for white men: a white man's ideas on four dead black men

If you are already angry at the title, please know that this is intended for a specific audience:  white men.  Also know that although Tamir Rice was a boy, the man who would be also died.  This post is for my fellow white Christian men.  I am a white man.  I grew up in a small town which was almost exclusively white.  Almost no one in my town had any black friends.  I grew up not knowing who black people were.  There have been and there will continue to be many comments regarding the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, and now Rumain Brisbon.  I understand that some of you are police officers yourselves or are family of police officers.  This post in no way is intended to demonize police officers.  In fact, the more police officers you get to know and be in relationship with, the more you come to love and respect police officers.  On the other side of the coin, the more I have begun to know and develop friendships with black men, the more I have come to love and respect black men.  This post is not intended to debate who is right and who is wrong.  The facts remain:  four black men are dead, one was just a boy.  How do we view these mourning families?  Do we view them as getting what they deserved?  Do we view these families as the problem of American society?  I believe that the less we know black people, the more we make assumptions like this, when really, we do not even know who black people are.  But in our internet posts we seem to know everything:  we could be the judge and jury in every case from Abel and Cain to Rumain Brisbon and the white officer who shot him.

If my wife is mad at me for something and I just keep telling her how wrong she is, our relationship is in a bad place.  If I say gruffly, which I have, “okay, I’m ready to listen. . . go ahead, tell me,” she is likely to stay silent.  My wife is quite intelligent and knows if I really want to listen or not.

Similar is the story of the white man and the black man in America.  Do I really want to listen?
Do I want white and black to be divided?  Do I want white and black to be reconciled?  Is my answer to that question the same as Jesus Christ’s answer?  This issue of reconciliation is not a political issue, but THE Christian issue:  God reconciling people to Himself and people to each other. 

I write this post for my fellow white men, men who are mostly in relationship to other white people.  I am suggesting, as a white male who still knows almost nothing at all about what it is like to be a black male in our society, the way towards racial reconciliation.

Very bold, you say, and you are right.  The way out is something that has been around for about two thousand years.  The way out is reconciliation in the church.  If churches continue to be white churches and black churches the racial divide will continue.  If churches become a family of believers united together across racial lines and begin to develop relationships in the Lord, I believe change will come.  I believe the time is ripe for pioneers, like my hero Ruby Bridges did in an elementary school, for people willing to take integration to the next level:  the church.   For such a time as this, we can take down the dividing wall on Sunday morning.  "It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o'clock on Sunday morning…," Martin Luther King Jr. spoke over 50 years ago.  What has changed in 50 years?   Are you willing to be a pioneer?  Am I?

Practically speaking, what can a white man do? 

Idea number one:  Join a black church. 

I believe that if even one person reading this decided to join a black church, not in your comfort zone, not in your denominational preference, something different from what you are used to, for the sake of learning to relate to black people even as I need to learn to relate to my wife, then you will be changed.  Yes, you getting up on Sunday morning and walking through the doors of a black church.  You can’t?  Why not? 

Idea number 2:  Start a multi-racial church.

If you absolutely cannot leave your church for some reason and join a black church, try to make your church into a multi-racial church.  For more information see http://www.christenacleveland.com/2013/10/a-road-map-for-diversity/   If many of us started being part of multi-racial churches, developing relationships across the racial divide, then I believe that change will come.

One last note on Rumain Brisbon:  When my mother died in an automobile accident, she hit another man head on and he died as well.  It was her car that swerved over and hit his.  She was at fault.  Maybe she fell asleep, maybe she reached down.  When the myriad of people came to the funeral to hug me, not one brought up how stupid it was for her to swerve into the other lane.  It was many of you that hugged me and grieved with me.  I ask that we give Rumain Brisbon’s wife and four children the same consolation.  Let us not shoot a dead man again. 

Idea number 3:  Speak no evil of black men on the internet.

Words are very powerful.  I have used words many times to hurt and wound people.  I have also used words to heal people.  The words we put on the internet are very powerful.  Let us not say one bad word on the internet or anywhere for that matter. 
Idea number 4:  Ask God to soften your heart towards black men.
Satan cheers when my heart is hardened to anyone.  God does not cheer at that.  It is black men who are dying in the street and being locked up in jail in staggering disproportion to white men.  Weep with their Heavenly Father.  Weep with their families.  Could we, as the family of God, grieve together over the death of Rumain and the other men?  What if Rumain was Danny Smith instead?  What would you say on the internet if I had been killed?  Those Christians reading this, let’s remember what Jesus said in the parable of the sheep and the goats at the end of Matthew 25.  You can read it for yourself.  Whatever I do for the least of these, the black widows and orphans, the black men who fill the prisons, the black men being shot and killed, I do for Jesus Christ, the King of all Kings.

For those reading this who may be grieving the loss of someone, whether it be one of the four dead black men, or the million black men in prison (see http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet) I take time now as I end this post to weep over your loss and our loss.