How God Changed My Heart about Systemic Racism

I’m going to make an embarrassing admission.

I did not really understand the deep concerns of the black community in America until last summer.

I did.not.get.it.

The circumstances swirling around the death of Trayvon Martin began to open my eyes, but I was still awash in the fish bowl of my white culture. It was the context I knew and the context I could see, and I doubted whether another context existed. In many ways, I grew up believing in the myth of the mighty individual who bore individual choices and was able to rise above any circumstance, aided, of course by a strong pull on their bootstraps.

But last summer, the death of Michael Brown began to get at me. Although the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative began to fall apart, the aggressive way the police reacted to protestors in Ferguson, the dismissal of concerns, the paternalistic attitude of the prosecutor, the subtle and not-so-subtle racist attitudes of my fellow whites and fellow Christians began to bother me. But there was leadership too. There were people like Thabiti Anyabwile of the Gospel Coalition and my friends at Christ and Pop Culture and Jen Hatmaker and Jefferson Bethke and Matt Chandler: evangelical leaders who understood what systemic racism means. They taught me powerfully. They understood that when you get sinful people together in one group, their sin interacts with each other in such a way that systems get built up that are imperfect and reflect bias, even if individuals within those institutions do not necessarily personally feel biased against blacks or other minorities. That’s what systemic racism means.

When change came to my heart, it was like a lightning bolt that hits the ground and illuminates everything that has been dark to you. Suddenly, I began to see what I had had the luxury to ignore previously. What really shook me to my core was this video posted by Thabiti Anyabwile last summer (note: it depicts–from far away–the shooting death of a black young man). As I watched, my heart broke, and I was able at last to see the situation from the perspective of a black young man. I was dismayed to see the unnecessary harshness with him and the low respect for human life. It changed me forever. Since then, so many videos on the news have produced a similar feeling and a longing for change and justice. Since then, change has filtered further and further down into my soul. Change of perspective. And my heart has been broken to see my white community respond so often with harshness, lack of listening, and refusal to see another perspective.

But how can I judge them? I’ve been there! It’s been a long journey along the way, but I feel I’ve only really started to understand the broad picture for less than a year now. I got parts of it, here and there, but the central change happened to me last summer. And so I write here. Even though it’s embarrassing to admit. I write, hoping that somebody whose heart is hard to the black community or even just inattentive to their experience will listen to my story and will move even a little bit. I write, praying that somebody will stop and consider somebody else’s experience, somebody else’s perspective. I write, hoping and praying that we can begin to approach the world with empathy before we move to judgment.

I had taken a course called Dismanting Racism in seminary and was familiar with the concept of systemic racism.