Why Do I Care?
A few months ago I attended our church’s Faith & Race seminar and during the small group time, one of the women in my group said this:
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“I don’t get why White people come to a class like this.
Seriously, what are you doing here? Why do you even care?”
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As the only White person in our group at the time I just stared back at her for a beat. Who me? I managed some semblance of an answer at the time but I’ve been thinking about her question ever since. Why do I care? Why has this become “my thing,” as some of my family and friends refer to it?
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The Progression
For me, the process started like this:
- I don’t care. I don’t even know that this is a conversation people are having.
. - Ok, people are having this conversation. They should stop. It’s only making things worse. COLORBLIND, people! We’re supposed to be colorblind.
. - Fine, it’s possible that some people are, like, kinda sorta racist but not me. Definitely not me. And mostly it’s all good.
. - I have some friends who are not White and they tell me that they are affected by race on a daily basis. I’m skeptical but these are my people. This is my crew. I’m not sure I buy it but I’ll try to care more.
That was the beginning for me. That was the start of a seismic shifting in my life.
Putting on Glasses
When I was 10 I got glasses for the first time. And like many folks who need glasses long before they actually get them, I was astonished when I walked out of the optometrist’s office. I remember staring out the window in silent wonder on our drive home and when we turned down our tree-lined street I actually gasped out loud.
“Is this what it always looks like?” I asked my mom. “Does everybody see it like this?”
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There were individual leaves on the trees. And the flowers! They had individual petals. I had never seen them before. To me they had always just been blurs of green and pink and purple and red. Could it be that the world had always looked this way and I had never known it?
When my friends told me that they experienced life in a starkly different way than I experienced it based on their race, it was like putting on those glasses when I was a kid. Things that had previously been a blur or barely a blip on my radar gradually came into sharper focus. It was a painful and slow process and certainly some of the scales that had so clouded my vision continue to fall even today.
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What’s God Got to Do with It?
As a person of faith, I also care because I believe that humans, collectively, are the Imago Dei. Together, we are the image of God, and we cannot understand the complexity of God if we do not understand the complexity of God’s people. I don’t care about race because I’ve “turned liberal” or joined the so-called “race-baiters.” I care about race because I want to explore the mysteries of God.
I grew up imagining a God who looked like me. I imagined a God whose skin was white. I imagined a God eating my food and participating in my customs and my rituals and my traditions. But as my vision slowly re-calibrated I could see the laughable limitations of a God who only ate Taco Bell burritos and wore blue jeans like my dad. God is so much bigger than my constricted imagination and if I want to know God, I need to know God’s people.
The Church is supposed to be an agitator in the world. The Church is supposed to be agitating for shalom; for the world as God intended it to be. And we are told that the world as God intended it to be includes “a great multitude that no one can count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.”
We are supposed to be modeling this vision and leavening the world with it. But how can we do that if we continue to uphold theologies that have sustained racial hierarchies and perpetuated injustice? How can we do it if we don’t care about race?
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Relationships are the Glasses
I think the only reason I was able to move from a place of unawareness and ignorance to actually caring about race was because of relationships with actual people. Without relationships, the best I could hope for was an intellectual assent to a set a ideas or beliefs about race but not much else. I might have cared but only in theory.
The reason why we were so universally stricken by the news of Sandyhook in 2012 is because every single one of us could immediately relate on some level. No matter who we are or what our creed, we all know and love a child somewhere or in some capacity so it was easy to imagine how we would feel. We could imagine the child that we love, the child with whom we have an actual relationship being caught in Adam Lanza’s crossfire and it brought us to our knees.
We couldn’t relate in the same way to the mass murder at Mother Emmanuel AME in Charleston because we lack the richness and the diversity in relationships that God intended for us. We’ve filled our churches with homogeneity and we worship a God who looks just like us. We’ve bankrupted ourselves by not embracing the gift that God gave us.
But when we are in relationships with people who do not look like us or experience the world the way that we do, we are grieved beyond measure when we see an 18-year-old boy lying dead in the street because we can see instead our 18-year-old neighbor who babysits our kids. We can watch a video of a new dad getting shot in the back in a Wal-Mart and readily see in his place our friend who just had a baby of his own. We can see the picture of Clementa Pinckney’s family at his funeral procession and cry out in anguish as we imagine all the families in our lives that look like theirs.
And it’s when we are in relationships that the answer to the question becomes quite obvious. Why do we care?
How can we not?