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June 22, 2020 - May 14, 2022
When we lack historical understanding, we lose part of our identity. We don’t know where we came from and don’t know what there is to celebrate or lament. Likewise, without knowing our history, it can be difficult to know what needs repairing, what needs reconciling.
Church leaders were slow to acknowledge, let alone lament, the continuing racism in our country.
And sometimes church leaders even referred to non-White communities with terms like they, them, and those people.
I began to ask questions of and have conversations with my White friends within the church about this topic, and as I did, 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. That bridge might open space for my White friends to better understand my history, culture, and experience and would provide room for my non-White culture friends to share their pain.
A bridge of voices that is about equity of marginalized voices, not equality.
That there are these two perceived types of minorities—assimilated or non-assimilated—has caused so much division in communities, among other races, and within the majority culture. These perceptions create internalized racism, colorism, and our own racial prejudice against other groups and one another.
Instead, I told her I’d read the slave narratives and that there was no love or care in slavery. “Love,” I said, “brings freedom, and slaves didn’t have freedom or choice. Family doesn’t leave family in bondage.” And having stated that truth, I changed the subject.
Hasn’t truth become a complicated word in these days when news is labeled “fake,” where “alternative facts” serve as the basis for a sort of virtual, choose-your-own reality?
The truth—historical, sociological, psychological, and spiritual—should not be up for debate, especially among Christian people.
Truth, unvarnished and unfiltered, is essential to the work of sanctification, freedom, and reconciliation. So what is truth in the context of racial reconciliation? 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
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Amen!
This does not mean that we take a color-blind approach to community. Too many Christians believe that the ultimate goal should be seeing the world without color, and some even pretend to already be in this “holy” place. But Paul wasn’t suggesting that aspects of our gender or racial identity aren’t important, that we should all meld together into one indistinguishable throng. In fact, Paul emphasized that unity can be found in diversity.
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.
Without understanding the truth of racial injustice, both majority-culture and non-White-culture Christians will find themselves mired in dissonant relationships. If we avoid hard truths to preserve personal comfort or to fashion a facade of peace, our division will only widen. Jesus can make beauty from ashes, but the family of God must first see and acknowledge the ashes.
Mary Turner’s story is ugly, a difficult story to read, and maybe that’s why it (and thousands like it) isn’t told in our textbooks and is rarely acknowledged as part of our history. This and other heartbreaking realities undermine the romanticized stories, the lies, of slavery and Reconstruction that have been woven into the accepted narrative.
Jesus can bring restoration to even the most broken and gruesome atrocities, atrocities like the lynching of Mary Turner; after all, Jesus experienced his own unjust lynching. Like Turner, Jesus was hung because he opposed the dominant authority. But Jesus sought to bring reconciliation, even to that place. After he was wrongly convicted and hung from a tree, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”7 Forgiveness and healing cannot begin until we become aware of the historical roots of the problem and acknowledge the harm caused.
through these discussions, I’ve seen awareness lead people out of denial and ignorance, into lamentation, and ultimately into racial solidarity. I’ve seen my friends transform as they begin to understand our nation’s history from a perspective that includes racially diverse voices.
Historical truths play an important role in our understanding of how we arrived in our current racial tension. Without looking back, without understanding the truth of our history, it’s difficult to move forward in healthy ways. And even though it might be painful to recount our history as a country, denying it leads us nowhere. Truth is the foundation of awareness, and awareness is the first step in the process of reconciliation. Jesus said as much: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”12
Hurt people hurt people, they say, and this was true of my grandfather.
Understanding the hurt and harm she experienced, not only as a child but also as an adult, has helped me become a better daughter and friend and has helped me identify with and relate to her.
Awareness of the truth is useless without acknowledgment of our complicity or its effects on us.
Amen!
We can’t shy away from the conversations just because they’re uncomfortable or awkward or unpleasant. We can’t change the subject because issues of racism make us feel bad. Instead, we have to have the hard conversations so we can move to a place of deep lament.
What is the purpose of lament? It allows us to connect with and grieve the reality of our sin and suffering. It draws us to repentant connection with God in that suffering. Lament also serves as an effort to change God’s mind, to ask him to turn things around in our favor. Lament seeks God as comforter, healer, restorer, and redeemer. Somehow the act of lament reconnects us with God and leads us to hope and redemption.
American culture teaches us not to sit in sadness and despair. Pretending that everything is okay, though, requires that we mask our true feelings. God doesn’t want our masks; he wants all of us, all our emotions, even our sorrow, our despair, and our grief. He wants to hold us close, wants to wipe every tear from our eyes. He cares about the parts of us that are burdened and weary.
It took nearly a century for the Tulsa Police Department to acknowledge the pain of the Greenwood massacre. It took nearly a century for the presiding police chief to confess and lament the actions of the institution and vow to do better on behalf of the police department.
She felt alone until she became a part of a community that shared her heart for racial healing, a group that listened to her without judgment.
We have replaced your supremacy with idolization of our nation and racial identity. Lord, have mercy.
Shame and guilt are powerful motivators. In the context of racial reconciliation, shame and guilt often compel majority culture to cover up and whitewash sins.
But to build bridges of racial reconciliation, we’ll need to confront the guilt and shame of our collective past. We’ll need to see those responses to the uncomfortable truth as tools that help lead us further into repentance.
We’ve all heard the justification: Why should I repent of racism? I never owned slaves.
In the Bible, guilt and shame are often communal and point to the need for corporate repentance.
Ezra, a priest and scribe, was personally innocent of the sins committed by the people, but he still felt the weight of guilt and shame. He prayed, “O my God, I am utterly ashamed; I blush to lift up my face to you. For our sins are piled higher than our heads, and our guilt has reached to the heavens.”4 See how Ezra acknowledged and lamented the truth of the sins of Israel? See how that acknowledgment and lamentation connected him with the guilt and shame of that sin? And identifying with that guilt and shame, Ezra cried out to the Lord.
In both instances, the confessors were personally innocent of the wrongs, but they came under guilt and shame nonetheless.
Although communal shame and guilt brought both Ezra and Daniel great personal distress, their response highlights the redemptive arc of Scripture.
As members of a group, they assumed the responsibility to confess and seek reconciliation on behalf of that group.
from the fact that discussing the true accounts would be shameful and might conjure feelings of ancestral guilt. But some descendants of slave owners are telling the full story regardless of the weight of all that guilt and shame. Instead of trying to distance themselves from their history, they’re facing it head on.
Originally owned by a German immigrant family, the Whitney Plantation was purchased in the late 1990s and renovated by an affluent White New Orleans lawyer, John Cummings. His goal? To acknowledge the shameful history of slave ownership in the South and to honor the slaves who once lived on the plantation.
though he admitted he couldn’t do anything to change the injustices of the past, he hoped to change some of the effects of slavery by looking at the truth and “owning it.”
Acknowledging racism, both explicit and systemic, can lead us to experience shame and guilt, even if we haven’t acted in overtly racist ways ourselves. In fact, it can make those who were oppressed feel shame and guilt too. Why? Because so many of us connect slavery to weakness, inferiority, and a lack of humanity. This shame and guilt—the shame and guilt of both White and non-White people—can keep us from reckoning with the truth.
The church will not be a leading example in racial healing until we feel the weight of communal guilt and shame and then allow it to push us into the truth. We won’t be agents of reconciliation until, like Ezra and Daniel, we take on the guilt and shame of our community and let it propel us toward confession.
before we can move forward toward racial healing, we need to examine our own family histories, our systemic advantages and disadvantages, and our personal participation or capitulation in acts of racism.
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. But where did that bias come from?
We’re moving to a healthier place, in which each member of the Black community is accepted no matter how light or dark his or her skin.
Confession requires awareness of our sin, acknowledgment of it, and the desire to move past the shame and guilt, but those aren’t the only conditions for confession. Confession also requires great humility and deep vulnerability. While this might feel risky, consider the risk of not confessing our sins.
In the book of Proverbs, Solomon, the Old Testament’s wisest man, highlights the link between confession and receiving God’s forgiveness, writing, “People who conceal their sins will not prosper, but if they confess and turn from them, they will receive mercy.”1 Solomon knew the truth.
The sin of racism—as well as my sin of colorism—disrupts God’s order of justice and righteousness. It denies the image of God in our brothers and sisters. And though we must name our individual sin, we must also confess our corporate sin.
Bridge builders don’t refuse confession just because the wrong done to them feels greater than the wrong they’ve done.
Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
The answer to white supremacy isn’t black supremacy. The answer to colorism within the majority systems is not corresponding colorism among non-White groups. Any supremacy, any colorism, should be acknowledged and confessed if we’re to find hope of healing. In fact, all forms of racism and bigotry—using racist slang, laughing at racist jokes, entertaining the privileges of color—must be confessed before we can move together toward lasting reconciliation.
C. S. Lewis wrote, “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”7
Forgiving others is the most Christlike act we can carry out. It is costly and painful, transformative and life giving.
