I Don't Want To Talk About Race. I Want to Listen.

If there’s one thing social media has taught me, it’s that talking about race is almost entirely useless. Blood pressures rise, feelings are hurt, sweeping generalizations are made, and in the end nothing is accomplished—the exchange ends not because a consensus has been reached, but because its participants are too exhausted to continue. The declaration that is made each time a new video emerges—that is time for all of us to have “a national conversation about race”—ignores the simple reality that we don’t know how to talk about race.

If I choose to enter into a conversation about race, I do so from the perspective of a blond-haired, blue-eyed, white, straight, middle class, Christian, married, college educated, employed adult—the perspective of someone for whom oppression is purely academic. I can only imagine what it might feel like to be discriminated against by society, because that is not part of my experience. I can learn about it, I can hear others talk about it, but I cannot know it. It’s not part of my sociological DNA, and to claim otherwise is to be blind, arrogant, or both.

So when an unarmed black man dies at the hands of a white police officer—as in the cases of Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Walter Scott and others—my first question about the victim is, “What did he do wrong?” I have been raised to believe that police officers are here to serve and protect the public, that they keep us safe from the bad guys, that if the police are looking for you then you must have done something wrong. So if an unarmed black man is killed at the hands of a white cop under ambiguous circumstances, then he must have been doing something illegal or threatening. Policemen are the good guys, so if an officer is standing over a black body with a smoking gun, then that dead man must have been a bad guy.

Obviously each of these stories is complicated and unique, and obviously my opinion can shift away from that immediate reaction as the details of each incident come out. But make no mistake, that instant, visceral reaction matters. The moment another police video goes viral, my background and the biases that come with it have already determined who gets the benefit of the doubt. I cannot read these stories or see these videos neutrally, just as you cannot. However implicit, each of us understands race based on the way we have experienced its effects in our own lives.

And so we don’t know how to talk about race with one another. We are so tied to our own understandings that are we are unwilling to hear another vantage point for more than a few seconds. The truth is, we don’t want to have a real conversation, a dialogue, about race—we want to explain why we’re right and they’re wrong, and for them to sit down and shut up while we explain it. Talking about race isn’t getting anything done because we have too big an appetite for our own words and no stomach for those of another.

But, as I alluded to in my introductory blog post, sometimes reading and writing can do what talking cannot. This week I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, “Between the World and Me”, a cross between a memoir and a manifesto on race in America, written as a letter to Coates’ 14-year old son. The book is not an optimistic one; there is no attempt to find redemption in African-Americans’ painful struggle for equality in this country, nor is there much of a nod to progress in that direction. Coates’ outlook is bleak, arguing that the American Dream was built upon the domination of “black bodies” (a term he returns to throughout the book) and that in order for America to change, it must not only acknowledge its past and present sins, but fundamentally reform its Dream.

Coates’ writing is provocative, brilliant, beautiful, and heartbreaking. Certain passages made me angry, others made me sad. Sometimes I nodded along with his points, other times I found myself wanting to argue with him mid-sentence, to accuse him of oversimplifying something so complex. But all I could do was keep reading, keep immersing myself in his perspective, keep learning from the experience of his life and the lessons it has taught him. And in doing so, in letting him tell his full story without interruption, I was able to grasp some things I never heard in the back-and-forth of a Facebook debate, whether because they hadn’t been said or (more likely) because I wasn’t listening.

When I played my music loudly in the car at 16, it meant I was a teenager—when Coates’ son does so, it means he’s a thug with no respect. When I’m asked if I need help in a store, I can say no thank you without eyes following me around the premises—Coates does not share that privilege. When I’m pulled over by a cop, my worst fear is that I’ll be given a speeding ticket—Coates’ worst fear is that the wrong word from him will make his wife a widow and his son an orphan.

Is Coates’ perspective fair to white America, to the establishment, to the police? I don’t know. But I’m not sure it matters. What matters is hearing him before responding, letting him tell his whole story—his fears, his hopes, his ideas—instead of dismissing him out of hand. He has a perspective that is different from mine, probably different from yours, and that perspective deserves a voice at the table, a chance to speak without being shouted down.

Reading “Between the World and Me” stretched me, because it forced me to enter a world I do not know and to inhabit a life that is not my own. It made me do what great writing should—it made me empathize with someone who is not like me. And by listening to his feelings and his arguments, his stories and his conclusions, an unspoken connection formed between writer and reader, black man and white man. I do not know his world as he does…but I know it better than I did before. And in that there is progress.

Perhaps we do not need conversations about race, with their myriad interruptions and misunderstandings. Perhaps we need to do less debating, where the prize is not consensus, but the last word. Maybe the secret is not better explaining your perspective—maybe it is hearing someone else’s.

The Forever in the Photos (Friday Devotional)

“For the Lord is good; His steadfast love endures forever, and His faithfulness to all generations.”

- Psalm 100:5

At any family gathering, a consistent source of fun is the photo album. Old pictures spark stories and even elicit tears, but the most common reaction they provoke is laughter—at the clothes you wore 15 years ago, at the hairstyles your mom’s bridesmaids had on her wedding day, at the way your grandparents’ house was decorated 60 years ago. The older the photos, the more struck you tend to be by how much has changed since then. Looking at some of these old pictures, it can seem like they were taken on a whole different world than the one you know today.

But when the people in those photographs start to tell their stories, you quickly realize that, for all the surface-level differences between 2015 and 1995 (or 1965 or 1925), much remains the same today. Whether wearing parachute pants or cargo shorts, parents still cram kids and luggage into vans so they can experience the wonder of the Grand Canyon together. Whether they put them in brown paper bags or insulated lunch boxes, moms still put post-it notes saying “I love you” on their kids’ sandwich bags. Whether the house was a log cabin built by your great-grandfather or a suburban condo that your realtor landed at a good price, it is still the love of family that makes a house a home. As much as the details change, the important parts of life endure for generations.

In the same way, much of the way God works in your life seems to change over time. When you’re a child, God is found in the exciting stories of the Bible, where He helps people like Moses and David and Samson win thrilling victories over impossible odds. As you get older, you learn that God wants you to know Him not just as a character in a bunch of stories, but as the one who loved you enough to send His Son for you. Faith becomes about more than memory verses and moves to a personal relationship between you and Christ. By the time you’ve reached adulthood and maturity (which don't necessarily happen simultaneously), your picture of God is a more complicated one—He is there in your victories and your defeats, when you laugh with joy and when you sob with grief.

Like the details in those old photographs, your mental picture of God and your understanding of His role in your life changes as the years go by. But the psalmist reminds us that while some things look different to you as you mature, the important things endure—“The Lord is good; His steadfast love endures forever, and His faithfulness for all generations.” No matter how you change over time, no matter how mighty your triumphs or how miserable your losses, God’s goodness and faithfulness and love endure through it all, just as they have for the generations before you and the generations that will follow you.

Especially when goodness and mercy seem like distant memories, when you’ve fallen and feel like there is no one to help you up, you can draw encouragement from the promise of God’s unchanging love. As different as life looks when circumstances shift, God remains the same today as yesterday, still regarding you as His precious child. When God’s faithfulness seem like a memory from a long-gone past, resigned to faded photographs, take a second look—some things never change.

Why I'm Doing This

I hate writing. In college, essays were always the homework assignments that I pushed to the back burner; it would take considerably more fingers and toes than I possess to count the number of papers I completed while more responsible students were in bed. That procrastination is a bad habit that I’ve never outgrown—as a pastor, there’s never been a Sunday morning that I wasn’t still editing my sermon 30 minutes before the service started.

Any time I look at an old piece of my writing, I find 4 or 5 things that make me groan, wondering, “What was I thinking here?” And the older the writing, the more horrified I am at what I once thought was acceptable prose.

The writing process takes too long, editing is painful, and by the time I’ve finished the work, the feeling is less akin to pride than relief. Writing, more often than not, leaves me exhausted and empty.

Thing is, I also love writing. I don’t know how to build anything more complicated than a Target bookshelf, but constructing an essay has always been something that came naturally to me. Where math and science presented problems I had to solve, with right or wrong answers, writing challenged me to give my thoughts, and to let the quality of the argument and the writing determine its rightness or wrongness. Writing my ideas, instead of just thinking them or saying them, somehow makes them seem more organized, more substantive, and more thoughtful—maybe because in order for me to put those thoughts on paper, they have to be all of those things. My best thinking doesn’t come through in my writing; my best thinking is my writing.

So I’m both unlucky and lucky that a large part of my job is spent writing. I have to write a sermon every week, because come Sunday morning I either have something to say or I have to say something. Of my own volition, I put out a devotional every Friday. Add to that preparation for weekly Bible study, church newsletter articles, and a variety of more occasional assignments, and much of my week ends up being spent in front of a computer—mostly staring at a blank Word document waiting for inspiration to strike, but occasionally typing, occasionally enough that I’m still employed. All of that writing pushes me and drives me, empties me and fills me.

But when I’m “off the clock” (and for the record, no pastor ever truly is), I’m still thinking. Sometimes about faith, sometimes about family, sometimes about sports, sometimes about politics, sometimes about comics books, sometimes about the news of the day, sometimes about television, sometimes about what I’ve been reading, sometimes about something so random I can’t wait to tell somebody about that something. But when I’m thinking about those things, the things that don’t apply to Sunday’s sermon, I have no outlet. I can talk about it, sure, but whenever I do, I find that my enthusiasm tends to overpower my thoughtfulness. So instead of presenting my idea or my argument the way it sounds in my head, as something potentially worth hearing, it comes out jumbled. Words, so powerful when written deliberately, come out of my mouth too quickly for their own good and see their impact lessened as a result.

I want a space where I can put those words, those ideas, on paper, where I can erase a sentence here and move a paragraph there, where those thoughts that come out of my mouth as a muddled mess can come through my keyboard as something worth reading. And thanks to the Internet, such a space exists—it’s called a blog, and you’re reading it.

This will be a place for me to write about whatever’s on my mind. Sometimes that will be the kind of argument you’d normally hear at a sports bar, sometimes it’ll be a review of a book I just read, sometimes it’ll be a devotional thought. Sometimes I’ll address big, universally important issues, other times I’ll just give my two cents on a headline. And so sometimes you won’t care about the topic I’m addressing at all—no problem! This blog is not about drawing an audience, it’s simply about organizing my thoughts and practicing my writing. I’m not doing this because I want to impress you, I’m doing it to challenge myself.

That being said, these essays are being put in a public space for a reason: collaboration leads to better thinking and better writing. So feel free to comment, share, e-mail me, or just read. I’m going to keep writing regardless!

I know that maintaining this blog will be something I’ll hate some days, when I would rather shut down my brain and watch 30 minutes’ worth of YouTube videos than write. I know sometimes I’ll wonder what the point is of writing this stuff down, what I’m really accomplishing here. But I also know that it is writing—strong, eloquent, thoughtful, passionate writing—that has moved me more than any verbal argument ever has. And if I manage to stumble my way into writing something like that, then this blog will have been worth the trouble. I hope you will enjoy reading what is posted here—because as much as I hate it sometimes, ultimately I will love writing it.