One Book, One Community and one frustrated white person
In the past few years, many communities have been organizing community-wide reading programs that focus on one pertinent book for a period of time. Always a little behind the big cities but generally ahead of the small ones, our community recently engaged in its first such project using Alex Kotlowitz’s The Other Side of the River. Last night the library hosted a discussion with the author and two other panelists.
I was happy to see a decent turnout--around 80 people, I think--but left somewhat frustrated, even though I feel I learned a lot about how we should be moving toward racial healing in the United States and in our community. Out of the eighty people who attended, fewer than 10 were African American, although the representation was about proportionate to the total percentage of the local population. One of the comments from the discussion that sticks with me came from Liz O’Dell, the former head of the local NAACP. She looked around at the crowd and, holding up the book, said, “Three Rivers, this is your story.” I suspected this, but being relatively new here and being white, I needed a person of color to verify that thought. The application I draw from this is that racial problems are bigger here than most of us know or acknowledge, especially if we’re white.
Then, Reverend JoAnn Mundy stepped up to the mic. She is an African American woman pastoring an all white congregation on the north (historically white) side of town. She made the point, which I believe, that minorities cannot advocate for themselves. They need whites to take the initiative. And the initiative can be as simple as walking across the street and asking someone to tell his or her story.
So here’s my frustration. As someone who’s taken the initiative as a citizen of a wealthy country to advocate on behalf of the world’s poor and as someone who’s trying to take responsibility for encouraging and reforming the Church, I’ve run out of vocational capital, so to speak. I have nothing left to spend, even though the leader in me has several (good) ideas about how to approach these problems in our community and is tempted to make them happen even in spite of a pending energy deficit. I know racial healing is important and I want to be a part of a solution, but is it selfish of me to say that I cannot take a leadership role on this one? Am I shirking my responsibility to say that I’m watching for new leaders in both the black and white communities to whom I can go with ideas and trust that, if the ideas are good, they’ll find a way to make them happen?
I do feel like this is my luxury as a white person, to say that I’ve chosen other issues as my focus because, as one of the panelists said, we white people often delude ourselves into thinking that we are raceless while, for blacks, race is central to identity and there is no freedom to choose racelessness. But also, in the back of my mind, is something a very wise friend of ours said: that to be able to say “no” to things is predicated on knowing what I am made to do or, stated differently, knowing the purpose for which God created me.
My thoughts on these issues go in circles. My inclination is to watch and wait, but if we all watch and wait, who will act? Round and round I go…