Your Wait For Social Change Is Over

I took a breath and held it, as if rage and air are the same and holding one will contain the other. Count to ten? Try 100. Someone at my son’s public school just injured him in the worst way.

My son’s name is Taras. He’s ten and a genius. He’s terrifyingly innocent, asking questions about sex and stomach bile in the same breath. Taras sat in the middle of my bed and asked a question unlike anything he’d ever asked.

He asks questions all day long: “macrophages can kill up to 100 deadly pathogens before they die, right?”; “the Kuiper Belt is about three billion miles from earth, right?”; “E flat minor seventh is the same as G flat dominant seventh, right?” Lucky for me he ends his questions with, “right?” No matter how I answer, he still thinks I know everything. 

“Black people are different than white people, right?”

It took me a second to process the ramifications of his question. “NO! We’re exactly the same except for melanin, our pigment in the epidermis. People aren’t defined by physical things – unless they define themselves that way.”

Sometimes he grasps the deeper philosophical ideas, and sometimes he’ll just revert to pyloric sphincters and battleships. 

“But white people killed black people, right?” Setting his laptop down he scooted off the bed toward me.

“Yes. But white people also killed white people. And black people also killed black people.”

“And black people also killed white people.” He finished my thought with a grin.

I nodded. “It’s got nothing to do with their skin color. Weak people will find any excuse to make themselves better than someone else. Then they do bad things.” 

I rubbed my jaw. Who was telling him this stuff? Defining personhood based on physical traits has got to be one the most senseless things we people do. Look at the greatest people in history. What sets them apart? Not what they look like. Their greatest attributes come from the unseen – a great leader, scientist, writer, philanthropist. Who’s the whitest person in history or the blackest? No one cares, not in the long run. It’s the same with a million other characteristics and preferences. 

We focus on superficial things at the cost of the truly great things within us and within those around us. 

I started thinking about what racism is at its core. Isn’t it simply thinking someone else has less value, maybe even to the point they’re less than human? I realized even though I’m not racist, there are still groups of people I struggle not to look down on. Bigots for example. I also have issues with fools and liars. I asked God how to navigate feelings that someone is less valuable of a person than I am. He reminded me that while I was a fool and a liar, he still pursued a relationship with me and treated me with such love and dignity that it changed me.

That gives me an example to follow. Loving my enemies isn’t feeling warmth and closeness with them, it’s making a choice about how to treat them despite my feelings. Jesus tells me to go the extra mile for them anyway, and always treat them with the same respect I want from others.

On a societal level, how do we approach racism? Nelson Mandela says racism isn’t natural, it’s taught. Just like that person telling Taras that people are fundamentally different because of their skin. Morgan Freeman concludes the best way to help stop racism is to stop talking about it.

The way to fix the human condition isn’t to focus on it, it’s to focus on our relationship with God. Dr. Dallas Willard says if my single priority is my connection to God, his love and power will fill my life and change my perspective. Love and compassion and kindness will naturally pour from me into the people around me — even the ones I would normally despise. Jesus says all our fruitfulness flows from our connection to him. The alternative is that we can do nothing. It’s simply a choice. Our wait for social change would be over. 

A few months ago I asked Taras to choose an icon for my Amazon account. He chose a Denzel Washington look-alike. Why? Because in Taras’s eyes, skin color was not a difference. In that moment I realized how long it would take for racial inequalities to disappear if no one perpetuated them. 

One generation.


“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” ~ Nelson Mandela

“If anyone is to love God and have his or her life filled with that love, God in his glorious reality must be brought before the mind and kept there in such a way that the mind takes root and stays fixed there.” ~ Dallas Willard

“Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different than it was before. … All your life long you are slowly turning … into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state of the other.” ~ C.S. Lewis

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing… If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” ~Jesus (John 15)