Bad Advice: How to be a Racist

How to Become or Stay a Racist

Like many of you, I followed the news of Charlottesville on the 12th and Boston last weekend. I saw the images of protestors clashing in the streets. Of white supremacists waving their confederate flags and making Nazi salutes. Like you, I saw the anger and fear of protesters and counter-protestors. And, I was convicted we need to talk about this in church.

I shared this decision with our congregation through our weekly newsletter. And, I got some responses from people. There is a lot of energy and passion around the issue of race in America.

So, today, I want us to think together, through the lens of scripture, about racism and the gospel, about oppression and Jesus.

This is the second week in our Bad Advice series, a series in which we tell you how to mess up your life, somewhat tongue in cheek, and then look at a better way to life through the gospel of Jesus.

Think Racism is Something “out there”

How is it, then, that we can become racists. First, make sure you look for the racism in other people, especially people who are not like you. If you are young, make a point of noticing how your grandparents use outdated language to refer to people of color. If you are from the North, focus on how you don’t fly the confederate flag like they do in the south. Focus on all the people of color you know and so you could never be racist.

Prejudice is a preconceived judgment or opinion about a person or group of people based in limited information. Anyone can be prejudiced.

That’s what I want to do. I want to tell you about how I was part of a diversity awareness group called Colors when I was at Calvin. How one of my closest friends in college was from the south side of Chicago. How, I sought out Jhonny Baez as a mentor and count him a dear friend. How, through adoption, my family is likely more diverse than most of your families. And if all that fails, I can point out how I would never celebrate the Nazis or Confederate generals. But in that moment of pride, I can’t help but remember a quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident from the last centruy who came to faith as a political prisoner in the Gulag who wrote of his own desire to separate the world into good and bad people, keeping himself in the corner of good:

Racism is a system of advantage based on race, involving cultural messages, misuse of power, and institutional bias. Anyone can be prejudiced, but only people with cultural power tied to their race can be racist. Higher caste people can be racist in India. And, white people can be racist in the US.

Racial prejudice

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes (showing 1-30 of 416)

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. Or as Paul might put, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And, if you live in the US, unless you work hard at fighting it, you will act in racist ways. It is part of the air we breathe, even the best of us.

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Avoid Conversations that make you uncomfortable

First, define racism as something that affects other people and not you. Second, avoid conversations that make you uncomfortable. For those of us who are white, conversations about race make us uncomfortable. We may feel guilty. We may feel attacked.

We have so defined racism as this terrible evil in our culture that for many of us, to even have a conversation about race make us so uncomfortable that we just want to end and have someone say we are OK.

We can avoid these conversations, because most of us live segregated lives. Seriously, look at the makeup of Grandville, Jenison, and Hudsonville: Grandville is 88% white, Hudsonville is 93% white and leading the pack, Jenison is 94.5% white. We do not often need to have these conversations. We can live as if everyone has the same experience regarding race as us, because almost everyone around us does.

And, because we live segregated lives, we don’t build up the emotional muscles to have difficult conversations. Our white perspective is never challenged because everyone else is white too. So, when presented with an experience that contradicts our own, we do not know how to respond.

Grandville is 89% white

Rather than listening and trying to understand, defend or push away.

Hudsonville is 90 % white and leading the pack

Jenison is 97% white

Ignore Subtle Forms of Racism

First, act like racism is only out there and something other people deal with. Avoid conversations about race that make you uncomfortable. And then third, ignore the subtle forms of structural racism.

There are subtle experiences of racism we may not even notice as white people. People of color being followed at Meijer’s for fear they will shoplift. People of color consistently paying more for cars. People with minority sounding names getting job interviews less often than people with white names, with the exact same resume. Literally, all they changed was the name.

I was talking with a friend recently and he shared a story from a neighborhood around the Hudsonville area. Apparently, their neighborhood has a covenant and it prohibits people from having non-immediate family members live in their house. They probably want to avoid having people rent out a room or something. There are also no hispanics in their neighborhood. In their culture, multiple generations living together is more common, but the covenants won’t allow it. The neighborhood across the street had the same rule but then they changed their covenant. And, within 12 months, 5 hispanic families had moved into the neighborhood. Sometimes, the discrimination is subtle and unintentional and we may miss it, unless we pay close attention to the experience of people of color.

Pretend you are colorblind

Fourth, go through life pretending you are color-blind. Which of course, no one is. Pretending we can be color blind is as silly as pretending we are height blind. This is a picture of Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues. Both played in the NBA. One is the tallest player ever at 7’6” and the other is the shortest at 5’3”. They both play on the same court, but their experience and their capabilities on that court are radically different in large part due to their height.

The same is true in our culture due to the color of our skin. I’ll never forget hearing my younger sister talk about how they had to go to training when they were adopting to learn how to raise a black boy in America. The focus was on how to relate to police and other authority figures. And, it’s not just in their heads.

This is a quote from a top advisor to Richard Nixon the 1970s, John Erlichman, that just became public a couple of years ago:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

The color of our skin shapes our experiences. If you want to be a racist, pretend it doesn’t.

The Gospel Call to Reconciliation and Unity

The Gospel Call to Reconciliation and Unity

Addressing racism and prejudice are core aspects of living a gospel shaped life. This deeply matters to God. Way back in Genesis, the people gather and decide to build a tall tower so they can control God and make God do what they want. IN response to this sin, God comes down and changes all their languages so they can’t communicate with each other. And the people are divided from each other because of their sin through a diversity of languages. But, on the first Pentecost, when the disciples are filled with the Holy Spirit, the crowds can all hear them in their own language. The punishment of division by language is undone when the gospel is first preacher.

Literally, the entire book of Galatians is all about how Jews and Gentiles, two groups of people who both saw the other as somewhat less than human, are now being made into a new people, a new group, through the gospel.

In the Old Testament, God sends the prophet Jonah to the people of Nineveh. These are the mortal enemies of the people of Israel. The Israelites hated, the despised the Ninevites. But God loves them and sends a prophet to call the people to repent and come back to God.

Over and over again in the New Testament, we see the gospel crossing cultural boundaries and reconciling people to one another. To not seek the reconciliation, to not seek community is to deny the very gospel itself. Listen to Jesus prayer in on the night before he died on the cross for you and me.

John 17:20–23 NIV

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Reconciliation and unity in the church is part of our witness that Jesus really is who he says he is and that God really did what the Bible claims he did when Jesus died and rose again. This is core to our witness as the church. So, how can we work to fight against racism and prejudice in our midst.

How to Change

Root Your Identity in Christ

First, we need to root our identity in Christ. This does not mean that we do not acknowledge other aspects of who we are. I am still a white, upper middle class, educated, male who lives in the suburban midwest of the United States. But, if my identity is found first in Christ, then rather than being drawn to upper middle class white people like me, I will be drawn to Christians like me. When watching the news, my first loyalty emotionally and intellectually will be to Christians in Iraq or India or Iran or Brazil, rather than unbelieving white, upper middle class educated white guys.

When Paul is pleading for unity in the churches in Galatia, for a rooting their identity in Christ rather than the Jewish or Gentile ethnicity, he says:

Galatians 3:26–28 NIV

So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Root your identity first in Jesus and find common cause first with other believers, no matter their race of ethnicity.

Work to Build Relationships

Root your identity in Christ and then work to build relationships with people of color. Knowing that many of us live in communities that have huge white populations, this is not going to be easy. It won’t happen naturally for many of us.

I may have a diverse family, but as I looked at my life recently, I realized I currently do not have any close friends who are not white. I have had them in the past, but it takes intentionality when you live in Jenison, and I have not been as intentional as I should have been.

It may make you feel uncomfortable, it may feel awkward, and depending on your friends, you may get some looks, but it has never been easy to be a person who seeks reconciliation and community across racial and ethnic lines. Way back in the 1st century, the apostles felt a lot of pressure to stick to their fellow Jews, to not rock the boat, by hanging out with Gentile believers. In fact, the pressure got so great that for a while Peter stopped eating with Gentiles. This is how Paul describes what happened in Genesis 2.

Galatians 2:11–13 NIV

When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group. The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray.

Paul rebukes Peter and accuses Peter of putting the very gospel at stake by withdrawing from relationship with the Gentiles. It takes work. It takes intentionality. Build relationships, friendships with people of other races, people who are not just like you.

Listen to the Experience of Others

Root your identity in Christ. Build relationships. And then, listen to the experience of others. You do not have to agree with everything you hear, but listen to understand. And whatever you do, don’t explain away their experience. Don’t mansplain to women, don’t whitesplain to people of color. Listen and learn from them.

That’s one thing that has always impressed me about the early church. In the very beginning of the church, they had to figure out how to include both Jews from Judea and Jews from around the empire who came to Jerusalem to die. Back then, many wealthy Jewish men who lived away from Jerusalem would travel to Jerusalem to die, leaving their widow behind, often with little to no means of support. These widows spoke Greek. The church cared for these widows and the widows of Jerusalem. But, the Greek speaking widows felt neglected. And this is what happened in Acts.

Acts 6:1–2a NIV

In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenistic Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food. So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, “It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables.

The widows complained, the disciples listened to their concern. They heard them out. They did not tell these women their experience was wrong or that somehow things were really just if they just looked at it right, they listened. As the story continues, the disciples give away power to 7 new people called Deacons who would serve the widows of the church. But this is what I love, every last one of the 7 new deacons has a Greek name. The Greek speaking Jews felt ignored and marginalized and the early church listened and gave them power.

Give Away Leadership

What would look like today for the church to intentionally recruit people of color to lead in our communities… to be our pastors and elders and deacons… to let go of our power and let the often marginalized lead.

What will you do?

So, what will you do today to live into the ministry of reconciliation? Maybe you will begin to pray not just for US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also for our brothers and sisters in Christ in those lands. Maybe you will invite someone out to lunch who is not like you ethnically. Not to grill them on what it is like to be a person of color, but simply to get to know. Please don’t make someone else explain racism and the black or hispanic experience in the US to you. There are lots of books and documentaries and podcasts that can help. If you want to listen to the experience of people of color, you can check out the Netflix documentary 13th about mass incarceration or the Reformed African American Network podcast called Pass the Mic that discusses the concern of people of color in the American church. Or you could read, Waking Up White by Debby Irving or Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coats.

Or maybe you will pray for our own church and our denomination that we will be open to and even seek leadership from the people of color already in our midst and do a better job of welcoming all people regardless of race into our community.

Talking about race and racism and prejudice can be hard. It makes us uncomfortable. But it is central to the gospel of reconciliation we have found in Christ. May we more and more become ambassadors of God’s reconciliation and reflect the diversity we see in heaven in .

Revelation 7:9–10 NIV

After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.