It happened in those convulsive days after the killing of George Floyd, when every major city erupted in demonstrations. Things were moving so fast you couldn’t keep up.
One day I glanced at the news and saw a photo of a skinny white guy, whose grotesquely contorted body lay face-down in the street. Black blood was pooled beside his head. Then I saw that this happened right here in Dallas—in Deep Ellum, the nightclub district.
I was shaken for the rest of the day.
The news was sketchy at first, but it appeared that a bunch of guys kicked, stoned, and beat this man to a pulp the night of May 30. Now the facts turned out to be a bit more complicated, as they usually are, and I will get to that. But I want to go back to my immediate response.
My chest seized up, like the wind had been knocked out of me. I couldn’t get that image out of my mind. It was so disruptive, so jolting to the emotions, that I wished I’d never seen it. I actually prayed that night that God would erase it from my mind, so I could go on with life.
I know why I responded this way. When I looked at that man crumpled in the street, I saw my 21-year-old son. Tallish and slender, with short brown hair. Dressed in a green plaid shirt. My son has a shirt just like that. I remember going to the department store and picking it out for him at a time when we could barely afford it, then taking satisfaction when he wore it, as only a mom can. Now it brought tears.
but it’s close.
I had seen the George Floyd video earlier that month. It left me shocked and angry. I took notice of certain details, like the multiracial group of bystanders who shouted, begged, and took a few brave steps toward those officers as they slowly crushed the life out of a Black man. I identified with them. I could feel their impotence, their outrage, as these uniformed men extinguished a human life before their eyes.
But I didn’t feel the way I did when I saw that skinny white guy lying in the street.
I realize now that the same way I felt about the skinny white guy is the same way Black people felt about Ahmaud Arbery, Atatiana Jefferson, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and Daniel Prude.
Kicked in the throat, robbed of breath. Ruined for the rest of the day or year. Left with horrifying images that won’t leave you and look just like your sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, and friends. (Sharifa Stevens of Dallas crafts words of crystalline beauty. Read her reflections here and here.)
Except it doesn’t happen once or twice. It keeps happening year after year, and no amount of pleading, no multiplicity of videos, no measure of someone else’s pain will convince your white brothers and sisters to care for more than a day, or expend more than a sermon or tweet, finely calibrated not to offend the base.
There is ample evidence that we are conditioned from the earliest age to empathize with people who look like us, at the expense of others. I guess what is necessary for survival in childhood leads to a limited ability to feel the pain of people who look different from us when we grow up in ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods, schools, and churches.
The study of implicit bias adds another layer, with one test demonstrating that 75 percent of white people automatically make positive associations with whiteness, and negative associations with blackness.
I say these things because I am grasping for answers. I can’t understand why my white evangelical brothers and sisters—who have the Spirit of Christ in them—care so little about Black lives, though they have led the way in caring for unborn lives. What does it mean, after all, to be pro-life?
Surely the Church will be judged for the way we stewarded the precious gift of human life in the year 2020.
P.S. The story of the Deep Ellum guy has a better ending. His name is Charles C.A. Shoultz, and he survived with relatively minor injuries. Shoultz says he was drunk, and he grabbed a sword (!) and went charging into a group of demonstrators. What happened next is pretty much what you’d expect when a skinny drunk guy with a sword barrels into a group of guys much bigger than he.
