How to be a Person...when Charleston changes you

I went over to a friend’s house recently to spend the evening chatting and drinking wine, as we’ve done more than a few times before. This time was a little bit different, because it was the first time we’d spent such time together since Charleston. I looked into the eyes of my dear friend that evening as we sat on her couch, and I told her that Charleston changed me. She asked me the most logical but profoundly difficult of questions: How? Why? This is my best attempt to answer those questions.

I was shaken – badly – by the Charleston church shooting: because it was a vicious and premeditated atrocity carried out by a self-proclaimed white supremacist racist, because I’m black and my children are biracial but still black enough to be viewed as black, because Roof wasn’t apprehended quickly but when he was taken in got food brought in to him when he became hungry, because certain media outlets immediately changed this killer’s motivation and re-branded this atrocity as an attack on the church, because of media coverage which sought empathy for Roof with the headline that he “almost didn’t do it,” because the judge who presided over Roof’s arraignment stated – with conviction – that Roof’s family were victims just as much as the men and women who were murdered at their church – and the families who now mourn them.

There’s the why.

Here’s the how:

I feel I can no longer sit idly by and ignore microaggression and racism in its most passive forms. Such hatred-borne violence that gets promptly written off as an anomaly, re-branded as an attack on Christianity, and has its stated racial motivations blatantly ignored, demands activism, counteraction, education and self-reflection of the hardest kind.

By my having remained silent regarding matters of race, I’ve unwittingly encouraged a culture 

of nonblack Americans who have convinced themselves that racism is a thing of the past and not the present. The prevailing opinion among these Americans seems to be built upon the problematic teaching that “color-blindness” is the cure to racism.

It is not.

In fact, this doctrine of color-blindness has encouraged a large segment of the population to de-legitimize the cultural experiences of nonwhites: If I don’t see color, that must mean no one does. Therefore, it is simply impossible to acknowledge as true that someone else is being treated differently because of their race.

Let me put this more simply: If #blacklivesmatter offended you, it’s because you’ve been conditioned to believe that such an assertion is audaciously untrue by a system that insists black lives don’t – in fact – matter. This point is illustrated when innocent, unarmed black men, women, and children are killed – particularly at the hands of police officers – and their killers are not held accountable. This point is illustrated when nonviolent protesters take to the street in order to draw attention to such brutality and injustice and are branded as race-baiters and greeted with heavily armed police officers hidden behind shields and “protected” by helmets and batons. This point is illustrated when a white supremacist racist maliciously plans and executes the murder of nine innocent black people inside their house of worship and is treated to Burger King after he gets to jail.

When I say Charleston changed me, I mean that #IAMCharleston. When I look at the face of Tywanza Sanders, I flash forward mentally and imagine my son, having graduated from college, become gainfully employed, and plugged in to a local church, being killed in cold blood by a man who sought him out based solely on his skin color.

When I say that Charleston changed me, I mean that if you share a meme which spouts someone else’s ignorance and has a snappy picture to accompany it, you can expect that instead of hiding your post like I have in the past or simply ignoring you, I’m going to kindly but definitely ask you what you mean by what you post, and if you realize its implications. I will initiate a conversation that I should have initiated long ago.

When I say that Charleston changed me, I mean that I’ve never told you the story of my first – and only, to date – speeding ticket. The one I got while driving to a Matchbox 20 concert in New Orleans with my best bestie. I haven’t told you that I was asked to get out of the car while the police officer asked my bestie – who’s white – if she was in the car against her will.

When I say that Charleston changed me, I mean that I need to tell you I am vigilant in my insistence that my children always keep hands out of pockets while we are in any store. Because all too soon I know they will be in a store without me, and they’ll be tall for their age and will look like grown men to store-owners.  And that it won’t matter if their hands were near pockets rather than in them, won’t matter if they truly took something from the store without paying by accident. It’ll only matter that they are there. And they are black. This is my reality.

So as I sat talking to this friend on her couch, she listened. And her countenance changed noticeably. She looked worried. And she told me some truth: that I have to give all my anxiety and fear over to God, that He doesn’t want me to be afraid and anxious. To an extent, this is true. True, too, is the attention and care Jesus afforded to those on the margins of society, to those whose voices were ignored, invalidated. And for the Church – and me, as part of it – to live out the Great Commission, we must necessarily pay attention to the hurting in our own society rather than assuming the only people who need Jesus and justice are those who live far away from us.

For me, Charleston was a call to action, awareness, a call to wake up. 

I intend to answer that call.