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Just listening to Sheila, I felt a familiar knot in my own stomach. I saw my son going down the driveway in that dark green Hondo all those years ago. Seeing him in my mind, in that driver’s seat still evoked the same scary thoughts and feelings. He might go too fast, get pulled over, run into something, damage the car, he could be hurt. “He could mouth off to the police. Then who knows what.” Sheila’s words jerked me out of the re-run playing in my mind. I stared at her face. She wasn’t worried about a ticket, a bent fender – her son could be killed, shot. Her fear was palpable. And it was a rational worry – one I certainly had never had. That was the first time I was struck viscerally by what it might be like to be black in this country.
I have been slapped in the face by that difference of being black in the United States a few times since then. A gentle minister friend of mine, after being pulled over by the police for no apparent reason, turned toward the open window to see the nozzle of a revolver in this face. Intelligent and insightful Cynthia became anxious about getting out of the car near a white neighborhood to watch a shower of falling stars; she didn’t have binoculars or a telescope to bear witness to her intention.
My awareness of the pervasiveness of systemic racism in this country has been intensified in Christ the King’s Anti-Racism Reading Group. The accounts in the various books have shocked me, perhaps those in Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law more than any other. I am not a person who believes my country is without faults, any more that I believe I am a person without faults – but I had not realized how deeply racism has disfigured our national character, my character, until recently. Certain people, policies and institutions have isolated me from my fellow countrymen, blinded me to their lived experience - and I have willingly turned a blind eye to our national stain. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Nostra culpa, nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa.