A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that 40 percent of blacks believe African- Americans should no longer be viewed as a single community. The poll put scientific heft behind what many in the African-American community have known forever: Black America is as culturally diverse and ideologically sophisticated as the rest of America.
How else can you explain a racial group that comprises both Jesse Jackson and Condoleezza Rice, T.D. Jakes and Jimmie “J.J.” Walker? We’re not all Democrats. We’re not all fans of hip-hop. Many of us can’t jump.
In that Pew poll, 53 percent of African-Americans now agree with the statement that “blacks who can’t get ahead are mostly responsible for their own condition.” As recently as 1994, 60 percent of African-Americans believed racial prejudice was the main thing keeping blacks from succeeding economically. What’s more, 61 percent of blacks said class, not race, accounts for the greatest social differences in our nation. Yet the specter of race continues to haunt us.
For the last year, I’ve traveled around the nation speaking to Christian groups about the importance of diversity and racial reconciliation in the body of Christ. The message is a needed one, as Martin Luther King’s “11 o’clock Sunday morning” axiom is as relevant today as it was 40 years ago. One of the tragedies of the modern American church has been our tendency to buy into the prevailing culture’s tribal mentality, when in fact we are called be a counterculture of love. We’ve managed to segregate ourselves rather than breaking down divisions in the name of Christ.
I speak primarily about the church’s black-white divide. This typically has meant addressing white audiences about the things they fail to see about our relationships across racial lines. But everyone knows the issue is much bigger than black and white, and we do the kingdom of God a disservice when we freeze the discussion there.
The reality is that we live in desperately polarized times. Everybody’s fed up. Everybody’s angry. And everybody goes on the Internet or talk radio to let you hear about it.
White folks are tired of black folks playing the race card. Black folks are tired of waiting for white folks to “get it.” American-born Latinos are tired of being judged and treated as if they were illegal. And illegal immigrants are tired of being exploited for their labor and then told, “No, we don’t want you in this country!”
These are complex issues that we shouldn’t take lightly. But, as a church, we need to be willing to move beyond conventional wisdom and take the time to apply kingdom wisdom. For many African-Americans, this may mean abandoning a victim mentality. It may mean extending more grace to whites and people of other races. It may mean searching our own hearts for those pockets of prejudice, hatred and unforgiveness. It may mean seeing beyond color.
Jesus didn’t operate using labels or stereotypes or broad generalizations. He took the time to see people for who they really were. He loved them.
Too often, it’s easy for us to write folks off because they live in “that” neighborhood or belong to “that” political party or attend a church in “that” denomination. It’s easy to brand folks a certain way and then excuse ourselves from any obligation to connect with them.
But love requires more. Love requires intentionality. It requires preferring others before ourselves. It requires taking the time to get to know someone beyond the labels and stereotypes that we—or our group—have placed upon them.
It’s time for us to stop looking at one another through worldly eyes that tell us, “Because he’s white and lives in that neighborhood, he’s a racist.” Or, “Because she’s a black single mother, she’s a drain on society.” Or, “Because he’s a Pentecostal, he has no theological depth.” “Because she’s a Baptist, she has no Holy Ghost fire.” The labels go on and on.
The apostle Paul wrote, “So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view” (2 Cor. 5:16, NIV). As Christ’s diverse body, we must allow that spiritual truth to become a lived reality for us today. Our racial and gender and denominational and cultural unity represents a tangible expression of the power of Christ’s love (see John 17:20-23). When the world sees it in action, it is so much more compelling than anything we could ever preach at them.
Edward Gilbreath is the author of Reconciliation Blues: A Black Evangelical’s Inside View of White Christianity (InterVarsity Press) and the director of editorial for Urban Ministries Inc., in Chicago.
