The eCrozier

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you. – President Lyndon B. Johnson

This past week the clergy of the Diocese of Georgia met for our semi-annual clergy conference. As has become our custom, we kept the discipline of the full Daily Office, hearing meditations offered at each liturgy by one of our colleagues. We met in plenary three times with Dr. Catherine Meeks, Executive Director of the Center for Racial Healing in Atlanta. Dr. Meeks, an Episcopalian and retired university professor, led us through important conversations around the long history of racism and the continued, persistent lie of white supremacy. As a white man that wasn’t easy to hear, but history is what it is. There’s no denying it happened (although some persist in denial just as others insist the Holocaust never happened). To be sure, we’ve made great strides, but the work of racial healing is far from complete. It can’t be until we end the continued injustices that African-Americans experience. When I was a boy, I was sure we’d have done so by the time I was an old man. Now I can only hope my children will see the day.

After the white supremacist mob and march in Charlottesville in August 2017, I wrote about how I had seen other white people look uncomfortable when they saw those messengers of white supremacy, but also nodding their heads affirmatively to much of their political message about immigrants and other non-white people. And I asked then: Can we really separate the message from the messenger?” I concluded that eCrozier with this: “It’s time for white people to look in the mirror and tell ourselves the truth. We don’t have a problem with religious or ethnic minorities in our culture. We have a white person problem. And white people, especially those of us who call ourselves by the name of Christ, must be determined and truthful enough to fix it.”

Many white people I encounter don’t want to see this as our problem. And that makes some sense from the perspective of evolutionary biology. Joshua Greene in his book, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, points out that as human minds evolved over the millennia in tribal life, we became cognitively wired to defend our tribe from other tribes. As a result, we’ll accept the truth of new information about our tribe only if it’s consistent with what we already believe to be true. Likewise, we’ll see our positions as objective and accurate while labeling other positions as biased and false. In fact, Greene argues, we tend to dismiss such challenging information without giving it any due consideration.

Is it any wonder then that white people don’t want to admit what we have done and what we continue to do? We dismiss such knowledge without even considering it – it’s just too painful to contemplate. But we must if we want to be healed and if we want to see our communities healed. Facing the truth takes courage. It takes the willingness to be forgiven and to forgive ourselves. Fortunately, we’re blessed with a Savior who has shown us how to do just that. With God’s help, we can do this.

+Scott