I Am a Racist

6 comments | Jan 21, 04:11 AM | | by Earl Creps

In the mid-1950’s I attended a segregated school system as a white, elementary-age student in West Virginia.

The racism of the day was so taken for granted that it never occurred to me to ask where all the black kids were in my school. They just never seemed to attend.

I came to know black people only by meeting some of the men my father hired to work on the lawn of our house in a white neighborhood. Slowly, I started to understand that these men lived in another sort of neighborhood in another part of our town. Their children had a school of there own, one that I would never see.

The monstrous injustice of it all was clothed among whites with a sort of middle-class respectability. We did not consider ourselves racists because we did not burn crosses. Only fanatics did things like that. But our society was set up in a certain way and the marginalization of black people was assumed to be part of it. Overt slavery had been replaced by a sub-economy in which people unlike ourselves lived with invisible chains.

I recall my mother calling a local public swimming pool to ask if my sister would be allowed to bring a black friend with her to the facility. The answer escapes me so many years later, but the fact that such a call had to be made tells the story: white people were the gate keepers for the opportunities available to blacks.

Later, I spent several years in a Pennsylvania elementary school about evenly composed of white and black kids. We were just friends. Just kids. Oliver. Wendy. Cheryl. All of us.

I entered junior high school as racial unrest began to emerge in most of our major cities, including mine. On the day Dr. King was killed, two black students attacked me in a stairwell filled with other teenagers. Just as they were about to inflict some bodily harm a hand came down on my shoulder, and a bass voice intoned, “Let him go.”

The words came from my friend Ernie Graves. He wasn’t the biggest or toughest guy in our school, but he had a quality about him that deterred anyone from taking him on. I haven’t seen Ernie since graduation, so I’m not sure what he is doing these days, but I am sure that he is still black.

Not long after this event, I witnessed a race riot outside my high school, student sit-in’s, evacuations, and always—the police.

Much later, during our adult years in the ministry I collected memory flashes on racial issues:

1. A black minister giving a speech on the floor of my denomination’s national meeting pleads with the virtually all-white crowd to understand what life in our movement is like for him. I suspect he feels a bit like the men who worked on our lawn when I was a child.

2. A white minister at the same sort of meeting much more recently uses the “n” word while telling a joke to his peers in an overheard conversation.

3. The shock of discovering that some parts of my denomination struggled with whether or not to admit blacks to our ministerial ranks as late as the middle of the twentieth century.

Just a month ago, Janet and I moved from Springfield, Missouri (94% Anglo) to very multi-cultural Berkeley, California to plant a university church. During the first few weeks after our move, I had to confess to my wife that I was reacting to people of different races in different ways.

Walking down the sidewalk, I felt fine if an Asian or Anglo person approached me, but experienced just a touch of elevated anxiety if that person were a black male.

This feeling disappeared in just a few days, but shocked me into recognition that racism is not someone else’s sin, it is mine. While abhorring the overt bigotry of others, my own mind can harbor the same sub-economy that my West Virginia town operated in the 1950’s.

A lot of people have told me how much Berkeley needs a church like the one we want to create. But only one person has ever mentioned how much we may need Berkeley. Already I find myself brought to a place of repentance on issues like race, and I am sure this is not the end of the list. IF our context is not an influence on our spiritual growth, are we really engaged with it, or do we just live there?

None of us can know ourselves fully until we are in relationship with someone different. This is one of the great potential benefits of marriage and a reason why heterosexual marriage makes sense. This is also why our humanity is realized only in a relationship with God. God is so different, that his friendship reveals us for who we really are by contrast, and offers the possibility of growth and reformation in a way that nothing and no one else can.

In something of the same way, my new encounters with people unlike myself surface the best and the worst in me.

1. I offer my home to a black neighbor who accidentally locks himself out of his house

2. I feel gratitude when the little Muslim girls from down the block leave house warming gifts on our front stoop.

3. I am delighted to learn that the Asian woman who lives behind us has a really cool dog—that does not bark.

At this point, I still think of race/ethnicity/etc. as a modifier. For instance, our friend next door is our “Anglo” neighbor and the people across the street are our “African American” neighbors. By God’s grace, I want to one day think of them as just neighbors and let them define themselves. When asked what kind of person constitutes a “neighbor,” Jesus depicted a good Samaritan rescuing a robbery victim without regard for the person’s background or circumstances.

All these new acquaintances are making me better, helping me to learn that while love cannot be reduced to acceptance, it certainly needs to include it. No wonder we love living in Berkeley—because we accept it.

The inauguration of Barak Obama put a face on what I am feeling. Watching his speech was a moment of healing, joy, and hope for someone who remembers segregation and was a part, even unwittingly, of the system that maintained it.

But my journey toward really loving people did not begin in the Berkeley move or the inauguration of a new President so much as it did in that junior high school stairwell.

Thanks, Ernie.

I hope I can return the favor.