Reflections on Racism, Protests, and Moving Forward

I sat on the porch with Elaine last night and listened to the sirens, the flash bombs, an occasional gunshot, and watched the helicopters circling downtown. I had spent the day reading perspectives on these protests from many of my fellow white Christians strongly implying, once again, that blacks in America aren’t responding appropriately. While I feel the need to add my thoughts here, I’m not sure where to begin, so I contacted a couple of friends and asked if I could share their reflections on the mess we continue to find ourselves in.

The first comes from a fraternity brother, Tim, who leans a bit conservative for my taste, but he’s thoughtful and a regular go-to for my attempts at grasping how the other side thinks. And he’s super funny. He posted this on May 28, 2020:

“I know exactly zero people have been waiting to see what I have to say about the death of George Floyd, but I gotta get some stuff off my chest…read if you want, skip it if you want…we are good either way. Just some thoughts:

You’d never see Bernie Madoff or Martin Shkrelli in handcuffs being choked to death by a cop’s knee, but George Floyd pays for a bad check with his life. Hell, I can’t imagine a scenario where my 51 year old white neck is under that knee for a similar crime. There is a wealth privilege and white privilege in this country you have to be willfully blind to not see. It is illustrated in the extreme in situations like this, but it manifests in a thousand other ways – big and small.

I thought systemic racism and white privilege were overblown for years. I had some people of color who loved me enough to tell me to shut up and listen, and I got to hear their stories. I urge you to do the same if you are fighting the instinct to tell me how wrong I am. I worry about my 18-year old son all the time, because he’s in that magical, ridiculous age when kids think they are immortal…but I never worry about him being the victim of violence by the police or anyone else because of his skin color…even when he’s in a hoodie.

It is a peripheral note, but if you want to say racism is overblown, or you feel the need to rationalize, do a little research into the modern-day slavery of our prison system as well as the ridiculously skewed sentencing patterns between blacks and any other race. It has gotten better under the current administration (yes, I am shocked too), but it is absurd.

I see lots of my FB friends with posts condemning the rioting and looting. I’m not going to directly defend that, but I will say I get the rage. And if things would ever actually change, maybe the instinct to burn it all to the ground wouldn’t be so strong. I also don’t think those posts are very helpful…but that’s just me.

 …I had one friend say something to the effect of “this stuff almost never happens. Every time it does, it gets plastered all over the news.” I would make two points regarding that:

1. I don’t remember the last time an unarmed white person was killed by the police or a vigilante…probably happened, but can’t remember. But the names of George Floyd and Eric Garner, and Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and others come to mind easily. (And I have zero interest in rehashing those cases).

2. We generally only get the ones caught on film splashed all over the news. An average of 2 unarmed black people are killed every week by police. That can’t happen.

And no – I don’t think most people are racist. But it’s time for all of us – especially white people – to be actively, passionately anti-racist. Look for it, root it out – in your own life first and then in every corner you see it in.

If you made it this far, thanks. And as always, my opinions may be completely wrong…however, if you are about to argue with me, might I suggest talking it through with a black friend first.”

Tim calls for two things we avoid like the plague. First, not many of us will sit down with a black protester, face to face, and listen to what they have to say about this current crisis, and all of the crises that have led up to it. That would involve the painful process of questioning our grasp on reality, making the world feel like it’s about to fall apart. At best, we’ll go to our favorite media outlet – the one that a) tells us what we want to hear and b) is populated almost entirely by white people – and let them tell us why blacks in America are upset.

Second, while there are some of us who might broach the issue of systemic racism in the US, we don’t talk about racism at the personal level. “Rooting out racism in our own lives” simply isn’t going to happen.

One of the realities we need to “wake up” to is that we are (still) living predominately segregated lives. Our friends are white. Our kids’ schools are white. Our churches are white. Again, with few exceptions, the media folk who tell us how to think about race are white. Few of us interact on a personal level with non whites and therefore have no occasion or opportunity for our racism to show itself. Ergo, we’re not racist, right? Somehow we’ve come to believe that, if we’re racist, we’d feel it. Sin seldom works that way.

To my Christian brothers and sisters I’ll expound a bit on Tim’s advice to root out racism in ourselves. Don’t ask yourself, “am I racist?” Instead, ask God to audit your dark internal spaces and bring to light whatever might be lurking underneath, especially with regards to attitudes and beliefs about people who don’t look like you do. I did. In my experience, the “show me where I’m broken” prayer is one that God always answers. As someone raised in the south I can tell you that it’s still a painful process.

Either way, if we’re going to continue to give our personal sin a hall pass, refusing to ask hard questions of ourselves, racial healing for our country doesn’t have much of a chance, and systemic racism will continue to find the fuel it needs to motor forward.

The second thought comes from a friend, Jim, who founded what I’d call the best spiritual formation curriculum on the planet. The gist of Faithwalking is to empower and equip Jesus followers to be “fully human,” “fully alive,” and “fully missional,” stepping freely into the world’s broken places to do what Jesus does best. He posted this on May 29.

“My friend…[a former police officer]… asked me in another post what evidence I had that Derek Chauvin, the police officer in Minneapolis who killed George Floyd, was a racist. I am grateful to you for your service to our community during all those years that you served. And, I want to say again here, that I believe that the vast majority of police officers in our country are hard-working, honest, courageous community servants.

I really appreciate you asking the question because it gives me an opportunity to keep attempting to communicate clearly.

I do not believe that I have said that this officer is racist. If that is what you heard, I did not communicate clearly. I don’t believe I said that because I don’t have any way of knowing whether he is a racist or not.

What I have said repeatedly is that I believe the justice system itself is racist.

To me one evidence of racism in the system is that he was not immediately arrested. On a daily basis offenders are arrested and held when there is probable cause. I believe that if a black man had pinned a white man down with his knee and held him there until he died, he would’ve been arrested on the spot – based on the immediately available evidence. This white man was allowed to go free for several days before finally being charged today.

And, if this was an isolated incident, I might interpret it differently. It is not fathomable to me that if two black man had stopped a white jogger in a Georgia neighborhood at gunpoint, shot and killed him, that they would not have been arrested or perhaps shot and killed on site. Or if a white kid wearing a hoodie was walking through the neighborhood and a black man had shot him that he would have been immediately arrested, tried and convicted. And the list goes on. In virtually every nationally publicized case when black people are killed by white people, it is clear to me the black people are treated differently – unfairly – in some profound ways by the justice system.

I believe the system itself is broken. It works for you if you’re white and even better if you’re middle class or rich. But over and over people of color are treated in ways the middle class and rich white people would never be treated. People of color have been saying that to us for generations. White people have just unable to hear or unwilling to listen.

I think a part of what is changing the conversation is not that there is more racism today, but that racism is being filmed and the stories are being broadly told.

The system is made up of police officers, district attorneys, judges, offenders, and defense attorneys as key players in the system. One of the things that is true about systems is that sometimes a system will do something that no one in the system believes is right. All the way back to the early 1920s, Reinhold Niehbuhr, in his book Moral Man Immoral Society, gave expression to that idea.

I believe there is clear anecdotal and statistical evidence that our justice system is unfair to people of color. And as I white man I’m working to change that. Not by calling individuals racist, but by working to change what I believe to be a racists system.”

The mounting evidence of a system rigged in favor of white America is problematic for people who aren’t intersted in looking deeper, indicting the “All Lives Matter” approach to racial injustice. Again, considering data that doesn’t jive with our political ontology is painful, so, again, it’s something we’re not going to do.

And because so many of us will refuse to ask “might I be wrong?” we condemn ourselves to more division, more protests, and the secured future of racism in our country.

Instead of thinking “here we go again,” we should see these demonstrations as an invitation to step into humanity’s most broken places, as Jesus commanded, to expend our energy and resources on behalf of people who are running thin on hope.

I know that some of my friends will feel compelled to point out what I’ve missed, the flaws in my thinking, etc. I’ve invited you into a process that I’ve engaged for the last few years and can testify that it’s changed many things. Like Tim, I spent the majority of my adult, southern Evangelical life thinking as you do. I’ve lived on both sides of this coin, and have heard every argument for the idea that goes something akin to “yeah, there’s racism here, but it’s not that bad.”

None are compelling enough for me to return to a way of thinking that runs counter to the righteousness of God and the wholeness that He’s called us to pursue.

These protests serve as an invitation into a level of peace that America has not yet known. Imagine what would happen if we accepted. Until then, demonstrations like the ones protesting the death of George Floyd are going to be as much of white American life as baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Jesus.

 

art by Sonia Sadler from Seeds of Change