5.26.2016

I, Racist or I, Human?


     I just finished reading a book about pain--specifically the pain carried by one person as he navigated the American experience as a black man, born and raised in the inner city.

        He was steeped in the poverty, violence, hopelessness, and the discrimination which is so common in urban areas, and taught to fear and hate the descendants of those who had perpetrated all the horrors of mental and physical slavery upon his ancestors. 

     He spoke of these atrocities with all the freshness of something that happened yesterday, and drew bitter lines from those days to the present, circling himself, his people, and his descendants in a protective barrier of mistrust.  

     He wrote of pale-skinned people as if we were a monolithic group, often attributing evil motives to us, and accusing "us" of waging a cultural and institutional war on him and everyone like him.


      Sometimes, he said, we act ignorantly, sometimes deliberately, but always we are acting with a will to power, within a structurally racist system, and with the subconscious need to keep minority people groups under our feet or in our pocket.

     Furthermore, I am told that I am unable to even speak to my inherent racism, having lived my whole life as a member of an intrinsically racist collective and as an unconscious beneficiary of it.  

     The book was called, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and it really was a thought-provoking read.  It was useful in that I think I better understand the great burden of anger and pain that so many African Americans carry every day.

     Maybe he is right about the inevitability and pervasiveness of racism in this country.  There are certainly large numbers of voices, both white and black, telling me he is.


     But what if they are only documenting the symptoms and not the cause?  What if the issue is more complicated than black and white, or more nuanced than the simple need for reparations, or more difficult than a government program could ever fix?  


     What if these problems don't just originate in a slave past or persist because of systemic modern-day corruption?


     What if the problem is not that some are black and some are white, but that all are human?  

     Would the solutions look any different if the problem was seen to be with the heart and not with the skin?
    As the protective mother bear of three bi-racial children, I have spent many years with my "racism radar" out, and on occasion I have found it.  


     It existed in pockets of angry ignorance, among small, bitter-spirited individuals.  Sometimes it came from strangers, and sometimes I found it in people who were close enough to me to know better.  
     I am happy to say, that in every case where I encountered racist rhetoric or attitudes from friends or relatives, the sweetness and beauty of my individual children and the relationships they established worked to erase those negative attitudes.


     I never drew my children's attention to comments I heard, and always told them to assume the best about others, and to this day, my 18 year old daughter cannot think of a circumstance where she felt diminished or discriminated against because of her color.  


    But even that, I am told, is evidence that I have stripped her of part of her birthright as a woman of color, specifically her "black-consciousness".  I have read a number of posts that intimate that without a connection with a larger collective black identity, a person of African descent is missing authentic personhood--i.e. identification of her "true self".


     So what does this mean for her and my other two racially mixed children?  Does being raised by white parents make her less of a person in the eyes of other African Americans?  

     Does her adoption make me akin to a modern day slaver, stripping my black children away from their roots and community in order to satisfy my desire to be a mom?  Or, as I've read, to exert my continuing superiority over African Americans by "saving" black babies from being raised by their own distinctive cultures due to my low opinion of that culture--in short, my subconscious desire to be the "white savior" to the black race?

      I read these arguments and I try to understand them.  I hear more and more Christians condemning my for the racism I am doomed to participate in simply because of the color I was born.  I am told I cannot even speak about the topic coherently because I am so steeped in it--"like a fish isn't qualified to talk about the water he is in because he knows nothing else." 

     I know that ignorance of a sin does not absolve a person of its guilt, but if I am not qualified to examine my own motives for adopting and loving my children, then who is?    
       It seems to me that racism, like so many sins, is born of the mistrust between all humans everywhere who are different in some way from one another.  It is also born of selfishness--the desire of one person or group to exalt himself/itself at the expense of another.

       The tangled and messy history of relations between the white and black folks of this country is a story that has been played out thousands upon thousands of times throughout human history in countless other places. 


    It has happened here among people of different colors.  It is happening in the Middle East among people of different religions.  It is happening even today on the continent of Africa among people of different tribes.   

      I think this is one of the problems I have with accusing white parents of stealing the black experience from their children.

     What really is the "African culture" which helps to comprise the "black consciousness?"  Ta-nehesi Coates refers often to the attitudes and attributes that black people have retained from "mother Africa", as if the vast African continent with its 50 plus countries, its 2,000 plus languages, its 3,000 plus unique tribes, and its billion plus individuals could possibly give birth to something called " the black experience".  


     In my opinion, such beautiful diversity does not deserve such a broad brush.


     As in this country, there are people there living in communities shaped by dire poverty and people living in vast wealth.  There are individuals who struggle daily with drought and famine and those living in lush landscapes.  There are urban cultures and rural cultures, people accustomed to war and people living in relative peace.  


     They eat different foods, wear different clothing, sing differently, dance differently, think differently, organize their communities differently, raise their children differently, and practice religion differently.  


     How patronizing it seems to lump them all into one, monolithic cultural group based on the darkness of their skin! 


     Even in this country, I think it is simplistic to talk about the "black experience", as if every person of color is marching through their life here in some deterministic lock-step.  There are people of color descended from slaves, and people who immigrated freely.  There are farmers, business owners, educators, artists, athletes, tradespeople, and engineers.  Country folk and city dwellers.  Heroes and villains.  It seems to me that black Americans, like all Americans, live rich and varied lives.  

      So what exactly is the "black culture" I should be giving to my children?  Too much of the literature I am reading seems to indicate that a good part of it involves a constant dredging up and meditation on horror and injustice, the inherent mistrust of others based on the color of their skin, and justifying and excusing the misbehavior of a small segment of lawless and irresponsible young men who insist on terrorizing their own neighborhoods.  If that is the case, then I will take a pass on giving that legacy to my bi-racial children.  


     Like others of  partially African descent, my children have some shared physical features, but that does not define them.

     Neither does this:  my bi-racial children all came from backgrounds of poverty and sadness, and they all tragically lost their first families. They all suffered through a season of uncertainty before we brought them home, and none of them look like the people who are raising them--but even with these shared traits they STILL cannot be painted with a broad brush.



     They are individuals and the way they have responded to every event in their lives is unique to them.  


     What they share with one another more than anything else, is a history of early pain that no child should have to endure on this earth.  The indignities they endured didn't happen to their great-great grandparents.  They didn't just happen to people somewhere who had skin like theirs, or hair like theirs, or genetic material like theirs.  


     Injustice happened to THEM, and since that time we have spent our lives trying to help them redeem the evil that was done.  


     This means helping them to see the infinite value they possess before the God who created them.  

     It means surrounding them with a community of people who affirm their worth as human beings.  

     It means teaching them how to forgive as we would want to be forgiven.  


     It means giving them a safe place in which to process their pain, trauma, and loss, and helping them understand a world that creates people who would hurt children-- so that they will know that they were not to blame for their parents' bad decisions.  

     It means helping them look for ways to minister to others who have been through hard times.  

     It means choosing to focus on the goodness and potential within them instead of dwelling on the pain and scars.


     Because there is no power in victim-hood.  The power lies in grace and the ability to acknowledge the reality of evil and yet not give it a foothold.  

     It seems to me that when life is viewed through a prism of grievances (either real or perceived), you forfeit your power to rise above them, becoming instead defined by your hopelessness and anger.  


     My children have the "right" to be embittered, distrustful, defensive, and angry, but those are rights I hope they will lay down.  

     I want them to have compassion for their birth parents.  I want them to see themselves as strong and capable and beautiful, not as impotent or damaged, and to live lives so bright and hopeful that others will want to lay down their pain and follow after.  


     After everything else, I would hate to see them imprisoned in their own never-ending nightmare of finger pointing and injustice collecting.  

     I have told them about the atrocities that happened during the Civil War, about the wrongs that were committed during the Civil Rights Movement and since then, but only so they can see the kind of tendencies we are all prone to when we consider our own selfish interests and do not choose to build bridges to one another--not so they can add to the list of ways they have been held back (or may be held back in the future).


     I think this is what I wish I could tell Ta-Nehisi Coates and the other people who are spending their lives in an endless blame game.  No one wins. 

      I'm not saying that we should never speak of humans in terms of shared characteristics or experiences, and I will be the first to say we should advocate on behalf of those who have been mistreated, but I wonder greatly at the wisdom of taking the horrors of the past and endlessly projecting them onto present and future generations of their descendants.  


     I also reject the idea that I, whose ancestors did not even live here during that awful time, am guilty of the crimes of slavery and racism, simply because I happen to suffer from the same lack of melanin as those who were guilty.  


     What if we all drew lines back?   I came from Viking stock, which means I probably owe  reparations to some native Swedes.  

     But then I also had some Moravian ancestors, who underwent severe persecution for several hundred years, routinely being forced to flee, losing their property, and being martyred for their beliefs.   

Several hundred years of being hunted down for the simple desire to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience!  Who should be held responsible for those horrors?  Maybe I should start a movement.


     But then, another line of my family tree comes up through the Kentucky Hatfields, who perpetrated horrendous murders and assassinations against the McCoy men, women, and children for several decades.  Where is the justice for the families burned in their sleep and young children tied to trees and shot? 


     But then, I am also a woman, a demographic which has been treated as chattel for thousands of years, and which continues to be subjected to the whims of the stronger sex even to this day.  

     What should be the price for the countless innocents of my own kind whose voices have been silenced and whose rights have been and continue to be trampled?  

     More recently, on separate occasions I have been personally scorned for having a large family, rudely questioned about the validity of my decision to homeschool, and made fun of for my Christian beliefs.  Shall I start a personal list of grievances and make sure my children learn it young?


     We live in a world full of misunderstandings, prejudice, fear, greed, and mistrust.  It comes out in various forms of ugliness until either the persecuted group rises up to address the wrongs, or another group rises up on its behalf--or both. 


      And so it goes.  Down and down through the entire sordid history of the human race.  


     So what is the answer to this dilemma?


     As with so much, it all comes back to God for me. Christianity, specifically--a faith which so beautifully lays out how the path to knowing God--opens the door to being able to love others well.  

     It is, first of all, supremely counter-intuitive, which is why I think children often understand it so quickly.  
     They are not thrown by apparent contradictions--the idea of a Savior loving us by dying for us...

     ...the call to find our lives by losing them...

     ...the idea that the last could be first, that weakness is strength, that humility is power, that in laying down our rights we are made royalty, that beyond our visible end is an invisible and infinitely better beginning. ..

     ...the truth that there is no "Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free", but that we are all one race of infinite worth, showing our beauty in thousands of different colors, cultures, features, sizes, ages, interests, and abilities.

     I have told my children that because we have been forgiven much, we need to forgive much.  And that since we can never out-forgive God, we have no right to keep a ledger against anyone else.  Ever.  

     So maybe the reason my girl can't recall being the victim of racism is that she chooses not to be one.  

     I have heard her laugh off inadvertent comments made by friends.  I have heard her graciously field awkward questions posed to her by children.  I have seen her smile at the rudeness of strangers who say with surprise right in front of her, "Is she yours?"  

     If one day she bears the brunt of a more violent form of discrimination, be it in a racial, religious, or moral context, I trust that even though she was raised by white folks, she will still know that she is perfectly loved by the One who made her, and be able to lay that injustice in His hands and walk forward.    

     Brown and beautiful and uniquely her.  
 ***********
 Micah 6:8
"What does the Lord require of us?  To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God."




No comments: