Sermon

Up Close and Personal: Race

Several months ago there was a national call by the United Church of Christ to initiate a “sacred conversation on race. The truth is race was an underlying issue and race and racism are still serious matters that we have never really dealt with as a nation.

We also need to continue our conversations about gender inequality. Still today women in many instances do not receive equal pay for equal work and they are overlooked for job promotions solely because they are women.

The election this past week brought to the forefront both race and gender. Whoever won the election – Barack Obama on the Democratic ticket or Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket, history was going to be made. The polls throughout the campaign indicated that more people were concerned in their voting about race than gender. That is probably to be expected in a nation with a history of enslavement of blacks.

A sacred conversation on race belongs in the church and especially among Christians of every denomination. After all, we affirm God’s creation of the whole of humanity and we proclaim that all people are equal in God’s family. Jesus, both through word and example, called his followers to think beyond the exclusive Jewish community of his day and to embrace all people. In fact, his crucifixion can be traced to his radical call for the inclusion of all of God’s people.

I decided to share with you my own journey as a Southerner that grew up in a very segregated society and who, at one time, honestly believed in the segregation of the races. It is not a history of which I am very proud. I still struggle at times and, where many people may proudly proclaim that they are not racist, I prefer to call myself a “recovering racist,” in much the same way that an alcoholic who stops drinking realizes that alcoholism is an ongoing recovery. Overcoming racism is also an ongoing recovery – at least for me as a Southern white. It may not be true for you, and especially those of you who are in younger generations. I suspect, however, there are times that racism sneaks into almost every life even if we do not want it to do so.

I am the great grandson of a slave owner on one side of my family. One the other side I am equally the great grandson of a family that was fiercely opposed to slavery. My grandfather used to lament the fact that the term “red neck” had fallen into such disrespect. According to him, there was a time that to be a red neck also made a statement – namely that you did not own slaves and your neck was red from working in the fields.

Thus I have always felt a very personal sense of shame about the role one side of my family played in oppressing others. And I have equally felt a great pride in the affirmation the other side of my family made about all people being created equal.

The day in 1954 when the Supreme Court announced the decision in the Brown versus the Topeka Board of Education ending school segregation, I had gone home from school for lunch. I immediately went to my room and got my pocket knife to start carrying because I was determined that those “colored people: were not coming to my school. My sister tells me that I also said I was going to draw a line around my desk and kill any colored person who tried to step over it.

At that time I believed in the “separate and equal” concept of education. I believed that we each had our schools, our ways of life and that we would not have a race problem if outside agitators would leave us alone.

My faith had taught me that God created all folks equal. But I also knew that one of my Sunday School teachers was right when she said that the mark of Cain was the beginning of the colored race. I have, of course, since learned differently. But at that time in my way of thinking, “separate and equal” was logical and probably the way God really intended it to be.

Throughout high school I wrestled internally trying to reassure myself that “separate and equal” is the way society ought to be. During my years in the public schools, our schools were not integrated despite the Supreme Court ruling.

When I went to college I needed a job. One of the few job openings in the small town where I lived was for an orderly at the local hospital. I went to apply for the job and was turned down because the hospital had never hired white boys as orderlies. After I could not find another job, I went back and applied again at the hospital. Finally, with great reluctance, the hospital hired me as an orderly.

There, in the hospital, for the first time in my life, I saw up close and personal the evils of racism. Within a very short time I was converted. I could see that “separate and equal” is a lie and that white people had to know it was a lie.

There were three of us on duty as orderlies in the hospital each evening. The first time the hospital washed my uniform they called me at home to see if I preferred to have my uniform washed with the white nurses rather than with the other orderlies. I said, “No, wash my uniforms with the other orderlies.”

The switchboard operator paged me as “Mr. Bell” even though I was just out of high school, but paged the other two colored orderlies by their first names. It caused tension. I went to the switchboard and asked that either I be paged as Jim (actually as “Jimmy” – after all this was the South) or that the other two orderlies be paged as Mister. Needless to say, the switchboard operator would not page the other two as “Mister” so she began paging me by first name also.

The three orderlies ate our lunch together in the middle of the night in the segregated dining room of the hospital. There was a cut-out section in wall dividing the two dining rooms where the condiments set – mustard, catsup, mayonnaise, etc. So, I sat next to the hole on my side of the dining room and they sat next to the hole on their side so we could talk. We were the only three in the dining room at that time of night. Finally, I asked the nursing supervisor if we could eat together on the same side. The answer was “yes” so long as I was willing to eat on the “colored” side. So I did.

Then the night came in which I so vividly experienced the evil of segregation that it forever put to rest any question I might still have had about “separate and equal.”

That night our schedules as orderlies had me coming in two hours before the other two orderlies. That meant that for that period of time I was to “float” as needed throughout the hospital. As I was making my rounds to the floors to see if any of the nurses needed an orderly I went to the second floor, west wing, known as “the colored” wing. There was a man on that wing who was in great pain because of urinary retention and he needed to be catheterized. He was suffering from a serious bladder infection.

I went to get the catheterization kit, but was quickly stopped by the colored nurse. She told me to leave that until one of the other orderlies came on duty because the doctor (who was white) would not want a white boy having to catheterize a colored man. It happened that this white doctor was also my physician.

I tried to assure the nurse that my doctor would allow me to do that if she would call him. Finally, after much hesitancy she did call the doctor because she felt the man’s pain was so severe that he needed relief quickly. As she dialed the doctor’s number her hand trembled and a tear ran down her face in fear. She explained the situation that I was willing to do this procedure and then – she handed me the phone because the doctor wanted to know if I “minded” doing it.

Picture a registered nurse talking to a doctor about a common procedure that under other circumstances she would simply have told an orderly to do. But instead the doctor talked to me, a kid just out of high school with no nursing experience, to see if I minded. I don’t know who felt more humiliated – the black registered nurse making the phone call or the white boy who saw the searing pain of how a registered nurse had been treated just because of her color.

I have never carried a pocket knife since that night …

Some years later a close relative married an African-American. When she did so, her father would not let her come home anymore. When my grandfather died and I went to the funeral my relative invited me over for dinner. However, no one in the family would allow me to use a car. So I walked several blocks away from the house and my relative and her husband picked me up.

They had a baby girl. In fact, their daughter and my own daughter are only a few months apart in age. But her grandfather had never seen his granddaughter.

When I got back to the place I was staying after that dinner, I began tohear how unhappy my relative was because of marrying that “n” man. I gathered all the nerve I could and finally said, “She is not unhappy because of the color of her husband. She is unhappy because of her family. Her father has not seen his beautiful granddaughter. She is not allowed to come home. Those are the things making her unhappy. Tomorrow morning I am getting on a plane and flying off. But in the future when we come to North Carolina my family is going to visit and my daughter is going to know (my relative). We are going to stay their family.”

A few months later the daughter was allowed to come home and bring her daughter. Over the years the family accepted the reality and today there has been reconciliation.

My own daughter and my relative’s daughter to this day are best friends and see each other as often as possible. Once when my daughter was a child my wife and I were discussing the pain that my cousin had been through because her husband was black. My daughter overheard us and she said, “Daddy is (name) black?” When I said “yes” my daughter responded, “I just thought she had a really neat tan.”

I was invited to speak at a national symposium on the 36 th anniversary of the Brown versus Board of Education decision. Right in front of me was a black woman, my age, named Linda Brown Buckner – Brown in the Brown versus Board of Education decision. It was one of the most humbling experiences I have ever had.

I think I was able to stand there that day because somehow, even though I grew up in a very segregated society, I believe that God did create all of us equal and one human family. What still perplexes me is why it took me so long and why the journey was so tortuous to bring me to live out that belief. It disturbs me that there are still many problems in our society which are rooted in racism and sexism and homophobia and classism. The religious community and particularly we who are Christians, still have much for which we need to repent and much we still have to discern.

You and I, my sisters and brothers in the faith, are entrusted with the visions of the prophets and the actions of the martyrs. We are entrusted with the very intention God has for humanity and that intention – at least from my understanding of scripture – is that God wills us to live together as one human family.

With all of our weaknesses, people of faith are still called by a God who, as Isaiah preached, calls us to bring good tidings to the afflicted, to bind up broken hearts, to proclaim liberty to captives and to open the prisons of those who are bound. We are still the ones, as Jesus would tell his followers, who, in the poorest and most oppressed persons, must see God. Amos reminds us to do justice. “What does the Lord require of you? To do justice.” And then he calls out, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

How will we see God in the oppressed? How will the oppressed see God in us? How will we have the courage to release those who are bound? Where will we work for justice? In what ways will we make sure that justice does indeed roll down like water mighty waters in this day? Where will the truth be spoken? As people of faith we cannot retreat from the battlefields where martyrs have shed their blood for Christ’s call that “all may be one.”

That Supreme Court decision in 1954 forced many of us to look at our society in a new way. Admittedly we have long way to go to bring equality and acceptance to others who are marginalized. I pray that we, as Christians, will play an important part in promoting a society that determines that people will not be disposable because of their race or gender or sexual orientation or their limited net worth on a financial statement. I pray that because we gather here each week as people of faith, the world will edge a little closer to true peace and justice.

A Jewish prayer sums it up for me:

O God, give me strength never to disown the poor,

Never before insolent might to bow the head.

Give me strength to raise my spirit high above the daily trifles,

Lightly to bear my joys and sorrows,

And in love to surrender all my strength to you.

For great are your gifts to me:

The sky and the light; this my flesh.

Life and the soul –

Treasures beyond price; treasures of life and of love.

And sometimes, I want to add, we even find God in the decisions of the Supreme Court.

Amen.

Jim Bell 11-10-08