Untangling Gnarled Roots: Recognizing My White Privilege
The conversation around race is hard. To have it each of us has to be willing to challenge our own assumptions about the world, to see life through another’s eyes. The beautiful thing about Jesus is that he is always asking us to challenge our own assumptions, to see the world with the eyes of mercy and justice and compassion. Jesus always asks us to be uncomfortable, to hurt with those who hurt.
This is a story I’ve always been intimidated to write about before, but it’s time. Today I’m over at Off the Page, sharing how I came to a place of acknowledging my own white privilege, how my eyes were opened to racism’s long, hairy roots.
Molly and I sat at the round laminate table that had been my great-grandmother’s in the eighties. I’d been home from my month-long trip to Kenya and South Africa for one day, and we were doing what we always did in that year post-college: eating our feelings in burritos. She was my best friend in the world.
I’d collected a thousand thoughts for her in my journal, prepared to explain each story, to tell her each wild idea of God I’d consumed in my graduate African Cultures and Religions class, and share the names of the people I’d met in South Africa whose faith had given them courage to fight for justice, to put an end to Apartheid.
But I was mostly silent. We stuck chips in guacamole.
She stared at me across the table. “You seem older,” she said. “Sadder.” And I knew it was true—forever. I could never go back.