Since last fall’s Black Lives Matter protests here in Oakland I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about race. In particular, I have found those voices within the African American community, who are asking White Americans to have a conversation about race to be moving and compelling, and so, as part of an ongoing conversation about race, I’d like to offer this observation: as I follow and participate in conversations about race, I find that White Americans understand racism differently than do our African American counterparts.
Most of the White Americans I know think of racism in terms of personal animosity, such that a racist is someone who hates, fears, denigrates, mistreats is unkind to, or otherwise doesn’t like Black people because they are black. It is a fact that most White Americans are mostly past such personal animosity. Most White Americans enjoy the company of and genuinely are grateful for the people in their lives who are not White. White people–by and large–have come to appreciate the beauty of human diversity and so it’s easy for White People to think racism is a really ugly and painful part of the past.
But when African Americans write and speak about racism the focus is always on structural racism. In my experience Black Americans, like their White counterparts, appreciate the increasing interpersonal goodwill that marks America’s social landscape, but that’s really not the issue. As I follow the American conversation about race, I hear African Americans talk about societal systems and institutional inertia, and political proclivities that keep African Americans poor, educationally disadvantaged, medically underserved, and vulnerable to the whims of a perniciously dysfunctional justice system.
There is nothing new about African Americans focusing upon issues of justice rather than of personal goodwill. It’s worth remembering that the Civil Rights movement was not an audition for friendship with White Americans. It was a sometimes successful attempt to change laws. It was about things like voting rights and access to public services, and equality in public education. A lot of personal animosity also was set aside as a result of the Civil Rights movement, and that has been a wonderful ancillary benefit, but it never was the main point.
Like most White Americans, I love living in a society in which people of various races increasingly are living side by side, sharing love, friendship, and neighborly good-will. For me this is not just an abstraction: my family is biracial. I don’t just like living in an America where personal racism is a dying phenomenon, I need to live in that America. But for the sake of my non-White children I also need to follow the lead of the African American community as it talks about race. I need to work for justice on a societal level, so that all God’s children will not just get along but also will thrive.
Ben
p.s. Pastor Ben will be on vacation starting Monday, June 29th through July 16th. He will not have any electronic devices with him. Contact office with any emergencies.