Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
They are precious in his sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

This is a church song from my childhood.  It was sung in perfect innocence. It was sung in perfect belief.  Here’s the problem: the adults teaching me the song didn’t really believe it.

Growing up, racism was a distant problem.  I hadn’t even heard the word as a child. It didn’t exist in my community – or so I thought.

I first encountered  racism when I was 16.  My brother got engaged to a woman of mixed race – English/African-American.  The English part wasn’t the problem. In fact, I didn’t see any problem. The adults around me saw it differently.

I don’t know how to express the fullness of the shock I experienced witnessing my parents’ and their friends’ reactions to the engagement.  People literally paid condolence calls on my family as if the engagement was a tragedy. “I’m so sorry this happened.”

What happened?????

It was both shocking and horrifying for me to realize that the very adults who had taught me that everyone is equal at the foot of the cross didn’t believe it.  Maybe they thought separate but equal applied here.

Racism didn’t seem to exist in my community because the community was homogeneous.  It existed. It just didn’t show. My brother’s engagement wasn’t the problem. The problem was the latent racism that was hidden under the surface.

Of course, they weren’t really racist.  They sincerely believed that God didn’t mean for the races to mix.  Weren’t they supposed to follow God’s plan? They honestly didn’t see any contradiction in that underlying assumption of separation.

I believe that what we are seeing now in this country is similar – though certainly on a much larger scale.  The latent racism that lay quietly under the surface didn’t show much until we elected a mixed race president.  That’s when the racism started pushing through the cracks.

This is an issue with deep roots.  Celebrating the life of Martin Luther King one day a year won’t change that.  Emphasizing black history one month a year won’t change that. Marches and demonstrations won’t change that.  

My parents and the adults around me growing up did a good job.  I not only learned the children’s song, I believed it. It incorporated itself in my psyche.  It became part of who I am.

We need men like Martin Luther King, Jr. who shake up our worldview.  We need John Lewis and Maxine Waters who get in in our faces and remind us of how far we still have to go.  We need Colin Kaepernick’s face on billboards reminding us what happens when one individual kneels for what is right.  We need the NFL players who followed his lead. It just isn’t enough.

It isn’t enough when we have a president that is proud of calling himself a nationalist in professed ignorance of the context of that label.  It isn’t enough when a senator is elected that is blatantly racist. No, there are not good people on both sides. However you delude yourself, if you still desire separate but equal, you are a racist.  

There’s no happy ending to this.  Maybe someday there will be but not until we strip the illusion of equality that still exists in homogeneous white communities.  There won’t be until we see skin color in the same light we see hair or eye color – just one of many physical traits a person has.