The Uncomfortable Truth

Hi again!

Before I get to the point of this post, I want to mention the sub caption of this blog. 

“I want to be the best version of myself for anyone who is going to someday walk into my life and need someone to love them beyond reason.”

It’s from a self-help book I haven’t even read and, to tell you the truth, I’m not really a fan of self-help books. I'm not familiar with Jennifer Elisabeth or her work but this quote came up on a page when I was looking for something else. It resonated with me deeply and I included it as the subtitle because I felt like it perfectly summarized why I restarted this blog. 

If you’ve been around me just a minute, you know I’m a bit of an Enneagram nerd. If you’re not familiar with the Enneagram, it is “a system of personality typing that describes patterns in how people interpret the world and manage their emotions.” (Definition taken from a Googs search, AKA Google. There’s a link for more info at the very bottom if you’re interested.) Well anyway, I’m a Type One, commonly nicknamed The Reformer, who place an emphasis on personal integrity, morality, and self-control. Their attention focuses on seeing and correcting what is wrong in the world around them and doing the right thing. With this comes the presence of a strong inner critic that is talking at all times about the ways I could be doing better. From a Christian standpoint, Ones struggle to relate to God as they feel like they constantly have to be better before they can even come into His presence. In short, they really REALLY struggle with the concept of Grace- both showing it to themselves and (sadly) to others. I’ve been studying the Enneagram for a few years now and using it as a tool to understand myself and others with more compassion. It also seems God has been using it as a tool to get me to understand things He’s been trying to get me to absorb for YEARS. One of those things has been a loud and clear, 

“Hey Caitlin, when you fail to exercise grace, you don’t just hurt yourself, you hurt those around you.” 

Well, I’ll tell ya, that God is a smart guy because this really appeals to my Type One fear of being morally flawed. My thought process is often something like, “My inability to give myself Grace only makes me stronger.  It makes me set high standards for myself and refuse to let myself or others down.” It appears as though I’m often failing to understand that when I don’t learn to show grace to myself, it makes me awfully rusty and out of practice when it comes to showing it to others. I fear I have been accidentally (and self-righteously) thinking I was doing, not just myself, but others a favor because doesn’t EVERYONE want high expectations placed on them so they can get better and better?? Wasn’t I doing people a favor by expecting more of them?? (Spoiler alert, the answer is no.) Someone I love, respect, and trust very much recently pointed this habit out as sometimes being alienating and cold, reminding me that real change and conversation can’t happen if the other person is afraid to engage with me, in case they don’t live up to my INSANELY high expectations. I didn’t enjoy hearing that but only because I knew it was true. Because of this, I’ve been trying to reflect on how I engage in the topics that I feel passionately about. It made me recall a sermon from a local pastor several years ago who said, 

“Truth without grace is just abuse.” 

I’ve carried that with me since then, knowing My Enneagram One self needed it on a whole new level because as much as I want Truth spoken, I don’t ever want to be abusive. I cannot reflect Jesus to others in that manner.

 A friend and I were recently talking about the conversation surrounding racial equality and how volatile it has become. Both of us mentioned feeling more comfortable expressing our thoughts in writing so we have a moment to form a thoughtful response. Otherwise, I will certainly lead with emotion (usually resentment, also a Type One characteristic) and, would you believe, that doesn’t go well? This fear (I’d call it an “understanding” but I’m not comfortable giving myself that much credit just yet) of my own flaws is what motivated me to start this blog. I want to use this forum to share what I’m learning about racial reconciliation because I acknowledge that, despite my best intentions, I am not quite ready to verbalize how important I think it is without being a bit of an A-hole. And who wants to listen to an A-hole? Not me. Certainly not you. 

DISCLAIMER: I will get it wrong. I will miss the mark. My privilege or my whitewashed history (likely some righteousness) will crop up without me knowing it. But if I can make a commitment to share information respectfully (aka, without the aforementioned abuse) and you can make a commitment to correct me when I need it, without the aforementioned abuse, I believe we can create a space of sacred difference* which the world is deeply lacking right now.

So let’s give it a go now, shall we? 

I want to pass on a great source of info! It’s the first documentary I watched when I decided to start educating myself on systemic racism in America.

The Uncomfortable Truth is a documentary in which the son of a civil rights hero, Loki Muholland, learns his family helped create institutional racism in America. It’s done with such humility and is so well-researched. You can stream it on Amazon and it is only 1 hour and 25 minutes long. 

I led with the more benign poster for it so you wouldn’t clutch your pearls and check out right away, but the more common poster is below.

Loki starts by asking people to understand, “There didn’t need to be some grand conspiracy against black people, it was just built in.” And proceeds to provide a breakdown of what “built in” truly means. 

Here are a few topics covered that really blew my mind. It has been quite some time since I watched this so forgive me if I don’t quote something exactly right. The below is just based off of notes I took while watching it (#TypeOnesLoveNotes).

• As recently as 2013 the net worth of whites is 13x greater than blacks. Meaning for every $1 a white person has, a black persons has 8-10 cents. (In my opinion, the only logical response to this statistic is, “But why?”)

• Loki discusses a long-standing foundation of racism existing to maintain the status quo. He calls this “a starting line set so far back by the policies of white supremacists that you can’t even see it.” This means that even if the economic discrimination faced by African Americans ended right now, it would still take several hundred years for blacks to catch up to whites (this is the verbiage used by Loki.  I would like to be corrected if language simplified to “whites” and “blacks” is derogatory in any way). As a tangible example, Loki uses the GI Bill which still had negative ramifications for black citizens a FULL 70 YEARS LATER. 

Quick history lesson: The G.I. Bill aimed to help American World War II veterans adjust to civilian life by providing them with benefits including low-cost mortgages, low-interest loans, access to education, and financial support. The problem was that white southern politicians designed the distribution of benefits under the GI Bill to uphold their segregationist beliefs (consider the historical timeline, this is not farfetched). When black southerners applied for their assistance, they faced the prejudices of white officials from their communities who often forced them into vocational schools instead of colleges or denied their benefits altogether. Additionally. Black veterans weren't able to make use of the housing provisions of the GI Bill because banks generally wouldn't make loans for mortgages in black neighborhoods, and African-Americans were excluded from the suburbs by a combination of deed covenants and informal racism.

This is just one policy Loki focused on. So multiply that by hundreds of policies over hundreds of years... it starts to add up.

• The average person doesn’t really understand what it means when you say you’ve benefited from living in a racist society. 

An African American male contributor on the documentary, who is married to a white female discusses his wife’s response to that statement. She says something along the lines of, ”My father worked for  everything we had, I’ve worked for everything I have, etc.” and his response to her was along the lines of “This is true, but you had an opportunity to work for what you had. And you had a lot of black people who were working their asses off and couldn’t get a house or this or that because they were black. And you may ask, ‘Well how did that benefit me?’ Because, by denying them, you never had to compete with a whole bunch of people.”

This is one of the most logical, concise responses I’ve heard because it doesn’t take away from how hard a white person has worked for what they have (because they have worked hard); it is merely pointing out that some of the competition was eliminated before they even showed up to the race (so to speak).

• As the last vestiges of Jim Crow were being dismantled, a new structure was being built: “the colorblind society” which Loki refers to as “racism without racism.”  Some examples covered: 

*In 1981, political leaders started changing their campaign language. 

 They didn’t use the word “ni•••r” but started focusing on “states rights,” meaning each state could decide not to let their tax dollars be wasted on minority groups. 

*Georgia’s “Two Strikes, You’re Out” Rule

This was only invoked against 1% of white defendants facing a second drug conviction as compared to 60% of African American defendants. So what ends up happening is that of those serving a life-sentence under this provision, 98.4% of them are African American. (This brings back my “But Why?” Loki asserts it's because by this time we’ve been conditioned to see things a certain way. I don’t think I need to expound on this right now but what he means by this is we’d already been conditioned to see dark skinned individuals as more criminal beings than white skinned individuals by the time this rule is introduced) Loki’s point is that if the only information you were receiving is that 98.4% of inmates are POC (people of color) but weren’t given any information on The Why, what else could you possibly assume?

“While whites and blacks commit crime at roughly the same rate, their arrest rates are very different. If you look at a population of 100k white males in America, 478 are in federal prison. For black males, that number jumps to 3,023.”

• What Loki describes as the real crime in all of this is that today we have more African Americans under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system than were slaves in 1850. Loki elaborates with, “You’ll never see a SWAT team raid a university or Wall Street, but you will see them in ‘the hood’. Why?” 

He asserts it’s linked to the same reason the unemployment rate for African Americans is twice as high than that of whites. Whites make up 42% of the poor but take in 69% of the state benefits while blacks only take up 22% of the poor but only take in 14% of the benefits. (Tuck this statistic in your pocket the next time Uncle Billy Bob gets drunk at Thanksgiving and starts spewing his stereotypes regarding people who “live off the system”...also, I myself just stereotyped with my “Uncle Billy Bob.” Apologies.)

 

I’m not sure how organized that was, but those were the pieces I wrote down. I’ll be the first to admit that all those statistics utterly shocked me. Loki doesn’t fully break down the history and reasoning behind all of these things which is why I felt like it was a good one to get my feet wet with. It familiarized me with language I didn’t know and led me to a lot of “But Why?” questions that I really wanted answers to. 

I hope you’ll consider checking it out but if not, at the very minimum I hope you’ll take a moment to sit with the data presented here. In the racing analogy, if you are a member of the majority, are you ready to acknowledge that we’re not all starting at the same line?

Here’s to acknowledging the uncomfortable truths,

Caitlin 

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*I just completed a book club which studied Latasha Morrison’s “Be the Bridge” and this is how she describes the space created in bridge groups- “sacred difference. ”How beautiful is that?