My Voice on Race and Being White

Moving here I knew it would be the hardest thing about living in the South. Racism personified. It's subtle and then blatant as you are smacked in the face with it at every confederate statue you pass or with the history app I have on my phone saying that nearby was the spot where a young black man, Ed Johnson, was lynched in 1906 for a crime he did not commit. 

Even in our own home there is a small room above the garage where the help lived. The room is not ventilated, it's small, dingy and burning hot in the summer. There are remnants of buzzers in the dining room and in the living room where the lady of the house could call for the help. My third daughter and I are wired the same - fighters and then criers. We spent the next few days angry and crying after talking to the neighbor who shared the information about the help living in our house. "Momma, why did they make her live in such a hot and ugly room away from everyone else in the family?" she whisper talked from the backseat in the car. "Why are white people so mean to brown people?" I didn't know what to say except that it's not what Jesus asks us to do...He was always drawing in the marginalized and putting them front and center. Always.

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It was a Sunday morning and I was 17...we were in an old Catholic boys school meeting with other Believers while our church building was being built in a wealthy neighborhood nearby. Before the main service we'd gather in smaller groups and my group was filled with other youth. For a home schooled kid this was a highlight for my week and a space to connect with kids my age who love Jesus. My name was being called and I walked across the hall into another classroom to hear from a kind man about my personality test results - he offered to do this battery of test for all of the youth and we took him up on it. I'd been nervous about it for a few weeks. What seventeen year old girl isn't nervously excited to hear about who she is and hear what a life coach who works with the nations CEO's has to say about her? I didn't know it, but it would be a defining moment for the next twenty years of my life.

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I have been talking to my friends who have brown skin. Talking a lot about the racial tension in America. It always leaves me wrestling with my whiteness. I'm learning that my first step to understanding my brown brothers and sister is to understand that white people are a race with all their own with traits. That's hard to hear as a white person - to begin, the color white is blank, void of color, like a blank canvas to be painted upon. That's kind of the whole point...we have the privilege our whiteness offers us. We really can do and be and become whatever we want - at least that's what every white parent I know is encouraged to tell their kids. Paint our life just like we want to paint it. We assume every race tells their children that same thing. 

We're all born with certain qualities. Our race, our personality, our DNA...even the brain sequences scientist are finding we've been given by our ancestors based on their experience. Add on our own experiences and it gets complex real fast. I was born to two white middle class folks who came from difficult childhoods. They're both warriors, both extroverts, thinkers, both direct and both lovers of truth and Jesus. My older brother by eleven years is an extrovert too. So naturally when a life coach sat down with me and told me that I too was an extroverted thinker it was not surprising and I took it for fact.

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Sitting in that cold classroom with the man who would help me plot out my life I was encouraged as he looked across the table and said, "Oh, my goodness...I've been so excited to talk with you! Really, really excited!" I sat down into the hard desk every teenager sits in for 8 hours a day and skeptically waited. 

You have to know this about me - I trust very few men. If nothing else I'm ambivalent to most. I wonder these days if it is something genetic passed down from precious women in my lineage who were taken advantage of by men from childhood on into womahood? I don't know.  But hearing his words made me guarded at the least and skeptical at best. He went on to tell me that I could do or be absolutely anything I wanted..."Editor of Life or the New York Post...you have the exact mix to do anything you'd like to do in the corporate world. CEO, CFO...absolutely anything."

I honestly didn't know what to say. I felt like surely there must be a camera hidden where the joke would be explained. But he kept talking and I started thinking, "I don't want to be an executive or editor of Life...but gosh, maybe I should rethink being an interior designer and mom." He rambled on about my wiring and the details resulting from the multiple tests I had taken. I didn't hear most of it because hope surprisingly had begun to grow in my heart and I was fighting it. 

By that time in life I didn't allow myself to hope outside of what I could actually guarantee with my own hard work. I craved stability, I longed for a try at making a good life with a beautiful home and a family and maybe a Volvo wagon. But embracing the eternal optimism and entrepreneurial spirit that is also a great generational family trait was something I had long ago decided just brought crushed dreams and hearts. 

As much as I didn't want to my mind was racing with the possibilities this man was telling me were available. I knew I didn't want to follow in the steps of my parents and be in ministry. Not only was it a white boys club where white males dominated, well...most everything outside of children's ministry required I not have a uterus unless I wanted to volunteer. I was tired of it. Tired of the fact that women serving in the church we considered most valuable if they were exhausted from serving and quiet. 

Later I would hear of a young man, Jesus, coming for a Bride and how He would give His life for me and that would change everything. I would hear of His scandalous love for me and not be able to stop crying and wanting to respond with my whole life at His service.  But that was not where I was back then. Even though my dear parents fought the cultural norm in church with a vengeance, growing up as church planter kids you know this if nothing else - you're here to work for God and everyone else. Not only does your parents schedule revolve around caring for other people and growing the church, you're most valued by others for what you bring the church. And at the tender age of 17 I was "over it". Just completely done with hustling for my worthiness in the church. So hearing of opportunities and promised things you could count on and it didn't matter as much that I'm a woman??...yes, please. 

But at that time, not only did the dreams of the stability I craved seem to be attainable based on the assertions of this man sitting across from me, I was beginning to feel like my fairy godmother had just showed up and I really was a lost princess. 

That's when I heard him say "Oh, my goodness...I've made a mistake." He sat back in his chair with a long sigh.  "I am so, so very sorry..." he went on to ask if the name on the file he had in front of him was my name. I looked and said, "No...I'm Ami." White heat raced up my neck and I imagine flushed my cheeks in shame as he grabbed my actual file off another table and opened it up. He said, "I'm just so sorry. Well, let's see here. Ok..." As he began to tell me that it looked to him like I was best fitted as a store manager or possibly something that involved organizing and detail I fought tears.

I sat there eyes burning and decided it was my own stupid fault for hoping anyway, for letting a man manipulate my heart and offer hope. Our time wrapped up and I think the guy honestly felt horrible. He said how sorry he was again as he showed me to the door and I said, "It's okay." 

I walked into the other classroom filled with my friends who all wanted to know what he'd said all acting like I'd just gone and visited with Gandalf. I laughed and said "Store manager or something like that...real exciting." Of course, I knew that being a manager was a noble job, the boy I liked - his dad was a manager and I still think the world of him and I'm proud to call him my father in law these days.:) But managing a store was definitely not the American Dream for a woman that this man offered me when we first sat down. 

I wish I could have pulled myself aside. My 44yo self looking into my 17yo face and say, "Baby girl...we're gonna walk this one off. That was just a man's opinion. That was just a man doing all he knows to do. Let's walk it off and let's talk about what this is all about anyway, your heart. Let's talk about why it's so painful to hope."

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When you talk to people of color you learn that much like my story, false hope is offered them. We tell all American children they can be whatever they want, but when they begin to go out into the world and their color file is pulled - well, not really. They can't get rid of their color just like I can't get rid of my female DNA. It's what keeps them assimilating to our white world, our white churches and our white race. Assimilate and keep on dreaming of that manager position that will be "so awesome."

I can't help but think that the pictures my people as a race took with their children standing next to lynched men and women of color swinging by their necks from trees did something to them. Took pictures next to them like we would today in front of Six Flags. What did it do to the children's young white minds and spirits standing next to a brown Image of God swaying in the southern breeze from a rope? How did it shape their brains and in turn their children's, grandchildren's...my children...trauma is passed down and it shapes you. God help us - what did hundreds of years of slavery do to precious brown children's minds and spirits and of generations to come?

This is where I want to lose hope. Want to stop dealing with race and the issues it brings up. And because I'm white I can do that - I can just choose to stay in my white world and do my white thing. I've told my brown friends this - told them that I get tired of wrestling with all of it and they're beyond compassionate and remind me that White Fragility is a real deal. Tell them that I didn't do all those things my ancestors did and mercy, Jesus how do we fix this...what's a white person to do anyway????

It's where I was this weekend...walking around doing laundry while talking on the phone to my brown sister. Asking her how are we supposed to respond as a church? Without Jesus we can't reconcile - I'm convinced. We can learn to be nicer, we can learn to let others go first, but reconcile? Make things RIGHT? Not without Him. I wouldn't even try because honestly it's easier to just keep living white. So much easier. But I love Jesus and He wasn't just about reconciliation, He was about retribution...giving us back what evil has taken. Restoring everything to the way it should be.

Here's what she said, "You know white people like to do things. And this whole process isn't so much about doing as much as it is about being. About being with people of color and learning what that means for them in our culture. About making friends with people of color and listening. The doing will come, but there's a lot of just being with right now that needs to happen. White people like to go in and do things and it makes them feel better because 'Look, I'm doing something to make a difference!' But really they haven't wrestled with their whiteness and how that affects people of color. Racially diverse churches are mostly upper middle class diverse churches where people of color have assimilated. So you don't have to do anything right now, friend...just keep having those hard conversations with people and use your whiteness to empower people of color. When you can be for a long time - maybe a lifetime - you'll know what to do. People of color can help you know what to do." 

I cried and couldn't stop. It's so true - doing makes me feel better about the wrong. But people of color are not white people's projects. And it's not that you stay in the being and never do something to make a change. It's that the time of being can't be skipped over. Like Peter cutting off the soldiers ear when all Jesus wanted was for Peter and the others to stay awake and be with Him in the longest night of His life. And out of that being, we can do something - but we won't know what to do until we can be. 

There's so much more to be said about race and about being white and not knowing you're a race.  But today I know this - I would have lost who I really am in a corporate office. I would have lost time with my most favorite people, my children, and lost my heart and who I am too. I know I would have succeeded in that world because I'm determined and a fighter and like every woman on the planet, I know how to manipulate with my femaleness. I would have had the nice house and the Volvo and I would have assimilated into the white male world and lost my femininity. And I would have lost myself. 

I think this is some of what my brown friends are saying, "We don't want to lose who we are anymore. Don't want to lose our culture and our color just to make it in the white world. We know we can and we know it would cost us and our children our heritage and who we are as a people." I think that's what we have to wrestle with (and a lot more) as a white race. Our white supremacy. How we get angry when we have to make reparations - how we don't like it when people of color tell us we are the source of a great, deep injustice and pain. 

I don't like racism - I don't like talking about it and I get tired of wrestling with my whiteness. #grace #whitefragility But what I hate more? I hate injustice, I hate bullies and I hate the evil that fuels it all. I hate that I didn't have someone tell me that I'm actually an introverted feeler and that it's beautiful no matter that we seem to keep promoting extroverted white males in American Christianity. I hate that my brown sisters worry about being out at night with their brown sons and husbands and I never have one thought about it. I hate that I lived for 20 years thinking I was someone I wasn't. And I don't want that for anyone.

Being here in the South is an answer to a heart prayer really - one that never came out of my mouth. A prayer to make a difference. I don't want to be a CEO or an editor of some iconic magazine, but I will until my dying day keep challenging my white brothers and sisters like I did on the back porch the other night with a friend. Challenging them to stop and listen to what's coming out of their mouths - released into the atmosphere and emoted to every person of color they come into contact with...prejudice. Challenge all of us to be like the prophets of old and ask God to forgive US even though we weren't the ones tearing families apart and selling them off to never see each other again. WE have to make reparations, my dear brothers and sisters. WE have to respond in humility and stop the hating. 

I know it's scary and I know it's tiring, but this is the time in our generation to make a difference. WE have to start by BEING with people of color and listening and asking forgiveness for our race's actions. WE have to BE before we can DO. Because...WE have to change first and that only happens when we are present with the ones who change us. Please make friends with a person of color before you open your mouth about racism. Please make friends with a person of color who will be honest with you and let you be honest with them. Jesus can change our spirits and our minds - He can heal and forgive the sins of our fathers and mothers. But it starts with repentance. 

I'll stop for now, but this is my one small, home school mom of six white voice saying that I am not going to be quiet anymore for fear of saying the wrong thing. So here's my messy voice. It's time to start being, listening and using your voice white friend. Do it - it will change everything.