Talking About Race

One black man is killed every 28 hours by the police. Another young man was just shot in Madison, WI last night. A few weeks ago, a young black women struggling with mental health issues was suffocated while praying. Reports coming out of Ferguson talk about extensive poverty, police targeting of black residents, and a complex system of fees, fines, and debtor’s prison. Nearly a million black men and women are in our prison system.

When white professionals, especially white church professionals, talk about race, we like to talk about our feelings. And we like to talk about interpersonal racism. Did I say the right thing? How do I feel about my mom dating a black man? These can be helpful conversations, but sometimes I think we like to pretend that racism would go away if we were all nicer to each other and just learned to get beyond questions of race. And, even more to the point, we all need to acknowledge that, honestly, when we talk about racism only in the context of our own feelings, we make it all about us.

But in the wider world, people are actually dying. I mean, black women and men are getting shot in the streets. Black communities, disproportionately poor, are denied access to the basic means of life. They are also targeted by a system that intentionally penalizes poverty. People die in this system.  

So I’d like to talk a little less about my feelings about race. We have more pressing questions, I think.

Like, how do we preach openly about racism—not just as how we feel about each other, but also the hard, systemic realities of how racism plays out in this country? Its not a comfortable sermon in many congregations.

I want to have hard conversations about how we as white professionals interact with the police. Many of us assume that calling the police in a mental health crisis or during an altercation on church property is the thing to do. For many of us, it is our first choice. Do we ever ask how this affects our role in the community or what side this puts us on in the long run with people actually struggling to survive in our communities?  

I work in majority white, poor contexts and many white church leaders I know work in poor or working class contexts. How do we not only acknowledge the racism and prejudice that is present in white communities, but also the role and function it plays? Poor and working whites have long bought into the myth of white supremacy, therefore keeping poor whites from uniting with poor people of color. How do we make this plain in our communities, how do we point this out in a way that brings repentance and change? How, for example, might Ferguson (majority black) and Aberdeen (majority white) see that they are both targets of the same system?

I want to talk about prisons. I want to talk about how religious language justifies our prison system, justifies our drug wars, a war and a system that overwhelmingly targets people of color. With the highest incarceration rates in the world, the church generally says nothing. The church is perhaps one of the few institutions in this country that could actually conceive of alternative ways of dealing with interpersonal violence.     

These are real, pressing questions. Questions that deserve our time and energy. I work in a context of crisis, in a community also struggling to survive. Perhaps it makes these questions all the more urgent for me. Too often, I sit with people dying as a direct result of racism and the criminalization of poverty. We desperately need to be talking about it.