Gifts

Once a month or so, I gather on Zoom with some women from our church (mostly white) and some from another church in our city, who are mostly Black. We’ve been meeting with this group of ladies for about five years now. We converted to Zoom in June, due to the you-know-what pandemic.

Our objective has always been to build bridges among ourselves as a way of advancing racial reconciliation and social justice in our community. Since the group started as a book club, we often—but not always—focus on books and our mutual love of reading.

In our Zoom meetings since June, we have been very deliberate about discussing race issues. This was prompted by the shock and sorrow we all felt following the George Floyd killing. We were moved to up our game, energize our commitment. We have discussed specific books, created a running list of relevant titles, and shared our personal experiences with racism.

For our December gathering, we challenged ourselves to imagine a gift we would give to someone else that would deal with the issues of racism and social justice. I sent out the invitation with a couple of suggestions. I’d give the book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo to a number of friends and family members (that I won’t mention by name). I’d give the legislature of Texas a semester course in Black history. I’d give a turkey dinner to all of my Black friends in this group just so we could enjoy each other’s company at length.

And I really would like to give those gifts. But as a participant in the discussion, I had to think up another gift idea to share.

My gift would be to all of the white people in my city and the Black people in my city: a day or a week of swapping places. Here’s why. One of the most enlightening things we do in this group is listen to each other’s stories. We started with some of our Black sisters talking about the racism they lived through. These women grew up in the South and forged their own education and careers decades ago when racism was much more overt and sanctioned than it is now. I was a little surprised when they wanted us white women to share our stories, too. We did some soul-searching and discovered that there is much more racism deep in our cultural and family backgrounds than we would like to admit. It was humbling.

We learned a lot from these short descriptions of our personal journeys. Imagine how much we would learn and understand if we actually walked a mile or more in someone else’s shoes.

Several of the sisters on our Zoom call had similar ideas about helping people understand on a visceral level the experiences of people “who don’t look like me.” One suggested a magic mirror to let the viewer see how others see her. Another wanted virtual reality glasses so the user could experience different scenarios. A particularly pointed suggestion was that each of us spend a day in a corporate human resources department interviewing candidates. The trick would be that, by removing anything that would indicate the candidate’s ethnicity, we’d have to base our judgment solely on credentials. This begs the question of what would be the demographic profile of the people we would hire.

All of us on the Zoom call were in agreement that learning about other people’s experience is vital to building bridges and advancing racial reconciliation and social justice.

We also were unanimous in our conviction that the best gift we could give would be a personal relationship with Our Lord Jesus. Only when our weary, broken world embraces Christ’s teaching, “Love your neighbor as yourself” will we have any hope of any kind of reconciliation.