Charlottesville anniversary

I was out of town this weekend so I'm posting this a day or two late.  Last year, I was scheduled to preach a week or so after the racial violence in Charlottesville.  Here is the homily I preached on August 20, 2017, in the wake of that incident.

As I expect was the case for many of you last weekend, I was dismayed when the events of Charlottesville, VA were reported in the news.   Violence in the streets, and then terrorism and even murder.  And underlying all of it was the specter of racism.

The events in Charlottesville have forced us to confront a sin that many of us would prefer not to have to think and talk about: the sin of racism.  Many of us who are white Americans, like me, prefer not to think too much about racism, because for many of us, racism is personal.  It’s embedded in our personal histories, our families and our communities.

Racial tensions are in my family’s history.  My mother and her family experienced something that some of our parishioners also have experienced, in Chicago or elsewhere: the experience of her family moving away from the neighborhood in which she grew up, because the demographics changed very quickly in her neighborhood, from predominantly white to predominantly African American during the 1950s.  Her family still mourns the community and the life that were left behind when her family packed up and moved.

White flight was a common story in the cities of the upper Midwest in the 20^th century.  Changing communities inflamed racial resentment.  I will say that, despite that family history, the household I grew up in during the 1960s and 1970s, presided over by my mother, was one in which the “N” word was never permitted to be spoken, and disparagement of people of other races wasn’t countenanced.  Given my mother’s family’s history, perhaps that was interesting.  To be sure, a white family refraining from using the “N” word may not be a particularly heroic achievement; perhaps it represents the very bare minimum of human decency.  But if that was a low bar, it was one that, I’m sorry to say, many other white households in the neighborhoods and communities in which I grew up never managed to clear.  It was common, throughout my childhood, to hear white children and adults use the “N” word with impunity.  Racially derogatory jokes were told.  African Americans themselves were feared.  When white families drove through African American neighborhoods, parents instructed their children to roll up the windows and lock the doors.

In some ways, American society has changed for the better since the days of my childhood.  The great civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Brown vs the Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act still stand, and they are important pillars of a free and just society.   Those landmark achievements have made this country a better and more just place; although perhaps we’ve learned in recent years that we can’t take them for granted – those bulwarks have to be maintained and defended anew.

That is because racism, like other sins, has proven to be a very difficult virus to eradicate.  It turns out that legislation and court decisions don’t stamp out racism – they just drive it into the shadows, or underground.  Racism lives on today, in our communities, our schools, our workplaces, our families – perhaps even in our own hearts.  And through the pathways of social media, it seems that racism is making its presence felt overtly once again in the United States, as we saw at Charlottesville last week.

How timely, then, how fortuitous, that all three of our readings this week speak of God overcoming the divisions that plague human society.  We just heard God say through the prophet Isaiah that his holy mountain would be a house of prayer for all peoples- *all* peoples.  Then we heard St. Paul write to the Romans that Jew and Gentile alike have been instruments for God’s saving plan, and indeed that he is using each group to bring about the salvation of the other.  And we heard Jesus demonstrate to his disciples that he was sent, not just to the house of Israel, but to anyone of any nationality who has faith in him.  God is calling us all to a radical unity, a radical inclusion.  Jesus died for all – for everyone.  God’s gifts, and God’s salvation, have been offered irrevocably to all human beings, of all races, all nationalities, all ethnicities, all ages, all genders and sexualities, all political preferences.

When I was going to deacon school, some 17 or 18 years ago, we did an in-class exercise that opened my eyes to the continuing presence of racism in our community.  Each of us were assigned to small groups of three classmates.  The teacher arranged that each group included two white people and one person of color.  My group consisted of me, another white deacon candidate, and a black woman, an immigrant from Jamaica who was the wife of a deacon candidate.  Our group assignment was to spend a few minutes discussing recent instances of racism that we had encountered in our daily lives.  The other white guy and I just looked at each other blankly.  Neither of us could think of a single instance of racism that we had encountered in the last year or more.  The black woman just shook her head and laughed when we told her we couldn’t think of any racism in our lives.  She told us that was surprising, because something happens to her every single day to remind her that she’s black in a society still mostly ruled by white people.   She said, “I can’t go into a store without being watched closely by a store manager or security guard, because they assume I’m a shoplifter or a thief.  At work, white people say shockingly rude things to me, either because of ignorance, or because they think they’re being funny.  But it’s not funny.”  This woman of color was a daily victim of the sin of racism.  And all of us need to understand that this is the daily experience of many persons of color in our country.

What are some of the things we can do to overcome racism?  I’m convinced that racism is propagated through families, from one generation to the next, and all of us whose families harbor racist words and attitudes have a responsibility to speak up against it.  Don’t tolerate racism in your home and at your family gatherings, even when it is our own family members, our own loved ones who say racist things.  Not only is it ok, it’s required, to say, “We don’t talk that way in this house.”  It’s important to stand against racism, and it’s important to provide that witness to the children in our families.  That’s how the cycle of family-propagated racism can be broken. 

We’re also called to stand in solidarity with those who are victims of racism.  If racial discrimination occurs in our community, we must stand with the victims of that discrimination.  And we must do so publicly, promptly and consistently.  Let’s let the community know that here at St. Edna’s, we’re a faith community of love and inclusion, rather than one that harbors racial contempt.

And finally, let each of us examine our own consciences.  Racism is a virus.  Those of us who are white Americans and grew up in a white America probably have been exposed to the virus at some time or other in our lives – in some cases, massively exposed.  And so let us confess any sins of racism we may have committed.  And let us pray for the conversion of our own hearts, and one another’s hearts.  God is calling us to equality and brotherhood and sisterhood – we’re all called to join him around the table.  It may be only through God’s grace that we can be purified and made worthy to take a seat at the table ourselves.