Sermon Tone Analysis

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If you are young, make a point of noticing how your grandparents use outdated language to refer to people of color.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.