A couple of weeks ago, I got pulled over early in the morning at around 3 am while taking a drive during my lunch break to wake up a bit and clear my head. After everything that happened that week, with the Charlottesville protests and the reaction from my area, I had felt the need to clear my head a lot during the past week. With 10 minutes left on my break, I was mere feet from pulling into my parking lot, when I saw blue lights.
In 2014, Ken Ham came to my home church and preached a message titled, “One Race, One Blood”, in which he clarified that the Bible only supports one biological race: The Human Race. As a biracial female who was struggling in a predominantly white church, this message supported me in the beginning, but quickly became like a mocking chant, as some of my church family decided to pick this message up and run with it.
Instead of using it how Ham intended, as evidence opposing racial divide, they translated it into a reason to completely dismiss not only the physical presence of race, but the social concept of it as well. Let me tell you why that’s wrong. Much like “colorblind ideology”, denying the social concept of race dismisses the glaring fact that people have different perspectives and life experiences as a result of their skin color. Many people in the church have grasped onto an idea that since God didn’t create race, it doesn’t exist in any form. It’s time we acknowledge that while race isn’t a physical reality, it is very much a social reality, affecting everything from our most basic life decisions, to the way we organize as a Church.
When I think about Saturday morning, it becomes apparent that there are times that I am more aware of my race than others tend to be. One of these times is when I’m face to face with a police officer…on a deserted highway… at three am. Getting pulled over when you’re driving while brown exaggerates your opportunity to do two things: live and die.
Blue isn’t always your favorite color, but it does ignite a passion within you. A passion for survival. Make eye contact. Don’t be like Sandra Bland. Smile. Don’t end up like Trayvon Martin. Be super nice, even though you want to implode from fear because you’re scared he’ll see the color of your face, assume you’re up to no good, and arrest you or kill you in the street and say it was your fault and your community will agree because you live in the south and you probably deserved it. That's the way it always seems to go. I don’t want to judge this man. Jesus wouldn't judge this man, however; I want to be safe. It is no longer a hypothesis that brown skin has a higher frequency for triggering violence in cops. It’s been tested over and over: experiment after experiment, like a corrupt scientific theory.
The ache is not all physical, however. It’s everywhere, from the tip of my nose to the center of the inner-universe that is my soul. It envelopes me in the uncertainty, that even though I see people, they don’t see me. That if I express how dissatisfied I am with America’s racial climate, people, especially those I go to church with, will think I’m whiny or that I like to stir the pot. That all they’ll see is an angry black woman. That I’m an easy trick. That I should speak differently than I do. That I’ll automatically have an attitude. That men will always feel the liberty to approach me in ways that they wouldn’t approach my white friends; less respectfully. That no matter what I do or say, I will not be able to deviate from the archetypes that have been set out before black women for centuries. That I will be bitter. That I will be unsatisfied. That I will never feel pretty. It’s in the way men talk to me. It’s the way my classmate looks at me when I tell her she can’t touch my hair, even though she’s never touched black hair before.
If race isn’t real, at least in a social sense, I don’t know why I feel it to my core. If racism is a myth, why is this my experience? I don’t know why my stomach hit my ankles at the sight of blue lights. I don’t know why I sobbed in my car afterward and thanked Jesus for sending me a “kind” officer. I don’t know why my hands shook as I handed him my driver’s license.
When I think about the situation that I was in and imagine my younger brother, with his cocoa powder skin that is so much darker than mine, my blood runs cold because I know that one day he will face a situation like that and the officer might not be nice. I hope, like I did, that he'll hear my mother the whole time coaching him on how to stay alive. That getting arrested is better than dying. That being even part black requires him to act, speak and think differently than his white peers.
Better than his white peers.
I don’t know why that police officer ran my license for faulty taillights, even though my taillights work perfectly. Let me make it clear as I possibly can. God didn’t create hate. He didn’t create fear. God didn’t create race or racism. We did, and now they are towering over us.
Stop telling your colored brothers and sisters that racism cannot exist, simply because physical race does not.
We cannot throw a rug on a problem that is the size of a mountain. Weeds grow best in our gardens when we refuse to look at them. The only person who can move mountains is God Almighty, but if you’re going to ask him to move that mountain you must acknowledge that it is there. Weed your garden or your fruit will suffer.
You can say that you are disgusted by the display of self-proclaimed Nazism in this country, but you must also acknowledge that these individuals jailbroke out of shame and hiding with spoons. That the walls of their prisons were built from our nation’s empathy and understanding toward one another. Pray for Charlottesville, but pray for your hometown because we are all Charlottesville.
We have to stop looking at our neighbors and start to see them for what they truly are: individuals, because we are disciples of a God who is not stifled by prejudice. We don’t have to win this battle. Jesus already won it, when he gave his life for us. Take the burdens on your heart and give them to Him. Let Him give you love in return; it bridges an ocean of cultural difference. Challenge the idea that prejudice of any kind is acceptable. I love you all.
