Overwhelmed

This time I was only able to get through one page on the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 before I felt overwhelmed. Last time I picked up the material I didn't get too much further than that until I felt not only overwhelmed but deeply disturbed.

As a North Carolinian, as a student of predominantly Southern and African American history (though I am sooo far from being an expert) and as a former history teacher, I am familiar with the Wilmington Race Riots. I'm re-reading material that I have either both read before or have had summarized to me. But this time, it's messing me up. Perhaps it is because I read it as we are studying the Prophets in Old Testament. Perhaps it is because I know longer am looking for the "approved by black people badge" that Dr. Tyson so wonderfully described on our first day of class. Or perhaps it falls around the time we celebrate Human Relations Sunday (which I get a complete kick out of honestly if you study the quirkiness of the white folks who started these days), MLK Jr. Day and the Inauguration of Barack Obama.

As I'm learning to not hate and despise my whiteness, while being more active to confess my race-based sins, I find that it makes me less immune to not just knowing intellectually the pain of injustice, but feeling it in a pathos sense. All of this together raises new questions and emotions that I'm not sure exactly what to do with.

Why is there such a link between active white supremacists and proponents of Education? As a former school teacher I can assure that not only have I seen this in the form of your "typical redneck" folks involved in the Educational system, but I've seen it in more subtle ways in who Jonathan Kozol calls "the people who say that they are with me" like those in the Education Department who tried to physically restrain me from asking Mr. Kozol a question about "apartheid" on our own white-washed campus. And yes, that comment was directed to the "nice Southern women" who had in the name of rules and polite Southern etiquette who had restrained me and thus greatly angered Kozol. Yet I will also say that I left the school system in part because it did suppress me into being that person I didn't want to be--a person who was forced to live scheduled and scattered, expert and executer, not friend but foe, limited by resources, racial and religious tension, reading skills, raucous behavior and raw politics. In the case of the coup in Wilmington, much of the strategies were started and carried out by men famous for supporting Progressive Education.

As a white Christian woman, how do I respond when my race, religion and sex were used to legitimize horrendous acts of violence on the black community and to literally and figuratively emasculate and kill black men? My gut reaction is to cry, wail and throw up (which we learned in Old Testament today was much of the response in Lamentations--thus such a reaction would be appropriate). The answer of laying it on the cross of Jesus almost seems too much. "Jesus, how can you carry and forgive such sin?" Or even if Jesus can handle it, how am I expected to look at my black brother and expect him to forgive people who look like me? If the Christian Church is given the 2nd Great Commandment (according to Jesus) to "love my neighbor as myself," then how am I supposed to love myself as a white person to love my black neighbor and vice versa if correct self-love is supposed to make me rightly love my neighbor? What does this mean for feelings of black shame and white guilt?

I'm in the business and vocation of saying that Jesus is enough. And I truly think that He is, yet I can equally and justly see why others would struggle in this way. But I think the point for me is to situate myself in the sin that Jesus sits in and pays for and (as I believe) endured on the cross. Although I know Jesus is enough, I'm called to wade a little in the water, to linger, to mourn, to grieve, to feel a little of Gethsemane and Golgotha.

Yes, resurrection is coming. Hope is coming. The Kingdom of God is coming. But Jesus waited for it for three days and even made his way down to Hell before He rose in glory. He walked for a certain amount of time (yeah, I should know how long) on the Earth as a resurrected person before returning to heaven to be with the Father. He wasn't afraid to involve Himself in our junk. But he is also present in those of us who believe in Him and also sits at the right hand of the Father and actively involves broken, messed-up people in His work. He calls us righteous because He said we get to have the righteousness that He earned. In the process of making us more holy on Earth, we let go of our earthly junk and live more to the new identity that Jesus gives us: friend, new creation, beloved, righteous, holy, blameless. So how do I as a white person come to terms with the way that God made me? How can/will God redeem my whiteness and the ways my identity has been perverted by the past? How can/will He do this for other races and ethnicities that Psalm 139 says were "fearfully and wonderfully made"?

I have some ideas, but I think it is important for me to spend some time in the in-between area before I start sharing. So come, sit with me where Jesus sits. Sit with me in the brokeness. What shall we mourn over? How shall we respond?