From One Racist Human to Another

I try to keep up to date on the news. It’s tough to read. I suppose to an extent it always has been. News really means extreme events, often rare, that scare us and make us angry. It’s almost like the news is appealing to some sort of base human instinct that makes us…turn on the news. Our news is like a drug, but I digress.

It’s hard to pull out any conclusions about our society or world from the news without over generalizing, but I think it’s fair to say this about mass media, and really, much of humanity. We are a dualistic, polarized people.

Black Lives Matter vs. Blue Lives Matter

Democrats vs. Republicans

Christians vs. Muslims

I’m writing this post because of some events that have happened recently, and some interpretations of those events that I believe are over generalizations. To paint a dualistic picture requires a broad brush, and if there’s one commonality between all the talk I see on my Facebook page, and read in the news, and see on T.V., it’s a broad brush. 

This is my dad. He died when I was in middle school, but he’s still by far my greatest role model. Instead of going out with his buddies after work, he would come home to my brother and me. It’s hard to remember his voice now, but I can still hear him say as clear as day, “Hey buddy.” My brother and me—we were his buddies. My dad loved his family. He loved people. My mom told me that my dad never met a stranger. He worked to help people make better lives for themselves. He worked in schools to help children know they could be whatever they worked for.  He genuinely wanted to be a source of good in the world.

My dad was a police officer.

I guess it goes without saying then, given that my dad is my biggest role model, but I really look up to the law enforcement profession. It’s a profession that we’ve decided our government should provide in order to ensure our freedoms. To enforce the law and help ensure others do not suppress our freedoms.

I just watched the videos of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. I was going to post the videos, but it's far too disturbing. You can watch them for yourself if you want. They're everywhere. As a person who looks up to police officers, this breaks my heart. I’m not going to pretend to know all the details of these incidents, but here’s what I do know—our great Christian country has a real problem with confessing our sins, and I say that as a professing Christian.

It took until the 1960’s to put an end to the Jim Crow laws that perpetuated racism from the top down since the civil war. Legislation that, at best, disenfranchised an entire race of people. That's the 1960's. We're not that far removed, if much at all, from that world. Some of us just have the luxury of pushing it aside or explaining it away. And what’s the justification for this mentality, for those laws?  Every reasonably thinking person I know would say that the way our skin looks makes no difference to our humanity, so why do we do this?

Since the dawn of our existence, humans have looked for opportunities for their group to have security, and security comes through power, and power is achieved when other groups become the threat. We create stories to justify this behavior. But at it’s core are stories, and the stories are a fiction to solidify our in-group—Primitive, survival of the fittest, fiction. And beneath the reasons, the justifications, the stories that explain away our racism?  Somewhere in our primitive brains, we are still afraid for our survival, and the solution is to hold tight to our group and band together against the “others.” I say all this because we have to admit that, as humans, we each have these instincts. I’m not even talking about stated beliefs. I’m talking about reactions. Preconceived notions and biases. Racist urges.

We have to confess our sins.

And what happens when we don’t? We push them away and pretend we’re not in the wrong, but the monster still exists just beneath the surface, until something baits the monster and the monster reacts. This is why many police departments are using bias training. They recognize that as humans, we have biases, and until we recognize these biases and confess, we are held captive to our sins.

Police officers are humans. Some recognize their biases, keep them in check, and strive to make a real difference in the world. And some don’t. And on the sidelines we have our polarized debates, one side refusing to believe that people in 2016 could be influenced by internal bias—by racism—and the other side refusing to admit that there are so many police officers that live their lives to serve others.

But this post really isn’t about police officers. This incident is a microcosm of how so many of us are approaching the world. We see fundamentalist, violent Muslims commit atrocities and then it’s all Muslims who are fundamentalist and violent. We see an ignorant Christian who says Orlando victims had it coming, and then it’s all Christians who are ignorant and judgmental. We see police officers that violently react to fear, and anger, and preconceived notions, and suddenly all police officers are racists.  This type of rhetoric is all over the place. Us verses them. In groups and out groups. Survival of the fittest.

We have a choice right now. We can respond to these incidents in the news, appealing to our base instincts, and perpetuate this cycle of fear, anger, hatred, and violence, or we can direct our judgement and hatred toward judgement and hatred itself. I'm not saying we should stop standing up against injustice. I'm saying that the real enemy is driving us all. Here is my challenge to all who read this post. Confess your sins. You’re a human. You have fear, and your fear is a defense mechanism for your survival. Admit it, and then lay it down. Because here’s the deal, folks—There are no "others." The ghosts aren’t real. We’re all humans who happen to be on different rocks, with different pieces of cloth covering our bodies, with different materials covering our heads from the elements. We might look a little different, or have different sounding voices, or different names, or different stories about the meaning of life.

But we all bleed the same.

Let’s put down our broad brushes. We are painting an ugly picture.