From book “I’m Still Here” by Austin Channin Brown
Not long ago, I was sitting in a diversity training for a new job. Our group slumped into folding chairs beneath the almost blue fluorescent lights. We were halfway through the three-day workshop, doing an activity that left the white women in our group rather emotional. Our facilitators tried to coax our group into discussion, but after giving them short and to-the-point answers, we descended into the kind of silence workshop facilitators hate – the silence that feels so warm and comfortable it could last forever. And then it came.
Our collective silence was shattered by a trembling white female voice: “I just can’t believe it. This is so much to take in. I mean, I had no idea.” Inhale. “This is just unbelievable. Why didn’t anyone teach us this? I feel so cheated, deceived. I mean, really.” Inhale. “This is going to sound crazy. I know it sounds crazy, but I really didn’t know that slavery happened on purpose. Like on purpose.” Inhale. “I don’t know. I just kinda thought that it just . . . happened.” Inhale. Her sobbing then filled the room as she grappled for the first time with our country’s real history.
Slavery was no accident.
We didn’t trip and fall into black subjugation.
Racism wasn’t a bad joke that just never went away.
It was all on purpose.
Every bit of it was on purpose.
Racial injustices, like slavery and our system of mass incarceration, were purposeful inventions. But instead of seeking to understand how we got here, the national narrative remains filled with com forting myths, patchwork timelines, and colonial ideals. Like the sobbing woman in the workshop, many Americans try to live comfortably in ignorance of America’s racial history.
We have not thoroughly assessed the bodies snatched from dirt and sand to be chained in a cell. We have not reckoned with the horrendous, violent mass kidnapping that we call the Middle Passage. We have not been honest about all of America’s complicity- about the wealth the South earned on the backs of the enslaved, or the wealth the North gained through the production of enslaved hands. We have not fully understood the status symbol that owning bodies offered. We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America’s land.
The same goes for the Civil War. We have refused to honestly confront the fact that so many were willing to die in order to hold the freedom of others in their hands. We have refused to acknowledge slavery’s role at all, preferring to boil things down to. the far more palatable “states’ rights.” We have not confessed that the end of slavery was so bitterly resented, the rise of Jim Crow became inevitable- and with it, a belief in Black inferiority that lives on in hearts and minds today. We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But those signs weren’t just “mean.” They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at. any moment in the presence of whiteness. Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn’t be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal re course for injustice. The mob violence, the burned down homes, the bombed churches and businesses, the Black bodies that were lynched every couple of days. Jim Crow was walking through life measuring every step.
Even our celebrations of the Civil Rights Movement are sanitized, its victories accentuated while the battles are whitewashed. We have not come to grips with the spitting and shouting, the pulling and tugging, the clubs, dogs, bombs, and guns, the passion and vitriol with which the rights of Black Americans were fought against. We have not acknowledged the bloodshed that often preceded victory. We would rather focus on the beautiful words of Martin Luther King Jr. than on the terror he and protestors endured at marches, boycotts, and from behind jail doors. We don’t want to acknowledge that for decades, whiteness fought against every civil right Black Americans sought – from sitting at lunch counters and in integrated classrooms to the right to vote and have a say in how our country was run.
We like to pretend that all those white faces who carried protest signs and batons, who turned on their sprinklers and their fire hoses, who wrote against the demonstrations and preached against the changes, just disappeared. We like to pretend that they were won over, transformed, the moment King proclaimed, “I have a dream.” We don’t want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it – who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens. We ignore that white people still avoid Black neighborhoods, still don’t want their kids going to predominantly Black schools, still don’t want to destroy segregation.
The moment Black Americans achieved freedom from enslavement, America could have put to death the idea of Black inferiority. But whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity- all without consequence.
Ultimately, the reason we have not yet told the truth about this history of black and white America is that telling an ordered history of this nation would mean finally naming America’s commitment to violent, abusive, exploitative, immoral white supremacy, which seeks the absolute control of black bodies. It would mean doing something about it.
How long will it be before we finally choose to connect all the dots? How long before we confess the history of racism embedded in our systems of housing, education, health, criminal justice, and more? How long before we dig to the root?
Because it is the truth that will set us free.
Sadly, too many of us in the church don’t live like we believe this. We live as if we are afraid acknowledging the past will tighten the chains of injustice rather than break them. We live as if the ghosts of the past will snatch us if we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. So instead, we walk around the valley, talk around the valley. We speak of the valley with cute euphemisms:
“We just have so many divisions in this country.”
“If we could just get better at diversity, we’d be so much better off.”
“We are experiencing some cultural changes.”
Our only chance at dismantling racial injustice is being more curious about its origins than we are worried about our comfort. It’s not a comfortable conversation for any of us. It is risky and messy. It is haunting work to recall the sins of our past. But is this not the work we have been called to any way? Is this not the work of the Holy Spirit to il luminate truth and inspire transformation?
It’s haunting. But it’s also holy.
And when we talk about race today, with all the pain packed into that conversation, the Holy Spirit remains in the room. This doesn’t mean the conversations aren’t painful, aren’t personal, aren’t charged with emotion. But it does mean we can survive. We can survive honest discussions about slavery, about convict leasing, about stolen land, deportation, discrimination, and exclusion. We can identify the harmful politics of gerrymandering, voter suppression, criminal justice laws, and policies that disproportionately affect people of color negatively. And we can expose the actions of white institutions- the history of segregation and white flight, the real impact of all-white leadership, the racial disparity in wages, and opportunities for advancement. We can lament and mourn. We can be livid and enraged. We can be honest. We can tell the truth. We can trust that the Holy Spirit is here. We must.
For only by being truthful about how we got here can we begin to imagine another way.