Real Life Real Faith Men of Faith September Issue | Page 21

officers shooting and killing unarmed black men often without consequence to
the shooter—incidents that have led to demonstrations and unrest across the
country have gone out of control. When there’s no repercussions, no apologies,
and certainly no effort to be contrite in not allowing it to happen again the crisis
implodes, making it visceral and polarizing. If you’re not a Black man who has
lived with prejudice or racial profiling, or even has feared for your well-being
when you see flashing lights in your rear view mirror, you may not know the
difference how crisis can be destructive. Empathy is a good thing in too little
supply. Just because this nation has a history of civil disobedience and protest, it
doesn’t have to be part of the American quilt. If you were to ask me what can we
as concerned and law-abiding African American citizens can do to stem the tide, I
will answer thus—quite a bit. And it starts with self, family and community where
the church is in the center. We need to do a better job of creating and
maintaining a sense of oneness, where we should look to the church as a model
revealing to the world what true togetherness, equality, and freedom can
produce. We are, and have always been a resilient people, demonstrative in our
beliefs where our songs ring mournfully flat when the bells are bereft of sound.
Even so, we continue to belt out those songs with tremendous passion, perhaps
in hopes that by singing them loudly enough we can somehow cover the silence
among us not doing more to bridge gaps. Those gaps need to be morphed for a
movement to understand why we should be united for God’s ideal of the races
being complete. We need to constantly be reminded “we all bleed red” until we
are blue in the face where color won’t divide. We don’t want when the songs are
over that we go our separate ways. No, that has to change! We remain
relationally separated more often than to when we can only come together for
scheduled events as opposed to scheduling a life agenda with a desire for
ongoing mutual edification, and the implementation of a shared vision.
In closing, all of the above in this essay can only be achieved if African
Americans stop running from the truth, and white folk erase fear, ignorance and
misunderstanding from their mindsets. While we are running we should stop as
long as it takes to regain trust in ourselves so our families will be united, and the
church can regain an audience with God’s prescribed agenda for all races to live
under one command, one confirming method, and only one category for change.
Our failure to respond to this issue of biblical oneness has allowed what never
should have been problematic in the first place. Reality can come when you least
expect it, but it comes albeit in a timely fashion. In a humanistic way, we stop in