Recognizing our Prejudices
“My name is Jeff, and I’m a recovering racist,” the Rev. Jeff Jackson told the crowd at an ecumenical Martin luther king jr. day program.
When he was starting his priesthood at his second parish, St. Nicholas church in Hamilton, in the Diocese of Atlanta, Rev. Jackson decided to put his convictions on parade.
He noticed in the local paper that the town was holding a parade for the Martin Luther King holiday and asked organizers whether his church could enter a float. When he and some of his parishioners arrived at the staging area, he noticed that they were the only white people there. “That began the process of moving St. Nicholas further into being part of the community,” he said. “We kept showing up and building relationships.”
Later, invited to give the address at the community’s King service, Jackson went on to tell his story of growing up in a small town in Alabama with parents who taught him to love everyone. Despite their efforts, he said, he was influenced by his surroundings to make distinctions.
“I have made negative, sweeping generalizations of people who are different from me,” he said. “I have heard whispers from other white people about the ‘Black’ people they see. I’ve heard racist jokes told in church gatherings, and in my younger days, I might have even been the one to tell them. I live with a history of segregation in the many places I’ve called home. . . . I participate in a system where I get special privileges because I’m white. . . . I know well the darkness that hangs in the heart of someone who wants to be separate, at a distance, sticking to the people who look and act like me. But I am trying, daily, to let the light of Jesus shine in that darkness to show me another way.”
Seeds of Discrimination || Debbie Pritchett, a plump eighth grader at DeKalb County’s Avondale High School, was out to make an impression. Her Georgia history assignment was to write a paper and read it to the class. Debbie, a self-described perfectionist who valued good grades, knew she could give her presentation extra flair by dressing for the occasion.
When her turn came, she stood at the front of the classroom in a white robe borrowed from her aunt to read her paper about the Ku Klux Klan. She would have worn the pointed satin hood but couldn’t make it stand up properly, so she held it up instead.
Debbie simply accepted the Klan as a part of the culture she was steeped in. She never knew her parents to attend a Klan rally, but her uncle served as chaplain to a Smyrna klavern. She didn’t question the Klan’s premise that white people were superior to all others. By wearing a Klan robe to class, “it never occurred to me that anybody would be offended,” she said. She recalls little reaction from other students. Her teacher merely asked tersely, “Where did you get that?” Looking back, Debbie said, “she was probably horrified.”
Half a century later, Debbie (now Debbie Anderson) is part of a wide network of Episcopalians in the Diocese of Atlanta who are working to overcome prejudice and promote racial healing.
For Anderson, a member of St. Thomas church in Columbus, that means directing the TAP program founded by Chattahoochee Valley Episcopal Ministry. TAP—whose name, Thompson-Anderson-Pound Art Program, gets its title from founders and funders—is a five-day arts program for children of diverse racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Children aged six through eleven years old learn the value of diversity from volunteers who themselves come from a wide variety of ethnic and religious groups.
“Not only have I learned the value of diversity,” said Anderson, “I think it’s important for children to learn the value of diversity early.”
Melba Hughes understands the need to head off prejudice in even the youngest people. Hughes, who spent her early years in Jamaica, said she was called the N-word for the first time in her thirties as she and her husband were driving from Chicago to Atlanta. When they stopped for gas—she doesn’t remember where—a cute little white girl noticed them and said to her mother, loud enough for Hughes to hear, “Look, Mama, look at the niggers over there.” There was no animus in the child’s tone, Hughes said. She spoke as if calling attention to any curiosity.
“I was stunned,” Hughes said, “that this little girl who could barely speak could articulate the word so clearly. It made me sad for her.”
Hughes, senior warden at St. Luke’s in Atlanta, was one of more than 250 people who participated in a Lenten study of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in partnership with Ebenezer Baptist Church. The book by Isabel Wilkerson, a former New York Times reporter now at Emory University, is about the impact of divisions on individuals and society.
Hughes said she was surprised that so many white participants in the study knew so little about what Black Americans experience. “I try to give them a little grace,” she said. “Maybe I’m the only Black person my white friend has enough of a relationship with to have these conversations. The worst thing is that people live and operate in their own worlds, too busy to take time to understand other viewpoints.”
“JUST BECAUSE CYNDI LAUPER AND KENNY ROGERS GOT TOGETHER WITH MICHAEL JACKSON AND SANG ‘WE ARE THE WORLD,’ WE THOUGHT EVERYTHING WAS OK, BUT THERE’S A LOT OF WORK TO BE DONE IN SOCIETY, IN CHURCH, AND IN OURSELVES.”
Anderson and Hughes experienced two sides of the cancerous prejudice that can take hold almost from the cradle. Too many people carry the ideas into adulthood and even old age without ever questioning their validity.
In their book Blind Spot, authors Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald assigned the label “mindbugs” to the “ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason and make decisions.” The human brain, they write, “does a great deal of its work automatically, unconsciously, and unintentionally.” While the mindbugs might swarm unsummoned like gnats, the pest control to wipe them out requires intentional effort.
Dismantling Prejudice as Spiritual Formation || For two decades the Diocese of Atlanta has had a commission to address racism. In October 2017, the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing opened to offer training, pilgrimages, and dialogue to clergy, laity, and community leaders for people seeking what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the Beloved Community.” The center’s goal is to bring about individual and societal change in the context of faith.
Training at the center has had an impact around the diocese. Clergy and lay leaders have taken what they’ve learned and built programs that affect their congregations and communities. Some of that impact has come out of a course taught by the Rev. Kenneth Swanson. And some has resulted from efforts that rose organically within the hearts of clergy or laity in individual congregations.
Swanson presents dismantling prejudice as “a spiritual formation issue that doesn’t end until you die,” said Absalom Jones Center director Dr. Catherine Meeks. “We are in a society that puts values on people based on race or age or gender or sexuality or weight. If I’m going to be pleasing to God, I’m going to work to see every human being as a beloved child of God.”
Swanson, now retired, became involved with the Absalom Jones Center about three years ago, after Meeks gave a presentation at St. David’s church in Roswell, where he was rector. He joined the center’s board in 2018 and became its chair a year later.
Being part of the center gave Swanson an opportunity to use his background in spiritual formation—he had taught a course since 1985—as context for a course on racial healing. The result is a seven-session program over fourteen weeks that requires an intense commitment to outside-of-class work.
The introductory session is a deep look at racism in America “so that people have a clear understanding of systematic racism and how embedded it is,” Swanson said. That is followed by a concentration on the Prayer of Examen, which Swanson said is “designed to enable us to see with perfect clarity who we are in relationship with God.” He takes the idea of the Examen in several parts. In Swanson’s workshops, the steps of the Examen require “an acute self-examination of how an individual has been affected by racism, how a person has embraced racism, if unconsciously, how people of color who have been marginalized or hurt have also in some ways embraced racist ideas,” he said. “It’s done in the context of asking God to lead us into greater self-understanding.”
Following the difficult work of the Examen is a “circle of forgiveness” as participants seek forgiveness from God, forgiveness from those they have harmed, and forgiveness for those who’ve harmed them. The final session offers a lifelong prayer discipline of seven components designed to spiritually sustain and nurture people involved in ministries of racial healing.
Swanson said his interest in overcoming prejudice grew out of a realization that he had been raised in “white privilege” in Milwaukee and had never spoken to a Black person until he was eighteen years old. As dean of the cathedral in Nashville from 1997 to 2007, he participated in a small biracial group of clergy who met for lunch. Their honest discussions “opened my eyes to the depths of racism,” he said. “I came to believe racism is the biggest problem in American society, not just an individual problem but a social and systemic problem.”
The Church’s Job || Sara Thomas, a parishioner at St. Catherine’s in Marietta, says Swanson’s course was “pivotal” for her. “For me, it helped with all the shame and guilt you have to move through to get to the place of real action and reconciliation,” she said. “God can move us through that and wash us clean in a way that doesn’t have to hold back God’s plan.”
Thomas was already participating in a small group of women at St. Catherine’s, sometimes meeting on Zoom and sometimes in someone’s backyard during the pandemic of 2020 when, in May, the death of George Floyd came to light. Video showed Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin holding his knee on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes while Floyd begged to be allowed to breathe, until he couldn’t breathe anymore. The recording made the world witness to the death of a Black man by the hands of a white police officer—the offense being suspicion of passing a counterfeit bill at a convenience store. Chauvin was later convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty-two and a half years in prison.
The women “felt such urgency” after Floyd’s death, Thomas said. “We didn’t know what we wanted to do, but we didn’t want to do nothing. We didn’t want St. Catherine’s to stay the same in the wake of what I think was a real national reckoning.”
The women prayed together weekly, formed a “racial healing circle,” then read The Cross and the Lynching Tree, by theologian James H. Cone, looking at two powerful symbols in the lives of many African Americans. Some Black parishioners joined them for the discussion. Out of that, a ministry called All God’s Children was formed to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. “We make sure it’s grounded in our faith,” Thomas said.
The church is starting more racial healing circles, planning field trips, and “looking at the images on our walls and the songs we sing,” said Thomas. “We’re really trying to evaluate all our ministries.”
As for herself, Thomas, who is in her forties, said, “For a while, being aware of my own racism was making me shameful and afraid of being in relationship with people of color. When I started thinking about the way God sort of smooths the path when we are trying to be in God’s will, I began to build relationships with women of color. I felt so enriched by them individually! They are wonderful people I really love. But as I know more about their stories, I also know more about what the church is not seeing.”
Swanson’s course “is a look at the spirituality of what God wants us to be as a church,” said the Rev. Ricardo Bailey, chaplain of Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School and rector of St. Timothy church in Atlanta. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest, Bailey was received into the Episcopal priesthood in 2016. White nuns first taught him Black history. Their acceptance of him was “formative,” he said. When time came for high school, Bailey was one of the Black DeKalb County students bused to white schools for desegregation. “Nobody was burning crosses, but there was always a sense that ‘this is not your side of town,’” he said.
Harkening back to the 1980s, Bailey said, many Americans lived under an illusion. “Just because Cyndi Lauper and Kenny Rogers got together with Michael Jackson and sang ‘We Are the World,’ we thought everything was OK, but there’s a lot of work to be done in society, in church, and in ourselves. No matter how we try to absolve ourselves of it, the seeds of racism are in all of us. Our job as the church of Jesus Christ is to confront racism, tell the gospel truth about it, and invite people to the fuller life we all receive through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”
A Framework for Conversation || Leaders of Chattahoochee Valley Episcopal Ministry (CVEM) in Columbus “had been trying to have a conversation about racial justice for a couple of years when George Floyd was killed,” said executive director Martha Robert. In the midst of the pandemic, they decided to start a film discussion group over Zoom. The first session took place in June of 2020.
“The changes we want to see in the world have to start with relationship.”
— Sue McEvoy
Participants were asked to watch a free-access film on their own time and then join the group for a discussion. The first film was the documentary 13th, so named after the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery. That was followed by White Like Me, about racism and white privilege, and a series of other films, one per month. The program has drawn an interracial group of regulars with occasional drop-ins, including clergy and laypeople from other towns and even other states.
Starting with a movie gives a framework for conversation, Robert said, perhaps making it easier for people to address their feelings and experiences.
Some white participants told Robert that the conversations have helped them realize their own privilege and look at how to leverage that privilege in the interest of social justice. And, she said, she has heard from African American participants who are encouraged that white people in the group really do want to understand.
“What is so clear,” Robert said, “is that we all have such varied experiences with race. We have to face it as systems and policies and history, not taking it personally, while at the same time recognizing our personal responsibility to do our own searching.”
Malinda Shamburger, a vestry member at St. Thomas church, joined the conversation “as a way to move my own passion forward.” She grew up on army bases, lived in integrated housing, and went to integrated schools but noticed that her own son and daughter were having a different experience. Living in an all-Black area, they went to all-Black neighborhood schools. “Everybody they interacted with looked like them,” she said. Through a youth group called Infusion, which served as a pilot program for the Dismantling Racism curriculum for youth, her daughter, Sydney, made white friends.
The film discussions are an opportunity to do some “truth telling” in a “healing setting,” Shamburger said. “Before we can be recognized, we need to do some truth telling. The more we know about each other, the better we can get along.”
Bridging the Divides || While sitting in a meeting at St. Luke’s church in Atlanta in about 2015, Lindley Cole’s eyes landed on a photograph on the wall. The picture from the 1940s showed a group of people who were all white. The person next to Cole noticed where her attention was directed and remarked that, given the time the photograph was taken, Cole could not have been at St. Luke’s because she is Black.
The exchange prompted Cole to write a reflection for a devotional booklet produced by the church, which, in turn, was read by Amy Durrell.
Durrell, who is white, had been pondering her perception that although the church had both white and Black parishioners, they really didn’t know one another as friends.
Thus was born Bridge Builders, small fellowship groups that meet regularly and share stories and experiences.
“As churches, we want to be multiracial,” said Durrell. “People who are white are happy to have other people be part of our community, but we have to be willing to change our community. You can’t just open the doors and have a diverse community without working at it.”
Cole, who was raised on the island of St. Christopher, better known as St. Kitts, said that since she had a different experience by growing up in the Caribbean, she learns from the stories of African Americans.
When St. Luke’s and Ebenezer Baptist Church, the home church of Martin Luther King Jr., decided to do a Lenten study of Caste in the spring of 2021, the Bridge Builders groups formed a core.
The Rev. Ed Bacon was interim rector at the time, and he had introduced the congregation to centering or contemplative prayer, a practice of silence that has been part of his life for forty years.
“That journey led me to understand that I and everyone else are one, that there can be no hierarchy of human value,” he said. He points to the Episcopal baptism vows, in which a person promises to “seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself.”
“The most important verb there is seek,” Bacon said. “Not enough of us take literally to ‘seek the Christ in all persons.’”
“WE HAVE ALL THE TOOLS TO REALIZE THE DREAM OF JESUS IN DISMANTLING THE SIN OF RACISM AND CREATING THE KINGDOM OF GOD. WE JUST HAVE TO REACH DEEP AND DO IT.”
When Bacon came to St. Luke’s as interim in 2019, the church already had a long-standing relationship with Ebenezer. In a meeting with Ebenezer’s executive pastor, the Rev. John H. Vaughn, and other leaders of the two congregations, the group decided to do the joint study of Caste during Lent.
Jonese Austin, a student at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, represented Ebenezer as an organizer, along with St. Luke’s member Sue McAvoy. Both expressed surprise at the response as several hundred people signed up, including “friends” of both churches, some in distant cities. An average of about 250 people participated every week.
The program was “very intentionally spiritually focused,” said McEvoy. It began with a hymn and brief homily, went on to small groups and discussion of insights, and closed with prayer. After the last gathering, 235 people answered a survey about their experience. More than 90 percent said they felt “spiritually enlightened.”
As one of the youngest participants, Austin said she learned from the accounts of both Black and white participants as they reflected on their experiences with race, civil rights, and social justice causes. And, she said, she appreciated that the stories were told and heard in the context of people’s faith journeys.
“The changes we want to see in the world have to start with relationship,” said McEvoy.
Loving thy Neighbor || Debbie Anderson looks back on her childhood and sees that she was enthusiastic about wearing a Ku Klux Klan robe to school because she was raised in a culture that valued exclusivity. “People thought nobody was right but them,” she said, “that God didn’t love anybody but them. Finding healing through Christianity for me was a blessing.”
As Anderson’s story illustrates, racial understanding does as much or more for the person who embraces it as for the person who receives it from another.
People of any race or ethnic background who keep to their own kind are missing out on great experiences, said Melba Hughes of St. Luke’s. “There’s richness in the diversity of the United States, in the variety of food, of music, of cultural differences. We are shortchanging ourselves if we don’t see the richness in each other.”
Examining One’s Heart || After moving from his first parish in Hamilton to St. Margaret’s in Carrollton and the Diocese of Atlanta, the Rev. Jeff Jackson went on a pilgrimage to Ghana in 2019, where he said his consciousness was further raised as he stood by a river where African people were cleansed not for baptism but before being transported to the Western world as slaves.
“Coming back, I knew things had to be different for myself and St. Margaret’s,” he said. He gave some presentations, then the pandemic hit, and then the George Floyd death made the news. Some parishioners became angry at his messages, but others were receptive and encouraging. The parish is moving forward with plans to address racial understanding, and, Jackson said, he is trying to be attuned to what is happening in Carrollton. “I want to be open to possibilities,” he said, “to see where God is leading.”
The process of examining one’s heart for prejudice “really is about spiritual growth,” he said. “We have all the tools to realize the dream of Jesus in dismantling the sin of racism and creating the kingdom of God. We just have to reach deep and do it.”
