By Latasha Morrison
Some people admire bridges. Tasha Morrison builds them. Be The Bridge: Pursuing God's Heart for Racial Reconciliation is a compelling case, a helpful map, and a catalytic spark to better understand the racial divide; more importantly, how to begin to heal it.
I appreciate Ms. Morrison's careful work. She strives to be biblical and historical, showcasing biblical patterns as she uncovers historical atrocities. To her credit and our benefit, she does not leave us gazing in outrage at the inequities of the past. A summary hope (p. 222) gets to the "heal of the matter":
If this book serves to highlight just one truth, I hope it's that real beauty can come from the ashes of our country's history with racism. So we continue to spread the message. As the apostle Paul declared, "Because we understand our fearful responsibility to the Lord, we work hard to persuade others."
We must listen closely as she, like Mark Vroegop in Weep with Me: How Lament Opens a Door for Racial Reconciliation, urges us to listen deeply, confess, lament, repent, and seek to do what we can to repair the ripped, frayed, and tattered threads of the past.
Morrison addresses the problem of "filtered history" in America, how our history books often fail to satisfactorily address the racial inequities and atrocities committed against African Americans in particular, but also meted out against Native American and Japanese Americans (WWII). She takes pains to help us look back upon our troubled history. This is helpful. Historians can debate the volume of the historical record, educators the amount of information and time devoted to it. And we can all take responsibility for our own education.
At times, Ms. Morrison seems to apply examples of collective repentance (Daniel and Ezra on behalf of Israel) as models for us to follow. In some of these places, I cannot tell if she is chiding and challenging America or the church in America. Her call for reparations fails to consider or account for billions in governmental reparative and restoration legislation and social programs. And while I don't want to discount the need to lament and repent, how much and for how long is enough?
While I understand her book is an exploration of and pursuit of "racial reconciliation," I feel like I am on a one-way street. The problem is with the majority culture. And though she highlights the need for forgiveness and personal responsibility for owning one's "blackness," there seems to be a screaming silence when it comes to personal responsibility; i.e. the problem is the past wrongs committed against one, not the failure of any one "victim."
I appreciate Shelby Steele here. Steele notes,
The point is that those poetic truths, and the notions of correctness that force them on society, prevent America from seeing itself accurately. That is their purpose. They pull down the curtain on what is actually true. If decades of government assistance have weakened the black family with dependency an dysfunction, poetic truth argues all the more fervently that blacks are victims and that whites are privileged. Poetic truths stigmatize the actual truth with the sins of America's past so that truth itself becomes the "incorrect." (Shelby Steele, Shame: How America's Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country, p. 25
We need the message of Be The Bridge. I need it! But personally, and as a country, we must guard against and move from narratives of victimhood. Ultimately, they leave us in the unforgivable past despite our best attempts to move from it.