Chief Operating Officer the Right Rev. Stacy Sauls issues a call for A Call to Self-Examination and Prayer starting with white people, at his blog Mission is Who We Are: Reacting to an interchange of looks between a young black teenager and himself on the subway he reflects:
And then the really horrible revelation. Was I projecting? Was what I perceived really my suspicion of him and not so much his of me? God, I hope not, but if I’m honest with myself, I can’t tell you I absolutely know for sure. It calls for me to examine myself carefully.
It seems to me that this is where we have to start, and that Advent is a particularly good time to do it. We must begin with self-examination, a painfully honest self-examination. And now what I’m going to say is particularly difficult. The self-examination must begin with white people, such as myself.
I say this carefully and regretfully, but also from my heart. For one thing, I am a white person. I have no business telling black people what they need to examine in a situation like this. And besides, it’s not the same thing. Black people may have racial prejudices, but they do not generally make the power structure work based on them because the power structure is more in hands the color which is more like mine.
Just as an example, I saw the former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, comment on the Staten Island grand jury yesterday and ridicule the current mayor and others who took issue with it. He reminded his audience of the importance of process and that in this case the process had reached its result. And then he reminded those who watched that, after all, Eric Garner, the dead man, had just committed a crime when he was killed, something which, by the way, no jury, grand or otherwise, had a chance to consider. That’s the difference between those with power and those without. Those with power get the process. Some systemic self-examination might be in order.
Read it all here.
Posted by Ann Fontaine