To My Fellow Americans (Part 2),

Dear Friends and Countrymen,

I've started many blog posts over the past couple of years.  Including a "To My Fellow Americans (Part 1)" that I still haven't published.  Perhaps I will soon.  But I am determined to write this out, to get it down and then hit publish TODAY, even if the wording doesn't feel quite right, even if I want to edit it further.  I need to write this out, for my own processing and grieving; but also I want to publish this to encourage others in their own grieving processes.  And perhaps even to help someone understand a little better.

Over the past year, racial events in the country (and the world) at large have come to a boiling point.  Several times.  Over the past year or so, my personal experiences regarding race and multi-ethnicity have also been very poignant, and very formative.  I've tweeted a lot ("micro-blogged," if you will) but never managed to finish a longer blog post.  In the wake of the Charleston massacre, things have better come into focus for me.  And what I want to say is this:

We live in a fractured house.  A home that is full of violence, of bloodshed, of brokenness.  A dwelling place taken forcibly from the original owners, all in the name of progress.  In March I listened, with tears running down my face, to a Native American coworker who said that Native folks are like the old woman in a house who built it originally but has been shoved to a back room and left there to rot. Her beautiful home has been taken over, and violence has begat violence.  Bloodshed has led to more bloodshed.  And while the early sins of slavery and the modern sins of systemic poverty are true and heartbreaking, no one remembers the people who first were brutally displaced to make way for a foundling country.  "See us!" my coworker cried out.  "Please just see us." 

I remember (more tears!) as an African American coworker apologized, on behalf of the Black Campus Ministries portion of my organization, for being so (understandably) caught up in the events of Ferguson, New York, etc. that he had failed to see, as he put it, that although black staff had thought they were on the bottom rung of the ladder, when they finally looked down, they realized that they were stepping on the hands of Native American brothers and sisters clinging desperately below them.  

One thing especially stuck out to me in Jon Stewart's monologue on Charleston: the phrase "racial wallpaper."  Racial wallpaper.  Stained, peeling wallpaper that some people don't even notice anymore.  In some rooms it's been painted over.  In others, enough gilded pictures have been hung on top of the racial wallpaper that it's easy to pretend it's no longer there.  A black President!  Diverse celebrities!  Shiny, pretty pictures of "Post-Racial America!"  It's not that those pictures are entirely fake, but that they don't tell the whole story.  I see the racism plastered everywhere around us, and am reminded that it always has been there.  This house, this country, was built on--and is still steeped in-- racism, classism, favoritism.  The hallways reek of it.

Am I suggesting we level the house, or even just move out?  Beyond the fact that I've taken this analogy far past reason, obviously starting from scratch or literally moving elsewhere isn't an option.  And it need not be.  There are truly reasons to rejoice.  There are wonderful things about our country.  I'm both grateful and proud (most of the time) to be an American.  There are ways in which things are better than they were in 1864, in 1963, in 2008.  But there are ways in which things are no better.  And to ignore them makes it even worse.  

Our house--our country--is broken, friends.  We need to see this.  We need to see each other.  To weep with each other, to lament together, to speak truth about the good and the bad.  Will things ever be perfect?  Will our country ever be truly healed?  The Emanuel AME victims waited--with Christian brothers and sisters the world over--for the triumphant return of Christ when all things will be made truly well and completely new.  Yet we start to see the Kingdom come now by weeping, praying, and worshiping together.  By refusing to turn a blind eye to what is going on all around us.  This house--our country, and indeed our entire broken world--belongs to him.  To the God who welcomed those beautiful souls home and who is breaking down barriers and boundaries and sin, all in the death of his own body.  This is the reality of where we live, friends.  The poor we will always have among us.  Yet do we notice?  We must see our brothers and sisters who are shoved to the back rooms, to the crawlspaces, to the basement.  In this act of seeing--and then through acts of mercy and justice that flow from truly seeing each other--is God glorified.  Clean our house O Lord, and make our hearts your home.  That is our one hope. 

From one broken person to another,

A half-Asian, adopted-half-black, half white, from New Mexico, but full American Christian