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Changing our perceptions

Last Sunday, many Christians heard the story of Joseph’s brothers turning against him and selling him into slavery. This Sunday, congregations heard how the brothers discover that Joseph will save them and their families from starvation. Joseph’s brothers were challenged to encounter a different reality, to accept that what they meant for evil has been turned to good, to undergo a changed perception.

To see things differently from what we expect is not easy. One spring I went to church and was astounded that so many started church early. How could everybody be wrong? Then I recognized that I forgot to turn the clock ahead. This trivial example illustrates how accustomed we are to believing that our perception is correct, that it is others who are out of step.

Sunday’s gospel told us of Jesus’ encountering a Canaanite woman begging for help. He felt that he was sent only to Israelites, but she so humbled herself that he allowed her to take him beyond his expectation, to undergo a changed perception.

Sunday’s Old Testament lesson and gospel show challenges to change. The events in Charlottesville and the reactions to those events also challenge us to change.

Some have said that the expressions of white supremacy and anti-semitism “are not us,” that we Americans are better than that. I wish we were, that the chanting “Jews will not replace us” and the Nazi refrains of “blood and soil” is a total aberration, completely foreign to our history.

When Thomas Jefferson was in Paris, a man in his 40s, 14-year-old Sally Hemmings was with him. She is described as his mistress, but that’s inaccurate. She was his property, for him to do with as he wished, and he made her pregnant. That’s but one item in the long history of American racism.

New York state’s public schools are among the most segregated in the country. That is a reflection of segregation in housing, but it’s segregation nonetheless.

Almost every month we read of a police officer shooting a black man, sometimes in the back as the man’s hands were raised and he was walking away. Seldom, if ever, is the officer convicted of a crime. In 1965, when I drove back from Selma, I saw Pennsylvania state troopers and felt grateful because I knew that they were on my side. That is how any of us should feel about the police, but sadly, even today, many blacks and Latinos have good reason not to.

Violence is never justified, as when, in reaction, some are killing police. Saturday’s news reported three instances of attacks on the police. Isn’t that awful? People ambushing and shooting cops. That is beyond the pale. It is intolerable. It cannot stand.

Anti-semitism also has a long history in our country. I’m old enough to remember when Ivy League colleges had a quota on admitting Jews, and Jews were restricted to living in one portion of my hometown. Next to us, the Lake Placid Club did not admit Jews or blacks well into modern times, a policy to which the club’s founder was so attached that to keep it, he resigned a prestigious state position.

We hear it said that we must fight hate. May I suggest that is backward. We should not be reactive to hate but instead be positive with love. We should love all people: black and white, Asian and Latino, even the pitiable demonstrators chanting Nazi slogans.

Yet our individual love, while basic, is not enough. It’s not enough because white privilege, or racism, infects us. We are invited to a changed perception.

Scott Woods describes it this way:

“The problem is that white people see racism as conscious hate, when racism is bigger than that. Racism is a complex system of social and political levers and pulleys set up generations ago to continue working on the behalf of whites at other people’s expense, whether whites know/like it or not. Racism is an insidious cultural disease. It is so insidious that it doesn’t care if you are a white person who likes black people; it’s still going to find a way to infect how you deal with people who don’t look like you.

“Yes, racism looks like hate, but hate is just one manifestation. Privilege is another. Access is another. Ignorance is another. Apathy is another, and so on. So while I agree with people who say no one is born racist, it remains a powerful system that we’re immediately born into. It’s like being born into air: you take it in as soon as you breathe.

“It’s not a cold that you can get over. There is no anti-racist certification class. It’s a set of socioeconomic traps and cultural values that are fired up every time we interact with the world. It is a thing you have to keep scooping out of the boat of your life to keep from drowning in it. I know it’s hard work.”

Racism, as Scott Woods describes it, is deeply embedded in our culture and affects all of us.

To take one example: Desmond Tutu, once Anglican Archbishop of Capetown, describes flying in Africa. The plane encountered a violent storm, and Bishop Tutu wondered if the plane would crash. Suddenly, a wish popped up, unbidden, but there it was, and it embarrassed him. The troubling wish? He hoped the pilots were white. It reflects Bishop Tutu’s humility and graciousness that he would share such an experience. When we have thoughts like his, we are likely to have trouble admitting them to ourselves much less to others.

It demands a change in perception to see racism, or white supremacy, as an insidious cultural disease that you have to keep scooping out of the boat of your life to keep from drowning in it. If we make that change, if we look at racism as not simply an individual failing but as part of our culture, then we see the Charlottesville Nazis as an extreme example of what has been there all along. Despite this, we have a rich, positive heritage of service to and caring for one another. Opposition to Jews, blacks and Latinos arises out of but one strand, one element of our complex society.

The white-power Nazi demonstrations may be a gift. They are a gift if they make us aware of cultural racism. They are a gift if they help us understand how deeply rooted their hateful rhetoric is. They are a gift if they sound an alarm that awakens us to address the racism among us.

Changing our perception is hard, but I believe it’s what we’re called to do.

The Rev. George Nagle lives in Saranac Lake.

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