Tag Archives: racism

Jesus and the Disinherited

Howard Thurman’s book, Jesus and the Disinherited, let me peer into the racial sins we Americans have inherited, as no other book has done.

I was raised a white Southerner by parents and church and culture which was not overtly racist. Ours wasn’t the Ku Klux Clan kind of racism. We were a working class/lower middle class church in a similar kind of neighborhood. I will be forever grateful to that church and its love.

It was only in reading Thurman’s book that I began to understand the less violent kinds of racism. Thurman helped me understand how a black in America, particularly in the South, had to live.

He talked of a visit he made to India. His host, as they prepared for bed, told him he must be careful at night if he got up to go to the bathroom or for any reason. He must always shine a light ahead so that he would not inadvertently step on a Cobra, curled soundlessly in his path.

And that is when I began to understand the insidiousness of racism.

I never had to think, when I left my house, about my white skin. I never considered, as I went into a store or applied for a job, how my white skin might be noticed.

In a white majority society, Thurman showed me, a person with a dark skin has to be aware of it all the time.

Love Covers A Multitude of Sins

 

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church in Nashville, Tennessee. I never rebelled against the principles instilled in me by that church, despite living in many different cultures and growing beyond a few of the attitudes that infiltrated that age in the South. Why do the bedrock teachings remain as a part of my belief system? Why, when others, less challenged by change than I, leave the religion of their childhood?

The reason for the endurance of the lessons taught me, I think, is love. The song that mentions “a sweet spirit in this place” could have been written about my church. Why would I rebel against love and caring?

Perhaps some of the members of the church were racist. I don’t know for certain because we, at that time a white church to be sure, were never challenged. Ours was a humble, working class membership and not likely to be noticed by those who challenge institutions.

It came easy for me to change my views about race. The church taught love, and the seed thus planted couldn’t be smothered. One picture graced the wall of my childhood Sunday school class as we sang about Jesus loving all the different colored children of the world. A joyful Jesus held hands with a group of children. One was a fair-haired child. Another was a black African boy. The others were, if my memory is correct, a native American and an Asian child.

Teaching love and living it, as that church did, overcomes human failings and allows for later growth, as the title of this passage from the first letter of the apostle Peter suggests.