Silence is complicity...

Silence in this moment is complicity; yes. Also, I am aware that as a well-meaning white person, I often open my mouth thinking I know things that I don’t necessarily know, and I don’t quite trust myself. I’ve already been stupid and had to apologize recently, more than once, and I worry about saying anything at all. So. But. Here I am, talking.

This week I’ve tried to listen in a different way, to new voices, but also to voices from my own past. My father set the ground level of my heart, as one who was the spokesman for lunch counter sit-ins in Dallas in about 1960, when he was in seminary. I listened to his preaching all my life and knew that, as hard a time as he would give most people for many different reasons, Black people were off limits, period. Justice for them was a cause he championed all his life, a deep conviction I never saw him betray and which I often saw him uphold.

(This, of course, is my opinion and my perspective on my father. He was born Mexican American and raised basically white. To think he escaped cooperating with the racist nature of this society is naïve. But from what I saw, he spoke and acted for justice with consistency and courage. I also have a story about my own relationship to my Latino heritage, which is a subject for a different day.)

I remember the racist water I swam in, especially in junior high and high school. Austin started busing Black students across town in 1971, in response to a court desegregation order. I attended Webb Sixth Grade Center in 1974 and began at Burnet Junior High in 1975. I remember white boys fighting Black boys and wearing it as a badge of honor. I watched as junior high friends’ families decided to move north of town to send them to high school. I learned the term “white flight.”

My high school was named after Sidney Lanier, known as “the poet of the Confederacy.” I looked at other Austin high schools and wondered why one named after William B. Travis, a hero of the Alamo (which is itself a-whole-nother story to unpack), would use “Dixie” as their fight song and run the Confederate battle flag up and down the sidelines when they scored. There were lots of brown kids who attended that school. And the school which must have had the highest concentration of African American students in town was named after Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston. These things were curious to me, but I don’t remember seeing them as a larger pattern.

There was racism in my school, too. I won’t repeat the things I heard people say. Some of them were blatantly and intentionally offensive, and I remember objecting. Others were in the form of jokes, not at individual people, but still clearly racist, and I remember not objecting.

One summer after college, I served as a tour guide in downtown Austin. As I led groups at the State Capitol, I learned for the first time the deep salute to the Confederacy that was woven throughout that beloved building and its grounds. As a white person who grew up feeling proud to be more Texan than American, I hadn’t thought Texas was really the South. I gradually began to see that I was wrong, but the idea felt foreign to what I thought I knew about my identity, our identity. Our schoolbooks had done a good job of hiding it, but how much evidence before my own eyes did I need? The examples I’ve named are only the beginning of a very long list. How was it so hard for me to recognize the purposeful pattern, this blatant way of claiming the territory, lest any wonder or try to forget who ran things?

As I try to remember my past, I do know that what I learned from my father did not always translate to resistance or right action on my own part. Somehow, I was—am—able to sincerely desire to be on the side of racial justice yet still be complicit in injustice. Both those voices lived inside of me then and still do today.

I’ve since learned about Tulsa and Rosewood, redlining and contract homes, the lynching my grandpa remembered from his boyhood, the fact that the north was different, but not kinder than the south. In seminary, I read James Cone’s description of Martin and Malcolm—how the former began to see and call out the global footprint of our nation’s oppression, and the latter began to see a possibility for unity he hadn’t before. And how they were both gunned down, as they grew in their danger to the American status quo. During my recent time stuck at home, I finished the enormous Chernow biography of Alexander Hamilton and learned that white people have been raising fists and weapons at each other over politics since the very beginning. We were talking about civil war over slavery in the 1700s. (There’s much more reading and learning ahead about that.)

This is our national DNA, and if you know anything about churches or families, you know what it takes to overcome that kind of programming. It takes telling hard truths and an act of the will to do what initially feels unnatural. It takes disorientation, making room for new voices and new agency, and a claim on the vision of an alternative life.

Now I’m working on listening to new voices. Reading national Black writers I had always said I’d get around to, listening to podcasts and webinars, listening to colleagues. I’m looking for local places to give and to serve, once I’ve listened. I’m looking at my own job and how to work for the changes we have to make as a church and a conference. As I said, I am convinced of the validity and importance of the cause of justice for Black people, Indigenous people, and all People of Color. I have attempted to give myself to this cause in other venues. Yet I’m still part of the problem. I don’t always know, but I think and act as if I do know, blind to my own bias. I do harm that way; I know I do. And as a person of power in a larger institution, I help that institution do harm as well. I need to learn, and I feel both disturbed and grateful to be doing so. Our institution needs to learn as well.

I haven’t really posted until now, partly in an attempt to examine my own motives. Facebook can be a hard place to navigate. It has been most helpful to me during this time when folk have been honest about telling their stories or when they’ve shared resources I need to check out. I’m just trying to do the former, not seeking justification or affirmation.

The Maya Angelou quote is full of grace for me: "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." I’m trying to know better and do better. And I trust that God, who made us diverse, beautiful, and precious, the God who grieves and cries out with the murdered and oppressed, will not let us rest until we confront and amend our sin. I appreciate all that many of you are doing, often in courageous ways, to help me along that path.