I wade into deep waters with this blog post.  On July 5^th, my family welcomed Samuel Lewis into our family.  Over the next week we were in the bliss and busyness of adjusting everything about our family to welcoming Sam.  We’re still in that transitional time.  Over this same period, the family of our nation struggled with the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting of Trayvon Martin.  I don’t intend to parse the evidence or trial in this post.  I barely paid attention to it given the new reality in our home, but given the reaction to the silence of the white church from some of my black friends, I wanted to share some reflections that might be helpful to us all when it comes to racism in our culture.

While I was an undergraduate at Wheaton College I took a course titled Advanced Developmental.  It focused on gender and race in psychological development.  We were assigned an article to read by Charles Ridley, a psychologist at Indiana University. This article made a distinction that changed the way I looked at racism in our culture and pointed my life in a different direction.  I believe this distinction can be helpful to us in light of the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin and subsequent trial of George Zimmerman.

As I remember it, Ridley made the case that there is a clear distinction between prejudice and racism.  Prejudice is an attitude, whereas racism is a system, a system that tends to regularly benefit one race over another.  The distinction is important, because someone can participate in and contribute to a racist system and even benefit from it without necessarily having prejudicial attitudes.

What this distinction allowed me to do as a white man was to be open to the idea that my actions might perpetuate a system that provided privilege to one race over another, while not actively engaging in prejudicial attitudes toward other races.  This is not to say that I never have sinful prejudicial attitudes.  Rather, it is to say that this distinction allowed me to be open to my own culpability in perpetuating racist systems even if I didn’t want to be doing so.

The flip side of this distinction is that it motivated me to work toward becoming more aware of and breaking down racist systems.  I began to sense a call to racial (and economic) reconciliation.  My heart was open to my actions and decisions being searched and challenged by my friends and God.  I began to ask questions about how my decisions to live in certain neighborhoods and not other neighborhoods perpetuated racist systems that didn’t give the same privilege of choice to all people.  I began to ask questions about how my spending habits put money in the pockets of some people and not others.  I began to ask questions about how the friends I chose or tended to spend time developing kept me from seeing certain experiences of people who were different than my friends.  I began to ask these questions and be open to the uncomfortable truth that my decisions and actions just might perpetuate racist systems.

For those racists systems to be broken down, I had to change my decisions and actions.  So I chose to live in the ghetto while in seminary, a predominately minority neighborhood.  I saw how the actions of a few in that neighborhood terrorized the many and gave a bad reputation to the neighborhood as a whole.  I saw how the flight of resources from that neighborhood made it even more difficult to overcome the obstacles to wellbeing for all.

I chose to look at my investments and see whether the companies that were paying dividends into my retirement fund had a history of diversity in leadership and community impact or whether they had a history of homogeneity.  I decided to reinvest my retirement funds in a socially screened mutual fund.

I chose to begin to invest time in building friendships with people who were not white.  I spent intentional time talking about the issues of race with these new friends. I began to see that they saw things and experienced things that I was blind to seeing and experiencing.  Slowly I began to see some of the things they were seeing.

I don’t know whether Mr. Zimmerman acted out of prejudice in his choices, but I have no doubt that there are many racist systems in our culture that have contributed to this tragedy.  I’d encourage each of us to ask ourselves difficult questions about how we perpetuate those systems by our actions and decisions.  One of the best ways to do so is to cultivate friendships with people who are different than you: different racially, different politically, different socioeconomically, different in education, different in age, different in nationality, different in religion and faith.  My hope is that the church can be a catalyst for those kinds of friendships.  We have a long way to go to embody that reality, but with God’s help, we will accomplish that dream.

Here are a couple of resources that might be a good place to begin further reflection:

My friend Enuma’s article about the silence of her white church.

CNN article about the silence of white churches.

United Methodist Bishops’ reflections.

A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.