The Toxic Water of Racism

Acknowledging the Plank in My Own Eye

Hi, my name is Allison, and I am a racist. I read somewhere recently that the key to the success of 12-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous is that they start by requiring individuals to acknowledge they have a problem, because the road to healing cannot begin without this vulnerability. In my last post, I alluded to the fact that if you are a white American, it is virtually impossible not to drink some of the Kool-Aid of the counterfeit religion called Christian Nationalism. But if one of my high school English teachers had graded that essay, they would have called BS, as in “be specific.” Anyone can speak in generalizations, but what separates the sincere person which I want to be, from the counterfeits is the willingness to take risks, be vulnerable. Given that Christian Nationalism overlaps with white supremacy, our Christian faith cannot be separated from individual and systemic racism.

My biggest fear when I started this blog is that I would come across as self-righteous, and it is so hard not to be when you hear stories like the curriculum released by the Florida Department of Education which will teach Florida students that “slaves developed skills which in some cases could be applied for their personal benefit,” which Eugene Robinson rightly calls “appallingly ahistorical” a flippant denial of the reality of chattel slavery as it was practiced in the United States. I want to believe that because I found this curriculum disgusting, because I was shocked by the brutal, senseless murder of George Floyd, because I am horrified whenever I read accounts of lynching, or see documentaries showing footage of vicious dogs and fire hoses being loosed on peaceful protesters during the Civil Rights Movement, that I am a nice white person. But in her memoir I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, Austin Channing Brown points out that “even the monsters—the Klan members, the faces in the lynch mob, the murderers who bombed churches—they all had friends and family members. Each one of them was connected to people who would testify that they had good hearts. They had families who loved them, friends who came over for dinner, churches where they made small talk with the pastor after the service. The monster has always been well dressed and well loved” (Page 104). In other words, these monsters thought of themselves as “nice white people” too. Moreover, the Bible is unequivocal that all sin separates us from God. For example, I am not off the hook, immune from the need to repent of sin just because I have never, and would never literally kill anyone because Matthew 5:22 states that we are subject to judgment if we fail to repent for angry thoughts toward a brother, the implication being that when we nurture angry thoughts, we have already committed murder in our hearts. Given this biblical teaching, Christians more than anyone ought to be able to extend this logic to racism, recognize that even unintentional racial bias defiles our hearts and dishonors God’s commandment that we love all people as all people are made in his image. And yet, I must confess I am a racist because in the words of Rob McCann, the CEO of Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington, “for me as a white person, to say I am not racist is like saying a fish is not wet.” Racism is akin to toxic water in which we are all swimming. And yes, even a blind person can be racist, and in my case, it is especially embarrassing because I know what it is like to be underestimated, to be avoided or denied opportunities because my disability makes people uncomfortable. Why would I perpetuate that on others, especially because being a person of color isn’t even a real disability at all. Whiteness is nothing more than "a superficial generalization of multiple cultures and nationalities based on complexion" and a social construct with no biblical support or scientific validity, invented centuries ago to justify the enslavement and exploitation of human beings, and continued today by a society unwilling to let go of their unearned power and privilege.

I grew up in a majority-white, affluent school district, but due to open enrollment, a handful of black students from Milwaukee rode a special bus out to our district. In elementary school, I remember feeling bad for how these students must feel singled out because they were released ten minutes earlier than the rest of us to catch their bus, but in high school, their bus came later. By high school, I was the one who had to leave class a little earlier to catch my special bus. For some reason, my parents and teachers wanted me to ride the special-ed bus, even though I was not in a wheelchair and by high school no longer needed to bring my homework home in a suitcase (which the bus driver had to help me lift onto and off the bus) due to wonderful advances in technology. But on Wednesdays, I could stay in class until the final bell rang because I had piano lessons at 4:00, and we decided it made more sense for Mom to pick me up from school and take me straight to piano lessons than to take the bus all the way home, only to turn around and leave right away. But while I was waiting on the bench near the door for Mom to arrive, I could often hear black students being really loud, yelling, slamming doors. I could tell they were black by their dialect. It was the same dialect I heard when listening to people interviewed on our local news after a shooting in the city. Sometimes, I could tell they were laughing, just goofing around, but sometimes, I wasn’t sure if they were goofing around or fighting, and on these occasions I remember thinking, “come on Mom, hurry up and get here so I can get out before something happens.” I also remember wondering “who are these kids?” I wasn’t in Advanced Placement courses like my sister was when she was in high school. Maybe these black students were in those classes. But because of how loud and silly they were, and the fact that I didn’t recognize their voices in any of my classes, I presumed at the time that they must be in “lower level” classes. The sad thing is, I witnessed many academically gifted white peers act loud and silly too, and I never had these condescending or fearful thoughts about them. It wasn’t until my job at a Social Security disability law firm where I worked alongside several black women that I fully appreciated that failure to conform to white standards of “proper English” says absolutely nothing about a person’s intelligence or character. Around this time, I also remember learning that a friend from our church was black. I remember that this came up casually in conversation in the car after church one week, and I remember blurting out from the back seat, "Really? She's black?" as my mind finished the thought, "she doesn't sound black." The awareness of unconscious bias wasn't part of society's lexicon yet, but I instinctively knew this thought was racist, just as bad as the common racist refrains I have since read about black people having to contend with from white friends and colleagues: "You don't seem black to me", or "You're not like other black people."

These days, I have noticed my racism rears its ugly head whenever I read articles like this letter sent to PBS arguing that the network gives too much priority to Ken Burns and not enough to documentaries produced by people of color, or when I read editorials from white authors who claim to have more difficulty getting their books published due to diversity initiatives at publishers who used to accept their books, and find that my heart takes the side of these white authors. On the one hand, I don't think it is sinful to point out that two wrongs don't make a right, to believe we can (and should) elevate the stories of people who have been underrepresented for too long without employing intentional reverse discrimination. But I love Ken Burns documentaries, and the fact that I had a visceral angry reaction when I heard about this letter and what I perceived as its implication that Ken Burns should be displaced was convicting as it made me realize that while I want to think of myself as a nice white person, my mental resistance to changing the status quo of white-dominated media might tell a different story. It is also not lost on me that although I have had to contend with some prejudice as a blind person, the fact that I am white has made my path a little easier in this society. Perhaps I fear that changing the status quo will make future attempts to advance in my career even more difficult, but I know that such a self-centered attitude is sinful and racist.

Austin Channing Brown has no patience for white people who confess their racism to her as if she is a priest, and I completely understand her sentiment. She feels as though these confessions are motivated by white guilt, and that white people make these confessions in the hope that she will assuage said guilt, in essence shifting the burden from them to her. True repentance, Channing argues is about more than confession: it is about taking meaningful, tangible steps to turn away from this sin. In that spirit, I am making a conscious effort to diversify my media. I recently found a Substack newsletter called Black-eyed Stories, where a black woman analyzes news and culture from the Black perspective which often goes unrepresented in mainstream media. I have only been following this newsletter for a couple weeks, but already I have noticed that it has opened my mind. For example, when she discusses The Blindside, and how the movie portrayed the white family who adopted Michael Oher as heroes and his black mother as a terrible mother who was strung out on drugs and neglected her children, I was sobered because like most white people, I bought into this narrative, never stopping to reflect on the systemic racism that put this mother at a major disadvantage in society. Since reading this blog, my heart has softened to the idea that maybe it is time for people like Ken Burns to take a lower profile to people of color because this newsletter has helped me to better understand the harmful ramifications of a media landscape dominated by the white narrative.

God does not expect perfection. In fact he knows we will never fully escape sin this side of heaven, which is why we are saved by grace. But I believe it is essential that all of us as Christians take to heart Paul’s warning not to rely on what a Bible commentary I read at Trinity called “cheap grace.” “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? (Romans 6:1-2)” After all, I wonder if we are all going to be so embarrassed by our racist attitudes in this life when in eternity, we realize that Paul’s words in Galatians 3:28 are true. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you (we) are all one in Christ Jesus.”