A Short Conversation About Racism

I mentioned a few post back that I'm helping to facilitate a great JustFaith group this year, on Monday nights. We're in Week Eleven of thirty weeks, and just finished the second of three weeks on Racism. In the first week of the set, we discussed the first portion of the book Rising to Common Ground: Overcoming American's Color Lines by Danny Duncan Collum. It's a very easy book to read and understand, and it clearly explains the history and evolution of slavery and racism in the United States. We then watched a film called Come Walk in My Shoes, about the civil rights movement, that included lots of film clips from the 60's. It reminds the viewer very clearly of the religious roots of this great non-violent struggle. Anyone who thinks non-violence cannot work in the "real world" can see very plainly that it can, and it did.


And then this past Monday night we had the pleasure of having a guest speaker join us, Deacon Joseph Connor, an African-American deacon serving at Immaculate Conception Church in the central area of Seattle. Joseph was just great, and the discussion he fostered was honest, direct, without a lot of frills, and also just the kind of experience that people just don't usually have, even when living, working, or worshipping in multiracial communities. The group dialogue went way over our allotted time, and we wound up skimping on our other intended conversation on the second part of the book; we'll have to make it up next Monday!


Here are a couple of excerpts from the book:

Many black children grow up in a world in which the people with wealth and high status simply don't look like them and in which the people who do look like them are poor or in prison. We shouldn't be surprised if they use this information to begin forming expectations about their own lives. At the same time, white children may observe the correlation between low status and dark skin in the world around them and, if no one offers another explanation, they may logically assume that there is simply "something wrong" with dark-skinned people.....

In December 1955, when Rosa Parks kept her seat on that Montgomery bus, the average while American (outside the South) was deeply complacent and even apathetic about the condition of African-Americans. True, the previous year the Supreme Court had ruled that school desegregation was unconstitutional, and that had struck a panic into Southern whites. But the Court had also left the desegregation remedy to be carried out "with all deliberate speed," an oxymoronic phrase that signaled to the rest of the country that no revolution was imminent. Steriotypically docile and ignorant Negroes -- such as Amos and Andy and Jack Benny's servant, Rochester -- were still the image of black America on TV, and nothing seemed likely to change.

But then came Montgomery, and the children who desegregated the Little Rock schools, and the lunch counter sit-ins, and the Freedom Rides that were ended with mob violence and mass detentions. Then things began to change. It was only when black people took action to claim their rights and confronted violent hatred and repression with nonviolent resistance that the country and the world took notice.......

Bridging divisions between people always begins with acknowledging the wrongs of the past. This is true at the personal level. When there is sin, there has to be confession, followed by penance. When sin is confessed and the sinner is willing to make amends, forgiveness and healing follow. When there is conflict in a family, a marriage, or a friendship, someone has to apologize before it is possible to move on.

The same thing is true among peoples and nations... Perhaps the strongest and clearest example of the power of confession to heal a nation comes from postapartheid South Africa. Apartheid was the system by which a 15 percent minority of white South Africans exerted complete and often brutal comination over the country's black majority. During the struggle to end apartheid, many white South Africans expressed a fear that if the system ever fell, there would be a bloodbath as black Africans took revenge. When the system finally did fall in 1991, there was no bloodbath, and there was no revenge. The transition to majority rule came peacefully, through an election. And that election was followed by an inspiring process of national reconciliation.

Rather than trying and imprisoning those who, under the old system, had committed human rights violations, the new government, elected by a black majority, instituted a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the crimes of the past... Anyone who came before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and made a full and honest confession of his or her crimes received a pardon. Anyone who did not confess could be recommended for prosecution... The result was an unprecedented, nonviolent cleansing of several decades of horrendous violence... Post-apartied South Africa has a lot of very serious problems, but race-based resentment over the past is not one of them...

America's racial history cries out for our own "truth and reconciliation commission." After nearly four hundred years, we remain mired in division and resentment. We are, all of us, heirs to a system in which blacks were intentionally destroyed, black children were denied education, and poor white workers were deliberately pitted against their black counterparts. To this day, many of our most intractable social and economic problems grow directly from that system. Yet most white Americans are ignorant of this history and resent any reference to it as an attempt to blame them for sins they never committed.

After our conversation with Deacon Joseph the other evening, I am certain that our society needs to have other conversations like that among people everywhere in our country. If there were, then to have an American "truth and reconciliation commission" would not be so treatening; indeed, we might acknowledge its value, and even its necessity.