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<\/a><\/p>\nI don\u2019t ever like to write about it, but I do think a lot about the racial issues that plague this American political and cultural landscape. I don\u2019t like to write about it because I don\u2019t know whereof I might be tempted to speak. As I like to say, I am not from here. I grew up in a place where I would have been counted as a minority\u2013the single white little girl in a Malian village. All the other little girls were \u2018of color,\u2019 one of the most ghastly euphemisms I\u2019ve ever encountered. By the time I had stopped being a little girl and begun being a young adult, I was in school and all of my friends were married and having children. When I drug Matt home to receive a blessing to marry him, the village drew a collective breath of relief, since who would marry me, old and dried up as I was at 25.<\/p>\n
By then I\u2019d lived in America for a few years, and discovered that looking like the majority is no piece of cake if you don\u2019t understand who they are and how they think. No forgiveness is given to the person who looks and sounds like everyone else but nevertheless culturally blunders, not the kind of forgiveness I was used to enjoy in places like Africa where I obviously stood out, or places like Europe where you could hear the pathetic-ness of my French.<\/p>\n
After spending a few years of school being a white person in a white world, I drug my African American friend with me to Mali, for my Christmas break. She was hoping to feel at home, I think, to inhale deeply coming off the plane and onto the tarmac, the full-body relaxing breath that is the single thing I miss most in my whole life. She wanted very much to be at home, to discover something about herself, the key, perhaps, to her identity. I breathed the breath and she didn\u2019t. She was on edge of herself the whole time. And part of it was that there was no forgiveness for her, looking as she did. We switched places for the month\u2013the uncomfortable, the long terrible, seemingly insurmountable cultural distance brought into sharp relief by the fact that you look like everyone else. Looking different is a help so that the people you\u2019re offending can have mercy and forgive you. Looking the same means that you\u2019re always explaining yourself.<\/p>\n
However comfortable or uncomfortable I feel, I nevertheless go on knowing that I am always watching everything as an outsider. Certainly in Africa, no matter how comfortable I felt and believed myself to be, I looked different, and, of course, was not allowed to stay. The great distance of the ocean reinforced to me my alien status because I was sent \u2018home.\u2019 But now I am here and even after almost twenty years, I don\u2019t understand the racially pockmarked landscape that surrounds me. Even though I read about it all the time.<\/p>\n
And the reason I think I don\u2019t understand is because I don\u2019t think America at the core really understands either. The white European came as an alien to a foreign land and settled and made it into a home, even though there were already people here who felt quite comfortable. But along the way those Europeans stole and dehumanized people whose culture and language they manifestly did not understand, nor were interested to discover. The slavery that historically played out in the Malian village where I grew up\u2013because, let us not kid ourselves, we as human people are always enslaving, subjugating, and dehumanizing each other, it\u2019s what we do, it\u2019s who we are\u2013at least had the common bedrock of culture and language so that the offense, intended to sting, really did in the way it was meant to. Whereas, here in America, it seems to me, though all people lived in proximity to each other, a deep abiding shared culture was never developed. And then somewhere along the way the fractures and divisions were turned into moral goods, interpreted as virtues to be blessed and made holy.<\/p>\n
Which is one reason why I cannot fathom why America was ever spoken of in its essence as a \u2018Christian\u2019 nation. Because the gospel, if it was allowed to be full and deep and wide and broad, would never allow this kind of fracturing. Virtue cannot be signaled by the true Christian. Proper belief is worthless if you have to let it be known on twitter from the comfort of your carefully curated life. The church is a place where people should be able to come in, of whatever kind of color they are, and worship God. It should be filled with the poor, the downcast, the troubled, and also the rich, the \u2018together,\u2019 the one who enjoys the ease of being able to buy more than food.<\/p>\n
When I read about racism, classism, sexism, and now violence, there seems to be a wide gap between the way that language is used and the way that things really are. The words don\u2019t reflect the reality, they are superimposed, clumsily wielded, the way a foreigner sounds when he is using his hard won vocabulary list in a market stall trying to buy a portion of lettuce.<\/p>\n
But then when I go into my own church building and chat with all the people who go there, like me, to consider the great mercy of Jesus, the language smoothes out, the care and anxiety of one person, however he or she might look, casts into sharp relief the stilted brutal language of all my online reading. You stand and talk to someone as she is, laboring hard to find a common language and way of being, binding yourself to that person over the mini muffins of coffee hour. The distance is still there, but it is surmountable by the ordinary disciplines of showing up and praying to the God who made and loves us both.<\/p>\n
A God, one might say, who is interested in having mercy, who bridged an impossible distance to come and learn our language, who was a stranger in a strange land, but by enduring our wrath, was able to make a home for us to be comfortable with him.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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