Race

On our brisk walk, Reuben and I talked today about a topic, which would have been very uncomfortable to have some one walk into. It wasn't religion, or politics, or money. We talked about race and racism. Why you might ask, would it be uncomfortable if third person walked in on the conversation? Because he is black and I am white and we talked about our own encounters with racism, how it, has impacted us and what has happened to America as a whole over time with race relations.

He asked if I would write on this today, and I instantly thought, that's a good idea and then oh man, how am I going write about race and not stick my foot in my mouth. How do I not become the guy who says I'm not a racist, I have a black friend. This question drove me right into the problem, as I see it today, people are going to misread, get offended and be jerks because the topic is tough. In the end, I don't think I should worry about it, but I'm not sure I can help it.

There are conversations about race going on, but they are largely the wrong conversations with the wrong people. It is the conversations the racist parts of my family has giving blacks coded names and blaming envy thing they don't like on the fact they are black. It is the family who came to Reuben and told home they would disown him if he ever married a white woman. It is the group of all white leaders who talk about diversity in terms of how they are perceived, rather than gaining strength. It is the group of employees that talk about how the white manager talked longer than the black manager because the director is a racist. It is these conversations which don't cross the race barrier, that you can only have with people like you, and they are serious or poisonous. It is an inbreeding of ideas, which produces the twin retards of racism and phantom discrimination.

Yes, I wrote retards, it seems disingenuous to call them anything else.

There is a conversation, though, we should be having. It is a conversation which is interested in race and how it plays and doesn't play isn't the formation of a person. It crosses race lines. If I want to know why black people don't swim I probably am not served to ask my brother. Also, I should live in fear of asking such silly questions. It may be completely wrong, but that's better than this mock color blindness, which has us asking the wrong people the wrong things.

In addition to having the conversation with people of different races, we need to stop taking everything about race so seriously. Learn to laugh when one of your youth group tells you that Koreans are the only real Asians and she can measure you Asianess by the size of your head. It's funny. Don't assume every slight is discrimination, it may not have even been a slight. When you make a bad assumption about race, such as all Pentecostals are black (one of my own from my past), own it. If you want to have these real conversations, talk about your own bad assumptions, open the door on what you have thought and do think.

I walked into a big luncheon the other day and, as often happens at work, the people of different races had divided into different tables, I stand in the door and I can clearly see the white table and the black table. How odd I think, but then I realize the situation I'm in, the situation the last few people who walked through the same door were in. If I sit with the white people, I am just like them, I have shown racial preferential treatment. I don't like that. On the other hand, if I sit at the black table, It's like I'm trying to prove a point, going out of my way. Making a decision based on race. I hate this moment because suddenly I am hyper aware of how I will be perceived. I sit at the black table. Not because I have more or less friends there, although Reuben is there, but because I don't want to be one of "those" people. Those racist who will only sit with their own. Then I look at myself, who was just looking at them and think, your still not there yet.