Your Neighbor Is Bleeding

One of the very first things my mother taught me is that "Freeze!" means stop.Forgive me for not remembering the story's specifics. I was a little girl. On the news that night, an unarmed ethnic man (Asian?) was shot something crazy like 14 times because he didn't stop moving when police said, "Freeze." It turned out he didn't know much English and didn't understand what they wanted.So my mother sat me down and said, "Freeze means stop. If the police say 'Freeze,' you have to stop moving."Thus began my education in surviving the fallen world we live in.My heart has been squeezed so tight since the shooting death of Philando Castile on a routine traffic stop last week and the subsequent death of five white police officers by a lone black sniper.There is a burning in my heart to explain these events on Coptic Dad & Mom.But I ask myself, What does the #BlackLivesMatter movement have to do with living a holy, Orthodox life? I ask myself, How I could possibly explain 400 years of U.S. history, the black slave trade, and Jim Crow laws in this tiny space? And I despair to make manifest to you the truth that I know.What do we know about being black in America? The way so many of us turn and whisper, "knowingly" about black people; the way we go out of our way to avoid them. We all know. Don't go to that school. Don't live in that neighborhood. We stick to upper middle class whiteness as tightly as we can because we know that's the way in this country to be successful (our accents aside).It's hardly our fault. In light of our limited personal experience with the African-American community (and the conditioning of the societies we have lived in) that racism is completely natural. We grew up under the weight of the message the lighter your skin, the more successful you'll be. Use a straight iron recently? Yeah, me too. It makes me more professional, yeah? More likely to get hired.I can't explain and fix all this in a blog post. I can't erase it all and give our society a blank slate. We're all infected. The disease is sin. "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places" (Ephesians 6:12). I cannot single-handedly defeat them with my writing.All I ask today is that you listen to the African-American narrative with more respect, more empathy, and more openness. Deactivate the protective force field you have around you, the comfortable bubble that says the black community is lying or exaggerating or they deserve it. Instead of furiously insisting, "I'm not racist!" ask yourself, "Am I racist?" Don't reject the stories without listening. Allow the arrows of truth to pierce your heart.Why should you listen?Your Christianity means you have a responsibility. Look to the good Samaritan as your example. Your neighbor is suffering. He is bleeding to death in the neighborhood next door. In many ways, he is unlike you. In so many heartbreaking ways, he is exactly like you.Don't turn your face, pulling the cloak of ignorance and complacency tightly around you, rushing in the other direction. Hear him.When one of us says, "There is no racism in America," it's exactly like saying, "There is no discrimination against Christians in Egypt."When one of us says, "Look the president is black, so there's no racism," it's like saying, "Naguib Sawiris exists, so opportunity must be equal in Egypt."Today, I ask you to listen.Go out and listen.Just a Few Places to Listen:(these resources are for adults; there may be language and disturbing events)Go listen to Act One of This American Life's podcast episode "Got You Pegged."Go listen to this TED talk by Alice GoffmanIf you, like me, have been unable to watch Diamond Reynolds' Facebook Live video of the aftermath of the shooting of Philando Castile, go listen to the partial audio of it on the podcast Code Switch, episode "Code Switch Extra: No Words" - July 9, 2016 (first 2 and a half minutes of the show).Go listen to this talk by Clint Smith "How to Raise a Black Son in America" But aren't more white people killed by police?Let America Be America Again (poem by Langston Hughes) 

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