Dear Thoughtful Pastor: I love my parents very, very much. But I wish my dad would quit being so racist in front of my nieces. How do I tell them that what he is saying is junk without making them lose respect for him?
It is not your job to ensure that your nieces maintain respect for your father. That respect, or lack of it, is between them and your father. However, it is your job to offer a different perspective on race relations than your father offers to them.
In order to do that, it helps to understand the roots of racial tensions. They always spring from one source: fear of the unknown. That fear is part of our human nature–without some sense of healthy fear, people would not have survived.
Pretend for a moment that you are part of a small band of hunter/gathering people, bonded together by ties of family and a long shared history and living thousands of years ago. You know and trust each other. You also live a tenuous existence, not knowing if outsiders can be trusted. In fact, hard experience suggests that those not part of any extended kinship bonds may hurt you.
In other words, if you come across a group of people who don’t look like you, be very afraid. Survival very well may mean defeating those strange-looking people before they get the chance to defeat you.
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