No, It's Okay, I'm Not Racist! I Get It!

#1 - It's apparently tough for me to keep up a regular blogging schedule. Oops. Working on it.

#2 - I've been thinking lately about race.

Ethnicity. Heritage. History. Color. Whiteness. Blackness. Otherness.

I feel like it's important to discuss these things, to see where we stand on them, and to see the ways we can stop doing damage and start doing good. As a follower of Christ, it's important to, like him and the God he communicates, embrace those considered "other", to find our commonality as humans and as children of God.

I think about it often, the "race problem". Sometimes, it's because of something overt I've seen out in the world - On Facebook or Twitter, on a bumper sticker, spewing from the mouth of some Christian personality on television. Sometimes it's because I've come across some well-meaning but still racist ideology in one of those venues - somebody complaining about racism against white people, or denouncing the existence of discrete black culture as divisive, or denying the inherent racial biases within such social ills as poverty, crime, and drug abuse. Just recently, I saw again the blanket claim that racism is no longer an issue in America. That we are a post-racial society. That we are all color-blind, and that we as a society punish those who see race and judge upon it.

But racism is so not dead that it's the status quo. Every time you see a brainiac of Asian descent on TV, that's a little bit of racial prejudice poking through. Every time you see Jeff Dunham pull out his "Ahmed the Dead Terrorist" puppet, that's pure mockery of people with Arabian heritage, and people who hold the Muslim faith. Every time you see a poor kid of African descent sacrificed upon the altar of white American values, from the Treyvon Martin debacle to every black man who receives a harsher sentence than his white counterpart for a minor drug conviction, you are seeing the powerful and harmful effect that racism has on our neighbors of color.

Every time the world screams that racism is dead - because of MLK Jr., or Obama, or "my black friend", or Kanye West - that's racism at its most cruel and insidious.

You may notice that I'm using really awkward language. As if the Hyphenated-American language wasn't clunky enough, right? Now we have to say things like "of African descent", "with Arabian heritage", etc.
As a young man at my college once called out during a racial-sensitivity-seminar, "I'm just being honest -- if I see somebody who's black, I'm going to call them black!"

Is that an individual being racist? Do you have to use a slur to be racist?

Do you, personally, even have to feel negatively about other races to participate in racism?

When it comes down to it, racism isn't about individuals saying or doing stupid discriminatory things. Those actions are important and horrible, of course, but they're mostly a red herring.

Racism is about the million, billion subtle ways that our

language
behavior
newsmedia
entertainment
institutions
systems

perpetuate harmful myths about nonwhite people, and dismiss their real human experiences, sweeping people under the rugs of their ethnicities.

It's calling a person black, when her name is Susan.
It's thinking a person is smart because of their east-Asian heritage, when his talents and abilities grow and fluctuate over time as they are nurtured and abandoned, just like yours.
It's staring in wide-eyed-wonder as a brown-skinned person prays fervently, assuming that their ethnic spirituality is deeper than your white neighbors' glassy-eyed trudge down the communion line on Sunday, when people of all colors and heritages are flawed, distractable, and pious in their own ways.
It's when we white folks try to speak on behalf of our sisters and brothers of color, denying them the chance to share their own stories, their own experiences, using their own words in their own time. Even when we're "standing up for them", even when we're shouting, "No! It's okay! I get it! I'm not one of those racist white people!", we still reduce our neighbors to nothing more than archetypes.

You are not Susan, you are A Black Woman. I, the Enlightened White Man, will speak for you and fix your plight, in an attempt to purge my own guilt about how my ancestors kidnapped, beat, imprisoned and oppressed your ancestors.

In short, when we reduce a person to their color, or the geographic region where their family originated, we hurt that person. When we consider a person to be black before we consider her to be human, we hurt all humanity. When we hear somebody speak Spanish, and immediately imagine that the person is rich, poor, smart, stupid, evil, devout, lazy, or hardworking, then we hurt God, who creates all people as complete, complex, many-sided reflections of God's complex, many-sided Self.