The following Weekly Reflection is written by the Rev. Ellis Crum who is a United Methodist pastor, writer, teacher, and Cornelius Corps Board member. In this piece, he reflects on ways that systemic racism prevents people of color from expressing their true selves. Facing this challenge is essential for any of us who are committed to honoring the image of God in all people. Please take the time to read his insightful reflection and watch the associated videos.
Peace – Jim Melson, Executive Director
One Root, Two Endings
This past Tuesday, September 15th, marked two anniversaries that rarely appear in the same sentence: World Afro Day, and the deaths of four little girls in Birmingham.
An Afro grows naturally. It needs no chemical, no heat, no permission. Yet for generations, people have been told to straighten it, tame it, or change it to fit someone else’s standard of what
acceptable looks like. World Afro Day exists because that pressure never fully went away. It is a day built to say plainly, this hair, this texture, this way of being in a body, does not require correction.
Underneath that pressure sits a judgment, that difference itself is the problem, something to be corrected, managed, or erased, depending on how far someone is willing to take it.
Sixty three years ago today, that same judgment turned lethal. Four little Black girls, Addie Mae
Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair, were killed when a bomb tore through the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on a Sunday morning.
They were getting ready for church. They were doing nothing but existing as who they were.
Racial hatred had already decided, long before that bomb was planted, that their difference made them less worthy of safety, of childhood, of life itself.
I want to be careful here, because these two stories do not sit at the same weight. One is a celebration. One is a memorial to a horror. But they share a root, and it’s worth naming plainly, not because they’re equal, but because the same judgment, in different measures, produced both.
Both are about what happens when someone else’s discomfort with difference gets to decide a
person’s worth.
Devaluing someone is not the same as hating them. Most of us will never plant a bomb or spew a
slur. But hatred does not spring up on its own. It finds fertile ground wherever we’ve already allowed difference to determine worth in smaller, quieter ways. That same soil gets tended every
time someone else’s intelligence, vocabulary, competence, ambition, cultural expression, convictions, or gifts are required to shrink so that someone else can remain comfortable.
Consider how often this shows up in ordinary rooms. The colleague who waters down her expertise so she doesn’t sound too loud. The kid who code switches, changes how he talks and carries himself, before he even opens the front door. The coworker whose passion gets relabeled
as attitude, and whose directness gets relabeled as anger, simply because of who is speaking. The friend who softens a conviction because someone else’s reaction to it mattered more than his own
honesty.
Faith and formation point somewhere else entirely. Not tolerance, which merely permits difference to exist at arm’s length. Not even acceptance, which can still carry a faint air of concession. Scripture does not say we are tolerable, or even acceptable. It says we were first declared good, and then intricately formed, fearfully and wonderfully made, our souls know it
well. Declared good before we were declared finished. Wondered over in the making. That is delight, the kind that looks at a person fully formed in their particularity and says, this is good,
without asking them to file down the edges first.
That is the work in front of us. It begins with enough confidence to encounter difference without feeling threatened by it, because confidence, not defensiveness, is what makes room for someone
else to be fully themselves in another’s presence. It continues in the small moments, catching an expectation right as it forms, the instinct to suggest someone tone it down, soften it, or say it
differently, and choosing silence instead. And it ends, if it ends anywhere, in relationships where difference is valued rather than diminished. Not managed. Not merely permitted. Valued, the way
one values something one would be poorer without.
The honest question worth sitting with is where our own comfort might be requiring someone else to become smaller. Not to produce guilt, but to produce honesty. There is likely a moment, small or recurring, where someone’s ease has become the unspoken price of another’s full
presence. Naming it is the first act of dismantling it.
Belonging should never require anyone to leave pieces of themselves outside the door. Not the natural curl of her hair. Not the conviction he is afraid will make the room tense. Not the voice, the story, or the culture that makes a person distinctly, undeniably themselves.
Four little girls never got the chance to grow into the fullness of who they were becoming.
Somewhere today, a child will run a hand through her own natural curls and be told, in a hundred small ways, whether that is something to celebrate or something to correct. The least we can do,
all these decades later, is make sure the answer is celebration.