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Just a Few Thoughts (Questions, Really) on Race ¹

Paul Roberts Abernathy

What is race? A thing to run? If so, then, how?

A thing to which we run to as a shelter for safety, literally a roof under which our identity may dwell secure, a ground on which our integrity, the maintenance of that identity, may stand?

Or do we run to race simply, but no less significantly, as a source of pride in our presence and progress, our survival and success, as in those still heard phrases in many places, Black or White or (choose a color) power?

Or do we run to race so to run through race, to get to the other side, to stand with the other, so to see one another through the lens of the commonality of our humanity, as in that generation ago liberal-minded goal of a color-blind society? (A laudable ideal in theory, the pursuit of which, however, is beset by an insoluble real-world problem: even when color-blind, we all still see Black and White. It seems that we can’t run through race to some mythological place of total color unconsciousness.)

What is race? A thing to run? If so, then, how?

A thing if—or, if not, depending on one’s point of view—to run to, then also to run from in fear? Fear of rejection and isolation by prejudice, which negatively prejudges us without benefit or burden of knowledge of us. Hence, a thing to run from, as in “I refuse to be identified by my race” or “I seek to pass,” pretending by appearance or affect or other accouterment or action to be a member of another, preferably the politically, economically dominant race

Or do we run from race, indeed, from the other in fear of what we’ve been taught, of what we’ve learned and so believe as true about the other, about them, about those people?

Or do we run from race in fear of facing our own deep and abiding prejudice; how so quickly we judge the other based on evidence other than that which we attain by personal, individual encounter?

Race. A thing to run? No. Rather a thing to be as an expression of diversity. A diversity, as seen both from a theological perspective of divine intention and from an anthropological point of view of the created order itself, and, paradoxically, best shown and seen as one. For there is but one race, whose name is holy. And that race is wholly human.

Much the same point of Jesus’s parabolic reply to that lawyer’s testy question about eternal life.² An essential element of abundant, authentic life is our knowing and honoring our neighbor—who is anyone—and our being a neighbor to everyone.

Then why, O why, do we still divide ourselves, one from another, color by color? The color of fear. The fear of color, whether other than our own or our own. Despite our highest ideals and our best intentions, our history and sociology continually trump our theology and anthropology.

Let us pray and struggle still that we may find a more excellent way.

1. In conjunction with the viewing and discussion of the video, The Color of Fear, Lee Mun Wah, April 30, 1994, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0484384/.

2. Luke 10:25–37.