On Tuesday, March 29, Myers Park United Methodist Church (my home church in Charlotte, where my dad is the pastor) held an event focused on reconciliation, particularly racial reconciliation in Charlotte. Panelists included my dad; Dianne English, a church member and director of the Community Building Initiative of the
Foundation for the Carolinas; Sarah Stevenson, whose son Sammy sang at MPUMC until he sadly passed away several years ago; and Bishop Claude Alexander, Senior Pastor of
The Park Ministries in Charlotte. You can view the entire conversation below, and I'm going to reflect on a few highlights here.
Dianne English began the conversation by encouraging the audience to ask the right questions. She said that what we should ask is not "What can we do?" but "What's going on?" In my introductory ethics class this semester, we've talked a great deal about race, and the frustratingly true thing I've learned is that even—and especially—when you see that whiteness matters, you learn that you can't fix it. The work of reconciliation is not first and foremost about
doing something to make it better, but about knowing what's happening, being in relationship with people across racial and socioeconomic lines, and being together in a struggle that doesn't have a quick fix.
Bishop Claude Alexander offered this metaphor to think about how to talk about race: when something in the air, it is symptomatic of something in the ground. Race is in the air, but it is very much in the ground of our community and our history—we can't talk about America without talking about race. This actually is more than just a metaphor; in Charlotte, and in many other American cities, race is quite literally in the ground—when highways like I-77 were built, they cut through intact African-American communities, permanently and physically dividing them. As an adoptive Durhamite, I've learned a great deal about how NC-147 (the Durham Freeway) did just the same here. Race is in the ground, but Dianne pointed out that when toxic waste is in the ground, it's harmless; it's only when you stir things up that it gets into the air and starts causing problems. That fact, she says, tempts people to want to simply leave things alone and not deal with them, to say we're post-racial and move on; but the earth inevitably will be stirred up, and the poison will continue to sink deeper into the ground, so that even when we don't face it directly, somehow things persist in being really difficult.
My father later said something similar, that many people are reticent to talk about race because they feel like we've been there and done that, we're past all that. In response, my dad quoted John Perkins, a great civil rights activist, who talked about the hidden wounds of white Christians: "No one ever put a chain on another human being without tying the other end to himself." Perkins says that it is hard for whites to see how race continues to hold them captive and to make it difficult for them to see the freedom Jesus offers. For some reason, this reminds me of my 8th grade history class, when we talked about the Holocaust and how in dehumanizing the Jews, the Nazis actually dehumanized themselves. That has always stuck with me, and that general idea continues to come to mind when talking about race, class, or anything like that.
Bishop Alexander stated powerfully that reconciliation cannot come about just through legislation; we must be reconciled to one another in Christ. He says that there needs to be some kind of hope to counterbalance the despair that is often a logical conclusion to the difficulty of attempts at reconciliation. However, he says that the civil rights movement was nonviolent not just as a strategy but because there was a hope there that fought against despair and anger. We need to continue to cling to that hope and work, as so many have for so long, towards something that we may not see the result of in our lifetime.
All this conversation reminded me of a wonderful sermon given in Goodson Chapel this past Thursday by Th.D. student Mack Dennis. He was discussing the John 4 passage about the woman at the well, particularly in the context of how we so readily categorize and separate ourselves—Jew and Samartian, black and white. He talked about a documentary that I saw several years ago and commend highly to anyway, especially Durhamites; it's called
Durham: A Self-Portrait. Mack recalled the part that talked about how the city morgue was segregated for a very long time, how sad it was that even in death we could not be side by side. However, he said that perhaps even sadder still is the fact that the morgue is desegregated now, but we living people really are not.
Mack closed with a story about the birth of his son. When he was asked to fill out the form for the birth certificate, he left the "race" section blank. The nurse came back after a few minutes and nearly shouted at him, "Did you leave the race section blank on purpose?" He responded, a little afraid, that he guessed he did. "Good," she retorted. "I know just what to put then." Not until a month or so later did he find out what she had put down. The birth certificate came in the mail, and there in the "race" category, there was this word: "human."
Now, I am not suggesting we turn a blind eye to race or start declaring ourselves "colorblind," because most often when I've seen that happen, it's really just white people pretending they don't see race and ultimately whitewashing the world. I believe that God made and loves diversity and wants us to be able to revel in and appreciate each other's differences. But we must never forget that as many as we are in terms of ethnicity, background, class and culture, we are one in our humanity. Jesus' blood runs the same color as all our blood, and his blood runs to cleanse us all of our sin, especially the sin of separation that would divide us according to our blood, our skin, our status. The image of God has impressed itself on each of us in a unique way, and we can give thanks that our God is bigger than any racial category, yet close enough to walk with each of us in our wounds, whether they are obvious or hidden, sustained from without or self-inflicted. Praise Jesus whose blood covers us all.
This past Sunday, we debuted a song I wrote for Orange United Methodist Church, which recently launched an expansion campaign around their new vision: "Gather, Grow and Go." That's also the song title. Here are the words, and check out the video below as well (the song is playing toward the end of the video):
