Racism is built brick by brick. It has been building for generations. It started in the Bible long ago. Here is the thing you might not know. It all starts with God. God created race. As with most things in this world, we have a way of taking the thing that God made and misusing it. God gave us nature, and now kids feel like they need to scream for climate change. God gave us power and men use it to take from others. God gave us talents and people use it for their own gain instead of helping others. Nature, power, and talent are all great things. We live in a world where these things don’t make race relations any easier to deal with.
I grew up in a black neighborhood until I went to middle school. People were nice but most people I knew were poor. There was a guy at that school named big blue. We called him that because he wore a blue shirt almost every day. Now that I look back at that moment I realize that he probably didn’t have another shirt. Although we didn’t have a lot of money I remember being happy and enjoying school and people. I also remember the bad parts of it. Because of the poverty rate, our lunches were not that great and our textbooks were handed down from 10 to 15 years ago. My reading level struggled due to very old methods of teaching that didn’t affect the business of our electronic world that was growing. It wasn’t the teacher’s fault. Our nature (tools, economic ability, resources) didn’t nurture our growth.
I transferred to a middle school that had mixed races. One thing that I noticed is everyone was different. Not just the race. The clicks, popularity and the cool kids. Football players hung out with football players. Cheerleaders hung out with cheerleaders. Band kids hung out with band kids. They were the coolest by far. I say that as a neutral party. I didn’t join any groups in middle school. So I’m automatically cool, right? What you never knew as the loaner is that groups were power. Belonging to something was its own power. The power of a group of people backing you and giving you a thing to do was great. Especially for someone so young. The things you do shape the way you think and feel.
Then there were some kids that were just talented. They got the highest grades, the most awards, and had the most friends because they were talented at relating to people. Sadly by high school, I had learned that I had no talents. I couldn’t be better than anyone at anything. I was average at best and below average at worst. Although I was friends with a lot of these people I could never connect with them on that level. So there was separation due to the nature I came from, the power I had and the talent I couldn’t see inside of myself.
You might ask where racism comes in this story and I would tell you it wouldn’t. I never experienced it. I didn’t grow up during the racism of the ’60s. I don’t know what it’s like to have to treat a race of people differently because I grew up with best friends that are white. We met in middle/high school and have been best friends ever since. I know racism exists on an individual level but on a group level racism has been dealt with for the most part. I say that because we had a black president. A black person has the ability to be anything he wants in the world we live in. However, we still face what racism did to us as people. This problem didn’t come from white people. It didn’t start with issues that arose from the African slave trade. The problem of racism came from a story in the bible.
The story in Genesis is short but It talks about how the basis of racism started. The tower of Babel was the mecha of the dawn of men. There were many people that all spoke one language. The Bible says God saw how they worked together and had a plan to make a tower to heaven so they could reach God. God came down and saw their work and said that if men worked in this unity there would be nothing impossible for them to accomplished. This is the thought of God about men. Please don’t miss it. God said that anything is possible when we work together in unity. The problem with humanity now is that we are so far from that status. If you look at the news you can see it easily. It is just story after story of people who are everything but unified and mostly disagree. No one is on the same page or has the same goals.
So I really feel like racism which was a problem is now just progressed into our society and passed onto the next generations as a different look. The story of Babel continues to spiral out of control in the way people treat each other. We treat each other poorly in how we handle the power we have to help each other. We treat each other poorly in how we use our talents for personal gain instead of toward the encouragement of others. We treat each other poorly with our natural emotions. We say we love others but our natural reaction to most things is either harsh or judgemental. It’s hard to love anyone that you automatically blame or think the worst of. I truly don’t feel like anyone is racist as it used to be in America however we are still dealing with the after-effects of institutional racism.
Since our changes from the tower of Babel, we have been going down a path that has been as bad as racism and as unproductive as speaking different languages. One of the worst problems that came from the tower of Babel is the lack of communication. What that does to us is to assume. Assumption is the death of all communication. Instead of talking out our issues we assume and guess the intentions of people. We assume the goodness of others. Racism is gone mostly but many assumptions are still plaguing our culture. In fact, we can’t even address the issue of assumptions because we are too busy calling each other racist. Now racism is replaced with assumptions. These assumptions cause us to not talk to certain people. Or to decide who is right and who is wrong without any conversation.
We seem to also be dealing with indifference. Meaning you can’t decide who is what so you just do nothing to help others or invest in relationships that are a little hard to have. The problem in America isn’t that black and white people can’t get along its just that we still have differences in the way we see the world. There is nothing wrong with that but a lot of times that leads to indifference. This type of indifference can’t be dealt with on a grand scale. It must be rooted out of the communities and dealt with on personal levels. I have a best friend that's white who sees the world in a different way from me. Do you know how we deal with those differences? We talk about it. We eat together. We keep coming back to the table, not to change each other but to engage each other. We truthfully have known each other for so long our differences are few and far between. But had we not stayed in contact our differences would have become a valley between us.
I don’t know all the answers to how you deal with the effects of racism. What I am sure of is we still have work to do to overcome our failures of communication since the tower of Babel. We will have to work together to let go of our assumptions and indifferences. The main reason for doing this is no person you have ever met is just another person. Everyone you see is someone that God loves deeply. He is into them. I know they disagree with your politics and have sins that are different from you but at the end of the day, they are God’s to judge and yours to love.
The roots of racism have torn us apart for long enough. It leads to racism being replaced by things like politics. We don't judge people by the color of their skin, we judge them by the color of their flags political party. Now instead of racism, we deal with politics that separate us, instead of segregation, we deal with an indifference that divides us, instead of slavery we are dealing with assumptions that hold us bound to our ideas. In order to avoid the mistakes of our past, we have to make changes. Those changes should be decided together. Those changes are not just giving people money. Our government has already proven that doesn’t work for the long term. Those changes are not simple.
We might have to keep coming back to the table and speaking different languages until we slowly understand one another. I have to admit I don’t understand every issue facing the black community nor do I know all the issues in white communities but what I do know is our fathers put in this situation. Starting from the tower of Babel. It is up to us to not leave it to our kids or grandkids to fix it. Racism has evolved and it’s not about race, it’s about us.
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