I was browsing my Twitter feed late last year, not looking for anything, but spending lots of time doing it. You know how it is: in 240 characters some people can tell a life story, and some people can’t get to their initial premise. Sometimes what’s posted is interesting. Sometimes . . . well. Scan, scroll. Scan, scroll. Scan, scroll . . . .
This was around the time when Beth Moore was getting flack. Many people, including my wife and her friends, are inspired by her works. I was curious why she was receiving such negative feedback. Why all the push back?
Oh, of course. A white woman was speaking out about racism, and the usual suspects were outraged.
Then a response caught my eye: it’s on white people to fix racism.
I blinked at its simplicity.
This was an open, honest word to people like me. Or really, a statement to me, specifically: you should do something about this, because we certainly didn’t create this mess.
It’s on white people to fix racism.
I responded quickly.
If no one else will, I will.
The author of that tweet and I connected. Andre Mitchell is a bi-vocational pastor in Muncie, Indiana, who works five days a week to feed his family and then works weekends to feed his flock. I’m a technical editor with adult sons with few surprises in my life, and have been attending safe, suburban churches for the past forty-five years, again, with few surprises.
We chatted online. He shared his experiences, which helped me to know him better, and I shared some of mine. Then I committed to do the work to confront racism where I could, although I wasn’t sure what that meant.
There was nothing before me but opportunities. “Maybe I can try the doorknob of any shut door before me, and see if it opens. If it opens, I’ll step through it, and do the next thing.”
The door that immediately presented itself was a chance to audit classes in our denomination’s Bible school (BIOS—Bible Institute of Seattle). The first class that I attended, Movements that Change the World, had a challenge: “God starts at the cross— the surrender is death, the absolute catastrophe of all that is powerful and strong and beautiful and wise. The cross is the starting place because we start again with—and only with—God.”
What I heard was this: Start by dying to self. Let it all go. Stop trying to make it happen.
Then an opportunity arose to read and promote Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise before publication. The book is an analysis of the elephant in the white Christian community: race. (No Black person, no Person of Color in the American Christian community can ignore race, but if you’re white, ignorance is the default.) I gave the book to my pastor, and it became a spark for his series on addressing the issues of race in America.
With my efforts to be courageous in public (or “I tremble, but I try”), I grew more vocal in my social media. Here is another door to walk through. Speaking up led to participation in an open group discussion about Debbie Irving’s book Waking Up White. We each pledged to read a chapter and then blog about it.
It’s challenging work. Every chapter ends with discussion questions that dig required digging into who I am and how I think. I blogged a series of posts about my opening eyes.
Here is another door to walk through.
That led to more self-examination. What are my motives? Efforts? Accomplishments?
This all seemed too easy, though.
Not the work. The work is hard. If white people haven’t tried to identify their own whiteness, attempted to find ways to unwind themselves from it, and then failed spectacularly—maybe they don’t know what’s hard.
But what seemed too easy was that the opportunities kept coming my way. As I walked out my commitment to do what I could do—to keep my promise to Brother Andre—another door always appeared. When I tried the doorknob, the door opened, and I stepped through the doorway. Again and again.
I realized that I could have been moving like this decades earlier. Did I just not see the doors, not try the doorknobs, not even wonder what was beyond my own choices?
I began interacting with Jevon Washington, a pastor setting up a multi-ethnic church plant in South Seattle, forty miles from my home here in the Cascades. We talked a few times and had lunch, and then I decided to sit under his pastoral role as he led the church.
The church met Sunday afternoons. That allowed me to be part of my local church on Sunday mornings, and then drive down to Rainier Valley for afternoon church. Being in fellowship with a small multi-ethnic church start-up was like discovering a world that existed right alongside mine, but with new characters and plots and heroes—and villains.
When the church needed a better space to assemble and chose to meet on Sunday mornings, then this church plant, with all the challenges of scheduling and resources, became my home church. Another door. Another open doorway.
But I wanted to think and act bigger. What could I do to combine my passions of creation and connection?
I began writing essays, short stories, and radio plays. Seldom was the writing directly on the topic of “How can we approach this topic of racism and deconstruct it, see what it is, and destroy it?” I wrote about our human family, to talk about what matters to us all, and published an article that became my first featured story on Medium.
Then I was tapped to write for the publication, Our Human Family. The editor reached out to me to write an essay explaining what I was going through and how I was doing it. The essay is for people like me —white people looking for ways to escape their ignorance and harmful behaviors, with the promise that there is a way out.
Other essays followed, and they resonated with readers, sometimes on Medium, sometimes for other publication channels that distributed them through their own channels.
I expressed these ideas in public, with their messiness, unresolved issues, and ad hoc justifications, so that people like me could see that it’s possible to find a path forward out of rigid “white-ivity” and into a more humane, understanding, and loving way of being alive—without first having all the answers. We don’t have to erase the beautiful diversity of the people around us. We can embrace people in their unique, wonderful, delightful, real personalities, but we must be willing to grow and change. More doors. More doorways.
I’ve been writing and speaking and moving ever since that first encounter with Brother Andre. Each time I come up to a door, I open it.
I’m doing it for me, but I’m also doing it for my family, my friends —my people. I want us to know that there isn’t a single way forward. There are myriad ways to move out of racism, none of them the same, and all of them are available. I’ve done it my way, turning doorknobs and walking through doorways.
That’s something anyone can do —if you have the courage to try. (Courage is that we tremble, but still we try, remember?)
Not every doorway aligns with my commitment. But I’m willing to try, every time, because I want to take my place in fighting against racism and for human kindness and equality. I’m willing to do whatever comes my way to help bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice. Small acts lead to great effects, and nothing that we do is wasted when we are committed to doing well.
There are myriad ways to move out of racism, none of them the same, and all of them are available.
I don’t know what 2020 has waiting for me.
I’m confident, though, that I’ll continue moving. I’ll always hope that I’ll learn the lesson, rise to meet the challenge, and encounter new friends. I believe that a better world is possible and that I might live long enough to see it. I want to see a world of diversity and equality, where racism is as dead as the forgotten languages of ancient nations. And I’m dedicated to doing all that I know how to do so that such a world that is now only possible becomes reality.
For 2020, ask yourself these questions. Are you alive? Are you doing what you want to do? Are you ready for deep, satisfying change in your life?
Try the door. Check the doorknob. When the door opens—step through.
Life awaits.