CS 5 - This is in our DNA
This is in our DNA
My second cousin
I couldn’t believe what I was looking at as I sat on the stairs in my house on that Saturday night holding my phone reading the news article about the tragedy unfolding in Buffalo, NY. My brother had just texted the group chat saying, “Did you see what Pam and Paul’s son just did in Buffalo?” Peyton Gerndon, my second cousin, was responsible for driving 3 ½ hours to Buffalo, NY to murder 10 black people in an act of white supremacy.
To this date, I have never met or talked to Peyton, but there’s a cultural and familial connection. Peyton Gerndon is literally in my DNA. The week before from Tuesday to Friday I went on a Sankofa trip through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee seeing the worst of how white supremacy had oppressed and killed black people. We spent the day in Sumner, Mississippi visiting the courthouse and the barn where Emmitt Till was lynched. I remember flying back Friday night on the airplane completely numb at what I had just witnessed for 4 days.
And then it happened again 24 hours later and this time it’s in my own family. What does one do with this? The normal reaction is to distance ourselves from such a heinous crime and say that this had nothing to do with me, but is that the call of the gospel? Is that what the Black community in Buffalo needs and wants?
This is about standing in solidarity with the black church that’s suffering right now, condemning the sinful practices of white supremacy, and changing the narrative that led to this terrible act of violence. This is why it’s important that the white church stands together with the Black, Latino, and Asian church in solidarity and say, “enough is enough” and seek to deconstruct the demonic system of white supremacy that has led to this. Prayers and thoughts are not enough, the church is called to action. As Miroslov Volf said, “There is something deeply hypocritical about praying for a problem you are unwilling to solve.”
I wrote this in my journal four days after the event happened; “It’s been four days now since I received a text message from my brothers asking if I’ve heard the news. I’m sick right now. My heart breaks for the families of the victims of the people who were killed by a sick, fallen, disgusting white supremacist individual. Moms were murdered. Dads were murdered. Brothers were murdered. Sisters were murdered. Aunts, Uncles, Grandmothers, Grandfathers, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, etc. All murdered. And it was done by my second cousin. I am numb now as I was sitting on the steps reading the news. I have never met and I have never known the sick individual that did this. But we’re connected genetically and culturally. This is in my DNA, literally. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the pain you're experiencing right now. I’m sorry the white church is silent once again. I’m sorry white Christian’s don’t know the culture or heritage that they are a part of. I’m sorry for what a culture of whiteness has done to you again and again and again and that your brothers and sisters in Christ stand idly by and blame your pain on Crt, social Marxism and radicalized culture.”
Pastor Crawford and Ms. Karen Loritts have become friends and partners in this work and I reached out to them for prayer and wisdom the days after this event. Pastor Crawford was gracious enough to meet with me the next week after the incident happened and honestly, I was a bit timid because of the deep pain I knew that I would bring up to him. He was very gracious and kind in our meeting, but I could tell this incident hurt him. I’ll never forget what he said when we met; “They enslaved us. They punished us. And now they want to get rid of us.” The “they” Pastor Crawford is talking about is the culture I come from and benefit from.
This is in my DNA
Little did I know that taking ownership of our crazy family was a journey that the Heavenly Father would begin to take me in 2018 when a group of all men journeyed through Latasha Morrison’s Be the Bridge curriculum. That year a diverse group of eight men set out on a journey, four men of color and four white men. What was supposed to be a nine-week study turned into twelve months.
The first step of “Awareness” was fairly easy as we all knew there was an issue of racism in our country. It was when we got to “Acknowledgement and Lament” where we ran into a bit of tension. The response from the men coming from the majority white culture after realizing that there was an issue was to immediately jump in and fix the four hundred years of institutional racism in one year. We wrestled through what can we do together? What are some actionable steps to confront racial injustice?
Sensing the group wasn’t quite getting the severity of racial injustice in this country, our co-leader, Corregan Brown developed an exercise for lament.
The exercise was this:
Do a brief (5-10 minute) informal presentation on an event of racial injustice that occurred in American History.
The event must meet the following criteria:
Happened in America
Less than 100 years old
Against an ethnic minority
The perpetrators were either not prosecuted for at least 25 years, or were never prosecuted
The goal of the course is to expose how present and recent some of these things are to help bring people into a space of lament and acknowledgement of the evil that still is going on. We all presented a racial atrocity in our next session and it seemed to deepen our understanding.
Then Brodie Ballard stood up in front of the group and everything changed. Brodie is a white man in his 50’s, born and raised in the South, and who grew up in Atlanta from the 60’s to the 80’s. He’s been on this journey for a few years of understanding race and in his words, “There’s a huge wound that America has never fully dealt with.”
Brodie described the grotesque and brutal details of the Jesse Washington Lynching in Waco, TX in 1916. He described how a white mob wrapped chains around this 17-year-old young black image bearer of God, drug him from the courthouse and through Waco’s city streets, all the while him being beaten, stabbed, and castrated, before being hung from a tree outside Waco’s City Hall.
As the story unfolded, we learned that an estimated crowd of around 15,000 people watched, in a carnival-like atmosphere, as the lynch mob built a bonfire, hung Washington over the fire, and then repeatedly lowered and raised him for around 2 hours so as to prolong his suffering prior to being burned to death.
During the presentation, Brodie showed us a number of 8 x 10 glossy images of various parts of the lynching. Keep in mind that this public spectacle lynching was so well documented, with a professional photographer capturing the events from various angles over a period of hours, creating images that later would be sold as postcards. We viewed photos of smiling crowds of white folks, juxtaposed with the charred, dead torso of young Jesse Washington, his arms and legs mostly burned off.
As a group, we sat there stunned, trying to process what we had just learned. Brodie showed a photo of onlookers and pointed to one of the white men and uttered the words,
“This is my family. This is in my DNA.”
After a moment of contemplation, Corregan picked up a close-up photo of Washington’s charred, dead body and said,
“This is my family. This is in my DNA.”
Black people bear the emotional weight and generational trauma of their connection to those innocent victims of racial terror lynchings. But far too often, white people try to spurn the emotional weight and generational trauma of their connection to those of their ancestors who committed these same atrocities. Our history includes both the inhumane atrocities on one side and the unspeakable tragedies on the other. We cannot escape our history, even as hard as we try. It’s in our DNA.
When Brodie read the lament, the reality of lament and acknowledgement all become a reality in that moment. We as white men are connected to this event, because it’s a part of our DNA. This is why the theology developed around the Doctrine of the Original Sin of Genesis 3 is so important. As Christians we understand that Adam and Eve’ rebellion in Genesis 3 affects us all. We are all tainted because of this sin. But when it comes to the sin of racism, somehow we easily divorce ourselves from the sin of our culture and think it has nothing to do with us. This is not Biblical. Because of the doctrine of original sin from Genesis 3, what we inherit from the humanity of Adam, and how the American culture has been so impacted by one dominant culture (whiteness), we all carry the weight of the sin of the culture.
Daniel’s Ownership
I would argue that a Biblical response is taking ownership of our crazy family and doing everything in our power to make sure something like this never happens again. Taking ownership of his crazy family is exactly what Daniel does in chapter 9 of his book. Listen to the words of Daniel in chapter 9; “I prayed to the Lord my God and confessed: “Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps his covenant of love with those who love him and keep his commandments, we have sinned and done wrong. We have been wicked and have rebelled; we have turned away from your commands and laws. We have not listened to your servants, the prophets, who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes and our ancestors, and to all the people of the land.”
Following the example of Daniel, we must take ownership of the crazy family members in our culture. Is it painful? Yes. Will there be a sense of shame?Absolutely. Are we guilty? You better believe it. But guilt and shame are products of the fall, confession, ownership and restoration are rooted in the gospel. What Daniel does is stand in the gap on behalf of a foreign nation. These aren't sins that he is complicit in. However, he joined in lamenting and repenting because he was a part of said community. We must name our brokenness and sin, if we are to ever change it. You may not have done this, but the culture you’ve been a part of has been complicit.
Over the years I’ve heard the sentiments from the white community, “I’m not a racist.” Or, “that’s not us.” This misses the point that God is trying to help the church get. We are a part of this system that did this. Like pollution, we have inherited something. None of us caused pollution, but we are affected by it by what happened before. We now know that trauma carries over generations and those of us from the majority white culture have to enter into this trauma. Jeffrey Robinson writes in, “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America”; “If you have ever owned a slave, please raise your hand. And there’s not one hand going up anywhere in this theater. Slavery is not our fault. We didn’t do it. We didn’t cause it. It is not our responsibility. But it is our shared history. And when we try and turn it into something that it’s not, and we try to make more light of it than it was, then we are denying who we really are and we are impeding our ability to move forward as a community and as a nation.”
This was one of my biggest struggles the days, weeks and months after my second cousin did what he did in Buffalo. So many well meaning people would offer support and say, “Dan, that had nothing to do with you.” While I do agree with that sentiment, it misses the larger narrative of how a culture of whiteness and white supremacy created this and how everyone in the white community is connected to this. The reality is that Peyton Gerndon didn’t go to Buffalo to kill white people. He went there to specifically kill black people who he didn’t know. A culture of whiteness protects white people from atrocities like this. It is because of this that it’s hard for those coming from majority culture to take ownership.
Dynamite Bob
It’s because of this lack of ownership in the white church and community that allows silence and complicity and this is exactly what happened in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama with a guy named Robert Childress who was white. Birmingham was known during the Civil Rights time as, “Bomingham” and Robert Childress fit this culture with a nickname, “Dynamite Bob.” Robert Childress was overheard saying the day before the bomb went off at 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young black girls; “Just wait till after Sunday morning, and they will beg us to let them segregate.” Robert Childress would only be tried in 1977 a whole 13 years later in 1977, ironically the year I was born. He was finally prosecuted in 1981.
As I heard this story in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, I couldn’t help but think, how come no one said anything when Robert spoke those words, “Just wait till after Sunday morning, and they will beg us to let them segregate.” It was his young niece at the time that overheard him say this and I’m sure there was fear in her, but why couldn’t she say something to her parents about what crazy Uncle Bob was about to do? What about everyone around him that is a part of the same culture and the same family DNA?
Peter’s False Self
This is why what Peter does in Antioch is so detrimental to the mission of God as he was a part of a culture of Jewish superiority that forbade him to eat with Gentiles. Peter knew better than to get up from eating with his new brothers and sisters in Christ who were Gentiles. He had seen and witnessed what the gospel was doing both vertically and horizontally as it reconciled people to God and to each other. Peter had received the vision in Acts 10 that the Gentiles were now part of the covenant. He had argued for Gentile inclusion at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15.
But yet, here he was in Antioch not wanting to eat with Gentiles. Why? Peter had a sinful nature called the “false self”. The false self is that part in all of us that has a sin nature because of the fall of humanity. Paul calls it the flesh. Peter’s false self had been shaped so much by his Jewish culture of superiority that it allowed him to look down on Gentiles.
The false self is manifested all through the Bible and has eight different characterizations as Robert Mulholland unpacks in his book, The Deeper Journey. One of those eight characterizations of the false self is described as the distinction making self as, “Our false self is characterized by a need to categorize others in ways that always gives us the advantage. Since our false self is a way of being that positions us “over against” all others, others must be evaluated and labeled in such a way as to keep them either inferior to us or affirming and supportive “equals.””
He goes on to say; “The history of human life on this planet is a long example of what happens when a person (or a community of persons) lives out a posture of separateness with respect to others. This posture reduces others to objects to be manipulated for our purposes, whether those purposes be political, economic, social, cultural, religious, ethnic or whatever. When we meet resistance to our manipulations, we respond with violence of some sort that in turn results in retaliatory violence by those on whom we inflicted our violence.”
And here’s the deal, it’s in all of us! Culture shapes our false selves in such a way that it is constantly making those we look down on us, “the other”. It happens every time I go home to upstate Pennsylvania. I see my (white) people at the local Wal-Mart dressed in not so desirable clothing and walking at a slow pace and I judge. Growing up on a farm in rural PA in Bumpville, we always had a name for people who grew up in trailer parks….trailer trash, or worse, white trash. The worst part is that I don’t even know where it comes from, it just happens. Why? Because I have a false self that’s been shaped by culture and that’s in my DNA that loves to categorize and look down upon others to make myself feel better. (the irony is that I’m sure we got judged by people for living on a stinky farm….)
In Galatians 3 Paul says something so interesting; “Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.”
Verse 10 is key here, “and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.” Here Paul is talking about how Christ has given us a true self through repentance of our sins and placing our faith in Christ. This is why he begins the third chapter, “Since then…”
But context is everything as we engage the Bible. What’s happening in this section of scripture? What happens as a result of the new self in Christ begins to live through us? Paul’s next words are HUGE, “Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.”
Paul is making the argument that because of the new self in Christ, we no longer can categorize or distinguish people or groups. But, what we fail to miss in this text and argument (and what Paul deals with a lot in his letters), is what the false self or old man does to different people groups. The false self in us categorizes and makes distinctions in order to control, manipulate and have power over.
The false self shaped Peyton Gerndon. It shaped Dynamite Bob. It shapes me.
I still struggle with the "false self of ism’s” that likes to categorize and control people and drives me to my need for Christ's forgiveness. Because of the way sin has structured our society, I have racism, sexism, classism and cultural superiority within me. A pastor friend stated in a sermon to his church, “Humanity is trapped in an endless cycle of internal conflict and external chaos.”
I’ve been on this journey for fifteen years seeking Christ to live out the new humanity across color, class, culture and gender. When I am living out of the false self, it’s amazing and greatly troubling what comes out of me that profiles, classifies, categorizes, or puts others down. And I’m not alone. We all struggle with the false self, which creates the other, because this is in our DNA.
A close friend, Renee Bryan, who’s a follower of Jesus and a Licensed Counselor who’s African-American put it like this; “From a mental health perspective, systemic racism and emotional health remains easier to not look at because when white evangelicals begin to truly look at the history and present issues, it will unearth so much wickedness and evil which then forces people to look at themselves individually and collectively. This also forces people to look at how they are currently contributing (whether they consciously know it or not) to the oppression of marginalized populations. Who wants to readily look at that!!! Hence you see the self-preservation and pie in the sky thought processes occurring in order to soothe the conscience.”
The Iceberg Culture of White Supremacy
This is why it’s important to understand that a culture of white supremacy is like an iceberg. The iceberg analogy is used many times, but for culture it fits perfectly. We can normally only see the top 10% of the iceberg as the other 90% exists below the surface of the water. This is the part that supports the top and creates the most damage. When murders like George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery happen in 2020, we are seeing the tips of the iceberg of white supremacy. What we fail to see is the culture that lurks below the surface of the water and is as deadly as the tip. The iceberg below the water is a culture of whiteness that has segregated churches, neighborhoods, schools, etc. There are extreme forms of whiteness manifested in white supremacist activities, like my second cousin, and there’s more subtle forms, but it’s all connected. So much of white supremacy is subtle and goes unbidden.
This is why the response, “I am not a racist”, misses the point when it comes to conversations of race and racism. A core doctrine to the Christian Church is the doctrine of original sin. We’re born into the doctrine of original sin in a country founded upon a thing called white supremacy, and so we’ve been conditioned from the start. We all have biases, prejudices, and racist tendencies, why? Because we are born into sin and have been shaped to see others in certain kinds of ways.
So what do we do with all of this? For those of us coming from the majority culture we own this story because this is in our DNA. We don’t say things like, “I had nothing to do with that” Or, “That has nothing to do with me.” We own the culture that creates people like Peyton Gerndon and Robert Childress. We take responsibility for the crazy people in our family and seek to educate as many as possible. Sure, we might not be able to change their actions, but we do everything in our power to speak out against this and warn others about how dangerous they are.
We own the disparities and the privileges that have resulted from hundreds of years of legislated racism in our culture. We seek to undo the evil and wicked system that created this. Churches that are not having this conversation about culture are in many ways perpetuating and ignoring the problem.
We own the pain and discomfort that comes from the black and brown community and don’t run away when it becomes uncomfortable. We choose to step into the tough conversations, the attacks, the spiritual oppression, being misjudged, etc. for the sake of Gospel unity.
We acknowledge how we’ve all been tainted by the fall, which results in all of us looking down and judging others. God can’t heal what we conceal and so we’re honest about the division that lies with our hearts. In order for us to really heal as a country and church, we need surgery to remove this cancerous sin in us called “isms”. It’s in all of us. Let’s not ignore that, but the good news of the gospel is as Paul says in Romans 2, “not realizing that God’s kindness I intended to lead you to repentance.” It is God’s kindness that he allows us to look at this evil that’s been lurking beneath the surface of our lives and face it. We can only gain access to this new humanity when we choose to face the evils of our culture and the evil that’s inside each of us.
Something that’s helped me in owning and acknowledging that I’m a part of this culture that has done this is to write confessions. This is a confession I wrote:
Most merciful and loving God, I confess that I have been a part of a sinful system that has oppressed, segregated, lynched, and marginalized those different than me.
I confess that I have been blind to this sinful system that has given me more rights than others.
I confess that I have been a part of a majority church that has stood on the side of the oppressor, rather than standing with Jesus on the side of the oppressed.
I confess that at times I willfully participated in this sinful system because it works for me.
I acknowledge all of this and bring it before you so that it may be brought to the light and healed.
Heal my sinful and wicked heart that does the same when I am operating out of my sinful false self.
I wrote a prayer of confession in 2019 that our friend Latasha Morrison asked me to contribute to her book, Be the Bridge; “I confess that I have been part of a system of whiteness that has oppressed, stolen, and killed those who are different from me.” The family of God that comes from the majority culture has to confess that we are a part of the system that’s done this and that our silence is betrayal.
To the white Church, I say this gently and with all of the love and compassion that the Holy Spirit gives me; we have to take ownership of what our culture does to people of color. We have to see whiteness and white supremacy in all of its ungliness and seek to dismantle this as much as we can so that it no longer impacts our brothers and sisters of color.
Paul saw how damaging Peter’s Jewish Cultural Superiority was affecting the new Gentile believers in Antioch and so he confronted them. I’m attempting to do the same to my brothers and sisters in the white church. I desire to do what Paul does to the letter in Colossians; “admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ.”