I’m 32 years old and I grew up white.
I was raised in a suburban town of Dayton, OH where nearly everyone was white. The Dayton area follows the pattern of most metropolitan cities in America: urban core made up predominantly of people of color, particularly African-Americans, where the most recorded crime and the worst schools exist. You then move a circle out to find the “white flight” suburbs, “safe” towns and communities created by white people who wanted to get away from black people and the “danger” they brought.
My graduating class of ~350 people had 5 or 6 black kids in it.
My church of ~350 people had 0 black people in it.
I was never taught by a black teacher in school and was never preached to by a black preacher in church.
The Christian college I attended in Grand Rapids, MI was also predominantly white, the very small smattering of black students heavily outweighed by the (estimating) 98% white on-campus student population. I never had a black professor.
The seminary attended in Grand Rapids had a slight uptick in black students, still vastly dominated by white students though, and I still only sat under white professors and white senior leadership.
I never noticed or cared.
What does this sort of upbringing teach someone about race?
Directly, it teaches very little. Race is hardly ever talked about. Race isn’t on anyone’s radar. The few black friends and acquaintances I had growing up were treated kindly by me and others and that was about the extent of my thoughts on race. My social studies courses told me racism ended in 1865 when slavery was outlawed, so I let all thoughts of race float away like water under this historical bridge. If I was taught anything about the Jim Crow era, which I have no memory of, it certainly wasn’t enough to leave a mark on me or my white classmates.
I recently visited the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN, located at the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at in 1968. To the right is a photo on display at the museum of a child non-violently protesting Jim Crow in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama. This protest eventually brought violent attack by white policemen using high-pressure fire hoses and deadly police dogs on men, women and children alike.
“Can a man love God and hate his brother?” This question can’t help but allude to Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-37. Jesus responds to the self-righteous religious leader by telling him that
, but to love the other, and particularly, to love the oppressed other that the homogenous culture you belong to has always disdained, avoided and rejected. To not love passively, but to go out of your way, to intentionally enter into the life of your oppressed brother and to advocate on their behalf. This is love.
If the opposite of love is hate, then what word we use to describe the opposite of Jesus’ depiction of love in this parable? What word would we use to describe the person who stays in the safe cocoon of the other side of the road, the other side of the tracks, where the mess their brother is going through doesn’t have to get on them. Where the mess of the oppressed doesn’t have to register on their radar. Where they can go on like everything is fine.
Will we let the Scriptures speak?
Are we not a family? (Ephesians 2:19)
Are we not a community? (Psalm 133:1)
Are we not one body? (Romans 12:4-5, 1 Corinthians 12:12-14)
What I learned growing up white was mostly about what I didn’t learn.
When you are only around one culture your entire life, you naturally think your culture is the best. You don’t hate people of different races and cultures, but you certainly alienate them from you. Alienation in and of itself isn’t ideal, though it can be justified, but intentional alienation by the powerful toward the oppressed can in no way be justified in the name of Jesus and his teachings on love.
When you are only around one culture your entire life, you don’t acknowledge the awkwardness a person of color experiences when they are one of the only non-white people in the room.
When you are only around one culture your entire life, you will subconsciously avoid talking to persons of color because you don’t know what to say and you assume they don’t want you to talk to them.
When you are only around one culture your entire life, you become afraid of others. You believe what you hear on the news about other races. You lock the doors when you’re in the city because black people are scary. You look at black men cautiously when they approach you in a group. You keep an extra eye on them if you’re a police officer. You follow them in stores if you’re working security.
When you never hear someone’s story, you can never know them, and if you never know them, you can never love them. Loving someone without hearing their story is superficial and inauthentic. Hearing someone’s story and invalidating it because of your presuppositions is the opposite of love. Telling someone you’ll accept them but not their story is not love. Telling someone their story doesn’t matter is telling them they don’t matter.
Your ideas of race are based on arrogant and insular assumptions. You think you can tell black people what it’s like to be black or Hispanics what it’s like to be Hispanic. You think white is right, even though you’ve been taught to never let these words actually come from your mouth. You live entitled and judgmental rather than humble and empathetic.
We hide behind “cultural preferences” and platitudes to excuse our now chosen walks of segregation, walks that only perpetuate the lack of love toward brother, ethnocentrism, fear, and distrust. Walks we walk like fish in water, never knowing we are in water because it’s all we’ve ever known–never realizing what these waters are actually breeding in our hearts, our society, and in the Kingdom of God here on earth.
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Author of Beyond the Battle: A man's guide to his identity in Christ in an oversexualized world
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