A year and a half back, I was invited by Jake Owensby, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana and chancellor of the University of the South, to speak with his clergy about racism and white supremacy. That Saturday retreat was powerful, and it felt as though we moved a step or two toward justice, that we answered the question my friend Catherine Meeks asks, “Do we have the courage to want to be well?” with a strong affirmative.
On that Sunday, I was invited to preach and teach in a Louisiana parish, and during the formation time, I invited the small group to talk with me about their experience of race. One older white woman brought a heaping helping of tropes to the table. She has many Black friends; she grew up with many Black people and never had any arguments with them; she did not see color.
Greg Garrett
I cannot tell you how many times over the past six or seven years as I’ve talked with other white people about racism that I’ve heard that statement: “I don’t see color.”
It’s meant to be a positive statement, like the one Asian Jim makes to Dwight in The Office: “Hats off to you for not seeing race.” It’s meant to prove that, just as Dr. King said in 1963 (and sometimes prompted by Dr. King’s speech, sometimes by the conservative Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character) a person has reached a place where he/she/they judge another person not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
It’s meant to prove that our nation is or can be post-racial, that no further action needs to be taken to confront racism, that remembering, repenting, repairing America’s racial sins can stop almost before it has started.
And it is patently and completely wrong.
“Do you know who can be colorblind? Someone who looks like me.”
Do you know who can be colorblind?
Someone who looks like me.
I get up in the morning, I shower, run my fingers through my hair, throw on some version of a black T-shirt.
Then I walk out into the world and I get to be white all day long.
Do you know who doesn’t have to worry about being shadowed in a department store?
Someone who looks like me.
Do you know who doesn’t have to endure micro- and macro-aggressions about race?
Someone who looks like me.
And as we demonstrated to a cathedral full of people one night when NPR’s Korva Coleman asked both me and The Atlantic Monthly’s Vann Newkirk II about our respective experiences with police officers onstage at Washington National Cathedral: Do you know who can be pulled over by white police officers over and over and over again without fearing for his life?
Someone who looks like me.
Yesterday, June 29, 2023, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling striking down affirmative action in higher education. In the majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, I heard the echoing voice of that good Episcopal woman in Louisiana, of the many white people who believe they have done their time in racial purgatory: “The time for making distinctions based on race (has) passed.”
Institutions of higher education — and certainly, by extension, every American institution — may stop trying to repair what even Justice Clarence Thomas recognized as “the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination,” and trust instead in what Justice Thomas called his “enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles” of equality and justice.
“We don’t want to see color anymore, and the highest court in the land has validated this spurious practice.”
We don’t want to see color anymore, and the highest court in the land has validated this spurious practice.
My friends at PRRI have demonstrated that a vast number of Americans — most of them white evangelical Christians or white Republicans or some admixture of the two — believe there is no longer any such thing as structural racism (or believe, in fact, that white Christians are the true victims of prejudice in America). Many of those who embraced color blindness have been hoping they never would be forced to reckon with the “social and economic ravages” implicit in the founding of this nation atop the bodies of its indigenous inhabitants and through the labor of Africans imported to these shores.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court seems to have stopped this vital resource for racial repair dead in its tracks. Rage, sadness and resignation are obvious responses for all of us dreading but anticipating this ruling. I am wrestling to find where I’m going to land.
But thanks be to God, ardent voices tell us it is time to lean back into this work, regardless of those privileged justices who have set back the cause of justice and equity in this country by decades, if not centuries.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissenting opinion, as CNN reported, accurately “accused the majority of having a ‘let-them-eat-cake obliviousness’ in how the ruling announced ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat.”
Dr. King used to say maybe you can’t legislate morality, but behavior can be regulated. That is, you can’t make people regard people as equal, but you can find ways to force equality. This Supreme Court has decided to step back from regulating racist behavior in higher education and in the larger society, and to declare the war won. Pack up the tents. Send the troops home.
And the war is won.
For people who look like me.
So I call on all of us, but most particularly the white Christians who see color, not as a tool for judging others but as a way of understanding what those who don’t look like us have had to endure, to step up our efforts, to speak and teach and preach about race, prejudice and inequality in America, for these things are real and lasting and cannot be dismissed by a white supremacist Supreme Court ruling.
Michelle Obama said what I hope all Americans of good conscience will hear, mark, learn and inwardly digest:
My heart breaks for any young person out there who’s wondering what their future holds — and what kinds of chances will be open to them. And while I know the strength and grit that lies inside kids who have always had to sweat a little more to climb the same ladders, I hope and I pray that the rest of us are willing to sweat a little, too. Today is a reminder that we’ve got to do the work not just to enact policies that reflect our values of equity and fairness, but to truly make those values real in all of our schools, workplaces and neighborhoods.
I know many of us do believe in these values, believe in them so much that we are not willing just to hope that someday we’ll witness America living up to them.
Roll up your sleeves, dear ones. It’s time to sweat.
Greg Garrett teaches creative writing, film, literature and theology classes at Baylor University. He is the author of two dozen books of fiction, nonfiction, memoir and translation, including the critically acclaimed novels Free Bird, Cycling, Shame and The Prodigal. His latest novel is Bastille Day. He is one of America’s leading voices on religion and culture. Two of his recent nonfiction books are In Conversation: Rowan Williams and Greg Garrett and A Long, Long Way: Hollywood’s Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation. He is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.