Racism and Equality

According to the French teacher at Franklin Academy in North Carolina, Angie Wellman director of student life at the Ohio State University, and Alicia Garza of Black Lives Matters, only whites can be racist. In their opinion, race, power and prejudice are the three necessary ingredients to be a racist and anyone who disagrees is also racist. Further, because whites hold the power in the US, only whites maintain that key third ingredient. Therefore only whites can be racist.

Now before you go and discount the argument entirely try and see it from the perspective of Angie Wellman or Alicia Garza – that of a black woman who has suffered at the hands of a privileged white society. In the case of Garza, she was so moved by the death of Trayvon Martin and the injustice surrounding his murder trial that she started the Black Lives Matter movement we see today. From her perspective, and that of others with similar experiences, only white privilege could so victimize an entire culture so completely and for so long. In the case of Wellman, she believes whites have a responsibility that comes with privilege to use their status to stop racism and make positive change for people of color. White privilege comes when the front page of a newspaper shows primarily whites and the bandages at Walmart are all only “flesh” color for whites.

I’ll add one more ingredient required to be a racist, and that is hate. Hate takes many forms and comes in all sorts of shades, but the key goal of hate is division. Through the effective and sometimes subversive use of surgical hate we can separate ourselves from anything we want and even make others out to be the bad guy.

So what do we do about it? What should our action be whether we’re white, black, Hispanic or Asian?

Well, for starters we can stop categorizing people as this or that and start recognizing we are all one in Christ. Skin color and favorite sin don’t matter one bit to God. One of those, by the way, will keep you from heaven and it has nothing to do with matching bandages at Walmart.

Galatians 3:28 says “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (NIV)

So stop dividing the church. Stop segregating the body into parts and start uniting under the common call of Christ. We’ve all sinned (Rom 3:23) and unless we remedy that first our surgical use of hate won’t matter a hill of beans. For God so loved the world – that’s you – that he gave his only son – that’s Christ.

When we accept God’s gift and recognize we are all one in Christ, we’ll be amazed how unimportant are the color of bandaids.