My Shameful Racism

For the past 3 months I have been attending monthly meetings with several hundred other Ithacans to discuss and learn about the issue of mass incarceration. This is an issue I had never heard about until I saw the documentary "The House I live in" and then 13.

The theory is that the war on drugs started in the 1980's under Ronald Reagan has actually been a tool of social and racial control. By creating lengthy sentences for very minor drug offenses and then targeting African American offenders we now have an extremely unbalanced incarceration rate of blacks vs. whites.

I have lived in the United States for 4 years. Every country in the world has racism and prejudice of various kinds. In America, white supremacy has been built into the very fabric of the nation. When America was founded, blacks were defined as 3/4 human.

Abolition of slavery came.
Jim Crow laws were passed - and then Jim Crow was outlawed.
After Jim Crow came mass incarceration.

As one academic said, slavery never ended, it just evolved.

At the discussion tonight I shared about how in the past 4 years because of the type of work I do, I mainly work and socialize with white middle and upper middle class people. The neighborhood I live in is 90% white. What happens when you live like this is that you start to become socialized into the environment you are in.

There is a concept called "white spaces". This refers to geographic areas where black people will not be seen in very often and in fact it would be unusual to see a black person. My neighborhood is one such place. I know because unfortunately I have fallen into the environment that I live in. Last summer 2 black men drove down my street in a car. To my shame and horror my first though was - what are they doing here? I wouldn't have thought twice if they had been white or Asian or Indian. I came home and told Felicia - time to move, I'm becoming a racist!

But, you see, racism is in the very air we breathe. And most of us are completely unconscious to it. We are color blind racists as we learned tonight. What are the options for change?

Education, structural reform - all these were brought up tonight. And they can all help.

But, only a heart transformed by love can fully excise from itself the darkness of racism. And that can only come through the new birth in Jesus Christ.