I’m pausing in the series of “Why am I so tired?” posts to interact with an altogether different kind of tired conversation.
“This is not who we are.”
I was recently sent these words in a correspondence responding to yet another instance of racism and bigotry caught on camera. But they were nothing new. It seems every time a person of color or other minority culture individual is assaulted, degraded, mocked, killed, or otherwise suffers at the hands of someone from the majority culture, we hear a similar sentiment. “That is sad and unacceptable… but remember, it’s not who we are.”
What a cop-out.
Let’s be honest here: This is who we are.
Until we are willing to acknowledge that who we are is broken and who we are is not who we want to be, I don’t know how anything will change. If we convince ourselves “this isn’t who we are,” then we minimize the voices inviting us to be better, to be different, to own our individual and corporate need to really see the image of God in each and every person. We hush the Voice inviting us to be new and we push away the invitation to be desperate in pursuit of real transformation.
When we say, “but this is not who we are,” we are saying instances of bigotry in all its sundry forms are simply outliers–acts perpetrated always and only by “someone else” with no connection to us or the systems and practices we engage with every day. It means we never have to look at ourselves and what we allow or perpetuate.
When we say, “this is not who we are,” then it’s only someone else who must do something; the rest of us don’t have to do anything–we can shake our collective head from a distance, wrapped in the warm embrace of imagining all of this to be someone else’s problem. We don’t need to be sorrowful or move into discomfort to take any ownership for where we are…because that’s not who we are.
Instead, let’s try, “This is not who we want to be, and we must find a new way.” By itself, this won’t solve or fix anything, but it’s a start.
