Deciding what to think—and do—about an issue that hasn’t gone away

By Mark A. Taylor

My friend Adrian Williams became a leadership development consultant and professional mediator for companies across the country after retiring from a successful ten-year stint in the Navy. He is a founding member of the John Maxwell Team for leadership training, and he has lived and traveled all over the world. He has a son in college and a swimming pool in his backyard. He lives in a suburb north of Cincinnati, and he’s a member of my church. My wife and I got acquainted with him when we attended an adult elective class he taught there.

Since then, we have always greeted each other warmly in the hallway before and after Sunday-morning worship. And, even in those limited snippets of time, our conversations regularly drifted to the subject of race in America and race in the church.

You’ll understand that better when I tell you that Adrian is African-American.

A troubling report

A few weeks ago he texted me the link to a report posted at NBC News. It told of a years-long conflict in Southlake, Texas, an “elite, mostly white suburb thirty miles northwest of Dallas.” The trouble began with an eight-second video clip of Southlake white high school students who filmed themselves laughing and using the N-word at a party.

Robin Cornish, the African-American wife and mother featured in the report, said she wasn’t surprised by the video. It was typical of a pattern of racist jibes that some  African-American parents in her community had discussed for years. They called it Southlake’s “dirty secret.” Perhaps you will be surprised, or perhaps you might expect, how this had been experienced by Cornish’s children. The report gave examples:

 This was the city where, on the day after Rosa Parks died in 2005, elementary school children told Cornish’s four oldest kids “now you have to sit in the back of the bus,” she said. It’s where a sixth grade boy once joked with her son: “How do you get a Black out of a tree? You cut the rope.” It’s where, weeks after her husband died suddenly in 2008, a white boy on the football team told her son, “Your mom is only voting for Obama because your dad is dead and she's going to need welfare.”

 She would have dismissed this video as just one more unreported incident, but for some reason the video went viral, and officials were upset. The school board called a special meeting where community members could share their thoughts and report their experiences. This eventually led to the formation of a sixty-three-member community diversity council to explore solutions. This group eventually produced a thirty-four-page Cultural Competence Action Plan that called for cultural sensitivity training in the schools, among other measures.

A furious pushback

The community uproar over this initiative was fast and furious. Two years later—after a flood of fiery complaints and emails, the formation of a well-funded political action committee to oppose it, and finally a lawsuit to prevent the plan’s implementation—it is stalled, and the PAC is backing two of the plan’s opponents in the upcoming May school board election.

The NBC report includes more disturbing details than I have room to include here, but perhaps you’ve read enough to imagine the frustration and grief I felt when I went back to see what my friend Adrian said about the article when he texted me the link:

“While my experiences have been somewhat different than those described in the article,” he wrote, “it still speaks to a lot that I have and still endure in my predominantly white/affluent neighborhood and surroundings.”

Three words in that text stung me most: I still endure.

A difficult reckoning

Adrian ran for school board in his district where a school basketball team had been videoed wearing T-shirts with racist comments scrawled on the back. Not only did the district not have a board member of color, but it employed not one Black person at any level in any building—no teachers, no secretaries, no counselors, no support personnel. (He lost the election, but another Black man did win.)

Adrian told me once he’s lost count of how often he’s been stopped in his car for no real reasons, at least 11 times in the last 10 years, once in his own neighborhood. “Hey, you live not far from here, don’t you?” the officer said, obviously surprised, when Adrian showed him his license. In all those stops, never once was he cited.

What does it mean that a soft-spoken, educated, accomplished Black American man must still wonder, in 2021, when he will be stopped for no reason simply because of his skin color?

And what does it mean that, at this late date, in the eighth decade of my life, I’m just beginning to grasp that life for Adrian is so much different than what I experience—in the same community, in the same church, but not in the same surroundings because his professional accomplishments are much greater than mine?

What does it mean, at this late date, that I’m just beginning to grasp
how different life is for him?

And what does it mean that Adrian is more of a warm acquaintance than truly a friend? We’ve never eaten a meal together. He’s never been in my home. More to the point, what does it mean that the only Black person I’ve ever had in my home was one of my wife’s African students? What does it mean that I’m still working to overcome the embedded notion in the background of my psyche that Black folks are fundamentally Them, not Us?

A personal decision

The answer to my questions, the response to my ignorance, is more overwhelming than I want to face, frankly.

But now that we’re in Black History Month, now as the agitated protests against racial injustice have subsided in our cold, Covid winter, I realize I must not turn away from my questions.

Last year a friend posted an article about racial justice on Facebook, describing himself as “just another white guy trying to figure this out.” Perhaps that’s the right balance: No heaps of self-induced shame for prejudices I inherited in a world that bred them into me. But also no ignoring difficult realities that for me, like so much of white America, are still only vaguely grasped. As Dean Collins wrote several days ago, “We are called to love mercy, walk humbly, and do justice. Loving one’s neighbors as one loves self demands that we work for the justice of our neighbors.”

I don’t presume to know enough about how any reader of this blog should cope with this. But in another post or two, I’m going to wrestle with this some more. I resonate with a quote from Flannery O’Connor: “I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say.” So I’ll write, because I’m still deciding what to think, and more important, what to do about an issue I’ve decided I can’t ignore.

Photos by Oladimeji Ajegbile from Pexel, Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash, and Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unsplash

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