Today I read Austin Channing Brown’s book “I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness”.
My primary emotion: overwhelm.
There is so much to say, to do, to feel badly about, to defend, to be afraid of, to run from, to deny, to get my feelings hurt over.
The conversation about racial reconciliation is not completely new to me; I have two dear friends who generously opened their hearts to me in this area, and to them I owe my awareness of this book.
As I try to process what I read, I find that one of the ways I want to do it is by making the problem smaller. Here’s the truth, though: racism isn’t small. There’s no way to make it small, unless you do so by ignoring 99.9% of it.
In the last chapter, Brown speaks of the hopelessness of where we are and quotes author Ta-Nehisi Coates:
“Slavery in this country was 250 years. What that means is that there were African Americans who were born in this country in 1750/1760 and if they looked backwards their parents were slaves. Their grandparents were slaves. Their great grandparents were slaves. If the looked forward, their children would be slaves. Their grandchildren would be slaves. And possibly, their great grandchildren will be slaves. There was no real hope within their individual life span of ending enslavement—the most brutal form of degradation in this country’s history. There was nothing in their life that said, “This will end in my lifetime. I will see the end of this.” And they struggled. And they resisted.”
Although this reality is ugly, for me it also points to a way through the hopelessness. The way through is to keep going. The way through is not to try to tear it down with one grand five-year plan. The way through is not to make bold claims that We Will See The End of Racism In This Country In Our Lifetime. The way through is to keep going, one small step at a time, and to lie down on the operating table and beg my God to carve the racism and hate out of my own heart, day after day after day, for the rest of my life.