Crossing the Color Line

Crossing the color line for democracy is the beginning of the journey to repent, repair and redeem America’s Original Sin for white people, especially white Christians.

In an earlier post, I previewed a recent talk I gave in Atlanta at the invitation of Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta. It was something like a TED Talk, but with the Bible, theology, and spirituality as its chief subjects, rather than technology, entertainment and design. I encourage you to check out their great library of talks.

Now, the full video of my talk is available online, and I hope you’ll watch it, and share it with others if you’re inspired to do so. The title is “Crossing the Color Line” and the full text is below the video.

Crossing the Color Line

My first conversion came when a fiery revival preacher came into our church one Sunday night, pointed his finger right at me – it felt like–and all the other “unsaved” kids who were made to sit in the front row for the special service. With fire and brimstone he proclaimed, “If Jesus came back tonight, your Mommy and Daddy would be taken to heaven, and you would be left all by yourself!”

It got my attention. I was getting up in years – I was six – and I realized that if what the preacher said were to happen, I would have a 5-year-old sister to support. My caring mother reassured me it was not about the wrath of God, but that God loved me and wanted me to be his child too. That sounded much better to me, so I signed up. 

My second conversion, and the one which has stayed with me and continues to change my life – as conversions are supposed to do – came when I was a teenager. 

I was born and raised in Detroit–the Motor City.About the time when I was about 16, I began to listen to my city–hear the news, read the paper, then some books, and started to have serious conversations with adult people.

Some big questions emerged and I began to feel that something was very wrong in my city and my country, but I found that people in my white neighborhood, white school, and white church didn’t want to talk about it.

I remember the questions I asked.

I said it seemed that life in White Detroit is very different from life in Black Detroit. Why is that? 

I hear about people and families who are poor and even hungry, who don’t have enough jobs or good ones, who live in bad housing and in rough and dangerous places, and lots who have family members in jail. I don’t know anybody who has those things true in their lives, so how come others do, just a few short miles from where we live? 

And the biggest question. I hear there are Black churches. How come I have never been told about them or why haven’t we ever visited them or been visited by them?

The answers from my white church and world were: You’re too young to ask those questions; when you get older you will understand. Or we don’t know why things are that way either, but they have always been this way.

The most honest answer I received was this: If you keep asking those kinds of questions you are going to get in a lot of trouble. That was the only answer that later proved to be true.

I realized that I wasn’t going to get any real answers to those questions in the world where I lived, so I decided to travel outside my world, to make my little pilgrimage into another world to find the answers. I tell my students to trust their questions and follow them to where they lead you. 

So I took my naive white boy questions into what we called  “the inner city” to try and find out why Black Detroit seemed so different from White Detroit, and why we were so separated. Even – and especially – in our churches.   

I needed money for college. So I looked for jobs that would place me alongside young Black men in the city of Detroit who might have some answers to my questions. In those new jobs I began to listen to life stories that were very different from mine, stories that would ultimately change my story.

I also went to Black churches and was immediately welcomed in, with patient and generous answers to my many obvious questions. What they said sounded like what I thought Christianity was supposed to be. I began to realize it was very different to be a Black Christian than a White Christian. 

Perhaps the greatest epiphany came when a new friend who was a fellow janitor and elevator operator (yes I am that old!) took me home to meet his family one night. His mother responded to a discussion we were having about the police in our city of Detroit, whose treatment of Black people would spark many confrontations. “I tell my children,” she told me, “If you are ever lost and can’t find your way home, duck under a stairwell or hide behind a building if you see a police officer; and when he passes by you can find your own way home.” 

I was deeply struck by that advice from a mother who wasn’t any kind of political militant, but was completely focused on protecting and raising her kids. My own Mom’s words to her five white children screamed in my head, She told us, “If you are ever lost, and can’t find your way home, look for a policeman; policemen are your friends; they will take you by the hand and bring you home safely.” Loving mothers who gave completely different advice to their children if they were white or Black. Two Mothers, Two worlds.

I would learn that Butch and I were born in the same city but lived in different countries. The more I listened and learned across color lines, the more that different standard applied to everything else too.Across the color line I found a different world still waiting to be fully, freely, and safely included in America. 

Through those new places and new relationships I also learned that racism was more than personal. It was structural. Let’s compare Butch’s family to my family. 

My father, James Wallis Sr., graduated from college, was commissioned in the U.S. Navy, and got married–all on the same day! They were pushing new troops out to the war in Europe and the Pacific where he was sent. When he came home, like all other World War II veterans like him, his family was eligible for an FHA loan for a first house and a GI bill to pay for any education they wanted. That meant that every house in our Redford Township neighborhood next to Detroit was a three bedroom ranch headed by a WWII GI. But no Black sailors on my Dad’s ship or Black G.I.s serving anywhere in the military were able to get those huge benefits for housing and education–that make families middle-class. 

That racial exclusion from the biggest affirmative action program in American history was a deliberate racializing of geography; and made my neighborhood, school, and church all white, which was the exact purpose of these racist policies. No racist jokes were allowed in my house, because we were Christians, but the deeper issues were never understood or discussed

Racism, I learned, shaped everything from voting rights to civil rights, from economic life to educational opportunities, to policing and criminal justice; to the safety of your kids, and to whom you go to church with.

So where are we now? Is the incremental progress we have made enough? Many whites I know wish it were, while Black people I talk to don’t think so. Slavery is in the past, people say, and many white people want to believe that the civil rights movement fixed everything. So why can’t we just put the issue of race behind us? Can’t we just go on with our lives and never have to cross the color lines? Can’t we stop asking these questions?

No.

Now more than ever it is time to seek the truth, understanding what’s happening in America.

America’s Original Sin of racism with a human hierarchy based on skin color still lingers, and has continued to “evolve” in the words of criminal justice leader Bryan Stevenson. Jim Crow is now wearing a suit, instead of sheets, and is once again making a final comeback to prevent a united democratic future with a myriad of new voter restrictions and procedures designed to make it harder for people of color to vote–once again–and to even have their votes fairly counted. 

I believe that the battle for voting rights is literally a religious issue; that it has become both a moral test of democracy; and a theological test of the church’s faith. Gen 1:26 Do we believe that all of us are made in the image of God, or not? Do we believe in imago dei, or not? Are we the imago dei movement, or not?

Here is the new strategy of white supremacy in modern terms; and in a single sentence:  To prevent our changing demography from changing our democracy. It is  a commitment to white minority rule; to persist by any and all means necessary: covert and overt voter suppression, racial gerrymandering, restricted immigration, election rejection with electoral corruption and manipulation, judicial bias all the way to the Supreme Court, and, when all else fails, the promotion of political violence, as January 6 revealed to us, with the threat of more of all the above to come. 

Today’s racism is based on an old ideology of America’s Original Sin that never left us,but is rising up again in more aggressive ways. And now that the resurgence of the old ideology is being combined with the return of an old heresy. It is the false gospel named White Christian  Nationalism –both a biblical heresy and grievous sin. Its very name spells its heresy–White instead of the completely humanly diverse call the message of the gospel makes; Christian that implies domination instead of service; and Nationalism which is contrary to the international great commission Jesus makes to all the world’s people. 

White Christian Nationalism doesn’t cross lines, it creates them. It seeks to divide us, using darkness and lies. It is leading the country to fear, then hate, and ultimately to violence. It literally defies what Jesus says about loving our neighbor, and even our enemies.

I am proclaiming today that it is now a sacred Christian duty to fight and defeat this false gospel with the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

This isn’t only important in politics or in Washington, but for all of us– in our lives, our communities, our congregations; talking to our friends and family and, yes, loving our brothers and sisters in the body of Christ. 

Crossing the color line for democracy is the beginning of the journey to repent, repair, and redeem America’s Original Sin for white people, and especially for White Christians. 

Crossing the color line is what opens the world for us, lets us find the truth that will only set us free–from the bondage and baggage of white supremacy–and creates a network of creative, caring, and bonding relationships that will become the foundation and fabric for the common good; and take us toward the vision of what our nation’s civil rights leaders have called: the beloved community. 

And people of faith have a role here to play. If we as people of faith can help a divided and polarized nation to cross that color line to democracy, we will be called the peacemakers, whom Jesus calls the children of God.

As I said earlier, my six year old self knew the importance of salvation, but didn’t fully understand what that meant. But I have learned since – and crossing the color line has helped teach me – That salvation is always personal, but never private. My friends, We are now being called to both a courageous personal faith that will lead the brave public discipleship that we will need in the days ahead.