The Speck and the Plank
Thoughts on American Race Relations from a Christian, Conservative White Girl
The first thing I want any reader to know is that I approach this subject with great fear and trembling. I always hesitate to engage in commentary on this topic because the last thing I want to do is to add another can of gasoline to a fire that I would love nothing better than to see extinguished. My heart’s desire is to see this subject become irrelevant.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus taught:
How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
Jesus knew humans very, very well. And I’m sure he knew as he said those words how very often they would be quoted by someone trying to convince the other guy that he was the one with the plank.
I am a big believer in personal responsibility. I am a big believer in taking responsibility for those things that I am responsible for, and only those things that I am responsible for. This is why I cannot sign off on concepts like “White Guilt”. I refuse to raise my baby girl to believe that she bears the shame of the slaveholder or the lyncher or the KKK member or the Neo-Nazi merely because she shares the same skin color. That is too much weight for any of us to carry. She will have sin enough of her own without the guilt of others crowding out true self-reflection and repentance.
White Guilt, or any other type of communal guilt, is a way out of true repentance. It is easier to apologize for the sins of others than to confront the sin in our own hearts. It is a burden that is both too light, because it keeps us from seeing our own, individual faults, and too heavy, because we can never be absolved for the sins of others, so we will be damned to carry them forever. Communal guilt frees us from our own shame only to be trapped in a corporate shame that we can never, ever escape from. We are held hostage by the sins of people who, in some cases, were dead before we were even born.(This, by the way, goes both ways: I don’t think there is anything to be gained by telling Black Americans, as a collective, that they just need to get their stuff together and that would solve the problem.)
Renouncing White Guilt, however, does not release me from my own personal responsibility to examine my eye for the planks. When I looked for mine, I found it.
Over the course of the last few years, there have been several high-profile encounters between police and black people in which a black person (usually a black man) has ended up dead at the hands of one or more police officer. We are all aware of these cases, and the controversies that surround them. I must stress that each situation is unique and deserves to be analyzed separately. I don’t think it would be particularly helpful for me to do that here, but suffice to say that I have become convinced that there have been multiple cases which ended in an unjustifiable death. The police are not judge, jury or executioner, and the only justification for their taking someone’s life (as would be the case for any private citizen) is self-defense or the defense of others. Police officers should be allowed and expected to defend themselves when necessary, and they do deserve due process the same as anyone, but so do the people that they police. We should not put greater or lesser emphasis on the rights of either one.
When these cases first started to gain national attention, I have to confess that as a white person I became sidetracked by the back-and-forth arguments about whether or not there is rampant racism in America or in the police force. I felt implicated, and that triggered a defensive reaction. I put more emphasis on trying to defend white America from charges of racism than I put on trying to defend the fundamental right to due process and justice for every citizen. It is clear to me now, which issue deserved more of my attention. Whether you want to call that racist or not depends entirely on your definition of the word, but I certainly do not have qualms about calling it wrong. It was wrong for me to put more emphasis on extricating myself from communal blame than on concern for the human rights of another person. I am ashamed of it. I am ashamed of me. Not white people. Me.
When I took this plank out of my eye I realized that I didn’t have to worry about trying to quantify just how racist or not racist America was before I could start caring about justice and human rights for every person. It became obvious to me that it was more important to ask questions about how we can prevent these instances from happening in the future and how we can make sure that justice is served when they do happen. This would be true whether the victim was white or black. The fact that there is race-related controversy surrounding these incidents does not change any of that. Even one instance would have deserved my concern, because every life is precious.
I don’t have answers for how to make racial tension in America go away, but I do feel sure that consistently affirming the value of every life by demanding legal protection and equal justice for all is absolutely indispensable to that effort. There will never be perfect policing, and there will never be perfect justice, but if we are seen to pick and choose when and where and for whom we will choose to advocate, it is easy to see that this is only going to contribute to the fear that white people care about white lives, and black people care about black lives. That is why I have resolved to stop seeing police shootings as questions of race, and instead put the emphasis back on human rights, due process, and blind, dispassionate justice for every person, in every situation. This goes for both private citizens and public servants of any race, creed, or background. It’s not going to be perfect, but I believe it can be better.
The beauty of the Speck and the Plank teaching is that it is eminently practical. I’m sure I will never be done removing planks from my eye, but the more I do it, the more ability I have to change the one person I have control over: me. I humbly submit a theory: that this individual self-examination is where a world with better race relations starts: each of us beginning with ourselves before we cast stones at each other. Removing the plank from your own eye does not mean that your brother is going to to respond by letting you take the speck out of his. But at least you get to see more clearly.
Iron Ladies is a collection of the writings of conservative women for non-conservatives. The Collection for this week is here. We are also on Twitter and Facebook.
