s still true, 56 years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. noted that “the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning.” This morning, my mind flickered back to when white women left my wife’s women’s ministry over a discussion of racial equality—in 2018. I smirked as I remembered her response: to launch a new series on the topic of race, to show video Bible studies taught by black women, to give a teacher of color on her in-house teaching team more opportunities to speak.
I remembered this past Sunday afternoon, and I wept. I had been playing in the creek for hours on my friends’ farm, often with their biological and adopted sons. My new buddies and I explored a creek that dumped into the one bordering their family’s property. When the cloud cover turned the air cold, we turned back in the direction of their momma. A handsome and hilarious little black boy who barely knew me asked, “Can I ride on your back?”
I hesitated.
I’ve bro-hugged my African American buddies dozens of times. We’ve laid hands on each other’s shoulders. We’ve seen each other in the intimate act of crying. Yet my automatic response wasn’t the same as if one of my white nephews had asked. It definitely wasn’t as immediate or proactive or gregarious. Because of generational sexual abuse in my family and because our daughter has only been in our house for a matter of months, I’ve not yet learned how to be physically affectionate with her. But here was a moment where I had the chance without any baggage to be affectionate with a child who deserved it, and I hesitated.
Acclaimed (biracial) author, Malcom Gladwell, has written about social science experiments in micro reactions. Specifically, he discussed a study in which researchers measured white adults’ reactions to racial differences before and after conditioning toward tolerance and acceptance. Observers discovered that decisions could change because of the pressure of expectations but that the first, split-second hesitation wasn’t trained out of their test subjects. We all know this on a macro level. We’ve lived for decades with our Februaries filled with the stories of black heroes and inventors. We lived eight years under the leadership of an African American President. We cheer for and debate about athletes & artists of color. Despite that, we still have neighbors hunting down an unsuspecting, innocent jogger, murdering him on camera, and boldly defending their heinous act. And we have a Facebook group of 69,900 people (formerly labeled “Christians Against Google”) defending their actions.
I’m sitting next to that same cold creek right now as I write this. Rain is ever so lightly rinsing my car like the tears that trickled on my cheeks this morning. Upstream from where I’m parked, I scooped up a little African American boy five afternoons ago. As my feet sank deeper into the sandy muck from both our weights, my little buddy climbed up onto my back. He wrapped his arms around my neck, his legs over my hips. As he started to slide, I reached back and cupped my hands under his tiny bottom. Awkwardly, almost stumbling and plunging us both into the mountain stream, I plodded along the uneven creek bed back to our friends and family.
That’s the way peace will be made—even if at a glacial pace. That’s the way society will united—or at least some seams repaired. That’s the way wrongs will become right: when we lean into our prejudice and choose what is right. Whether we ever change our culture, we can change our own hearts and maybe the heart of one new friend at a time. We can invite the kind of reconciliation Jesus offers to others and thus become an extension of his plan, his work, and his character. He’s not nervous about us leaving our comfort zone. In fact, he’ll probably reward it. The Prince of Peace is not intimidated by the assignment of heart change, and he invites us into his courage.
Even if at first we hesitate for a second or two, when we choose to do the right thing, we stop the inertia of evil, the progress of hate. It might be awkward or wobbly at first, but we can get where we’re supposed to go. And we can get there with new friends.
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Since writing this post two weeks ago, I’ve been made aware of further evidence of the white supremacy and racism in my heritage. I was shocked and saddened and angered by 2020 opinions including (1) slavery was a net positive for African Americans, (2) systemic racism is over, (3) white privilege no longer exists, and (4) Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest is worse than the police brutality it highlights—including the murder of George Floyd. I reference them here, only because they gave me the courage to finally share this post.
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Stock photo purchased from iStockPhoto.com
