The Hidden Danger of Racism

As a cross-cultural missionary, I am in a unique position. I have worked with people from many different cultures and ethnic groups from different parts of the world for years. Not only have I met many different people and been exposed to their way of thinking, but by living cross-culturally I have also had the opportunity to adopt their cultures for myself and internalize them. My own culture and the culture of the family I am forming have changed in the process - I started as a yellow person who moved to a blue country, but now after years of exposure, I am a shade of green. I don't fit into either group entirely, and because I started as a missionary as a relatively young adult - many of my formative experiences as an adult have been outside of my first culture. Sociologists refer to this phenomenon as a third-cultured person, and it is both a blessing and a curse. While I may not feel entirely at home anywhere as a green person in a blue and yellow world, I am also much more aware of the conflicts between cultures and ethnic groups and their differences in thinking. It is this cultural awareness that helps me understand racism and ethnic differences from a different lens. As a cultural outsider, I have a different point of a view - and this informs my responsibility to share it with others.

My Childhood Experiences with Racism

Growing up in a mixed-race family where every one of my siblings was a different color, I had several experiences of racism early on. I remember coming home from school one day and seeing my mother angry. Someone had made a comment about my brother not being my brother because he looked different, and it had affected her. As young men of eight or nine, we didn't fully understand what had happened - nor did we fully understand what racism was, though we had already had a taste of it. My mom, for her part, stopped for a moment and explained it to us. "Racists are people that hurt and kill other people because of the color of their skin - because they hate people that look different than them, that's why they were mean to your brother". For my two mixed-race brothers and I, it was all too much - the thought of being hated for something external to our beings and yet so intertwined into your person just felt wrong - and the growing feeling of powerlessness surrounding us was enough for us to take up arms - and then march around the backyard in defiance. As we spent the rest of our afternoon playing soldiers, we shouted and threw rocks at our imagined enemy: 

"No one is going to hate any of us because we look different - that is stupid. Racists are stupid! We hate racists!" 

My youngest brother caught on quickly- 

"We're racist against racists!" he shouted, "and we're going to hunt them down and kill them all before they hurt anyone!". 

As we continued to ready ourselves for battle, we chanted our new mantras in unity, three terrified little soldiers readying themselves to fight the unimaginable and ethereal problem of racism. Little did we know, that the real enemy was already silently creeping into our hearts, and would impact our lives in a much bigger way than racism ever had.

The real enemy, of course, was hatred. Racism without hatred is a horse with broken legs - unable to march to war, not useful for work on the farm, not even capable of reproducing - only waiting to die or be eaten, and then become nothing but a memory. While racism may feel like the worst of villains - when hatred is removed from it, it becomes little more than prejudice married with ignorance - and while prejudice and ignorance cause many problems on their own - they are easily cured with compassion, shared understanding, and experience (the antonyms of hatred). 

A Worldwide Problem

Prejudice and ignorance are certainly a large part of humanity's problems: in the 12 years that I have spent living cross-culturally, I have seen and experienced both prejudice, ignorance, and even persecution more times than I can count. Most of the world (at least every ethnic group I've lived with or visited) is guilty of prejudice and ignorance - preferring people of their own ethnic-group over outsiders. Even outsiders who (to everyone else) seem to look just like them, could actually be their mortal enemies. 

The universality of this kind of prejudice is what anthropologists call ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one's culture or people group (greek ethnos) is superior to all others, and the summary judgment of outsiders based on one's own cultural standards. 

"Our language is the hardest to learn, which is why most foreigners can never speak it well - they are less intelligent than we are!". 

While it may surprise you, this is a sentence that I have heard dozens of times, in many different countries. Likewise, the compliments I have received for being 'different from the rest of your race' are the norm with these kinds of intercultural experiences. 

So what can be done to heal the wounds of prejudice, ignorance, and racism? While every racist act of violence is guided by prejudice, it has never been the real problem - and moving beyond our hyper-focus on racism may be part of the answer. While many wars have been fought with racism as their catalyst, no wars have been fought without hatred as the sustaining fuel for the fire. Why then is our focus solely on racism? It may very well be that while hatred is the real root of our societal problems, racism is a much easier target because (at least on the surface) it seems much easier to identify, and therefore much easier to vilify. 

Any person that has been around people from a different ethnic group (think "race", though I would argue that the word race in of itself is probably a misnomer) has experienced or felt the pullings of ethnocentrism and the resulting prejudices - though they may have fought it or been taught out of it, they were at least in part aware of its underlying presence, the same way that we are aware of an awkward silence. 

The Moral Problem of Fighting Racism

"Only a horrible person would become a racist!", people tell themselves - convinced in their hearts and minds that by some great moral fortitude or profound enlightenment they are incapable of such a base and vile thing as racism, and yet totally unaware of their own cultural biases. 

But while racism, we are told, is reserved only for the morally bankrupt (though anthropology has proven otherwise), hatred can hide in even the purest of hearts and will latch onto any pain or fear it can find - whether morally debased or noble. While morally-debased hatred (like racism) seems hideous to our society, noble hatred (like from the oppressed towards their oppressor) is often accepted with no questions asked - and when this noble hatred is groomed just right, it can even pass itself off as righteous-indignation. The truth, however, is that hatred in all of its forms - whether the hatred of the perpetrator for the victim - or the victim for the perpetrator, all lead to the same mire of violence and despair. Hatred, it would seem, is the real human enemy. 

Had my brothers and I had a father, he may have spoken to us about our fear and hatred that day. He may have told us that while we were justified in feeling angry and scared - that hatred was the real enemy we had to contend with - and that hatred can only be defeated by love - which is why Jesus went to the greatest of extremes - even dying voluntarily at the hands of violent men - to teach us how to love our enemies; but as young men, we had no so such father. For my family, the many experiences we had being a mixed-race family (among many other hardships) lead us to fill our hearts with hatred and violence, seemingly as a way to protect ourselves from becoming targets, but this ultimately led to very real problems with hatred and violence of our own.

A History of Violence

Hatred, it would seem, almost always leads to violence. Though this violence may not always be manifested physically (indifference and manipulation are the quiet older siblings of physical violence) its effects can be traced through the generations. Though I could tell you about a lot of experiences in my childhood that stuck out - the violent ones always seem the most vivid. The memories of fear and power that I can visualize (both suffering violence at home and in turn wielding it as a weapon towards others) fill me with both dread and awe. But violence, like the hatred that begets it, is learned behavior and will soon be mimicked: there is nothing scarier than being a victim of violence - except of course for watching yourself use that same violence to assert yourself over others. 

Though I lost many years of my adolescence working through the violence of my childhood - there was one key thing that brought about the most change in my thinking and actions: I had to come to terms with the horrible experiences I lived through as a child that I could not change, but I could break the hated that was birthed in my through those experiences by choosing to forgive, and ask for forgiveness - and committing myself to walk in that forgiveness whenever those memories came up or new circumstances arrived to trigger my response. 

I thank God every day that I was able to learn these lessons before starting a family of my own - but my heart is still broken when I see others continuing down the same path that I left, and that is often how I have felt watching things evolve politically in our society.

Society's Solution

While racism is an endemic problem that needs to be addressed through education and shared experiences; it has been exacerbated by our current culture and the tendency to want to fight fire with fire. The conversation that our culture is having about racism is only the latest example of this: smoldering fires along every major line of division (whether social class or political party or perceived race or religion) in the US and many European countries have been spun into flames; while the media (who have higher audience retention during times of intense emotional conflict) fan the hatred by continually blaming one group or the other, and compelling normal people among every group to feel deep feelings of injustice and powerlessness - until they cannot do anything more but take a stand. 

The result of so many individuals taking a stand against hatred by embracing hatred themselves has started a firestorm of hate, and the lack of discourse and trust between different groups makes it almost inextinguishable. The only possible outcome of so much hatred is violence - against anyone around them (society, the state, any group that is perceived as the enemy). But there is one antidote: Love. And if Jesus could love those who hated him, then so can we. We may even find that in doing so, not only will we save ourselves from the fire, but also our enemies too.