Care Enough to Blush

When my dad was in high school, he was a ladies’ man. Surprisingly, he ended up falling in love. In his words, “I was crazy about this girl! I would have done anything for her!”. There was just one problem. My dad was ‘Black’ and the girl who won his heart was ‘white’. Within 24 hours of the girls’ parents finding out that she loved a ‘black’ man, her family packed up all of their belongings and moved out of town. My dad never saw her again.

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When I was starting grade school, my parents moved from a rat-infested house by a creek, up the street a block or so. My first week in the new neighborhood, a group of slightly older ‘white’ kids, brandishing pocketknives, surrounded me outside of our new home, taunting me with racial slurs. I leaped into the street gutter, grabbed a fallen tree branch and started swinging and screaming until a neighbor heard me and the kids ran off. During my years in that neighborhood, I was stabbed in the hand once, hit in the face with a stick on a separate occasion (I still have the scar), took several severe bites in my side during another altercation. All fights over race.

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When I was in grade school, I had my first real crush on a girl. We only saw each other on the bus or at the bus stop. When school pictures came out that year, I got up the nerve to give this little girl one of my wallet size pictures and asked if she, ‘wanted to go out’ with me. She smiled, blushed and said yes. I was eager to see her the next day on the bus, but when I sat beside her she could barely look me in the eyes.

She handed me the wallet sized picture I had given her the prior day, gingerly, and said, ‘I can’t keep this.”

I asked, ‘Why?”.

She explained that when her parents saw my picture, they told her in no uncertain terms that she was not allowed to date a ‘black’ and that she needed to give the picture back immediately.

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As I got older, about 90% of the fights I ever was involved with were because of the color of my skin. So much so, that the police threatened my parents, with me listening in, that the next time they were called to our home because of me, they would make sure I’d be sent to a juvenile detention center. Oddly, I never recall any of the ‘white’ kids, whose slurs instigated much of the occurrences, receiving the same type of threats.

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I used to love playing pick-up football at a kid’s house that had a huge yard not too far up the street from where I lived. Those were hot and sweaty summer days. Days where the soles of your shoes would stick to the melting asphalt of the streets. Yet, I was never allowed to go into his house for a glass of water or to use the bathroom. One day that changed, oddly enough. His family wasn’t home. It was an old, large, creepy house. After we had a drink, he wanted to show me the room he shared with his brother. He had Star Wars figures - an X-wing fighter and a Millennium Falcon - he was proud of. My eyes were fixated on his brother’s dresser where a wooden statue-like figurine stood with a handle at the base. It had the exaggerated features of an African man. This kid and his family were obviously not African - they were very ‘white’, so I asked what I thought was an obvious question,

‘What’s up with that?’ pointing with a head nod toward the wooden figure.

Nonchalantly, he replied, ‘Oh, that’s my brother’s nigger beater.’

‘Um… and what does he us it for?’, the answer seemed obvious looking back, but I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and how I was hearing it.

Almost chipper, my little neighborhood friend replied, ‘You know, in case he and his friends run into any niggers while they’re out and about, he busts them in the head with that.’ nodding at the African featured figurine.

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My dad used to let my cousin stay with us during the summers. It was a way to get him out of a pretty abusive home situation. My cousin is ‘white’. As he got older, he was involved in more and more run ins with the law. Eventually spending much of his time in and out of jail. One year, I met him as he was getting released from county. As we walked across town toward my parents’ house, an infamous car pulled up. The neighborhood kids use to call it the ‘skin head’ car. It had swastikas, and racial/nazis terms spray painted all over it. While I’m looking over my shoulder for escape routes, to my surprise they yell my cousin’s name. I slowly reached my hands in my pocket, so I’d have an excuse to keep my right hand on a pocketknife I used to carry everywhere I went… just in case. My cousin strolled over to the car, and they talked in muffled tones. They would smile and shake hands. They mentioned something about ‘partying’ that night and the driver of the skinhead car leaned out of the window, scowling at me yelled,

‘AND NO NIGGERS ALLOWED!’

My cousin ignored him, and they talked and laughed some more. As plans were finalized it seemed, my cousin turned to walk back to me. He’d stopped smiling. As the car drove off, the driver wanted to get one more dig in, leaning out the window once again, yelling,

‘MAKE SURE YOU DON’T BRING YOUR NIGGER TONIGHT!’

When my cousin reached me, I looked him in the eyes and asked, ‘What are you doing with them…?’

‘When you’re inside, you have to choose sides to survive. I did what I had to do.’ he answered, voice trailing off.

‘Well, you ain’t inside right now are you!? You know my ‘Black’ dad practically raised your ‘white’ a**, don’t you!? You remember that don’t you!?’ I rebuked sharply.

‘I did what I had to do’ he simply responded, voice trailing off once again.

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Not too long after my 17th birthday I was homeless. Prior to my homelessness, I found a camp that had a horse ranch I could work on in exchange for room and board during the summer months. I fell in love with ranch work. It’s all I wanted to do. Regardless of pay, in exchange for room and board, I wanted to do this all year round for the rest of my life! The owners of the horses were ranchers from Missouri. I asked them if I could leave with them and work their ranch in Missouri in exchange for room and board. They agreed - until about 2 weeks before summer was to end. The man never spoke with me about it. His wife approached and said,

‘My husband and I discussed this idea of yours and came to the conclusion that it would not be best for you to come back to Missouri with us. To be honest with you, we’d fear for your safety as a ‘colored’. I know you said you were planning on dropping out of school, but even if you did, the town we live in don’t take kindly to ‘coloreds’ and we’re afraid it’d be just too dangerous.’

It’s funny looking back at her calling me ‘colored’. It wasn’t the first time, and it wasn’t even a blip on my radar though I could tell it made the other ‘good Christians’ uncomfortable. By that point in my life, I had been called nigger, Oreo, half-breed, etc. so many times that being called ‘colored’ didn’t even register to me.

I practically begged and pleaded, but to no avail. In the end, because I was ‘black’, I couldn’t go with them. Within two weeks I was homeless, living in the hay loft of a barn.

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I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. Partiality (racism) had a profound impact on my upbringing. In some ways I knew, yet in other ways I didn’t discover until years later the effect racism had on me. Things I’m still discovering.

It’s ironic that a large part of my current daily activity as an adult involves preventing, looking for, and addressing concerns regarding discrimination, bias, and unfair treatment in many forms including … racism. The fact that I make a living, in part, because things like racism still exists, is ironic, yet shows that the world understands that there’s still a lot of work to do.

The church on the other hand… I have concerns. All the stories I just related weren’t from the Civil Rights era, or times long ago. They were part of my formative years growing up - the recent past. Yet, even more recently than that, I’ve watched and experienced the behavior of Christians when topics that involve racism are brought up and it’s been heart breaking on one end of the spectrum and baffling on the other end.

For example, I was part of a growing men’s group. I had expressed concerns about being intentional in making sure people, who don’t look like the majority of the men in this organization, feel welcomed as brother’s /potential brothers in Christ. I had others in my community express the same concern. We also had men who we were trying to reach or had showed up once but didn’t come back. At least one of these young men of color had experienced significant racial issues over the years and it really affected his faith. A video was released by the men’s group leader using a former slave owner as an illustration of a person to admire and follow. In a Christian leaders group chat, designed to support/answer questions to help leaders better serve our individual men’s groups, I asked the question if there was a better example we could use of individuals to follow besides someone who trafficked in flesh? Some of the responses I received were as follows:

“We’re all just sinners, I thought you knew that.”

“Slavery is still here and it’s here to stay.”

“Our founding fathers were just products of their time.”

“Everyone has their faults”

“In spite of its past, America is a Christian nation”

“It’s exhausting talking about this, what more do you want? Can’t we just move ahead?”

My hope is you, as the reader, can recognize the tones of dismissiveness and defensiveness in these reactions over a fairly straightforward question. One of many questions that has significant implications for many people of color who are made in God’s image but wounded - people who are hurting from behaviors and/or complicity by God’s people in the church. I have family very dear to me that don’t want anything to do with the church because they believe it’s a ‘white’ man’s religion filled with a bunch of hypocrites. These are folks that Christ died for, that mean the world to me, that could spend eternity never knowing the God that gave everything for them. The God that sends you and I as the very hands, feet and heart of Jesus to a world cloaked in darkness. Yet, it’s baffling we can’t discourse in love and empathy regarding matters of racism, its implications, and if there’s an opportunity to do things better to help heal modern day wounds of real people that we are called to be salt and light to. Actually, more baffling is that many so-called Christians do the opposite. Not only have I observed the defensiveness and dismissiveness of Christians in this area, I’ve experienced the attempts to make the person who has the audacity to discuss race feel bad for even mentioning such a thing. I’ve seen the Word of God manipulated and people attempt to use their authority illegitimately to silence others.

I find it hard to imagine how:

… we can “weep with those who weep and mourn with those who mourn” or

…“consider others as better than ourselves” or

…“treat others the way we would want to be treated” or

…“bear one another’s burdens”

and yet have the unbiblical posture reflected in those I’ve quoted above.

A common theme I hear from my ‘non-white’ brothers and sisters in Christ is the feeling that they are ‘not seen’, even among (perhaps especially among) Christians. Their stories, experiences, pains, perspectives are not acknowledged or are dismissed. It’s not hard to see, if we would just open our eyes to what’s going on in the world around us. If we could just humble ourselves enough to listen, step into the perspective of another and truly share in what another person not like us is trying to communicate. I could have shared worse stories to start this off, but I’m trying hard not to create the “myth of me”. How we love each other and promote the bond of unity is so much bigger than me. Than us. And there are so many who’ve had it worse than me in the area of racism among Christians.

The thing I believe that strikes me the hardest… to be honest… that hurts me the most … is the lack of care in Christians who hear the experiences of their brothers and sisters of color. The lack of shame at what is being done to another person so that it stains and tarnishes the witness of the church on behalf of Christ. A passage of scripture I marked that reflects my feelings well is:

“They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush…” Jeremiah 6:14-15a ESV

Perhaps you, as the reader, can ask yourself the same questions I asked myself after I read this:

• When was the last time I tried to dismiss the experience of someone of color by minimizing (peace, peace, when there is no peace) what they’ve went through? (i.e. Things are much better than they used to be. Nobody’s perfect. etc.)

• When was the last time I was ashamed over my attitude, behavior, or complicity towards a person of color?

• When was the last time the behavior of Christians towards a person of color, in a watching world, made me blush?

Do you even know how to blush?

Because of Him,

Ron