Be the Bridge: Pursuing God's Heart for Racial Reconciliation

by LaTasha Morrison

I found that many were oblivious to the full scope of American history and its multicultural realities. With that realization, I made a conscious decision: I’d do my best to build a bridge between the majority and non-White church cultures.

The typology of Black people is a racial reality in America. As a Black person in a majority-White culture, I observed people looking at me, trying to determine whether I was more assimilated to White culture or whether I was too Black for their comfort.

Besides, I said, for a few years I’d been on a journey of dismantling, deprogramming, and detangling many unhealthy worldviews I’d previously held relating to the intersection of politics and my Christian and racial identity. I’d come to realize that race is both a political and a social construct.

persistent disengagement.

Cross reference "benevolent detachment"?

Enforcing a law didn’t dismantle racism. Diversity doesn’t disrupt systemic racism, I told her, nor did it kill racist views.

“Love,” I said, “brings freedom, and slaves didn’t have freedom or choice. Family doesn’t leave family in bondage.”

The truth is that each ethnicity reflects a unique aspect of God’s image. No one tribe or group of people can adequately display the fullness of God. The truth is that it takes every tribe, tongue, and nation to reflect the image of God in his fullness. The truth is that race is a social construct, one that has divided and set one group over the other from the earliest days of humanity. The Christian construct, though, dismantles this way of thinking and seeks to reunite us under a common banner of love and fellowship.

In the love of the family of God, we must become color brave, color caring, color honoring, and not color blind. We have to recognize the image of God in one another. We have to love despite, and even because of, our differences.

Mary Turner and her unborn child were denied the right to live because she had the audacity to demand justice.6

Events just like this one led to the flight of thousands of Black families from the South through the period of Reconstruction and into the late 1960s, a movement now known as the Great Migration.

Forgiveness and healing cannot begin until we become aware of the historical roots of the problem and acknowledge the harm caused.

By becoming aware of the realities of racial division, she could grow in empathy, and empathy is the first step toward racial solidarity. Empathy would allow her to sit in someone else’s pain.

Could it be that lament connects us with God, that it allows us to experience his response and then cooperate with him to make wrongs right?

American culture teaches us not to sit in sadness and despair. Pretending that everything is okay, though, requires that we mask our true feelings.

David’s lament meant sitting in sorrow for the pain he had caused, grieving his sin, seeking God’s forgiveness, and even asking him to change his mind. But when his son finally passed, David rose from the ground, washed and anointed himself, and changed his clothes. He went into the house of the Lord and worshipped. His time of lament prepared his

heart for reconnection with God.

After hearing about Greenwood, Oklahoma, I posted video and testimony of the stories, drawn from scholarly sources, on social media.

Consider researching your family tree and discovering any role your ancestors played in systemic racism or abolition.

Lift every voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise High as the list’ning skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won.

We’ve all heard the justification: Why should I repent of racism? I never owned slaves. But in the Bible, guilt and shame aren’t described in such a narrow individualistic sense. In the Bible, guilt and shame are often communal and point to the need for corporate repentance.

She shared how, no matter how hard we might fight against it, some of that water soaks into us as though we’re a sponge. “It’s impossible to grow up in the sea of white supremacy without absorbing some of it,” she said, “whether that’s implicit bias or prejudiced beliefs or discriminatory actions that we don’t realize we’re engaging in or that we’ve convinced ourselves are okay.”

The Black community has its own sort of embedded racism, rooted in society’s unconscious bias toward lighter skin. For years we applied this standard against our own people.

Throughout the early 1900s, churches, fraternities, sororities, and other organizations used what has come to be known as the brown-paper-bag test to keep in check the upward mobility of people of color, especially Black people. If a Black person’s skin was the same shade or darker than a paper bag, he would not be permitted in certain communities, organizations, and churches. If his skin was lighter than a paper bag, he might get a pass.

Bridge builders don’t deny hurt. They experience it. Sit in it. Feel it. But they don’t stay in that pain. They don’t allow those who’ve wounded them to control them or constantly drive them back to anger and resentment. Instead, they allow that pain to continually push them into forgiveness.

We confess that a structure of racial oppression was formed at the beginning of our nation’s history, a system that, instead of being eradicated, has been adjusted to be palatable with the changing times.

Most of us—even those who don’t directly hold a Christian worldview—believe in the reality of human brokenness.

Douglass knew that if those who claimed to be Christians finally saw God for who he was, if White people changed course and viewed African Americans as image bearers of the Almighty, God could wash away the sin of the country. God could lead the nation into a better, more just future, one not cursed with spiritual blindness.

Often, unjust events feel historically distant and disconnected from us. We didn’t personally land grab or enslave folks or lynch anyone. So why should we have to make reparations?

Reparation can seem like a fringe term used only by activists, but it is a thoroughly biblical concept.

The Hebrew root word for restitution in God’s instruction to Moses is shuwb, and it is used nearly one thousand times throughout the Old Testament.

This

is the concept of reparation, a concept God prescribed in Numbers 5:7, as we saw earlier. We call this kind of reparation restitution, but reparations might also take the form of creating previously unavailable opportunities or closing advantage gaps for those who have suffered marginalization. It might look like a wealthy White man funding a museum to commemorate the slaves, such as Whitney Plantation. It might look like a predominantly White church hiring a preacher of color, just as Gateway Church, my home church in Austin, did. Maybe it looks like a business advancing people of color in corporate leadership positions, like my friend Jessica Honegger at Noonday Collection.

Reparation is not about punishing anyone. It’s not about paying a fine for a wrong committed or assuaging a guilty conscience. Instead, reparation acknowledges that through historical injustice, some communities were denied (or had deliberately stolen from them) opportunities, possessions, property, wealth, and safety so that other communities could obtain more of those things. Reparation is about repaying or returning those things so as to restore equity.

It was genocide by assimilation, and Native Americans have never received reparations.

Reparations require sacrifice. But effective bridge builders don’t shy away from Jesus’s call to “go and sin no more,”24 a call that includes making things right. Like Zacchaeus, effective bridge builders must return what was taken, even if it hurts.

You can intentionally put yourself in the way of diversity by taking a job where you know you’ll be in the minority. You can bring people of color into your home. You can place yourself under the authority of their organizations and learn from them. You can sacrifice your upward mobility and use your power for the good of others.

you can identify racial wrongs in the world around you and take one step toward making them right. That’s the work of reparation. That’s the work of the gospel.

But it’s also worth noting that Thomas’s friends played a role in that restoration. They didn’t kick Thomas out of the group because of his doubt. They made margin for it, allowed him to be vulnerable. Jesus showed up in this space and brought restoration.

One Georgetown alumnus stumbled across this history and determined to take steps to bring restorative reconciliation. While reading through the Georgetown historical records, Richard Cellini, chief executive of a technology company, found the names of those slaves sold to Southern plantation owners. Deeply troubled, he wondered why no one—not the bishops, not the priests, not the school—had made any efforts to reconcile the history. No apology had been offered, and no one had attempted to track down the descendants of the slaves who were sold. There’d been no reparations, no space to even have a conversation about reparations. Instead, the atrocity had been ignored, all but erased from the school’s acknowledged history.

Instead, as a Georgetown University graduate, he recognized that he’d benefited from the history. His education, his network, and the inherent value of his degree had all been made possible by the sale of those 272 slaves.

What will Georgetown University do to restore their relationship with the descendants of those Black men, women, and children who were sold down the river? How will they come to the table with these descendants of the slaves they sold, the families they separated? What will they offer in exchange for all that was lost? It’s unclear now, and for purposes of this book, it’s not really the point. Cellini’s individual effort to bring some kind of restorative reconciliation? That’s the point. He’s done it by building a bridge between the oppressed and the oppressors. He’s done it by creating space at the table, opening the conversation to explore a new way forward.

There are times when we need to be silent and take in new information. But I’ve learned over the years of beating the drum of justice and pursuing racial reconciliation that in this bustling world, it’s easy to mistake being still with complacency, to mistake waiting with hiding.

We disciple others in the way of truth because it’s God’s means and method of drawing the world to Jesus. It’s his way to bring the kingdom to earth.

If this book serves to highlight just one truth, I hope it’s that real beauty can come from the ashes of our country’s history with racism.

With one voice and in humility we acknowledge that we sat by while image bearers were dehumanized. We acknowledge that silence is complicity and that your Word requires us to do more. We acknowledge that we have valued property over people and greed over grace. We have protected material objects while image bearers have had their lives taken, property stolen, and dignity rejected.