How the Lord Opened My Eyes to the Reality of Racism
This is our prayer for individuals in Providence Road as well as our church as a whole.
From Acts 29's A Call to Justice, Restoration, and Renewal
"Our only hope comes through gospel-centered repentance: corporately addressing our dark history and its ongoing implications, while genuinely turning to Christ with compassionate and consistent action. Individually, we must repent of our own wickedness—of sin that we may have committed explicitly, or have been complicit in, or committed simply in our silence or tone-deafness. And we must come together to denounce the evil that has been committed, as well as the systems that support it. We must not sit idly by. True reconciliation, one of the great thrills of being in community, will not be achieved without confrontation and responsive action..."
Here is Kim Hopper, a member of Providence Road, sharing how God has brought her along in her journey toward this end.
It was about 6 years ago, around the time of the protests in Ferguson, MO after the death of Michael Brown, that I felt some curiosity to learn more about the things I was seeing in the news. The death of Trayvon Martin at 17 years old had been in the news just a couple of years before, and the combination of those two incidents led me to read more. The outcry was loud, and I felt a desire to try to understand where it was coming from. That’s when the Lord began to open my eyes and break my heart regarding the rampant, systemic racial injustice in this country.
As I began to read more, I came to the realization that I had to not only listen to Black voices and the stories they were telling, but to believe what they were saying. That second part is really important, because in the past I tended to “give the benefit of the doubt” to the white person—for example, if a Black person said they were followed in a store for no reason…”well, maybe they just perceived it that way!” I came to a point where I realized that I as a privileged white person didn’t get to dismiss the truth of what Black people were telling us. They were sharing their experience, and I heard and read the same (or similar) stories over and over and over again. Once I acknowledged the problem, it was time to get to work.
From that point on I continued to listen, read, and learn more, and it’s a journey that I am still on today and will be on for the rest of my life. Learning terms like white privilege, white supremacy, white fragility, implicit bias, etc. and seeing them in myself was and is a humbling, heartbreaking process. It’s easy to sit in feelings of embarrassment, guilt, shame and sadness when you realize your role in an oppressive system. And I think it’s good to feel those things, and to lament. But then we have to use those feelings to spur us on to action. I have learned that it is our responsibility as white people to leverage our privilege to fight racial injustice whenever and wherever we see it.
