I was in a new place. I had a new way of seeing. I was a new person who I did not recognize.
The old life passed away; all things became new.
George Floyd's story wrecked me, and it wrecked my belief system.
I have never watched something so egregious, so inhumane, so sinful in real time. I recognize now that this is because my blinders were on. I had built my wall so high as to be unable to see the world on the other side of it. My wall wasn't protecting me, it was hiding me...insulating me...preventing me from seeing the reality of the oppressed and the marginalized.
And I am convinced that Jesus--as he always was in the Bible--was on the other side of the wall, with the hurting, not with me.
My wall had been so high as to have prevented me from seeing the effects that my decisions, my votes, and my thinking had on the very people that Jesus loved most.
In the aftermath, I took to Facebook and made a post about George Floyd that now seems quite saccharin, but at the time it was radical for me.
A few days later I pulled together some of my Black friends and asked them to dialogue with me. It resulted in this live conversation. That talk was a gut punch to me. I knew these people, but I had never heard their stories. I couldn't believe what they were telling me about racism and fear.
Why hadn't they told me before about their oppression?
The answer was obvious. I wasn't safe space...nor would I have listened anyway. My conservative constructs had me believing I was right
It was gut punch after gut punch.
And like a flood, the wall that had been a dam against the greater reality I had been actively avoiding now crushed me underneath its weight, threatening to drown me.
- Ahmaud Arbery
- Breonna Taylor
- Colin Kaepernick
- The Summer of the Black Lives Matter Protests
Portraits of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by OEN Managing Editor, Meryl Ann Butler.
(Image by Meryl Ann Butler) Details DMCA
I was seeing the world in color first the first time, no longer whitewashed.
Beautiful, brilliant living color.
I cried and cried realizing the ignorance in how I had lived and thought and taught. I was ashamed at so much of who I had been.
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