Racial Justice is Fought One Courageous Person at a Time

(The featured image above is Connally with a former roommate, Maria.)
by Connally Gilliam, co-author of And Yet, Undaunted: Embraced by the Goodness of God in the Chaos of Life, with Paula Rinehart
It was a profound gift that God dropped Maria and me into the same house as roommates for four years. More often than not, only relationship can coax us out of denial, bringing the reality of our sin to the light. And that happened with me and Maria.

Initially, I showed up in that house with all the right answers about race.

White and woke. Likewise, Maria, as an African American, came with a host of white friends. And probably in about two minutes of meeting one another, we had each sensed the cracks in the other’s story. Maria smelled in me my latent, ethnic arrogance. Likewise, I smelled her residual mistrust of white people, no matter how many friendships she pointed to in protest. We aspired to be Christian sisters prayerfully pursuing the harmony that we knew Jesus wanted between us. But in fact, what is meant we were more like tigers, ready to pounce.
Most prominently, despite my words about Jesus as my source of identity, it became clear as Maria and I circled each other that my deepest sense of personal value was inextricably tied to social status. Where I ranked was who I was. A pretty wobbly and exhausting way to gain and maintain a sense of self, no doubt. But dig deep enough, and it was mine.
Slowly, I realized my bind, pinging between pride and shame and fearing the revelation of either. On one hand, my heart harbored the unacknowledged suspicion that my people’s historic power was proof of our intrinsic superiority. Maria felt that suspicion in me. Simultaneously, I feared that perhaps I was intrinsically worse than people of color. Maybe my white privilege was just the product of arrogance specifically endemic to my people?

On top of all of this, I had some strange notion that as a black woman, Maria could, like a priest, release me from this icky bind if only she’d grant me impunity. Somehow, because she was black, if she could approve of me, she could pronounce me good. My pride would disappear and my shame would melt. Of course, this meant she couldn’t be just Maria, a regular human being, a friend with strengths and weaknesses. And that pressure created its own problems.

In the midst of all of this, she tried to be okay, and I tried to be okay. But we weren’t okay.

Eventurally, the tigers pounced.

Unleashed in one utterly uncharacteristic screaming fight, our un-okay-ness ripped through each other’s big, green fig leaves, unearthing in each of us the ugly lies that were buried deep in our interior spaces. She told me the truth about myself, calling out my attitudes for what they were—not just ignorant, not just a product of my own brokenness, but sin. Personal sin embedded in me that was painful to her and an offense against our shared heavenly Father. (I called out a few things, too, with her, but that is her tale to tell.)
Mostly, we found that as the dams broke open between and within us, the floodwaters catapulted us onto a new path. It wasn’t easy or straightforward. There were difficult words. Wincing moments. Awkward pauses. Truth telling. Wound licking. Prayer. The discovery that my sin was not just against her but also against our shared Creator. Repentance. Forgiveness. Attitude shifts. Mix up the steps and repeat.
Energized by our shared conviction that in the blood of Jesus, we really could and should enter something approximating true sisterhood, we just kept fighting our way forward. Facing our wounds and our sin. It helped that we also both happened to be as stubborn as mules.

Slowly, haltingly, as God’s Spirit continued to flow in—fresh waters began pushing out the brackish binds.

I’ll never forget Maria shaking her head almost in disbelief as we looked back on this time: “Something in you became different,” she noted. “Before, it felt like I was somehow supposed to be in the kitchen and you in the dining room. Since then, I’ve known that we’re in there together.” It was as if the floodwaters that were released when the dams of denial broke open between (and within) us catapulted us onto a new relational path.
So much more could be said, but here is the bottom line: Without this tough confrontation with what is, this naming of sin as sin, something so real never could have emerged between Maria and me. Right answers and good intentions are never enough in the face of the ugly parts of us that want, like Satan himself, to reign as god. But when what is is named honestly in the presence of God (and, more often than not, another person), things as gruesome as misplaced identity or cultural arrogance—or whatever else might be creeping around your deep interior space—can be named, forgiven, and dislodged. I think that’s just another name for confession. And when we risk confessing the truth about what really is, amazingly, the actual what is can begin to change.
This excerpt is from And Yet, Undaunted: Embraced by the Goodness of God in the Chaos of Life by Paula Rinehart and Connolly Gilliam. Discover renewed joy in the middle of your ache — and the goodness of God that will give you the courage to remain yet undaunted.
Read the first chapter of And Yet, Undaunted here.
Want to read more on the topic of privilege? White Picket Fences: Turning Toward Love in a World Divided by Privilege by Amy Julia Becker invites us to respond to privilege with generosity, humility, and hope. It opens us to questions we are afraid to ask, so that we can walk further from fear and closer to love, in all its fragile and mysterious possibilities.

Read the first chapter of White Picket Fences here.
 
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (New York: Harper, 1954), 112.