In Black and White – Part I

Médine was one of many international friends from outside my culture, but I found myself more comfortable in the African American community. The day that Grandma Johnson heard God tell her to feed me and take me to church, she could not have known the long-range effect on my life. The neighborhood where I settled initially and the welcome I received in African American churches made me feel at home.

Arthur Williams was starting an African American Bible study group at Duke and invited me to help out because of my Bible knowledge. One night many of the young men in the study group were watching the movie Cry Freedom. As the anti-white sentiment in the room grew, I began feeling more and more conspicuous, but everyone treated me as just part of the group. That was when I discovered that anger against racism did not usually translate into hostility toward white friends.

Being in the group also exposed me to conversations I would not have heard otherwise. “That student called me a n-,” one of my trusted friends told me one day. As if assuming I already knew, others chimed in about incidents of racism that they had experienced that week, some even laughing casually about it as if this were life as normal.

This was shocking to me. How could people treat my friends like this? And how could it be going on daily while I, their own brother in Christ, remained oblivious to it? Though I had been too polite to say it, I had long assumed that the civil rights movement had mostly resolved the real racism, except for a few crazy white supremacist.

Aft the others had dispersed, I lingered. “Arthur-those incidents that our friends were mentioning-those kinds of things don’t happen often, do they?”

Arthur eyed me sadly. “The first day of my first English class at Duke,” he recounted, “I was the only African American in the room. The professor called me aside after class. ‘You need to drop this class,’ she told me, ‘and if you tell anyone I said this, it’ll be your word against mine.’ “

I was horrified. I had doubted the reality of racism because I had never experienced it-but then, I would not have experienced it. Meanwhile whites so outnumbered blacks that if even just a handful were overtly racist, African Americans would be confronted with racism regularly. I began to remember some white friends’ offhand comments that I had previously just dismissed uncomfortably.

Through the patience of Arthur and others, I began to cross a cultural line over which I could not return without deliberately pretending that I knew no better. I also began to feel suspicion directed toward me as I came to the other side of the line. My black friends accepted me, but with every new black community or individual who did not know me, I felt I had to “prove” myself all over again.

I always persevered; the longest someone held my love at bay was a year. But the proving was painful-giving me just a taste of what my African American friends experience regularly in a predominantly white world.

This content is by Craig Keener, but edited and posted by Defenders Media.

For more, please check out Dr. Keener’s Impossible Love.