Religion in life by Dave Schmeltzer

Let’s Talk About Race

Are you in as many conversations about race as I am?  If you’re white, most likely not, both because I’m a pastor of a multi-racial church and I’m actually heading up a national taskforce on ethnic diversity for the 630 churches in my little denomination.  And also because most white people never talk about race.  On the other hand, if you’re anything like my minority-culture friends, you likely talk about this way more than I do.

Dave Schmeltzer

I hear the most amazing stories.  For instance, here’s one that’s about both race and gender.  I’m lucky enough to have administrative help both for my work and even for some personal things (all the better for my organization to get more hours out of me, I presume).  One of my recent administrators was a dynamic young woman from an immigrant family. 

As I walked into our administrative offices awhile back, everyone burst out laughing.  I discovered this was because I’d walked in just as my wonderful assistant had gotten off the phone having—you heard this right—pretended to be me. 

Now this is a young Asian woman and I’m a middle-aged white man (let me clarify: an early middle-aged white man).  So while I had some ethical concerns, what I mostly wanted to know was how on earth she’d pulled it off—and, I suppose, why she felt she’d needed to. 

It turned out she’d pulled it off just fine, thank you very much.  And she needed to because she’d discovered that companies often wouldn’t respond to her at all when she was herself, but if she’d call back as a white man, she’d get immediate results.  As they say, stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
Here’s another story that might grab you.

This week our church hosted a funeral for an amazing woman of faith who’d been with us for a few years, but had been in a few other churches over the years.  She’s black, and almost all of her mourners who weren’t part of our congregation were black as well. 

Two of our staff members—one black and one mixed-race—collared my wife to thank her for her kind words at the funeral.  They said they’d both been grabbed by African-American mourners who said to them, “That’s your pastor?  That white woman?  And she went to bat for our black sister, prayed with her, sat with her in her illness, mourned for her?”  It just seemed incredible to them—and their incredulity got our attention.

In my travels for this ethnic diversity taskforce, I’ve discovered that most majority-culture people never think about race and assume it’s a non-factor in American life.  They’re shocked when they hear stories about racism on the news and attribute those stories to one of three things: lone racists who live nowhere near them, muckraking media members looking to stir up controversy, or grandstanding minority-culture leaders looking to increase their personal profile (I won’t mention names, but if your last names are Sharpton, Jackson or Farrakhan, you may find your ears burning). 

The non-white folks I talk to laugh at this and say things like “Try walking around in my skin for a day and tell me if you believe that.”  They flag great scenes like the one in Spike Lee’s recent Inside Man, where a Sikh man bitterly complains to Denzel Washington’s cop that Washington has no idea what it’s like to be mistaken for a terrorist everywhere he goes, to which Washington replies, “Yeah, but I’ll bet you can catch a cab in Harlem.” 

They point out obvious stats that still somehow slip under the radar, like that a huge percentage of conservative white Christians vote Republican while an equal percentage of conservative black Christians vote Democratic.  Both believing roughly the same stuff about God, but seeing life through a different lens. 

So, what the heck, if you’re white and you have non-white friends (despite the standard line of “Some of my best friends are black,” the numbers tell us that it’s actually the rare white person for whom that’s technically true), run the risk and ask them for their thoughts on race and their experience of living in your neighborhood.  If you’re not white and have friends of different ethnicities, do the same. 

If you have friends in a mixed-race marriage and there’s enough trust between you, ask them what that’s been like, what’s come up as a result.  (One mixed-race friend recently said it wasn’t until coming to our church that he’d actually seen models of mixed-race marriages that worked, so clearly many couples find challenges related to the very real hurdles that two different cultures present.) 

I’m no genius with this stuff, but one battle plan does seem to me obviously to be helpful.  Let’s talk about race.

Comments

[david t.]

this is a pretty good collumn overall, one thing though:

"or grandstanding minority-culture leaders looking to increase their personal profile (I won’t mention names, but if your last names are Sharpton, Jackson or Farrakhan, you may find your ears burning)."

I am no expert on these guys' respective careers, but isn't this kind of like lumping Michael Moore, Clinton (B. or H.), and Pat Buchanan together? The national stage tends to lend itself to grandstanding and it is a little weird to single these folks out for that when their carreers have been so disparate. Also, are there any black leaders with national platforms and roots in the 60's era civil rights milieu who you would judge more charitably?