Racism Undercover

This morning I was troubled by a statement from a Donald Trump supporter I heard on the news. The overall story was about the controversy surrounding Donald Trump and his failure to distance himself from the endorsement of David Duke, former KKK leader. Here is the statement by a Trump supporter.

“ [News about this controversy] is only intended by certain persons to split us apart as a nation rather than solve problems….The problem is the black people in America. American blacks are unsophisticated in understanding they need to make people earn their vote.”

Now, shocking to many, if you were to ask this man if he were racist he would most likely claim not to be.

And that is exactly the problem. We’ve equated racism with hate crimes and not with the cultural lenses through which we see and interpret the entire world. If you can say that an entire race, ethnicity, or religion is “unsophisticated” then we have a problem. A racist problem. The lens through which you are seeing the world is discolored by a racist past.

That doesn’t mean you’re going to go and bomb an African-American church or deny someone a seat at the lunch counter, but that is our history and that history affects the way we see the world more than we realize. Unless we name that fact, we will never overcome it. The first step to repenting from sin and changing, even from societal sin, is admitting it exists in the first place.

Can we finally admit that racism is still a sin that our society deals with?

Can we finally begin to work together to eradicate it from our midst?

If not, we may need to revisit Paul’s word to the Ephesians who were divided among ethnicities as well. He reminds them, and us, that Jesus, “In his flesh has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (Eph. 2.14).

That dividing wall, that hostility is still a very present reality, and the work of Jesus is to tear it down, making us all one in Him. Will we join in that effort?