“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave or free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

                                                                                                Galatians 3:28

I was thinking about my faults one day recently. (It’s a good thing I had a long time to think that day.) And I realized that one of my faults is being white. Well, maybe not “being” white because that’s how I was born. The fault is still “thinking” white in 2021 and not realizing it. Here is what I mean.

First, I have a lot to learn about black history. Yes, I was a history major in college and yes, my concentration was American culture. So, I like to think that I am well-versed on, and understand well, the history of being black in this country. But I’m not, and I don’t. I still know very little. I may read the words, but I only see them through a “white lens”. Racial prejudice – even subconscious - is many things, foremost among them, real. It is heartrending and seems bottomless and limitless. And there’s no excuse to not know about it anymore because it’s right in front of our eyes like no other time in history. We need to open our eyes to the fact that there are different cultures and learn from others.

Second, white supremacy is still alive and well in 2021. I used to balk at the concept of “white supremacy”, at least in my life, thinking it meant only one thing – the Ku Klux Klan. No nuance. No degrees. Just evil men in white hoods burning crosses and scaring (and sometimes killing) black people. And I’m not that.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Over a century ago W.E.B. DuBois said whites and blacks both had the burden of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of a white society”, and that’s still true. We have not “integrated” for the white culture has assimilated very little, if any, of the black culture into ours. “Integration” simply meant when blacks were made to act and think white they’d be accepted. We have done little to learn or “integrate” black culture into the dominate white culture.

I could go on, but you get it. We all need to open our eyes and our hearts and our ears and listen with all three to better understand each other.

Eternal God create in each of us a clean heart with which to see the world and each other. In Jesus’ name, AMEN.