Billy Graham announced in 1992 he had experienced three “conversions” in his life: to Christ as Lord and Savior, to the principle of racial justice, and to “work for world peace for the remainder of his life.”
Four blog posts ago, I began writing about a journey of discovery I’ve been on for an America-I-never-knew. The journey included several eye-opening conversations with African American friends who described a world very much different than mine. Their lived experience raised many questions and I was struck with how little I knew.
I learned about America’s horrifying past where the massacres of Tulsa and Wilmington form the tip of an iceberg filled with centuries of racial ignominy, inequity, and violence. I learned how America’s racially disparate judicial system didn’t happen by chance. The creation of dense, poverty-stricken, black neighborhoods throughout the 20th century happened through the force of governmental and private discriminatory actions. Then I learned how the legacy of those past discriminatory policies and actions continues today in a systematic fashion, putting the thumb on the scale in areas of wealth, income, justice, job opportunities, and health.
Throughout my journey I found truth in the maxim “where you stand depends upon where you sit.” The longer my travels, the more my “standing” changed. As long as I made space for people’s stories, honored the data, critically examined the analytics of racial disparities, and refused to let past narratives cancel new discoveries.
Partway through this journey, I joined Billy Graham and became a convert to racial justice too.
The Priority of “Seeing” “Compassion” and “Doing”
An “expert in the law” once tested Jesus by asking “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus answers by telling a familiar story known to most of us, whether Christian or not. A man traveling from Jerusalem was attacked, stripped of clothes, beaten and left for dead. As he laid along the side of the road, several religious men came and went, offering no assistance to the injured man.
“Then a despised Samaritan came along, and when he saw the man, he felt compassion for him. Going over to him, the Samaritan soothed his wounds with olive oil and wine and bandaged them. Then he put the man on his own donkey and took him to an inn, where he took care of him. The next day he handed the innkeeper two silver coins, telling him, ‘Take care of this man. If his bill runs higher than this, I’ll pay you the next time I’m here.’”
The context to this parable is a most critical part of the story. Jesus was answering the question “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” His answer – to love God and love our neighbor with the second commandment as unto the first – forms the very core of the Christian faith. On those two commandments alone, Christ said, “hung all the law and the prophets.”
The Jesus Creed
Our love for God and others forms the two goalposts of our life. Our devotion to Christ connects them together forming a “Christ-centered or biblical worldview” ruled by love. This two-faceted and interconnected rule of love – called the Jesus Creed – launches a new way of life with a calling to “be like Him.” As we abide in Him, we are transformed, becoming a daily witness of “his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.”
Christianity is a story of grace. We receive grace through Christ and regift grace to others. This is the essence of the gospel – how it’s received and lived out with Christ as the Center. And the more His graciousness envelops us, the more we become conduits of His grace and mercy to others.
Living graciously shapes our behavior as well as our passion and attitudes. It creates a “biblical worldview” marked by compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and generosity (Colossians 3). For it’s impossible to demonstrate kindness to “others” if there’s distain. It’s impossible to be reconcilers of racial division without a generosity to those historically marginalized. And our generosity remains incomplete unless we have actions which follow our “seeing,” like the Good Samaritan who “saw” the man, felt compassion, and administered to his needs.
A Biblical Worldview “Sees Clearly” The Other
Jesus saw people too. Matthew writes: “Seeing the people, Jesus felt compassion for them, because they were distressed and dispirited like sheep without a shepherd.” When Nathanael asked Jesus “How do You know me?” Jesus answered and said to him, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.”
Our ability to “see,” unlike Jesus, depends upon the person being seen. In a fascinating study, researchers subjected white participants to digitally altered pictures of white and black people by various degrees: 30% (minor changes to facial features), 50%, 70% and 100%. The white subjects reacted strongly to even the most subtle differences in white faces, but not to black faces, even when the differences were large.
“Own-race bias” is a widespread phenomenon and enhanced through power dynamics. We pay attention to hierarchy and are quick to categorize. We are more prone to “see” the boss than the janitorial assistant, more prone to see the wealthy than the poor.
This “seeing” bias is hard-wired within us, yet we each have the ability to change through intentional actions. Seeing people as individuals rather than a face-less “other” changes our attitudes and our actions towards them. It means we must be thoughtful in our encounters with people, paying attention to their details. We must approach people with the expectation of finding nuances and sophisticated behavior. We must pair honor towards others with humility about ourselves. We must, like Christ, see others – every single one of them – through the lens of imago dei, as those created in the image of God.
Impediments to “Seeing Clearly:” Cultural Blinders
Walter Lippman once famously said: “for the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define and then see.” We subconsciously pick and choose our facts so that “what is alien will be rejected, what is different will fall upon unseeing eyes…more often without knowing it, we are impressed by those facts which fit our philosophy.”
Throughout America’s history, blacks were often “seen” through three pre-defined narratives, all disparaging to their character and abilities: simple-minded, incapable of learning; the “black beast” (a stereotype intended to create fear and outrage among white populations); and a lazy worker.
The first two, especially the one about simple mindedness, are seldom heard today. Yet the poor work ethic narrative continues to show up in the data. This accusation seems strange at first since black slaves were responsible for much of American’s economic growth of the 1800s. Growing and harvesting cotton was incredibly hard work and the South grew 60% of the world’s cotton and 70% of the cotton used for British textiles. And just this one crop, cotton, once accounted for over half of all US export earnings.
The persistence of this “lazy” narrative by a sizable portion of Americans is helped through two presuppositions: all Americans are created equal and all Americans enjoy equal opportunity in life. Hence, America is structurally colorblind and successful people of any race, creed, or background can pull themselves up by their bootstraps through an ethic of hard work. Given these beliefs, then the equation
Equally Created + Equal Opportunity + X = Unequal Outcome,
when summed across individuals in a population, only allows for a very limited explanation of “X.” If there are unequal outcomes across different races, “X” can’t be an extrinsic (e.g., systemic) factor because of equal opportunity. “X” must then be intrinsic, applicable within a particular race and found across a spectrum of individuals.
The enduring cultural narrative of black character deficiencies solves this equation for them. In their culturally defined worldview, bad outcomes stem from poor choices and poor choices stem from character issues such as relationship dysfunction, a lack of initiative, and a lack of responsibility. Much of the fault, their narrative says, lies with the government’s welfare program. This is the “X” factor as welfare removes the motivation to work which then sets up a cycle of poor choices and the breakdown of the family.
To prove this narrative, they just need just one person of color who has achieved success against all odds. See, they say, anybody can do it. You just have to work hard enough and want success bad enough. It’s an argument that ignores the data and is rooted in probability neglect, a classic cognitive bias, in support a pernicious tribal narrative that puts blinders upon what one sees.
Implements to “Seeing Clearly:” Isolation
“Seeing clearly” becomes impossible when, as Alexis De Tocqueville once observed, societies like the United States order themselves into two disparate or even foreign communities, one white and the other black. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. lamented the persistence of this racial divide by observing “that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.” Today, nearly 60 years later, surveys show that most America’s churches remain racially segregated. Yes, things are slowly changing but any further integration faces stiff headwinds from the increasingly polarized nature of America where our religious, political, social beliefs all mix together.
We not only worship separately, we also live separately. White Americans still live in mostly white neighborhoods even as metropolitan areas diversify. Part of this is unintentional. People tend to sort themselves into like-minded communities, clustering around people who think and look like them. The wealth differential contributes too, as the entry cost into many of these communities is expensive and beyond the financial capabilities of many people of color.
All of this separation, whether intentional or not, hinders us from “seeing clearly” people different than us. We need close relationships, cross-racial relationships, either through close living proximity or friendship before our “seeing” and thinking begins to change. It takes meaningful time together before meaningful change begins. Low to moderate level friendships (“but I have friends”) or contact (“I work with someone”) change people little. In fact, they only increase racial division through enabling those who deny structural effects to feel justified in their assessments. Its only when a relationship develops to the point where one can “walk in their” shoes and “see how they see” before the light of discovery comes on.
Implements to “Seeing Clearly:” Willful Ignorance
The problem is compounded when the lack of understanding is willful, an intentional decision to not care about knowing. Sociologists call this phenomenon an epistemology of ignorance and it arises when people don’t see the benefit of making an effort to understand. They don’t see it worth their time because the outcome doesn’t add value to their worldview.
We see this lack of understanding most profoundly in surveys of race in America. Most (87%) black Christians believe America has a race problem. Most (70%) of white Christians disagree even though the data on inequalities is clear. Most Americans believe there is “a lot of discrimination” against historically marginalized groups in the U.S. Most white evangelical Protestants think there isn’t. When asked about fairness in hiring, housing, justice, and other societal issues, white Christians are the only ethnoreligious group to disagree that people of color were treated less fairly.
Other survey organizations report similar findings. The Barna Group, an evangelical survey organization, shows 94% of evangelicals believe “Christian churches play an important role in racial reconciliation,” yet only 13% approve of the message “Black Lives Matter.” They summarized their data by saying “If you’re a white, evangelical, Republican, you are less likely to think race is a problem, but more likely to think you are a victim of reverse racism. You are also less convinced that people of color are socially disadvantaged. Yet these same groups believe the church plays an important role in reconciliation. This dilemma demonstrates that those supposedly most equipped for reconciliation do not see the need for it.”
The Barna Group continues: “More than any other segment of the population, white evangelical Christians demonstrate a blindness to the struggle of their African American brothers and sisters…By failing to recognize the disadvantages that people of color face—and the inherent privileges that come from growing up in a ‘majority culture’—we perpetuate the racial divisions, inequalities and injustices that prevent African American communities from thriving,”
Impediments to “Seeing Clearly:” A Colorblind Gospel
The apostle Paul’s declaration “there is neither Jew nor Greek…for you are all one in Christ Jesus” became the rallying cry for those who sought to end racial segregation in America. Using language such as “unity in Christ,” “the body of Christ,” and Jesus died for all,” they saw such colorblindness as the solution for America’s racial divide. After all, the breaking down of walls of enmity forms the very core of the gospel itself. And if only Christians could walk in love, uniting together under their commonness as believers, the walls of prejudice could be broken.
It wasn’t long before these same statements became the rallying cry for those opposed to addressing racial inequalities through societal measures. The racial divide must be settled in the hearts of man, they said, not on the streets of our nation. A message of sin, repentance, and regeneration of the heart changed society, not a focus on social justice. Civil disobedience was not only an affront to law and order, it was a denial of the sufficiency of the gospel.
A colorblind society, they said, kept an eye on the root problem: sin, not skin. It announced “all lives matter,” seeking a day when race was not an issue and skin color was overlooked. Slogans such as “black lives matter,” they said were racializing, moving society away from the aspirational vision of Martin Luther King who said “one day every Negro in this country, every colored person in the world, will be judged on the basis of the content of his character rather than the color of his skin, and every man will respect the dignity and worth of human responsibility.”
Yet King later lamented the disconnect between his aspirational vision and the reality of America as he “moved through the ghettos of the nation and saw [his] black brothers and sisters perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity, and saw the nation doing nothing to grapple with the Negroes’ problem of poverty.”
Assertions of colorblindness without accompanying action are like the Levite who looked but walked away. The mandate to act in response to a need will be addressed in a subsequent post. But I think the Levite’s problem was even more elemental. What did he see when he passed by the injured man? What narrative did he imagine that caused him to keep walking? What distortion in his understandings kept him from following the Hebrew scriptures which are clear about the mandate of doing?
The problem with most present assertions of colorblindness is not just a “walk by” of the data, but that it’s not a neutral and fairly constructed character trait. When people isolate within their tribes and are blind to their biases, uninterested in other people’s stories, preferring instead to sustain a historical and pernicious cultural narrative, any insistence of colorblindness becomes meaningless.
It’s like missing a gate in a ski race. When we diminish the past, ignore the data on inequalities, and miss-see the present through a “seeing” formed more by culture than other people’s stories, we veer off the course and fail. For if we can’t see people clearly, we misunderstand their world – their joys and challenges, their strengths and weaknesses, their aspirations and needs. Such distorted “seeing” then corrupts our first-order gospel callings: to walk in unity, be ministers of reconciliation, and to be His hand extended, like the Good Samaritan who saw and then acted to bring healing to the needy man.