Saying something

I have eight thousand thoughts about race, American history, our current social climate, the scandal of our non-integrated church, my own culpability in systems of oppression, my own responsibility for working to change myself and those systems, and other tortured aspects of race in America. I keep wanting to write about it, but I haven’t. That’s partly because I know I don’t have anything unique to contribute. It’s partly because I should be doing more listening/reading than talking/writing. And it’s partly because there’s too much to say, too many angles and implications.

But silence also feels like a problem. What I feel compelled to say right now is that the push to force us to acknowledge that black lives matter is critically important. The response that “all lives matter” is of course true, but it deliberately misses the point of the original claim. To say that African American people’s lives matter should be so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said. But we as a society have long explicitly or tacitly agreed that African American lives are less deserving of protection/respect/dignity than European American lives. It is no novel thing to say that this is our country’s original sin, our national shame.

But it’s not all in the past. What we need to do is to tell the truth about how present this horrid arrangement still is. When we treat violent deaths and mass incarceration and under-resourced schools and food deserts and grinding poverty as the collateral damage in the development of “the greatest country in the history of the earth,” we reinforce the notion that some lives just don’t matter that much.

If God has a heart for the marginalized, the oppressed, the least of these among us (and he does), he surely is particularly on the side of those whose lives are treated as less valuable by those with power. And he stands in judgment of those people who are willing to sacrifice black lives at the false altars of American idolatry. I’m afraid to be honest about how often I’m in the latter group. But it will only be through fearless honesty that I and we can begin to be different. May God empower us to be honest and bold and, most of all, caring.