Anxious to Talk About It

Helping White Christians Talk Faithfully about Racism

Carolyn B. Helsel

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780827200739
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

"What if I say the wrong thing?" "I'm white--is race really something I need to talk about? I'm worried I'll be called a racist!" "What does race have to do with faith, anyway?" "Why do we have to keep talking about this?"If talking about racism makes you anxious, afraid, or even angry, you're not alone. In Anxious to Talk about It, pastor and professor Carolyn B. Helsel draws on her success with white congregations to offer insight and tools to embrace, explore and work through the anxious feelings that often arise in these hard conversations. Through powerful personal stories, new observations on racial identity development, and spiritual practices to help engage issues of racial justice prayerfully, you'll gain a deeper understanding of race in America and your place in it. You will learn how to join conversations with courage, compassion, and knowledge of self, others, and the important issues at stake. Helsel's guidance will inspire you to receive the gifts that come through these difficult race conversations and point to how you can get further involved in the important social justice work around race relations. Each chapter ends with questions for reflection and discussion to further help you get the conversations started.

While Anxious to Talk about It can be read alone, reading with a group will deepen the discussion, integrate the material, and provide opportunities to practice. A free Study Guide and other group resources are available at www.chalicepress.com.

Chapter 1: The Way We Think about Race

When you first hear the word race, what are the other words that come to mind for you? Perhaps words or phrases come to mind you have heard when talking about race with someone else. I hear the following phrases regularly when I talk about race with groups of white people: “Melting pot,” “reverse racism,” “post-racial,” and “colorblind.” Each of these phrases represents a way of interpreting race today. “Melting pot” in America implies all the ethnic differences among immigrants have “melted” into one citizenry. “Reverse racism” is what white people experience when they become targeted for their race. “Post-racial” often refers to an era where talking about race is no longer necessary or useful. And the word “colorblind” refers to someone who does not see color as racial difference. Yet each of these phrases captures a world of deeper meaning frequently missed by white people when talking about race. I will talk about each of these phrases as I have heard them in conversations with other white people.

“Melting Pot”

In an online course I teach on worship, a textbook I use focuses on diversity within one of its chapters, and a student took issue with the concept. The student felt the chapter lifted up positive elements from non-white worshiping traditions, but then disparaged the contributions of so-called “white” churches. I asked him to write out his concerns, since I had not experienced the reading the same way he had. His response included a story about race: a narrative that explained his own frustration with the current conversations around race and diversity. He said that the United States used to be a country of immigrants, where each person came and contributed the best of his or her culture, and then joined the melting pot of America. Now, he believes, persons want to come and receive the best our country has to offer, to enjoy its benefits, but not become “American.” They want to retain their “otherness,” using a hyphenated descriptor before the word American. My student said he could not understand why people would immigrate here and not want to learn our language, instead insisting that we speak their language and learn about their cultures. He agreed that we could learn something from other cultures, but argued that other cultures have something to learn from whites as well.

In this student’s conversation with me, he was lifting up the model of the melting pot of cultures, a way of saying talking about race maintains divisions and prevents unity. The student believed that talking about race negatively impacted what, in his mind, was a positive experience of American cultures melting into one larger nation. His story about race was that we needed to ignore it in order to maintain the melting pot of our country.

“Reverse Racism”

In a church I served, after preaching several sermons that focused on recent high-profile cases of police shootings of African American young men, one parishioner walked out in the middle of my sermon. I later learned more about the man’s frustrations: they had to do with his current work environment and colleagues. As a person in the tech industry, he worked with persons over the Internet and on the phone who were often a world away. The few colleagues who actually shared a brick-and-mortar office space with him were immigrants from other parts of the world, primarily India. He was the only white person in his office and often felt excluded by his colleagues, who would sometimes speak in other languages to one another. He saw them doing well financially and professionally, while he was still struggling to succeed in the company and overlooked for promotions. He experienced my sermons that lifted up the plight of people of color at the hands of oppressive white society as a contradiction of his own experiences, and he expected I would view him as a racist for disagreeing with me. He believed “reverse racism” took place, and felt he had experienced it himself.

In anti-racist trainings, I hear the leaders state that racism against white people does not exist, even though many white people express they have experienced it. What anti-racist trainers explain is that racism is more than feelings of being discriminated against; it is the systemic exclusion of certain groups of people from having access to opportunities based on their group membership. They highlight the history of laws that have unfairly benefited whites and how laws and patterns of discrimination become invisible social structures that perpetuate inequality.

Having a new understanding of racism as benefiting whites is important. But re-defining racism for listeners does not necessarily translate into new understanding or different interpretations of the world. White people who are told racism is systemic have no framework for understanding what this looks like in everyday life. Whites who believe reverse racism exists often have a story behind this belief, and these stories cannot be changed through logical arguments alone. Knowing the stories behind our own interpretations of race can help give us clues for how we went from seeing race one way to seeing it differently. In sharing our stories, we can begin to understand what shapes our interpretations of the world.

“Post-racial” or “Colorblind”

While leading a workshop on race and racism for a predominantly white church, I sat at a table of women during one of the small group discussions. One woman, in her 40s, spoke about her daughter, whom she had adopted from China. She expressed concern that we are still talking about race, when it seemed to her that her daughter just wanted to be seen as part of her (white) adoptive family. The woman shared that her daughter never showed interest in learning about Chinese culture or finding her birth parents, and the woman saw talking about race as negatively impacting her daughter’s ability to feel she truly belonged within her adoptive family. Another woman at the table, in her 70s, still remembered signs for “whites only” above bathrooms and water fountains, and she had believed that “not seeing color” was an improvement to that former way of life. Both of the women were describing a “post-racial” America, an ideal that values “colorblindness” as a way of moving beyond our ugly racist past.

If I had recently attended a workshop on anti-racism, I might quickly respond to the three scenarios above with the following explanations: “melting pot” was only ever used by white immigrants as an American ideal, that what whites perceive as “reverse racism” is not the same as centuries-old systemic discrimination, and “colorblindness” cannot be a positive thing when racial prejudice continues to operate beyond our awareness. I could respond this way. I believe the words. But I cannot expect that simply stating counter-arguments will change minds. Ending racism involves more than education. People need a new framework for interpreting the world they live in. The stories they believe about racism from their own perspectives are stories that make sense to them.

In order to talk about race among persons who carry a number of different stories about this subject, we need to understand the power of stories and the connection of our stories to our understanding. Cognition—how we think—is not solely responsible for how we interpret the world in which we live. Our emotions are both influenced by our interpretation of events and serve to influence our interpretation of events. And our interpretation of events is most often shared in story form, conveying the attached emotion and color of our personal perspectives. This is why some therapists engage their clients in cognitive-behavioral therapies to help the clients deal with serious emotional concerns: how we think about the world influences our emotions, and, likewise, our emotions impact how we think about the world.

Stories and Emotions Surrounding Race

In talking about race with white people, the emotions related to whiteness impact how we see the world. When anti-racist trainers introduce the statement “racism is prejudice plus power,” white persons may not see themselves as powerful—and this feeling prevents them from viewing whites as a racial group continuing to hold the greatest power in our society. The word racism is connected in their minds to other stories that also impact their emotional reaction to talking about it. Stories that come from the person’s history, from their education or schooling, from media sources, from friends and family, all influence their emotional reactions and their interpretation of the word racism. When talking about race and racism, we need to tell these stories and sit with the emotions they bring up for us. White people also need to hear the stories of others who have had different experiences than their own.

To be able to join the conversation and engage meaningfully with racial injustice, we must also expand our understandings of what racism means. Culture has changed, society’s racial stratification has evolved, and demographics in the United States have changed. Yet racism continues to be experienced in real and life-threatening ways for persons of color. For white persons who want to understand the phenomenon of current racism, we need to be able to recognize it, not only by bringing to mind our previous understandings of racism, but also to re-evaluate our understandings. It is necessary to broaden our own collection of stories that inform our understanding of racism, and rethink our assumptions about what racism looks like today.

The Power of Interpretation: Trayvon Martin and #BlacksLivesMatter

In the year 2012 in Stanford, Florida, a black teenager named Trayvon Martin was walking home wearing a hoodie in the rain, having just walked to a gas station to buy a drink and a bag of Skittles. On his way home, a person driving around caught sight of him and thought he looked “suspicious.” That split-second interpretation sentenced Trayvon to death.

His shooter, George Zimmerman, interpreted Trayvon’s presence as a threat, an interpretation that led to the confrontation that ended in Zimmerman shooting and killing Trayvon. Zimmerman had in his mind a story of assumptions about a young black man wearing a hoodie sweatshirt. The story in his mind told him that this young man was someone to fear and to suspect, and that interpretation brought on an aggressive encounter that ended with a gun shot that killed Trayvon Martin.

Zimmerman was acquitted for Trayvon’s murder. The jury consisted of six women—all of whom were white, with one exception. Their interpretation of the events as the defense attorney presented them was that Zimmerman was not guilty of any wrongdoing, and that Trayvon’s ...

Table of contents

• Praise for Anxious to Talk about it
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: White and Anxious
• Chapter 1: The Way We Think about Race
• Chapter 2: Feeling White
• Chapter 3: Mapping Racial Identity Development
• Chapter 4: Listening to Different Stories about Race
• Chapter 5: Expressing Gratitude
• Chapter 6: Spiritual Practices for Race Talk
• Conclusion: The Anxious Bench
• Recommended Resources
• About the Author