Hope Presbyterian’s Associate Pastor Geoff Henderson has a good post on his blog relating to our upcoming series on race. Read it here.
The paper to which he refers is available here. It is a gracious and helpful document.
Our contention, as Geoff mentions, is that try as we might, none of us has been able to eradicate our personal racial attitudes. We are encouraging a process of self discovery and repentance.
We’d be interested in your stories of how God has awakened you to your own racial prejudices. Anyone care to share?
Rebekah
I got to know a very nice 70+ year old lady through a project she wanted us to do at work (now lets me call her Grandma Dunwoody, and she calls me her granddaughter), but one time she was visiting my office, and a white man came in and I was very accomodating with him and practically bent over backwards to schedule an appointment for him with my boss, and I shook his hand before he left. After he left, she told me, “You never shook my hand when I first came in, that’s because of this,” and she tugged on her brown skin. I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach and I wanted to hide under my desk, because in the back of my mind I knew she was right. I may not hate black people, but I hadn’t started viewing (…and maybe still haven’t) blacks as my 100% equals. I realized that I was gregarious and excessively accomodating to the white visitors in my office, but I didn’t extend the same courtesies to our black visitors. And this was just last year.
Randy Greenwald
This is the very kind of observation that we are wanting to fuel the sessions we do. Mental judgments based upon race impact even the best of us. Thanks for sharing this.