#BlackLivesMatter
For what it matters – my take
on it
The hashtag #blacklivesmatter has
become both popular and controversial this year. I am writing this blog to try
to present my take on it. I suppose that how one feels about this hashtag will
largely reflect their history, perspective, hopes, dreams, and fears. I believe
African Americans often wonder how much their lives mean to other Americans. If
we view the hashtag #blacklivesmatter as an answer to a question being posed to
Americans by many in the black community we will begin to understand why
#blacklivesmatter as an answer cannot be replaced by #alllivesmatter. For the
question we are being asked to consider is whether black lives matter within
our pursuit of life, especially if we are white Americans who have more
stereotypes about blacks than we have contact with blacks. I am embarrassed
about some elements of my past dealings with African Americans. I mention them
because I believe that others might see more of themselves in my confessions
than will be comfortable to admit. While there might be necessary political
aspects to bettering our society, I believe that for many of us the harder and
more effective work of healing racial divisions will be to simply give
ourselves room to develop friendships one person to another that cross the
divides of race and ethnicity.
I was raised in the North, in a
rural area in a north central region of Illinois. I lived in one of those areas
where when you drove near where I lived you saw corn, soybeans, cattle, hogs,
and white folk. There weren’t many people of color near where I lived. We didn’t
imagine we were racist. We thought that was a Southern problem. We also didn’t
know, or didn’t choose to know, why the rich farmland across the Midwest seemed
always to be settled by white folk. We seemed to have no clue that once upon a
time the laws of the land were written or enforced, or both to favor the
building of a European based civilization in North America. I don’t want so
much to rehash our national history, but it is important to realize that white
and black histories in America have been very different and have shaped black
experiences and perspectives different than our white perspectives were shaped.
There has been a deeply rooted sense that the wonderful liberties and
opportunities this nation has offered have almost always been designed first
for whites and the leftovers fell to others. Maybe as a nation we have sought
to address these issues. Maybe as individuals we believe we support equality
and have embraced the ideal. But what I have discovered in decades of seeking
to live a Christian life is that there is something very different about
embracing an ideal and living out an ideal in everyday life and practice. The
ideals we embrace in our minds mean less to others than the practice of life we
live in everyday relationships.
Here are a couple of times in my
life where I discovered that my ways of dealing with my black brothers and
sisters needed some drastic changing. There was a time when I worked during the
day and went to school, taking German in the evening. I was trying to study
German for a couple of reasons. I suppose partly because I had a grandmother,
whom I never met, who was born in Germany. But also I thought I might go to
seminary or to study History especially of the Reformation, and German was one
of the great languages for Reformation studies. As it turned out I lacked the
discipline and had too much timidity to do well in a language. Timidity holds
you back in learning a language. You learn to converse with others in a new
language by conversing. There is no substitute. The more you are willing to
just do it, even if you make some occasional mistakes, the more quickly you
will learn to converse in a language. Those of us who won’t enter conversations
because we fear we might make a mistake usually never build the courage to
enter those conversations and so we never learn to speak the other person’s
language. There might be some application to building relationships with those
of other races and ethnicities.
At the time I was doing this a young
black person asked me if I could teach him German. I resisted the idea only
partly because I did not follow qualified to teach the language or because of
my fear of doing it wrongly. Too much of my thinking, though I couldn’t face up
to it at the time was because a black person studying German was simply outside
of my accepted stereotypes.
It was years later before another
black whom I worked with, with whom I had never shared this told me of his
growing up with parents who taught in the black segregated schools before
Oklahoma’s schools became integrated. He did not wish for a return to
segregation but he told of something that happened to many black students once
integration began. His mother was a Latin teacher in the segregated schools.
How do you think she responded if a black student in her class complained he
couldn’t learn Latin? She would never have accepted it. She believed in her
black students’ potentials. Then as schools were integrated and white teachers
began teaching black students Latin, how many of these students were held back
by the sort of stereotype I had where I had not thought of a young black man
wanting to learn German. There are so many ways that our inherent racism
expresses itself. But stereotypes generally rule our conduct when we think of
people in categories rather than knowing them as individuals.
A second event made me understand my
difficulty with stereotyping even more than the first instance I mentioned. I
was at a convenience store. It was not in a location where many African
Americans shopped at the store. I was in the store after working an evening
shift, maybe around 11 at night or so. Four young African Americans come into
the store. My stereotyping, that I really wasn’t aware of until that evening
took over. My first thought was I wondered if there was going to be any
problem. I perhaps appeared nervous, because one of the young men did something
that probably changed my life. He said in a quiet voice, “Good evening sir.”
That is when I noticed that these four young men were dressed nicely and acted
politely. If four young white kids making lots of noise had entered the store I
would have passed it off as that’s young people. But I actually found myself
nervous when four polite young black men came in because their vehicle needed
gasoline and they could use a snack. That was when I realized I had a problem
with stereotyping people.
So here I am in the year 2015 and
there is a crisis in the ways African Americans feel in the country where they
were born and have lived, many of them with ancestry paralleling my ancestry’s
length of time in this nation, and most of their ancestry predating the arrival
of much of my ancestry to America. These are people whose ancestry has been in
America for more than two hundred years and they still have to wonder if others
think their lives matter. As I sense it, the hashtag #blacklivesmatter does not
mean to indicate that white lives or other lives don’t matter. The hashtag is
simply meant to declare whether we understand it or not black lives do matter.
The hashtag is an answer to a
question. It is the question that many among our black brothers, sisters, and
neighbors are wondering. They are wondering and wanting to know, “Do you think
black lives matter? If our answer is to switch the subject and counter reply “All
lives matter” then they have reason to believe that we are continuing to hide
behind our clichés of hypothetical equality. But that leaves one final question
for those of us who are white to answer. “Why do we have such a difficult time
saying the simple sentence … “Black lives matter”? Do not let these words be so
repugnant to you that you cannot affirm the simple sentence “Black lives
matter.”
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