Seeking Forgiveness in a Black and White World
Forgiveness starts with an admission of guilt – our own.
At the foot of the Cross we’re all equals.
I was born white. Though I did not realize it at the time. Apparently, it was a big deal within the world around me.
I was born in 1962 in the city of Trenton, NJ. The sixties and the seventies were a very turbulent time in the United States. It was the era of the Cuban missile crisis, the wave of assassinations of very prominent leaders like John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. Senator McCarthy was propagating fear over Communism. The strains and stirrings of the Vietnam War were making headlines, as well as the vast numbers of protests, draft card burnings, rebellious hippies, free sex, major drug experimentation, and overall emotional, physical, and spiritual chaos. People seemed to be angry and rebellious at everything.
As a kid, while I didn’t really understand all of the political and societal ramifications of what was going on in the world, I do remember feeling the anxiety of my surroundings. Generally, I was a pretty innocent kid. My dad was a city police officer and my mom, prior to her staying home with us kids, was an Emergency Room nurse at a local city hospital. To keep their kids intact on all fronts, I remember specific things that they did. For example, to keep my brothers and I away from the prevalent drug scene, when we were old enough to understand, they showed us “deterrent movies” – movies of actual people who had overdosed getting their stomachs pumped. I can still see the tubes going down their throats and noses in order to vacate the drugs from their bodies, and their vacant expressions as the doctors tried to save their lives. I must say, the movies worked.
I also remember my parents taking us to church. Our church was a city church, just on the edge of merging ethnic neighborhoods. In its heyday, it was a relatively large Episcopal church, primarily white, and more or less middle to upper middle class. My parents connected with the congregation through the police chaplain. Relatively soon after we joined, a new pastor arrived. That pastor, a white man, was a strong voice for social justice. He had marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in King’s ground swelling march in Alabama. Because of his high commitment to justice and to the “plight of blacks,” our pastor systematically invited more and more black families to our church . . . preaching against “rich white values” and subsequently offending the majority of the “rich white people in the pews.” Within a few years that relatively large, middle to upper middle class church had experienced a significant turn-around in membership demographics. Many of those rich white families left the church and took their financial support with them. Because of the shift, we soon found ourselves with another new pastor. The new pastor that was hired was of an opposite theological framework and soon began to offend the black families that were attending. Within a short time span, this once large church now had around fifty people on any given Sunday. Yet another pastor was helped to the exit door.
The five of us in my family were among those fifty who stayed. My parents believed that God created all humanity and we were called to love everyone as equals. Their willingness to ride through the waves of burgeoning racism and civil unrest as it impacted our church was a commitment to a higher principle, a biblical principle – namely, love – that would go miles in teaching me about the heart of God in a trying world. That world was being severely challenged.
Yet, through all of those experiences, I was being taught incredible life lessons about people, about the kind of love that crosses barriers, about the power of that love to heal that which divides us. They were lessons that stayed with me… even though, many times, they were challenged by the world around me.
Madeline
Growing up in the city meant that my brothers and I would go to the city public school system. The neighborhood where I grew up was not what you would call “minority dominant,” by any stretch of the imagination. Yet there was rapidly expanding diversity within our neighborhood as well as the school system of which we were a part.
I remember very clearly an incident that occurred when I was in fourth grade. It was during that year that “desegregation” began for our school district and black kids were being bussed to my particular school from various other areas of the district. One such kid was Madeline. Madeline was an innocent-minded girl. In our way of comparing ourselves as kids, she was quite overweight—the largest kid in our class, weight-wise. Generally, she had a peaceable attitude about life. Rarely would you hear her speak two words, but when she did it usually was to offer you something – a flower, a pretzel stick from her snack bag, a picture that she drew. I knew that because alphabetically I sat next to her in class every day. Every day, she offered me something from her bag. Every day there was a new, gentle invitation to friendship and a smile.
Truth be told, she was (by our standards today) a child with significant learning disabilities and that provided her with great academic and social challenges. Back then, in the harsh realities of the 60s, as well as the harsher realities of childhood meanness, she gained the reputation of being a “slow, fat, black kid.”
One day, while a group of us kids were in the school playground area for lunch recess, we got on the topic of race and how other kids were different from us. Several of my friends were vehement in defending their (or their parents’) position that black kids were not to be trusted, that they were inherently bad and somehow of lesser value than whites. Being painfully introverted, I didn’t say anything, but simply listened and watched. At one point, one of the boys looked straight at me and demanded, “What do you think?”
The question put me on the spot. My response came out of my mouth before I had time to think.
“I think we should love everybody,” I replied quietly, reflecting the lessons that had impacted me from my years growing up in my family and in Sunday School.
The group was silent for a split second. Then my adversary challenged me. “Love everybody?!” He began to look around until he spotted his intended verbal illustration. “Love everybody? Do you love even her? Even her??” He was pointing at Madeline.
His question was angry and baiting. In that moment, I felt my face turn red. I was scared. Really scared. Something deep inside of me knew that this was one of those moments in time that would forever mark me – and I wished I had stayed home. My eyes darted over to Madeline – who was eating cookies from her snack bag and watching us with her typical, innocent, welcoming smile - and then back to the faces of the boys now staring at me from the circle. There was no help from the group – not even from my friends.
I remember thinking, “How do I answer this question?” If I say, “yes,” I run the risk of being alienated from my friends. If I say, “no,” I go against everything that I trusted in how my parents raised me.
“Yes,” I replied, in a whisper. “Even Madeline.”
The response was immediate. My challenger laughed callously and began taunting me, “David loves Madeline. David loves Madeline. David loves….” His voice trailed off as he and all the other boys – including the one boy who had been my closest friend - took up the chorus and left me standing alone, dejected. In one swooping motion, one simple response, I lost my innocence in the world and paid a price – my first price with the inequities of injustice (if, indeed, a white boy in the late 1960s could even fathom a moment of being rejected by friends as being comparable to Madeline’s and every other African American child’s experience).
I looked over at Madeline and I hated her.
I know now, as an adult, that I was projecting onto her the feelings of rejection that I was experiencing because I spoke what I believed in, what I was taught, what should have been the standard of a fourth grader’s world view. But in that moment, in real time, I hated her. I hated the differences that separated us, the differences that created the dilemma that I, moments ago, had to face.
I’m not sure what she thought or heard of our little group’s conversation, but after a moment, she walked over to me and without saying a word, offered me one of the cookies from her bag.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that moment . . . it was a moment of Holy Communion and it had its powerful impact on my young heart. My hatred toward her turned to shame. I was ashamed of my hatred, ashamed that I somehow failed both Madeline and myself, ashamed that I actually wasn’t sure that I wanted to be a defender of integrity if it meant not having any friends.
Yet, reflecting back, it was in that moment, as I looked at Madeline’s innocent, smiling face, it was as if two rejected people – each rejected in very different ways, for very different reasons – met at the foot of the Cross of Christ within the playground of the sinfulness of humanity. God was performing a grace moment on a school playground - using an innocent young African American girl who represented an entire race – to confront racism and its ramifications in a young white boy whose Christian-educated trusting heart was being severely tested. God was exposing something to me – and in me – that would forever change me, awaken me.
There is always a price to be paid for standing up for what you believe. Fear and faith must battle it out within our own hearts and minds and souls – time after time, through many practice runs, until we decide on what we will stand . . . and then indeed stand.
In reality, forgiveness cannot truly be discovered apart from a confession of guilt. The first law that governs a life of forgiveness for everyone who truly seeks it is that forgiveness starts with an admission of guilt – our own. For at the foot of the Cross, we’re all equals. Only when a person comes to terms with this first law will we ever know the true healing, God-given gift of forgiveness.
In truth, now as a 57 year old white pastor, I would want to say to Madeline, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what we white kids put you through. And I’m sorry that nearly 50 years hasn’t really changed the societal heart that still assumes white superiority -- when in fact, any superiority complex really reflects deep-seated insecurity and over-compensating fear. And on behalf of many white people, could you ever forgive us . . . could you ever forgive me . . . for the hurt, the pain, the grief, the loss, the challenges, the suspicions, the threats, the biases, the profiling, the lynchings, the name-calling, the shaming . . .? There are no words. There are no excuses. But I know that I don’t ever want to be associated with that kind of evil.”
We’re meant to love everyone. Every. One.
My baiting, taunting adversary from that circle of white boys would, within the coming year, become the school bully who would beat me up one day after school, for no reason that I knew, while his friend (my former friend) held my arms behind my back so that I could not defend myself. Racism, and all sins of arrogant and insecure pride, replicate themselves like a mutating virus—becoming a virulent pandemic unless checked by those who choose not to tolerate it.
Whether in a playground or in a pulpit, whether on a street beside a car or on a motel balcony, whether rioting in St. Paul, MN in order to be heard or walking peacefully to the Lincoln Memorial, we must believe that what is on the other side of hatred and anger and racism and fear can be better. For a voice of love – especially sung spiritually from the collective hearts of a generationally persecuted people – has the greatest capacity to pierce through the darkest night with the light of hope. We shall overcome, indeed.
I learned that—and am still learning that—from a sweet, innocent African-American girl caught in the battles of racism, desegregation and white privilege . . . who reached across the divided playground to offer me a cookie.