Spent a nice few days in Green Country Oklahoma this weekend. I was the speaker at a multi-church youth rally Saturday Night and did two services at the host church on Sunday Morning. I’ve never preached back-to-back on Sunday morning, it was kind of different. It is so fun to visit other congregations in completely different environments than the one I currently work in. I work in an inner city part of Dallas with mostly underprivileged kids; and I spent my weekend in middle class America. All is good, but it got me to thinking…
The church I work in here in Dallas is about 50% black, with the rest of us being white or Hispanic. I’ve grown so accustomed to being in mixed race settings, that I noticed almost immediately at the church I visited in Oklahoma that there were NO people of color. When one finally did walk in later in the service, I noticed him right away. In about 6 years time, I’ve gone from noticing I’m the only white person in the room and feeling weird about it, to noticing I’m in a room full of ONLY white people and feeling weird about it. I wonder if my black friends are ever in environments with no white people, and they notice it like I did?
I’ve always felt like racial prejudices are those things we aren’t always aware of having, (whereby racism is something people are fully aware of in their own lives.) For example I remember when I first moved to Dallas I was standing in a grocery store in South Dallas. After standing there for a few minutes, it dawned on me that I was the only white person in the entire store (as far as I could see.) Now I grew up in a racially equal environment, my parents taught me that color only defined skin tone, and not character; and that all races are all equal in every way. Unfortunately we just didn’t have many races in my part Oklahoma, outside of Native Americans. So as I sit in that grocery store, I begin to feel scared. Why was I scared? Why would being the only white person in a room of perfectly gentile black people make me scared? I clearly remember thinking that I needed to deal with this, and it horrified me to think that I had this feeling. I personally feel like moving out of my comfort zone brings me into situations like this where I have to evaluate things about myself that I didn’t know existed. So everytime I hear someone say, “I’m not prejudice!”, I always wonder if they’ve ever put themselves in places to expose if they really do have prejudices. And more importantly, are they willing to bring the prejudices down when they are exposed?
