Relationships can be tricky between any two people, regardless of their backgrounds. Any time two people come in contact with each other, they bring together very different sets expectations, norms, and experiences. Some walls between people are the walls we create through our actions and choices - but sometimes the walls were built long before either person was even born. They were built by the generations before us - our forefathers and foremothers - and continue to remain an obstacle between people today.
One of these walls is the history and politics of race. For centuries in the land that would become the United States, race-based slavery was a legal and accepted practice. And even after slavery ended officially, it wasn’t until about 60 years ago that racial discrimination was made illegal thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The scars created by slavery, racial abuse, and discrimination remain with us today, and as Christians many of us are left to wrestle with the question, “How would Jesus want us to wrestle with this legacy of trauma?”
In the Bible, when a person or group of people had sinned, we see that God called them to repentance. One way God did this was to call individuals to repent. In the story of Zaccheus we see a man recognize the harm he had caused others and change his behavior, doing all he could to pay people back for the wrong he had done them. But we also see examples of entire groups of people repenting and changing together. In the book of Jonah, the entire city of Ninevah realizes that they have been wrong, and everyone from the King himself down to the poorest person apologizes for their behavior and they change their ways. What can we learn from these powerful stories, and how might those stories apply to us today in the United States?
Early in her adult life, Sarah Sanderson found herself wrestling with these questions. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer in 2020, she found herself once again exploring her role as a Christian woman and a white American citizen, and she discovered that members of her own family had been part of enforcing racism just outside of the town she still lived in through Oregon’s Black exclusion laws in the 1800s, which stated that no Black person was allowed to enter or live in Oregon. Sarah published her findings and experience in a book called “The Place We Make,” which challenges white Americans to reckon with their history, repent of the ways they still benefit from that history, and to work toward a more just and honest future alongside the people around them.
