White nationalists protested outside Allendale during worship a few weeks ago. Many of us were forced to walk through a crowd shouting that we were pedophiles and groomers. These slurs were in response to a recent message on our church sign that named the harm Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was doing, and the name calling parroted his press secretary who said that those opposed to the “don’t say gay” bill must be groomers.
Last week we all witnessed a self proclaimed white supremacist target and kill Black people in a grocery store. This was followed by a man attacking and killing Taiwanese-American church-goers.
It is not hard to connect the dots between White Nationalism, White Supremacy, and other forms of hatred that inspires violence. Politicians, media pundits, and others have been gaining power by stoking the fear of white people and culture being replaced by people at the margins. We see this “Great Replacement” fear-mongering tool at work in everything from:
- voter suppression laws
- to the anti-CRT rhetoric
- to the chants of protestors calling LGBTQ worship attendees groomers
- to cable news pundits’ rants
- to the actual chants of torch carrying marchers in Charlottesville
- to the writings of both of last weekend’s shooters.
As a white pastor who has done the intellectual work of studying this evil, everything listed above is easy to spot and name. The hard work is knowing how to cure this disease. And the hardest work is moving beyond an intellectual understanding into connecting the dots back into our own organizations, our churches, our people, and even ourselves.
Said another way, where does the fear of “being replaced” dwell within me? As someone who benefits greatly from every form of privilege, how do I properly examine and root this from myself and our still white-dominated spaces? How do I go about this task especially now as I live in a state where the legislature how outlawed making people feel guilty or uncomfortable about systemic racism?
After all the progress made, new laws are codifying harm and protecting it from being touched. And meanwhile, the racism that has lingered in all white-dominant progressive institutions, has more oxygen to breathe. We are great at naming forms of explicit bigotry and at the same time, lack the tools to deal with our own fears of our white cultural power and spaces being replaced.
As board president of a national justice non-profit, Methodist Federation for Social Action, I am part of a team that spent the last two years facilitating an audit of ourselves to name and deal with the ways our intentions, marred with the stains of institutional racism, have betrayed our impact. The final report and action steps will be coming out soon. My hope is that this work will lead to a new and different future. My hope is also, when we come out of the pandemic, that we at Allendale will undergo this type of introspection in the form of an audit.
In the meantime, I invite us to continue to not just name the evil we see, but to push deeper into ourselves and our spaces, being fully open to self examination. Only then, will Beloved Community ever be a possible reality.
