One of my proudest parenting moments came many years ago when our four-year old Ethan came home from preschool talking about a friend he had played with. He didn’t know her name, so Joy asked him to describe her. He said that she was the girl with marbles in her hair. We smiled when we realized that he was talking about a black girl in his class. To most people the obvious identifying feature of this girl was the color of her skin. But not to Ethan. It was that she had braided and decorated her hair with “marbles”. He didn’t see color. He saw marbles.
The racial tensions in the US have caused me to reflect on my own childhood experiences related to race. One of the most formative experiences in my life occurred in middle school. This was in the early 70s when the racial tensions of the 60s were still percolating in my small north Texas community. The rumor around school was that a gang of black kids was going to beat up white kids behind the school on a particular day. Lots of kids, black and white, were afraid and asked their parents if they could stay home. I was afraid. I asked my parents if I could stay home that day. “Absolutely not,” was their firm reply. “You’re not going to sacrifice your perfect attendance over this silliness.” I went to school that day, and absolutely nothing happened. I learned an important lesson that day: some people will stoke racial fears to manipulate others.
I also learned that my parents were right about race. They didn’t see skin color as the primary defining characteristic of a person. Shaped by their strong Christian faith, they taught me to love all people – “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.” I was inoculated against racism by a Sunday school song, and I understood from Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech which envisioned a post-racial society, that we were not to judge people by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. That principle seems thoroughly Christian and undeniably true.
It seems that the effect of modern diversity training, however well-intentioned it may be, has been to undo that catechism I experienced as a child, telling us that we absolutely must see color and give it top priority in our prejudgment of others. As a result, I believe it has pushed our society to become more polarized than ever around the issue of racial identity. Rather than seeing individuals, we have become conditioned to see people sorted by color, and we are taught to prejudge them on this basis, assuming life experiences and attitudes that are not necessarily so. It seems to me that this approach has only heightened our sensitivity to race to the point that we see color first and foremost instead of as one characteristic among many. To put it bluntly, it is has tended to make us all more racist (in the traditional meaning of the word), prejudging others purely on the color of their skin.
The namesake of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a German reformer who championed individual rights. Over 500 years ago, in a time when social class structure was unyielding, his revolutionary idea was that anyone could interpret the scriptures for themselves, and a person is accountable to God for their own actions. As that idea worked its way through populations, individual rights became one of the hallmarks of western civilization, and it is no coincidence then that western societies influenced by the Reformation were the first to abandon slavery and champion the rights of the individual.
Luther’s radical idea was rooted in the fundamental New Testament teaching that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The Bible couldn’t be more clear or revolutionary on this teaching. Each one of us is seen by God as a member of one race, the human race. Of course, God made us all different colors, so naturally we see and celebrate color. We see it in the same way that we see male and female. It is important, but it is not ultimate.
In spite of the cultural pressure to make the color of one’s skin ultimate, I’m going to stick with MLK and the apostle Paul on this one and refuse to pre-judge another person in any way based on the color of their skin. I’m convinced the world would be a better place if we could see one another first through the eyes of a child – not as red, yellow, black or white but simply as “precious in His sight.” I’m going to continue to see the marbles before I see the melanin.
May the nations be glad and sing for joy,
for you rule the peoples with equity
and guide the nations of the earth.
May the peoples praise you, God;
may all the peoples praise you. (Psalm 47:4-5)