Several months ago, I had the honor and privilege of sitting down with Tuskeegee Airman LTC Alexander Jefferson. This man experienced countless instances of personal, structural, and institutional racism. After listening to his stories of courage and endurance, as well as his accounts of racism, one of my fellow service members asked if he thought America was still racist. He said, “of course America’s a racist country! But, it’s the best damn country on the face of the earth!”
I’ve been thinking about that ever since.
I used to post on social media a lot more about racial issues (and political issues), but I cut back on my social media interactions, mostly sticking to theological articles, family craziness, and dank memes. For one thing, it was taking up a lot of time from my family and profession that I didn’t have to give. I was staying up at night thinking about what I needed to say to people. I wasn’t present in my children’s lives like I am supposed to be. I wasn’t prayerful about my church like I am supposed to be. But, also, I questioned why I was doing it. Were there actually people on my feed who were racists and disagreed with me, and I would actually be changing their minds and hearts? Were there people who were unaware of the nationally publicized events of racial animus whose “awareness” would be raised by my three-line emotive posts? Is the reality that I just made myself feel good by saying the things that were, generally, agreed upon by everyone? What did I think I was actually accomplishing by social media outrage?
Probably, very little. As I wrote in my sermon for this upcoming Pentecost Sunday, “It is time for God’s people to be Spirit-living people, whose words and deeds are those of truth and reconciliation. I don’t know what that looks like for you, but social media outrage isn’t enough. In fact, that can make it worse when done in a fashion that just generates self-righteousness and hatred toward other groups.”
Of course, the problem remains.
As basically everyone knows, Ahmaud Arbery was murdered by two men in Georgia, essentially because the men thought he looked like someone who had stolen some items from a construction site. The men claimed to be attempting a “citizens arrest”, which is only legal if a felony has been observed. They stopped him while he was jogging. In the video of the murder, nothing Arbery does is any different from what anyone would have done if two men attempted to kidnap you - and because guns were out already, he was killed. Arbery himself was unarmed.
What would be seen as a wildly, tragically stupid act of Southern machismo - if the guns weren’t out for a suspected “burglar”, there would have been no struggle over a weapon and no one would have died - is seen instead as a racist murder. Do we have evidence that the two men decided that day that they were gonna go kill a black man? No. But this didn’t happen in a historical and cultural vacuum.
LeBron James tweeted “We’re literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our homes!” At first glance, the claim looks ridiculous, especially coming from someone who has the resources and privilege of an NBA star. If he had experienced any kind of racist threat of violence in the last 20 years, it would have been on the front page. Furthermore, the statistics are clear that black men are not significantly more likely to be killed by cops than white men. But this didn’t happen in a historical and cultural vacuum.
This history of the treatment of people with African ancestry in our country is shameful and despicable. If you haven’t read or heard accounts of the horrific treatment of slaves on slave ships, or in slavery, then go do it (Alex Haley’s Roots is a good start). Free blacks could be kidnapped and sold into slavery, and there were many in the North who may not have supported slavery but did not view black men and women as equals. Following the Civil War, African-Americans still suffered cruelty, injustice, and oppression across the country. Lynchings and state laws restricting their freedom were part of the culture in the South until 55 years ago, in my parents’ lifetimes, in the lifetime of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. While those practices became formally banned, a culture that cheered for George Wallace’s “segregation forever” speech wasn’t simply going to warmly embrace their fellow citizens as true equals. Because the history of personal and economic oppression continued for those centuries, a large proportion of African-Americans lived in lower-income and impoverished areas, where crime is more prevalent. Thus, big city cops became accustomed to seeing crime perpetrated by black citizens, and media portrayals of “Boyz in the Hood” and “Menace to Society” cemented that impression in Americans who didn’t live in the cities.
Furthermore, racist attitudes continued. With redlining and peonage policies continuing to keep the black family and community under the heel of wider American society, it was much more difficult for individuals to work their way out of their economic condition. Individual acts of racist violence, while becoming less common after the late 60’s, were regular reminders of the culture, history, heritage, and still-broken state of race relations. In 1981, two KKK members abducted and killed a black man in Alabama, simply because another black man had been acquitted of a murder. In 1998, in Texas, three white men murdered a black man who had accepted a ride from them, then dumped his body and went to a BBQ. And, while most Americans of all colors were horrified by these acts, non-state approved and non-higher culture approved racism was still alive and well.
I had never been in a majority-white school as a kid, having spent most of my childhood just outside NYC and DC - but I still remember vividly when some kids in my high school thought they were clever by using the word “sreggin” to try to thinly veil their racist language and attitudes. I actually was on the wrong end of poor race relations in a six-month stint at East High School in Memphis, where I was one of three white kids in a school of about 1000. I had to fight there more than the rest of my high school career combined, because not only was I white, I was also small. Racism always targets those with less power, and I know what’s it’s like to anticipate racist behavior from those around me and to live in a tension of expecting physical violence against me just because of the color of my skin - even though the vast majority of my fellow students were of no threat to me whatsoever, and some of them were my friends. But, of course, once I left school each day, I didn’t carry that fear and anxiety. I was in the majority in my neighborhood, and the cops weren’t patrolling my neighborhood looking for perps. On the one hand, I have been on the receiving end of more actual racist physical violence than Ta Nahisi Coates. True, my experience at East HS may have given me a glimpse into what it is like to be a minority, but because I was no longer a minority after I left, I never had to deal with the kind of character and personality formation that comes from living that all day, every day, with a history and family narrative of generation after generation of racial prejudice, discrimination, violence, and oppression. I may have been the target of more physical racist violence than LeBron James, but no one will ever put a racial slur on my house. To be African-American is to live a life in which you expect racism to impact you because even if you’ve never been attacked, denied a job, or called a n*****, those things have happened to your family members, friends, and people in your community. To be African-American is to know that, while every white person isn’t a racist, there are white racists, and you don’t know who they are until they reveal themselves. So, when you are denied a job, and a white person gets it, you are never really sure if you didn’t get it because you are black.
Thus, because of the significant racist history of our country, even though the emancipation of slaves, suffrage, civil rights progress, and cultural progress has all been achieved with (and, honestly, considering of the power differential at the time, largely because of) white allies, the problem of racism is much, much larger than racists being racist. The problem of racism in America is that it has left a cultural legacy where some groups know for certain that racism has impacted them and their families, and they expect it to continue to impact them and their families. True racist acts are rare - that’s why many white people seem perplexed that so many blacks seem to see racism everywhere. Those white people aren’t racists, have no sympathy for racists, and treat their fellow citizens as equals. They don’t see anything racist “happening” in their immediate sphere, so it isn’t a real problem. Because our country has made so much progress in its treatment of minorities in the past 60 years, it is socially unacceptable to express racist sentiments, in person, with someone you don’t know shares that idea. That’s why I haven’t heard a racist comment since high school! The availability heuristic leads most whites to believe that racism is a thing of the past because it hasn’t affected them and they don’t see it.
If you are not white, on the other hand, you only need to experience one or two expressions of racist thought or speech (a la Ta Nahisi Coates) to have it cemented in your mind that the oppression faced by your forbears is only being held back by some combination of policy and culture, and those things aren’t always going to be in place or be effective. When you have inherited the legacy of racist oppression, and experienced just enough racist behavior to reinforce that people would still be outwardly racist is they thought they could get away with it, then you will see racism everywhere that it might be. Two white men, one a former “lawman”, in Georgia, take out their guns and try to accost a black man because he “fits the description”, and in the ensuing struggle, they kill him. It’s possible that the men aren’t racists, and not unreasonable to suggest that they didn’t do anything differently because Arbery was black than if he was white. But, given the history and culture of Georgia, we cannot expect our African-American brothers and sisters to see this as anything but an act of racist violence - “he is dead because he’s black” - and the classic good-old-boy cover-up makes it look even worse. LeBron may not have EVER been hunted, nor may have the vast majority of black Americans. But, given the history and culture, he is not lying about how he feels, and neither should we expect him to feel otherwise.
And now, George Floyd is killed in an act of criminal negligence by a Minneapolis police officer. It’s still very early in the discovery phase as I write this, but we have yet to see a video that shows how Mr. Floyd goes from walking in handcuffs in front of the cops to pinned down by three of them, one on his neck, on a curb next to the cop car - a physical situation that surely caused his death. I have the somewhat rare circumstance of having close family members who are or were cops, and some who have been on the wrong end of over-physical police behavior. I can tell you that “I can’t breathe” is a common “perp” claim to get more lenient restraints so they can get a chance to escape. I can tell you that if Mr. Floyd, who was a BIG dude, did actually resist the officers in the time we don’t have video for, then getting thrown down on the concrete and held down by three cops is an expected consequence for any person of his size. That doesn’t mean he deserved his death, or that the one cop was justified in kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes. It does mean that there is nothing racist about what happened on its face. He passed a counterfeit $20, the cops arrested the right person, there was some kind of physical altercation, and he was forcibly restrained by the cops. They weren’t obstructing his windpipe or trying to choke him, but the one cop, at least, did not care if Mr. Floyd was suffering. Why not? Was it because he is a racist and trying to do racist things? Was it because he’s a sadist, and just likes causing people pain? Or, was it because the work of a cop can, if they aren’t careful, make one hardened to the complaints of those who are causing trouble in the community, and disregard genuine complaints? We’ll never know, but to be African-American in our country today is to know that racism is real, that it has impacted families and communities in awful ways, that it has contributed to the deaths of people who look like you, and to be expectant that situations like this require a kind of proof of “non-racism” that we’re all unlikely to get. This didn’t happen in a historical and cultural vacuum, and on the heels of Arbery’s murder, it looks even worse. That cop may not have a racist bone in his body, but it is reasonable and should be expected, that the African-American community sees it as racist police violence.
That’s why racism is so terrible. The power of lynching, especially with the number who were lynched based upon false accusations, wasn’t so much in causing the death of the individual, but in causing fear among the black community to get them to “behave”. African-Americans have been, as a whole, far more victimized by redlining and peonage than by racist violence, but the collective impact of institutional and individual racism has left a level of damage to race relations that looks, sadly like it will never heal properly. If, going forward from right now, every single white person had no racist thoughts, words, or deeds, and every policy and institution operated in a perfectly equitable fashion, the legacy of racism would still continue for generations. African-Americans would still see racism in people’s behavior because it has been part of our culture for so long. Who will believe when the leopard has truly changed his spots? And, of course, racism will never go away, though thankfully we continue to repress it as a society.
The lady in Central Park, screeching like she was about to be raped or murdered to the police while she stood ten feet from her supposed threat, shows that even people with “approved” progressive cred (I voted for Barack twice, I have black friends!) will use the racism inherent in the system to benefit themselves. Yeah, he was wrong for threatening to poison her dog – but the man is right. She knew when she told the cops that an African-American man was threatening her (which he didn’t), a white lady, that the cops would come in a hurry prepared to deal with a threat. She knew that, and he knew that.
And, Minneapolis riots. And then many cities riot. People aren’t aware that “race riots” actually began with white people rioting in black neighborhoods. White people didn’t approve of POC’s uppity behavior, thinking they were just as good as whites, and they would riot and destroy black property and murder black people. Cops did nothing. Over time the African-American community reacted, and now we associate race riots with minorities rioting. But in Minneapolis, the riots are fairly race-neutral. People want to sin, want to be violent, want to steal, and so they do – because the media has given them reason enough.
And that’s part of the problem. Take some time to read some local news reports. At least in my area, if the race of the perpetrator is non-white, the race is not mentioned. If a black cop kills an unarmed white woman, as happened in Minneapolis two years ago, the races are not mentioned in the headline. But, if a white cop or person is involved in the death of a black American, it is part of the headline. This isn’t an accident.
We have to wake up. Racism is real, even if you don’t see it, white people. There IS a media and political agenda for fomenting racial animus. There are people and organizations that provide leadership and money for these riots. Emoting your feelings on social media – about something everyone is already aware of and agrees is awful - isn’t bringing change or awareness. It mostly makes you feel good about yourself and provides an outlet for your emotions…and emoting anger about a group encourages anger on the part of one group while leading the out-group to be likely to ignore the problem because they can condemn the bad behavior and move on.
Consider, for example, the different versions of the meme I used for the title picture for this post. This one, shared by LeBron, is effective and communicates clearly. It reminds us what many had forgotten in the flag/kneeling hubbub, that Kap made his protest about police violence in America against African-Americans. Few people remember that Kap initially was sitting for the anthem, but a veteran convinced him to change it to kneeling. That message became twisted and lost when people began kneeling during the anthem, “because Trump.” However, the more common version of this meme said “if you care more about this kneeling than this kneeling, you’re part of the problem!” Who honestly believes that such a message does anything to move people in the right direction?
In an age and social media environment where everything must be for, against, or about Trump, it’s mostly just shouting past each other and generating emotion for my side and against their side. So, don’t be surprised that you see little social media reaction from me about these events, whether it is individuals behaving badly or groups behaving badly. I’ve been told enough times already that defending any policy that happens to be associated with Trump, or even voting for him (which I didn’t) makes me a racist or a contributor to continuing race issues. It’s clear that there are not many people who really listen.
There is one thing I do hope a certain group of people hear: to my African-American brothers and sisters, I understand your anger and fear – and I also understand your hope, because it is a hope I share. I feel sick to my stomach when I see those viral examples of police brutality and racism, and do again when I see communities shattered by people who are rioting because they have been manipulated into believing that an act which will only harden opposition against racial reconciliation will do any good. You have an ally in advocating for genuinely helpful conversations and public policies, even if I’m not dropping a two-sentence outrage post. I work at influencing people I know or lead in person, the organizations I’m connected to, and civic leaders who represent me. That doesn’t mean I don’t say anything in public online, but I see other methods as more effective ways to work for change.
Most of all, I pray for a peace that is not the absence of conflict but is the shalom that only comes from the Spirit of Christ moving in this world, the same spirit that brought together thousands on that first Pentecost after the ascension. That is the only true hope, a hope in the One who is making all things new.