Denouncing White Supremacy
I’d like to tell you a story.
Today I went grocery shopping at Aldi with my boys. The shopping trip itself was like any other:
whines from the baby and more sophisticated (but equally loud) toddler sweet talk to taste every flipping thing;
bags of honeycrisp apples launched over the side of the cart only to crush the eggs and bread;
explosive sneezes and drool leaving horrifying goo into unexpected face masks.
Yes, all was ordinary and well.
After herding the ragamuffins and accumulating a heaping full cart, I stepped into the check-out line as the third shopper. Ahead of us, the cashier was keeping tabs of the running total, eventually alerting a woman when she reached $46. The woman checking out was black. Left on the belt was an assortment of items that were eventually placed on cart behind the cashier. The woman paid and began collecting her purchased items at the bagging counter along the wall of windows.
Knowing I had an extra twenty dollar bill on my wallet, I offered it to her quietly, saying something like, “for you, for those extra groceries.” When she refused, I assured her I didn’t mind. She replied, “No thank you. I’m alright.”
I smiled, checked out, and went home.
And that’s the story.
Except, as I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, that’s not the end of the story.
All the way home and into the afternoon, I replayed the exchange over and over. Something did not sit right in my soul. I ruthlessly examined the interaction:
Was I aware of possibly reenacting a “white savior complex” that I have certainly embodied over the years?Yes.
Was I also aware of my responsibility for personal retribution, to give out of my abundance, as obedience, as honestly dealing with my own privilege?
Yes.
Were my motives totally pure and selfless?
No.
Am I trying to honestly love my neighbor while honoring human dignity?
Yes.
The inner pestering continued for several hours. Charity is certainly not wrong. But the Spirit persisted. And then the memory extended, moving beyond the initial exchange between myself and the black woman in Aldi, now including my own inner dialogue as I left the store. My own thoughts came flooding back: I hope I didn’t cause any harm to her. I never intended to embarrass her. I wish I knew if I was doing the right thing. I really don’t think less of her because she ran out of grocery money...
Fair enough.But there were other thoughts, too: Why didn’t she take the money? She must need those things. And if she needed them, or even wanted them, she should have just taken it. This is so hard— she makes this hard, too. Why do I even try?
And then I saw it. And the sin reeked foul.
It wasn’t that I offered money. No, it was my pride-- my white supremacy-- that refused to concede.
If the term “white supremacy” made you jerk away from the screen, please hang with me.
Honestly, the phrase makes me uncomfortable, too.But that is the point I’d like to make here.
White supremacy is not just hoods and waving AK47’s.
At a very basic level it is a sinful, deeply embedded pride in each of
our own perspectives, comfort, and preference coming from a white experience.
Hear me out...
You see, it was not the conscious action that lacked selfless love.
It was my unconscious, quiet distaste for being told “no thank you.”
Being openly dismissed is difficult when we perceive ourselves as the “good guys” or having something good for someone else. But in reality, any giving motivated by humility allows itself to be rejected. And yet the refusal of my “generous gift” was an affront to my pride, my ego, and specifically, my white supremacy-- seen in this moment as my confidence in what I can do and what I possess, particularly in comparison to another or “the other.”
Similarly, my inner insistence that she “needed me” or “needed my resources” revealed that I thought I knew better than she did-- even here, in regards to her own need. I couldn’t accept that there was more going on within her that I couldn’t see or that my perspective wasn’t the whole truth. I couldn’t trust that she knew herself best. And that pride, while certainly linked to class, is undeniably tied to race, too. In my heart, I knew it was.
Finally, I saw how I placed myself right, smack dab in the middle of the narrative. My thoughts upon leaving Aldi this morning were not about my neighbor: her provision, her joy, her blessing, her care. My narcotic thoughts revolved about my own feelings and need for constant validation. Me, me, me, me. I was victimizing myself for simply being confronted by a black woman’s God-given ability to say “no.”This is a painful story to share publicly.
And I struggle to write it because of how embedded this superiority is within me. In some strange way, it is easier to admit some insensitive, angry response or an overt attempt to disadvantage someone. But this subtle but pervasive racism--
its the tender underbelly of the whole beast, difficult to expose but essential to tear apart especially if we desire to follow Jesus’ command to love our neighbors wholeheartedly.
Last night, the President was asked if he denounced white supremacy. It was arguably the easiest question of the (migraine-inducing) night.* Some argue he answered the question clearly and others say that he did not, but the question really has been and continues to be posed to every one of us:
Do you denounce white supremacy?
Now, this is not to say that a presidential candidate’s answer doesn’t matter here. It certainly does. But we (on either side of the aisle) can get so caught up with one person’s answer, we neglect that it is being asked of us, too-- both individually and collectively.
To all of us: Do you denounce white supremacy?
To those of us who identify as politically conservative, can we find space in our political narrative to deal with our own pride, particularly in regards to our black brothers and sisters? Both in action and in our private thought life?
And to those of us who identify as politically progressive, can we allow our call for justice to also turn inward, to name our own hypocrisy? May we never believe the lie that we have moved beyond a desperate need for grace and forgiveness, too.
For those of us who find ourselves too overwhelmed and tired to care, may we simply allow the Spirit of love to move us toward deeper compassion and humility.
I guess this out loud, public “denouncing” is what stirred me to write this piece today.
It’s not about shaming people or myself. Nor is it relieving some kind of guilt.
It is about joining from the political work of activism into the spiritual work of reconciliation.
For me, this reconciliation looks like both confession and contribution.
Confession as a means for spiritual and relational repair— within us and between us all.
Contribution as a means to offer nuance, personhood, and heaps upon heaps of grace into the national dialogue surrounding race.
I guess my hope is to offer an example of what white supremacy may look like for most of us.
And I want to name these thoughts and pride for what they in fact are:
a subtle and yet incredibly harmful form of racism—
in the lives of black neighbors, but also in our own souls.
Because I am not whole if I do not love my neighbor in thought, word, and deed.
So what to make of our inner, subconscious prejudice?
What hope do we have to ever find unity, to love well, to truly desire good for our neighbors?
I have no easy answers.
Maybe more humble confession to one another.
Possibly contributing new narratives— offering the world more true stories of humility and reconciliation and repair between brothers and sisters, blacks and whites, Republicans and Democrats, old and young, and between all the divides the dominant narrative insists remain impenetrable by self-giving Love.
Because there is a Love stronger than our embedded hate. I’m convinced Jesus is that Love.
At the end of the day, I find great hope in found in the words of Saint Paul in Ephesians:
For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier,
the dividing wall of hostility,
by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations.
His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two,
thus making peace,
and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross,
by which he put to death their hostility.
A new humanity.
Where the most obvious and most intimate parts of me that I cannot even consciously predict will be won over in His love. And it is all done through our embodied Savior.
Yes, in Him there is peace.
*For transparency sake, I am in this latter camp. Party lines aside, the President’s response was far from what I hoped for even as someone who identifies more as a “reconciler” than an overt supporter of one party in particular. It is worth noticing that the question did not imply BLM or police violence or protests or riots. Simply white supremacy. The answer should have been resoundingly clear. But sadly, it was not.