Progress toward deep and effective racial healing in the United States has become disturbingly slow across church and society, a Colorado faith leader said during a podcast hosted by Denver Seminary.
“Frankly, I’m scared about where we are because I think the blaming and shaming is reaching a boiling point,” John Moreland, the seminary’s director of Black Church Programs and bivocational senior pastor of Denver Christian Bible Church, said in the Engage360 episode devoted to racial reconciliation.
“Over the last few years, our culture as a whole has been painfully reminded of one of the needs that has never gone away, and that is: What does it mean to be reconciled to each other?” podcast moderator Don Payne, vice president of academic affairs and academic dean at the seminary, noted.
Moreland, a veteran church planter and former military and civilian police officer, responded Americans have become increasingly unwilling to cross ethnic boundaries to engage in dialogue about the history and continuation of racial injustice enroute to eventual forgiveness and unity.
“We’re coming to a place where we’re no longer talking to each other; we’re talking at each other,” he said. “It’s almost turning into a battle of who can talk louder. That scares me. And then you add to that the sociopolitical fuel that often comes from public dialogue, commentators, talking heads, so to speak, and it just adds fuel to the fire.”
Failure to acknowledge, let alone address raced-based discrimination and violence is one of the biggest impediments to reconciliation.
The nation’s historic failure to acknowledge, let alone address, race-based discrimination and violence is one of the biggest impediments to reconciliation, Moreland explained.
“We cannot get past race until there has been an account of race, and a lot of people in different ethnic categories want to just push past history without taking a full account and evaluation and assessment of the implications in our contemporary society,” he said. “We haven’t taken the time to know the root of those things. So, we’re dealing with symptoms rather than root causes.”
One way to tackle the underlying conditions of racism is through Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, a theory proposed by author and researcher Joy DeGruy, he said. DeGruy argues the survival behaviors exhibited in Black communities across the nation are a consequence of the multigenerational oppression of African slaves and their descendants.
“She looks at the historical account of slavery and racism, and she draws very logical lines to the contemporary implications of those past happenings,” Moreland observed.
But he often is asked how racial reconciliation can be moved along without fully acknowledging the source and pain of racism, he said.
“This usually comes from a well-intended white colleague or friend: ‘What can I do?’ One of the things that’s always at the forefront of my mind is to simply believe what has happened. To understand that there is an objective reality to our country, to our faith practice in America that cannot be denied,” he said. “It is not the subjective account of someone’s feelings or even their lived experience. There is an objective account of things that have happened, and so many people just refuse to acknowledge it.”
Historical and contemporary realities must not be “explained away” in an effort to diffuse them or minimize discomfort.
Payne insisted historical and contemporary realities must not be “explained away” in an effort to diffuse them or minimize discomfort caused by the subject matter. “That strikes me as a white person not fully owning it,” he said.
Avoiding that mindset requires Black and white Americans, and especially people of faith, to consider the facts objectively and without judging the other, Moreland replied.
“The goal isn’t to blame any group of people, and the goal isn’t to shame any group of people,” he said. “If we are believers, we ought to all look at this, take inventory of it and be bothered by it. And then the next question we ought to ask is, what is my part in helping to rectify it going forward? But what happens is many people either make it or receive it as personal.”
White people typically interpret the dialogue to mean they are seen as racist because they are white, Moreland said. “I try to use language that doesn’t put us in that spot, because once it turns contentious, now we’re really not talking about the issue; now we’re defending our position. I try to objectify the issue so we can both deal with the problem.”
But there is no getting around the fact reconciliation work is challenging, he added. “It is gritty. It is ugly. It is dirty work. It is hard work, and people are going to get more frustrated before they feel the relief that they want to feel. And we just have to know that going into it. And most of us don’t want to do that hard work.”
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