Being a White Minority

        

            I remember when I first felt like a minority in my white skin.  I was studying at Virginia Seminary in the seventies.  For my Clinical Pastoral Education experience in the summer, I was working out of a Lutheran Church at the corner of Sixteenth and V streets in Northwest Washington, DC.   This was in the corridor that was burned during the riots that followed the assassination of Dr. King a few years earlier.

            I was assigned by the pastor of the church to visit people on a street that was composed largely of abandoned buildings.  The people who lived on the street were mostly African American, but there was one white family living there.  I went to the street intending to visit them.  There were no numbers on the houses, so I didn’t know where anyone lived.  There was a kid on one of the corners, about 5 years old, leaning against a wall smoking a cigarette.  I asked him where the family that I was looking for lived.  He responded to my question by saying:  who wants to know?  I knew immediately that I was foreign to him and obviously an outsider.  Eventually, I found the family and spoke with them.  The mother and one child were in their living room and the father was upstairs, closed in his bedroom.  The mother told me that he rarely came out of the room, mostly only for infrequent meals.  He was depressed and alone and she said that she didn’t know what to do about it.

            I thought about this family a lot in the days after that visit.  I talked with the pastor of the church and he asked me what my goal was for that man and for his family.  I told him that I would like to get him out of the room, have a good conversation with him and find a way to get him a job.  The pastor reached over, touched my arm and said, and finally, by your grace, he will attain everlasting life! I knew then what a foolish man I was being and how I was trying to make all things well with a man whom I knew not at all.

            I learned a lot that summer about who I was and what it was that I could reasonably do as a minority in an African-American neighborhood.  Minorities are what we all are, in one way or another.  Certainly, the Caucasian race is a minority in this world.  That is becoming increasingly clear.  It is probably the main reason that we are having trouble with groups that claim the status of white supremacy, such as the KKK or the neo-Nazis at work out there.  Speaking as a member of the white race we all need to understand what being a minority involves.

            Jesus learned something important in the lesson from the Gospel of Matthew.  He was travelling in the area of Tyre and Sidon, a Canaanite populated area.  A woman came to him and asked him to heal her daughter whom she claimed was being tormented by a demon.  Jesus told her that since she was a Canaanite, it wasn’t proper for him to take the children’s food and give it to the dogs.  She quickly responded: yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table!  Jesus knew immediately that she was right and he praised her faith and cured her daughter.  There are two things that I love about this passage.  The first is that the poor woman’s child was healed by our Lord, regardless of the belief, or lack of belief of the mother.  The second is that Jesus learned something profound in this encounter.  That God loves all of the people of the earth, no matter what their color, religion or anything else.  That means a great deal to me when I look at this world of minorities and know that I am a part of it. 

            Over the centuries, we have divided ourselves into many different classes.  These divisions are based on all kinds of things: our race, our religion, our nationality.  We sometimes trumpet these differences and claim that they are the best.  I learned a lot at that Lutheran church, and one of them was that Lutherans have a very nice religion.  I learned a lot in that African American community, that they care for each other and make a healthy neighborhood out of the fact that they have many problems.  They would take turns going to the various charitable groups in the city; the Salvation Army, the Lutheran Service Society, and other places that offered free food or services.  They took turns so that they wouldn’t be turned away for coming too frequently, and it worked. 

            I am repelled by terms like “America First” or any of the statements that make us all sound as if we are the most important people on earth.  The truth is that God loves all of us.  God doesn’t particularly care if we are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or whatever.  God created us all to be the people of God and to take care of each other.  That is what those people on that block that I visited were doing.  It is what we all need to do.  When we take care of each other, the shooting and the shouting won’t stop, but it will tone down a lot, and we can get on with our lives.