To My Black Brothers & Sisters

This message is written for black people. I need to confess this: I was not raised to love you.

My parents were not racists. They taught me to be kind and generous, introduced me to belief in a God who creates and loves every creature, and modeled the uniquely human search for a deep understanding of the world.

But they didn’t raise me to love you. They raised me in a community in which there weren’t any black people like you to love. In my high school, out of 1800 students, the African American students could be counted on one hand.

We can’t love what we don’t know.

I learned about you by absorbing what was presented to me through culture—the social attitudes of my friends and neighbors, through your depictions in politics, media, and the arts, and what (little) I saw with my own eyes. What I gleaned in the 80s was that you are poor. You are on welfare and many are on drugs. The communities you live in are violent and not safe for me to visit, except with Habitat for Humanity. Some black people become rich and famous, like Michaels Jackson and Jordan, but they are exceptional, and not the norm. I learned a gauzy history of blacks in America: you were slaves, then you were poor. Dr. King, urged blacks and whites to get along, and Mrs. Parks wanted to ride the bus in peace. This is what I was taught, what I soaked in.

No one taught me what I needed to know: why were you not in my shared social space? Why weren’t you on my street, at my church, or in any of my social circles? What does a white boy think, when he grows up in a world in which the preponderance of images of black life are negative, and there is not a single real life black person to dispel his ignorance? I didn’t grow up being taught to hate you, but I couldn’t love you, either—you were an abstraction with a prevailing negative valence.

It’s no mystery to me now that white America views the Black Lives Matter movement with disinterest or disdain. Most of us white people don’t have any black lives that matter to us. We have not eaten dinner with a black person. We’ve never invited a black friend to come to our house. We've never served as a church usher with a person who is black. We’ve never babysat our neighbor’s black children, or held the hand of a black friend in the hospital. We’ve rarely set foot in a black neighborhood, let alone lived in a place where a person could get to know black lives and black culture.

We white people live in racial isolation--a horrifying place, a place where we need never face the question: how did our lives get so white?

I have searched for (or been drawn toward) a way out of my whites-only world, but I am not fully free. My journey is akin to a religious conversion--it changes everything. Slowly, I met black folks in college. When I graduated, I stayed in the same city to work and I moved in with two roommates, both black men. We lived in a neighborhood where, I was told, “white folks don’t belong.” Living those 5 years and becoming part of that community, I began to understand the experience of blackness better—and perhaps more importantly, I began to understand my whiteness better.

I started to perceive answers to the questions about the place I grew up—answers that my white elders were unwilling or afraid to teach.

That lovely Ohio community with the fine public schools in which I grew up was created by racist impulses—houses had restrictive covenants that prohibited sales to blacks. It wasn’t just that black people chose to live somewhere else—they couldn’t live there. The black community I lived in as a young adult was also “created” by whites, through white flight—a mass migration into the suburbs that was a direct response to the rise in black civil and political rights. It was a re-location of financial and social capital into the suburbs, where, protected by city lines and police forces, we whites built the civic equivalent of gated communities. I learned that most of our community banks, through advantageous loan and mortgage policies, helped to create and protect white wealth, while denying the same services to blacks. I could see plainly that these injustices aren’t part of the past. We live them out every day, in every one of our communities.

How could I love you, my black brothers and sisters? Detached from the historical processes of my own racial isolation, I couldn’t love you. Black lives can’t matter to a boy who has never examined his own whiteness and the whiteness of his world.

I wasn't raised to love black people. I am trying to learn. Love, I have come to understand through my own love and affection for Jesus, is not a feeling. Love is a way of being in relationship that affirms the dignity of the beloved. Love requires justice, a fundamental fairness that shapes the way we relate now, and addresses and remedies the wounds of our past.

I wasn’t raised to love black people, but I am trying to learn.