I used to think that only members of the KKK were guilty of “white supremacy”. I thought “white supremacy” was limited to burning crosses on people’s lawns and lynchings. I thought that in order to be a white supremacist, you had to be violent and do your evil deeds under the cover of night, somewhere in Alabama or something.
My History classes taught me about the Slavery and the Civil Rights Era. Sort of. I knew the dates, the prominent players, and could even quote parts of some speeches. In other words, my History classes taught me enough about Slavery and the Civil Rights Era for me to pass my History classes. But even in my racially diverse high school, it turns out, I really didn’t learn very much. Slavery happened hundreds of years ago, and then it was done. The Civil Rights Era fixed everything, and I knew it did because I had Black classmates, and after all, the goal of the Civil Rights Era was integrated schools, right?
We never talked about race at all at my church. There were a couple of Black boys in my classes and youth group, but that’s all they were to me: Black. Just a different color and harder to find in the dark when we played Sardines. I never knew that their life experiences might in any way be different from mine. After all, we were all Christians, and that was the most important thing about us.
If I had to do it over, I hope I would ask more questions, pay more attention to the words that were spoken at these boys from others and noted how those words affected them. But I didn’t know I needed to do that because we never talked about race where I was from.
As an adult, I’ve been blessed, especially in the last couple of years, with relationships with people whose ancestors came from parts of the world mine didn’t. And the things I have learned just from listening to their stories and watching them interact with other people on all kinds of issues, have made my life so much richer. I have benefited from them. But has our relationship ever been mutually beneficial? I don’t know.
But what I do know it this: Their lives matter. To me. To God. I’m grateful I’ve gotten to meet them, to be on the planet at the same time they are. Their lives have intrinsic value because they carry in them the same image of God that I do. Their lives matter because God breathed life into their Brown and Black bodies and set those lives in motion. Their lives matter because they are flesh and blood and breath.
I’ve never burnt a cross on someone’s lawn. I’ve never participated in a lynch mob. But I’ve rolled up my windows and locked my doors in the Black part of town. And I have downplayed the cries of Black women and men who are just asking that their lives matter to me. That’s all. And that’s really the bare minimum they could ask for, isn’t it? They just want to matter.
Less in what I have done than in what I have left undone, I’ve contributed to acts of white supremacy. My silence has empowered the same racism that lives deep within the hearts of avowed white supremacists. I have both knowingly and unknowingly benefitted from my whiteness without a second thought.
But I know too much to ever do that again. I’m sorry for what I’ve done. I’m sorry for what I’ve left undone. I’m sorry to the neighbors I have not loved as myself. I humbly repent of the ways I’ve told Black and Brown human beings that their lives don’t matter as much as mine does.
So let me say this as clearly as I possibly can: I denounce white supremacy and every thought, deed, and attitude that fuels it. No exceptions. No excuses.