White friends in the South, we are living in a scary world.
There is indeed much to be feared. In any given month it seems there are fresh
stories of black people marching in protest, Muslim terrorists attacking,
non-English speakers crossing our borders . . .We are afraid – afraid of being
attacked, afraid of being taken over, afraid of losing the power that has
always belonged to us white people.
Can we talk about this a little – just us white people – and
analyze the whys, the hows, and maybe the what-to-do about our fears?
Let’s begin with a look at where our fears come from. With issues as huge and historic as this
one, we won’t attempt to reach any one simple answer, but let’s look honestly
at some of our collective reality.
First, our fears are
handed down from generation to generation. Most of us learned the fears of
our parents who learned from their parents who learned from their parents.
Almost all of us have KKK branches or roots in our family tree, known or unknown, and such history is never erased from our collective heritage. These fears are especially
strong in rural communities where few outsiders are moving in, and the
individual family fears have solidified themselves as community fears, with
each person confirming each other’s fears. We naturally come to believe that if
everyone around us shares the same fears then they must indeed be founded.
Second, our fears are
confirmed through the media we choose to follow. Most Southern white folk
prefer conservative cable news, listen to conservative talk radio, and attend
small Christian churches where the leaders get their fears from the same news
channel and talk shows. All of this confirms our fears, and the religious component adds even more
glue, cementing our fears into our view of God.
Now, why do these
media outlets, talk show hosts, and certain renowned religious leaders confirm our
fears? Money and Power. We Southern white people are such a large block of
people that, as hard as it is for us to ever admit it, we are being manipulated and used by many of these entities. They
are getting rich and powerful by feeding our fears, and they have all learned that our Christian religion is so important to most
of us that all they have to do is throw God into their mix and we will follow
them anywhere. Even politics has
discovered this about us. (The “power and money” does not apply to our small town religious leaders who are usually victims of the media the same
as everyone else.)
Third, we see legitimate
news stories of violent crimes committed by black men or Muslim extremists.
These frightening stories feed our already formed fears of all black people and all
Muslims. Our fears are real.
Let’s look at the question though of how realistic they are. The crimes are real, but do they really represent all black people, all Muslims, all . . .? It’s an easy leap to make, especially when our personal
circles don’t include people from these groups. Most Southern white people can
name several black people they have worked with or gone to school with and with
whom they do not feel afraid, but stay
with me now, and let’s challenge ourselves a little deeper – not for argument’s
sake, not to prove we are right again, but to seek our best selves for no
other purpose but to be better people. How
many black/Muslim/Spanish-speaking/ . . . people have eaten with you in your
home? or you in theirs? What if your
daughter told you she was going to marry someone of this group? And here’s a
big test: When you hear a tragic news story that someone in the community died
in an accident, but the identity is not immediately released, are you relieved
when you hear that it was (just) a ____ person? (You fill in the blank.) If so, can we
agree that we have some work to do?
If we label all black people as violent because of the violent
acts of a number of misguided young black men, or all Muslim people due to the horrendous
acts of a few extremists whom the Muslims do not claim as their own, would it not
be fair then to conclude that Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer are representative
of all white people, especially to people who don’t personally know any white
people? And that Fred Phelps is representative of all Christians?
Despite the violent gang culture of too many young black
males seeking their own power and security, southern black people are the most
amazingly nonviolent group of people I know. Their hero was a religious man who
preached that non-violence was the only way to make progress in the world.
These are people whose Southern history has evolved from being owned as white
man’s property to being “free” but not to vote or to sit with white people on
the bus or in the movie theater or to drink from the same water fountains, and
then to humbly living and working among us, perceiving our unacknowledged (often even
to ourselves) feelings of superiority. Dear white friends, if black people were
a violent people, we would have been in trouble a long time ago.
One of the most often quoted fears, now about immigrants, but
earlier about black people, was that they
will take “our” jobs. This has always been unfounded on several levels.
First, they are not our jobs, but aside from that, the black people of the
past and the immigrants of the present have worked for the white people,
doing the jobs the white people didn’t want to do – working our crops, ironing
our clothes, mowing our grass, sometimes even cooking our meals and caring for
our children.
That seems to be the
pattern in our still very young “melting pot” nation. Humble beginnings
followed by opportunities to become what we are willing to work to become. And
even now as we are coming out of a national recession, there are plenty of
vacant jobs that don’t seem to be attracting anyone’s interest. Yet there are far
too many black and white men who are opting to draw government help and/or to
sell drugs rather than work.
So anyway, black people are not a violent people. Nor is Islam
a violent religion. Extremism in any religion is a very dangerous thing. Look
at the Christian Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, Waco, Westboro Baptist
Church . . . It’s a shame that such extremists ruin the name of entire
religions that teach peace and love.
Similar to extremists, youth
of any race are an unsettled group as they try to find their way into
adulthood. Yes, young black men as a group have issues with drugs and violence,
but white youth are no less out of control, and out of their parents’ control.
It seems accurate to say that many youth, regardless of race, are running loose in
a state of temporary insanity.
So how can we best
respond to our fears? The most
difficult part is probably the acknowledgement
that our fears, for many personal and cultural reasons, are exaggerated,
and to privately evaluate whether we have adopted them from our parents, our
husband, our community . . . Then we can walk
away from racist jokes and conversations. We can vary our media sources, listening less to those that feed our fears,
less to those that lean to one political side; and more to those attempting to
be unbiased. We can seek out opinions of
those who think differently from us, reading or listening to them, not so we can argue them down and not so
they can change our minds, but so we can understand their point of view.
And most importantly
we can cultivate real relationships with people from our feared groups. Invite
your black co-worker and his family over for dinner. Or your gay neighbors. Or
your Jewish, or Catholic, or Hmong acquaintance. Counteract a lifetime of
hearing what white people say about black people, and a lifetime of hearing
what Christians say about Muslims, and actually get to know them for yourself.
They are all real people, real individuals with their own varied fears, hurts,
joys, and misconceptions, each as different as those of white people; and their
fears of white people are far more supported than ours of them – through violent
and racist history, and through the current Southern white weapons craze. Fear
begets fear, and violence begets violence. The black people have chosen
nonviolence. It’s time we did the same.
And speaking of which, before we end, let’s bring this to the question of how we respond as
Christians. As Christians we believe
that God is far greater and far more complex than our finite human minds can
begin to conceive. We also believe that God sent Jesus to model for us how we
should live as human beings. Jesus did not live in the South, nor even in
America, but in the Middle East where there were cultural taboos against
interacting with Samaritans, touching lepers, talking to women . . . but Jesus
broke the taboos. Jesus condemned the
churchy people who were more interested in rules and laws than in human beings.
He preached unity for all his followers, and reaching out in active love to
all people. And humility. Humility.
Humility. The hard first step to allowing God to change
our own stubborn and proud minds.
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photo credit: pixgood
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