Pastor Howe asked me to share some of my own experiences as an African-American and my thoughts on the recent events relating to the death of George Floyd. I do so with a caution: I can’t speak for other black people, only myself, even though my experiences doubtless overlap with those of others.
I had an easy, middle-class childhood in South Carolina and Georgia, with two parents, in a Christian home. Eleven years after the unanimous 1954 Supreme Court ruling which held that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, our town finally began to permit black children to attend formerly all-white schools, and I entered the first grade. My parents—committed to giving me the best education available—waited until the first year of integration had passed without incident and then transferred me to a mostly white school.
In the second and third grades I occasionally experienced conspicuous bigotry, and then we moved to a new town where we lived for a single year. There were two white boys in my class who made it their daily task to humiliate me. I only recall one remark specifically, not because it was the worst, but because it was ridiculous: One boy told me I should “go back to Africa where you came from.” The stupidity of the taunt was obvious even to an eight-year-old: my family were native-born Americans, going back for generations, while his parents were first-generation Greek immigrants! Yet, because I was black, as far as he was concerned, I didn’t belong in America.
Throughout my childhood and into adolescence, my life at school was a mixed bag. Academically, I was a success; socially, I had friends. But in all but a few cases there was a thin veneer of polite tolerance covering hints that I was somehow inferior.
I want to share two other stories, both from my senior year of high school in Augusta, Ga. Seven years earlier, in 1970, Augusta was the site of riots sparked by the death of a sixteen-year-old black youth who had been tortured and beaten in police custody. The city had recovered physically, but the riots provoked changes in the social structure that some white residents resented. So, for example, a few years after the riots, the largest Southern Baptist church in the city voted not to admit blacks as members.
Because I played the viola in several ensembles, I often attended rehearsals at the home of our orchestra teacher. She lived in a neighborhood known as The Hill, an affluent residential area that was almost exclusively white. One Saturday afternoon, after a rehearsal, I was standing outside her home talking as I waited for my father. A car pulled up and an elderly man I didn’t know got out and began striding toward us. His manner was disquieting; he seemed upset but I wasn’t sure why. As he drew nearer, my teacher called out to him, “It’s okay, Daddy; this is one of my students.” He slowed, and his demeanor shifted.
As my mind struggled to process what had just happened, I was stunned. Was he actually concerned that a skinny, bespectacled black kid holding a viola case and having a quiet conversation was somehow a threat to his daughter? Apparently, he was. I was at once embarrassed, confused, and insulted, but I managed to greet him politely.
The other episode took place near the same house. One of our rehearsals ran late, and by the time I left, my father was already parked nearby. As I got into the car, he spoke to me, and I could sense that he was upset about something more than the fact that I was a few minutes late. I asked what was wrong, and he informed me that while he was waiting for me to come, a pickup truck with three young white men had driven past him. They circled the block, then drove by him again; they did so a third and fourth time. Each time they passed, he explained, “They were yelling threats and epithets at me.” My father was an old-fashioned man who normally projected an air of calm, but he’d been rattled, not knowing whether these men might accost him physically. It troubled me deeply that my father, sitting in a suit and tie and minding his own business, could be mocked and demeaned by people who probably didn’t even know what an “epithet” was, and that they could feel free to do so in the nicest part of town with no fear of rebuke.
I’m thankful that my parents lived out their conviction that every person—whatever his color or class—should be respected and that it was wrong to harbor hatred against those who hate you. I was an adult before my mother disclosed to me a few hints of the grievous ways she and my father had been treated in the “Jim Crow” South of the 1940s and ’50s, an environment in which black people were forbidden from using the same drinking fountains, restrooms, and restaurants as whites.
Because my parents taught me that people were all equal, it always confused me as a child when I encountered someone who seemed to despise me for no reason other than my race. Well into my twenties, this confusion was a source of slow, burning anger and frustration. After my conversion in college, my encounters with racism became increasingly less frequent; yet it took a long time for me to be comforted by the fact that our Lord understands firsthand what it feels like to be hated for no reason.
Perhaps what makes prejudice most difficult to bear is the crushing realization that, no matter what you do, those who despise you will continue to despise you. No matter what you do. I sometimes think that, if the Lord had not saved me, my feelings of frustration and exasperation might actually have driven me insane. So, while I deplore acts of violence, I’m not surprised that people who experience that kind of frustration might act out in anger. A great irony here is that prejudice and violence are both violations of the same commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” In the absence of the gospel, hatred tends to beget hatred.
What about the death of George Floyd? Often, police officers are called to put their lives on the line in order to do their jobs. Two of my cousins who made careers in law enforcement—and most other police officers—are honorable. The work of police is difficult and dangerous. They should be allowed to use force to defend the people they serve and to defend themselves.
But with authority, there must also be accountability; this is a basic biblical principle. I have doubts that Officer Derek Chauvin, now charged with Floyd’s murder, acted responsibly in kneeling on the neck of a compliant, prone, handcuffed man as he lost consciousness. Two autopsy reports indicate that the death was a homicide—i.e., someone killed him. As the one who knelt on Floyd’s neck for several minutes, Officer Chauvin appears to have been responsible, though it may be that the officer who simultaneously knelt on Floyd’s back also contributed to his death. In the end, those accused in his death are entitled to be judged in a court of law, and not by me.
Actually, the one thing that I cannot conclude is that Floyd’s murder was racially motivated. We don’t know the motive for Officer Chauvin’s actions; Floyd’s death is probably more about police brutality than about racism. But Minneapolis’s police force, for some time, has been accused of using excessive force more frequently on blacks than on whites. Coming as it did in the wake of the deaths of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., (during the execution of a no-knock search warrant) and Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Ga. (at the hands of armed vigilantes), Floyd’s death under the knee of a white officer of the law became a death that, for many, broke open floodgates of anger.
How shall we who belong to the Lord respond to this terrible event, to the resulting violent protests, and to the sad reality that equal justice under the law seems to be ignored in our nation too often? We should:
• Pray that the Lord would still violent hands, and that human justice, imperfect as it is, would operate justly in the days ahead.
• Pray that we as God’s people would learn how to be peacemakers.
• Pray that we would know how to responsibly use the authority and responsibility given to us as citizens in a republic where we have the ability to elect and petition those who govern our cities, states, and nation.
What can we do beyond praying?
• Resist believing that writing your opinions on social media is as good as engaging at a personal level with those who disagree with you; it is not. Most of us are merely reinforced in our existing opinions by what we read on social media. Changing minds requires more than shouting into an echo chamber. We need to humbly and attentively interact with those who disagree with us, particularly when they’ve experienced suffering that we do not understand. Evangelical Christians in Minneapolis have begun reaching across color lines to help churches in areas hard hit by rioting; that seems like a good start.
Personally, I have grown weary of hearing that all white people are prejudiced. This is a falsehood, and it is contrary to my own experience. Rather, let us confess that prejudice is a sin that any of us can fall into in different ways and at different times. We need to be careful to be driven neither by false guilt nor by negligent self-satisfaction, but to seek to pursue a conscience void of offense in this regard.
What about institutional injustice? How should we pursue having a more just nation?
• For starters, continue to speak out and act against the murder of the unborn, which remains, in my opinion, the great national sin of our age.
• Let us also resist the false gods of American civil religion, which tempt us to say things like, “My country, right or wrong.” This attitude, as G.K. Chesterton noted, is the moral equivalent of saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.” Cultivate the ability to be loyal to our nation without blindly denying our national sins.
• Recognize that these problems are not new, and resist foolish proposals—like defunding the police—that promise easy solutions to problems deeply rooted in human sinfulness. Our own denomination, in its Covenant of 1871, confessed the painful truth that, “…the history of [our] government has been largely one of oppression and injustice towards its aboriginal and colored people, and of iniquitous distinction of caste; while Sabbath desecration, prostitution of the oath, official corruption and dishonesty, profanation of the name of God, murder, drunkenness, excess and rioting, violation of the ordinance of marriage, vanity of apparel, sinful extravagance, lying and deceit, are become common and ordinary sins.”
With proximity to the events at hand, let me suggest that you become more informed about a legal principle called the “doctrine of qualified immunity.” Since 1982, the Supreme Court has held that, under sovereign immunity, government officials—including police officers—are immune from personal liability for official acts unless their conduct violates an established statute. The way this sometimes works in practice can be seen from an appeals case last year.
In July 2019, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on a case in which the parent of a 10-year-old child sued an officer. The case came about because of this event: Michael Vickers, a deputy sheriff in Coffee County, Ga., led a group of officers in pursuit of a criminal suspect named Barnett. Barnett fled into Amy Corbitt’s backyard, although he did not know her. The officers entered her yard and found Barnett, along with another adult (Damion Stewart), and six children, including Corbitt’s ten-year-old son and two children under the age of three. The officers made everyone get onto the ground, handcuffed Stewart, and placed a gun at his back. The children were outnumbered by the officers present, and Barnett was unarmed and compliant with the officers. As they lay on the ground obeying Vickers’s orders, the family dog appeared. Vickers shot at the dog, missing him; the dog retreated, then reappeared and approached Corbitt’s son. Although the dog was not threatening Vickers, he fired at the dog a second time, missing it and striking Corbitt’s son instead. Corbitt sued Vickers, claiming that he had violated her son’s right to be free from the use of excessive force, as guaranteed by the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.
The court stated unanimously that “qualified immunity protects ‘all but the plainly incompetent.’ ” One of the three appeals judges concluded that “because no competent officer would fire his weapon in the direction of a nonthreatening pet while that pet was surrounded by children, qualified immunity should not protect Officer Vickers.” But the majority of the court disagreed, concluding that because there was no clearly established statute or Fourth Amendment principle that applied to this case, Vickers was protected by the doctrine of qualified immunity.
Last August, the 8th Circuit Court ruled that the doctrine of qualified immunity protected an officer who had thrown a five-foot-tall, 130-pound woman to the ground, breaking her collarbone and knocking her unconscious, in the course of his investigation of a domestic dispute. He did this because she had walked away from him after he had told her to do something else. Five judges dissented, but the majority ruled that “the constitutionality of [the officer’s] takedown was not beyond debate, and he is thus entitled to qualified immunity.”
If the family of George Floyd seeks to hold the officers involved in Floyd’s death liable, their claims might be denied under qualified immunity. So just as we pray for the reversal of Roe v. Wade, should Christians not also pray for a more just application of qualified immunity? I urge you to consider this possibility.
Finally, my dear friends, do not allow the evils of the present world to draw your eyes away from King Jesus. Though we still have to struggle with sin (ours and the sins of others) for now, remember that He is reigning over His creation right now. Better yet, He is coming! On that Great Day, when Christ comes, He will establish perfect justice across the face of the whole earth, and He will wipe away every tear from His people’s eyes. In that day, in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien’s character Sam Gamgee, everything sad will come untrue. May Jesus find us living lives that adorn His gospel.
Resources
For those who would like to read some other perspectives on living as an African-American in the U.S., I have a few suggestions. I wish there were many good books of this type by African-American Christians, but I only know of two. The first is by Kay Coles James, the first woman and first African-American to head the Heritage Foundation. Having served under both the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, she also was awarded a doctorate from Geneva College, in part for her service in the pro-life movement. Her autobiography is called Never Forget; here is her own response to George Floyd’s death. The second book is John W. Perkins’ autobiography, Let Justice Roll Down. Dr. Perkins is also an evangelical Christian and was a leader in the civil rights movement. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Geneva College for his contributions to racial reconciliation and social justice.
For the other two books, I must give a warning. These are not written from a Christian perspective, and some of the events in them will be disturbing or even offensive. But if you want to learn about the recent history of race in our country, they are worth reading. The first is the autobiography of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People: A Memoir, which focuses on his life growing up in West Virginia in the ’50s and ’60s. The second is Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. This one is unusual, because Griffin was a white journalist from Texas. In 1959, with the help of a dermatologist, he took drugs and treatments to darken his skin and shaved his head (to hide his straight hair) so that he could travel through the South appearing to be a black man. The book is an account of his experiences living as a black man. Some of the things in it may seem inconceivable to you, and this book is the more offensive of the two.
Tom Fisher is a financial advisor in his own firm and a ruling elder in the Cambridge, Mass., RPC.