I don’t think I’ve ever been called a racist—not because I’m not, but because the people in my life are simply too kind and too gentle, and treat me as if I’m terribly fragile. But I will say, with the same level of clear-eyed truth about being in recovery for my addictions, that I am a racist. Thoroughly dipped and dyed, all the way through, head to heart, sole to soul, from earliest memory until today.
Being called a racist will not kill you. It might sting because it attacks your self-image of being “not a racist.”
Actually being a racist is what kills you. It deadens you to humanity. It deadens you to connection. It deadens you to wholeness. It isolates and wounds and scars and stunts. Staying in racism, staying a racist, kills you.
Someone calling me a racist doesn’t make me one, and I don’t have to defend myself from a baseless charge.
I acknowledge it.
I’m doing what I can & what I know to untangle myself, to recover my broken humanness, to change my thought patterns as well as my grid of discovery and observation. It is grief and sadness and anger and frustration, because so much time is on the behaviors, and it is so damned hard to get to the core of the spoilage, the me that is soaked in racism.
I don’t expect to be cured this side of salvation. Like a dry drunk, the addiction is always there. What I hold to is the hope—the hope that one day I will master both my thoughts and my behaviors, that I will conquer my reactions and my prejudices, that I will unwind myself from selfishness and fear and hate and anger to fully embrace love and grace.
Don’t come to me to find a “good” white person. I’m not going to satisfy you. I’m satisfied that I’m repenting of both my formation and my choices, and that one day, according to my faith system, the long journey will be complete.
Call me racist if you want. It is not hurtful. It is truth.
But I know I have another name.