A friend of mine, a white Christian woman, like me, posted this meme on Facebook. It was meant to end any discussion of white America’s legacy of racial violence and to silence calls for social justice. Cute little innocent girl, says the meme. The implication: poor little innocent me. Leave the past to the past. Leave me be.
My friend is right. The bombing of Pearl Harbor is not the fault of Japanese infants any more than she or I are at fault for dropping two atomic bombs on the ancestors of Japanese infants. And, yet, my friend and I are responsible for those acts, and for any acts committed by our country in our names. We are responsible, too, for the ongoing legacy of oppression and racial violence in this country. And if you are a white American, you are too.
Please, let me explain.
Communal guilt, like trauma, is passed down through generations and within communities. Unacknowledged guilt, like trauma, shackles individuals within those communities, and indeed whole countries, to exploitative and destructive patterns of belief and behavior so prevalent that we think of them as normal, if we recognize them at all. I’m a historical novelist, a student of human behavior, and have become aware of these patterns as the echoes of generations speaking through me. My ancestors are within me. I carry their gifts but also bear their sins. I am them. They are me. When I say that I am sorry for our part in the legacy of oppression and racial violence in this country, I speak on behalf of us. When I fail to acknowledge the need, I fail my son, who will be forced to carry the responsibility forward.
I’m aware as I write these words that atonement is impossible. My apology cannot restore justice. The truth is that I hear — in that meme above and in countless other interactions with white Christian brothers and sisters — an unspoken fear of justice. Noble ideals aside, white America’s history is one of conquest and slavery and environmental degradation. It is bloody and ignoble and exists even if we pretend it does not. We sanctioned the genocide and displacement and continue the cultural annihilation of native people. Under the guise of manifest destiny, we exploited and continue to exploit natural resources and poison the earth. We continue to support, tacitly or overtly, systems that oppress people of color, and keep their communities in de facto police states.
It’s no wonder that the prospect of justice terrifies us. It’s no wonder that we deny all guilt and cling to the illusion of innocence. Instead we point blame elsewhere and manufacture righteousness, even as our sins, and the sins committed in our names, multiply. We do this because we white American Christians fear justice more than we desire it; we fear justice more than we believe in the possibility of grace.
Justice makes sense. Grace, even when couched in a Christian context, makes no rational sense. Jesus was unjustly punished. He sacrificed himself and was put to death so that we might — if we lay ourselves bare to the pain of remorse — be redeemed. This is a miracle and mystery. It makes no sense and many white Christians, no matter how fiercely we claim our faith, do not believe it is true.
And we are right to doubt–rational even. Certainly, really we have no right to expect the grace of forgiveness, leastways not from our brothers and sisters of color.
We have no right and yet our only hope, if we wish to salvage our integrity and embrace the promise of our changing nation, is to recognize the need and to ask without expectation. Our only hope is to accept and to name our collective shame and to open ourselves to remorse, that complex and noble emotion which does not rise merely out of fear of punishment but from an empathy and sense of responsibility for the people we have made, or have allowed, to suffer. Remorse that rises from a recognition of both the necessity and the impossibility of atonement. To seek instead, at-one-ment; to treat our neighbors (and even our political opponents) as ourselves. It is the first and the last step toward grace, and it’s a doozy.
But if we do not take that step, enlightened though we try to prove ourselves in the circus of public opinion, we are bound to repeat our sins and the sins of our fathers. Unacknowledged guilt and fear, turned outward into hate and violence, will guide us in place of grace. We saw this two weeks ago in Washington, D.C. And if we persist this way, no amount of righteous indignation or claims to innocence will save us.
Romans 3:24 says: “all have sinned and fall short and all are justified freely by grace.” What the passage doesn’t mention is the hard work of surrender and remorse that precedes grace. It’s time to do that work. Have courage. Have faith! No one is asking us to die for the sins of our fathers. We are being asked to acknowledge those sins, to stop denying and perpetuating them, and to let go of the monuments — bronze and storied — that we’ve made to stand in place of our national history.
It’s time to take responsibility.
I wish I could find words to say this to my friend who posted this meme in a way that she could hear me. I tried, but she heard neither the words nor the love with which I’d offered them. I’ve tried and failed many times. I offer my failure and my words, now, to God and whoever has ears to hear. I am sorry for the blindness that still governs much of my life. I am sorry for the actions of my ancestors and for the hardened hearts of many of my white Christian brothers and sisters. I am sorry, and I ask nothing from the divine or from humankind other than the chance to open myself to grace and to serve all the living world with new courage and humility.
Amen.
This article first appeared in The Common Politic in 2019.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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