The Right to Be Silent
Recently I participated in a live-streamed conversation about racial disparity in this country, and ever since I’ve been grappling with something in my own experience that I have only just begun to understand. I’ve thought a lot about the barriers I face as a woman, but this conversation with a black woman whose life spans the same years as my own clued me in to a “right” I was afforded as a white person that this woman did not have: the right to be silent.
Part of our conversation about, “Shared History, Different Stories,” contrasted my friend’s experience as a black child raised in Chicago with my experience as a white child growing up in Dallas, and as we examined our experiences of “normal” school and church life, it’s the normal-church-life part that hit me square in the face.
My childhood faith community was entirely mute on the subject of racial disparity. Though my friend and I were both raised in churches that bore the same denominational name, her church met on Sundays to loudly celebrate another week of survival, while mine gathered to sedately act as good white people should. In my entirely Anglo-Saxon church, racial inequality and injustice were never mentioned in spite of the fact that societal upheaval was happening just outside the stained-glass windows. In her church they were constant themes.
My parents were progressive in their views on race and went out of their way to demonstrate respect for all people regardless of color, so it strikes me as incredibly odd that the very faith community that formed the hub of their religious and social life was sending a deafeningly silent signal. It’s an easy option to choose silence when you are in the position of power and privilege.
My family eventually left that church, and for the last decades of my parent’s lives, they were active in a multi-ethnic faith community. They weren’t activists, but they lived a life of inclusion.
But I am haunted by the silence of my childhood church. If we claim to follow Jesus, we should live like he lived and do what he taught, and Jesus was never silent about the subjection and marginalization of people. He spoke out and demonstrated the equality of all people in spite of the reaction of the religious establishment. And he wasn’t afraid of the repercussions.
As a white person, it’s tempting to cover our eyes and ears and block out the “noise” people of color are making. After all, if we try to hear and understand, it may cost us. We are drawn to the stance of those who choose to “see no evil,” “hear no evil” and “speak no evil,” but the problem is that evil resides in a refusal to see, hear and speak out.
Silence may be a right, but for a follower of Jesus it is not an option. I’m learning to use my voice; will you join me?
