{"id":3893,"date":"2017-03-02T12:58:18","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T17:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/?p=3893"},"modified":"2017-03-02T12:58:18","modified_gmt":"2017-03-02T17:58:18","slug":"a-white-reflection-on-black-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/2017\/03\/02\/a-white-reflection-on-black-history\/","title":{"rendered":"A White Reflection on Black History"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like most white Americans<\/strong>, I have a limited understanding of my ancestry. An \u201coriginal, first-generation German-speaking Eppley\u201d, we think, immigrated from Europe into the \u201cPennsylvania German\u201d area sometime before the War for Independence.<\/p>\n

By 1948 my part of the Eppley clan lived in the Carolinas where I was born, 16 years before the Civil Rights Act \u2013 20 years before the Fair Housing legislation of 1968.<\/p>\n

Please understand that I grew up in a time and place in which our version of \u201cwhite apartheid\u201d was in full effect. So these reflections are not abstract, symbolic or metaphorical. They are all too real.<\/p>\n

I <\/b>presume<\/b> to be Caucasian<\/b>, although I really have no idea what my \u201cancestral DNA\u201d might show. Because of my appearance, I was never prevented from eating <\/i>at<\/i> any restaurant <\/i>or lunch counter<\/i>, swimming in any public pool. <\/i>I was never<\/i> forced to attend a substandard school, relegated\u00a0to the back doors of any home, told that I could not marry outside my race, or prevented from living in any neighborhood that I could afford.<\/i><\/p>\n

I grew into adulthood in a white-centric, fully segregated southern society. The dividing-line was all about appearance.<\/i> We clearly distinguished between ourselves<\/i>, and those others<\/i> \u2013 those people of color. We even called them colored<\/i>, when in polite company. We laughed at our racial jokes made at their expense \u2013 which, by the way, we did not call colored<\/i> jokes (if you get my drift).<\/p>\n

Yet our<\/i> thinking was clearly colored<\/i> \u2013 colored with racism. We were white and they were \u2026 well whatever we chose to call them. It was all about appearance. It was either white entitlement, or no privilege at all.<\/p>\n

I am just a few years shy of 70 years. 70 years. Do you realize that 1870 plus 70 is 1940? And that the 15th<\/sup> Amendment of 1870 essentially had been nullified<\/i> long before I was born in 1948, and would continue to be for another 22 years? As a result, there were few \u201ccolored\u201d folk voting in the South when I was born.<\/p>\n

Quite often I hear<\/b> some of my white contemporaries speak of the Civil Rights Movement as if it were some sort of benevolence given by the white folk on behalf of the others. If you are too young to know better<\/i>, don\u2019t you believe it. \u00a0Or if you are so old that you have some sort of selective amnesia<\/i> \u2013 well, that\u2019s why we have historians.<\/p>\n

We kind, white, Christian people did not wake up one day and say, \u201cYou know, God has just put on our collective\u00a0heart to extend social justice to all mankind.\u201d<\/p>\n

The truth is that the southern white church was often the bastion of segregation \u2013 a meeting place where people of like appearance spoke in serious tones regarding those people who just would not keep their place. Advocacy for social justice was called Social Gospel. \u00a0We were having none of that, thank you kindly!<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"I was raised in white Churches of Christ \u2013 was a Church of Christ preacher until the 1980\u2019s. During that time, neither in the particular Church of Christ college nor the congregations I attended, was I ever told that I had an older, African-American Church of Christ counterpart \u2013 a \u201ccolored\u201d preacher but with a law degree.<\/p>\n

This Church of Christ\u00a0brother<\/i> was <\/i>none other than Fred Gray \u2013 <\/i>Rosa Parks\u2019 and Martin Luther King <\/i>Jr<\/i>\u2019s <\/i>Alabama <\/i>lawyer<\/i>, who helped to desegregate the state as well as to lay the legal foundation for national civil rights legislation. That I <\/i>w<\/i>ould not even know that<\/i> until relatively recently speaks volumes of the \u201cwhite church disconnect\u201d to social justice.<\/p>\n

In that time our black Civil Rights <\/b>a<\/b>ctivists<\/b>\u00a0were really not ours at all<\/i>. \u00a0Every <\/i>movement<\/i> toward racial equality was an effort to claw one\u2019s way toward the light of freedom and dignity<\/i>. It was slow, and painful, and dangerous, and it was not pretty. \u00a0We good white church folk were virtually no help at all! \u00a0We just watched, bless our sweet hearts. \u00a0We just watched and shook our heads.<\/p>\n

During the 1960’s I was attending two worship services and two Bible classes each week. \u00a0My black counterparts were attending church sponsored workshops which literally taught young adults how to assume a fetal position to protect against violence during their non-violent demonstrations. \u00a0They were black Christians literally turning the other cheek, while trying to keep their teeth!\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

We white church folk<\/em>, secure in our white superiority, dared to flaunt it before our God. We\u00a0bragged about being a Christian nation<\/i>, a nation of laws<\/i>, as we pressed a sanctified white foot on the necks of those whose appearance was different than ours.<\/p>\n

Yet, I celebrate Black History Month.<\/b> I celebrate it with humility and reverence. With a profound and renewed sense of the \u201cgreater we\u201d, I dare to embrace it as our<\/i> national history, but hopefully not like some white politico who seeks to appropriate it for his own perverted purpose.<\/p>\n

I dare to celebrate it as one who is not worthy. \u00a0I esteem those determined, dark-skinned, faith-filled advocates of equality to be \u201cthose of whom my world was not worthy\u201d — not unlike the faithful of Hebrews 11:38!<\/em><\/p>\n

I celebrate it as truly our <\/i>nation\u2019s <\/i>story<\/i> \u2013 one in which people of my appearance played our part. And I openly confess that the gains made on behalf of the \u201ccolored others\u201d were, generally speaking, made in spite of people who looked like me. Which is why people of my appearance have reason for some reflection.<\/p>\n

So here I am in 2017<\/b>, almost 70 years since my birth, contemplating our future. I spend a lot of my time with people of brown complexion, Hispanics who understand that their very appearance makes them suspect. If they are not Mexican, they are suspected to be Mexican.<\/p>\n

If they are of Mexican ancestry, then they are suspected to be \u201cillegals\u201d. And should they be undocumented residents, then they are suddenly suspect as dangerous drug-dealers and rapists on the loose in our society, our white<\/i> society.<\/p>\n

Even U.S. born Hispanics are included in the stereotype, and are subject to taunting by their white peers. The walls that they see being constructed are not at the southern border, but rather are built in the heart, along the lines of appearance, along the lines of color, along the lines of language, or whatever arbitrary distinction one chooses in order to create a distinct THEY .<\/em><\/p>\n

As long as we keep building these walls, it will take far more than a trip to a Black History museum to keep us from Taking America Back there again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Larry is committed to the “Greater We”, embracing and celebrating our nation’s diverse backgrounds and cultural histories.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, raised during the 50’s and 60’s, strict racial segregation\u00a0was a way of life in the South.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Black History Month ends, Larry recalls a time of “we-they thinking” in this honest, confessional reflection of his formative years, believing that there is much to be learned from the past, as long as we are not willing to repeat it.<\/p>\n Continue reading →<\/span><\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3923,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christian-perspective","category-frontpage","category-race-relations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/youdidntask.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}