I Am Prejudiced

I’ve been doing a great deal of thinking about prejudice, racism, and its place in our country and the world. Numerous public incidents have rightly brought the issue to the forefront of our cultural conversation. I have come to the belief that we are coming to the wrong conclusion. We have traded the noble quest for justice for one of finding scapegoats. In our discussions on the matter we have rightly sought to root out injustice but our means to do so is by labelling people as “racist” or creating racist monsters. In the age of social media and instant new feeds it has become par for the course to scour a persons’ tweets, public statements, or Facebook posts for instances of prejudice. When we find them, we label that person a “racist” or the crime a “hate crime.” In doing so, we do not accurately address the problem. Instead of addressing the issue we instead create an “other” that allows us to shift the focus off ourselves. A celebrity with a twitter post becomes a “racist”. A police officer who allows his biases to affect his actions becomes a “racist.”

The reality is that we are all prejudiced. All of us. Racism is not something “other people” are. Each of us comes into people and situations with preconceived notions about others whether that is due to race, gender, age, socioeconomic statues, or what have you. When we walk into a convenience store, or a library, or an opera house, we all make judgements about the people we see there. Racism is merely one form of prejudice. The problem is when we let our prejudices outweigh logic and our command to love our neighbor. All crime is hate crime because we are asserting that our needs or beliefs outweigh the rights of others. When we turn our God-given desire for justice into a witch-hunt to find “those racist people” we do not accurately understand the problem. The problem is in us as much as it is in the neo-Nazi, or the abusive cop, or the militaristic regime. Throwing the term “racist” about like a grenade may be the easy way of addressing the issue but it will be ultimately unsuccessful. Until we admit that we are all biased, we can never have a real conversation about how to remedy it. Until we admit that we are all biased, we can never truly fulfill Christ’s command to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. The only cure for prejudices is found in admitting that we have them. I fear that we are becoming a society in which it is not safe to admit this. Just as the addict cannot hope to have victory until he turns the mirror upon himself and sees the truth of his addiction, we cannot hope to address the injustice of systematic prejudice until we see it within ourselves. Only then can we start down the path of allowing logic and real experiences to outweigh the prejudice.

Speaking to the prejudice of his day, Paul wrote: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus, then who are Abraham's descendants, heirs according to the promise”.

It is only when we turn the mirror upon ourselves and our own prejudices can we (as a society) ever hope to understand the unity in Christ that Paul was writing about. Unconfessed sin sickens the heart and is loathsome to the Lord. Let us come together and confess that we are influenced by our prejudices. Only then can light ever shine into the darkness.

Yes, I am prejudiced. Yes, I have let those prejudices lead me to sin. I am sorry. Let’s talk about this.