An Obituary for Racial Colorblindness

DerelictaBotticelli

An Obituary for Colorblindness

           On July 13th, 2013, when George Zimmerman was found not guilty of murdering Trayvon Benjamin Martin, the theory of racial color blindness in the United States died on the courtroom floor from a massive heart attack.
             The racial color blindness theory had grown up quite a bit since it was born out the civil rights era of the 1960’s.  It was a well behaved, gently intentioned theory with a great philosophical ancestry.  It proposed to judge people only on their individual merit, on “The content of their character” rather than “The color of their skin.”  The theory of color blindness insisted that it “Did not see color” and that it “treated everyone the same.”

            What Americans did not acknowledge was that the theory of racial color blindness had a huge birth defect:  the people in our country actually live and act very differently.  We have no common culture in how we treat others.  Many people grew up not only with broken sidewalks, but with twisted families.  Some people had learned to live with an attitude of suspicion. They understood personal protection as a fully loaded weapon rather than the sense of security that comes from knowing all of your neighbors names. They were taught to follow people in order to appear threatening, and to never trust or to follow the instructions of a police officer.  –Not everyone follows the golden rule and treats others as they want to be treated.  Instead many people were taught to skew that rule and treat others just as they have been treated: badly.

With all of these differences in actual culture and behavior, we should not be surprised when our theory of American racial colorblindness crumples at our feet.  Without an over arching principle of some sort of commonly held belief, there is absolutely no way to overcome our fear of others who are different than we are.  Without something bigger than the American freedom to become who we want to be and the liberty to do whatever we want that is legal, there can be no cure for this deadly disease that shows up with its terrible symptoms of racism and intolerance.

            What is needed, more than anything else, is a good old fashioned dose of love.  –The self sacrificial kind that loves your neighbor while also loving yourself.  The kind of love that Jesus showed by having long conversations with the despised and the outcasts, the forgotten sick and the poor.  The kind of love that sees the systemic poverty and the broken schools, the lack of healthcare and the chronic unemployment in our country as the cancer that guns all of us of us down, no matter what our zip code is.
 

            While our racial colorblindness may now be dead on arrival, this opens up the opportunity for us to look around us and to open up our hearts to meet people where they are, to find out who they really are as individuals. To get a sense of how they think, how they interact with others and how they have been hurt and broken just like the rest of us.  It gives us an opportunity for us to practice what we preach and to show love and to build true relationships in the world, everyday. I hope and pray that we will.

Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge

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“It Smells Like June”

The June Grand Valley Rose Show had ended, and as usual, hundreds of roses now just past their peak of perfection had to leave the Frederik Meijer Gardens conference rooms.   It always seems like such a waste to simply discard these prize winning roses that have been so meticulously groomed and pampered and photographed and fawned over.  But I am fortunate to show roses with such a generous group of exhibitors.  When I volunteered to take the flowers to the nursing home, they all helped me to load the roses into buckets instead of tossing them into the trash cans.

My husband Bill and I hurried to pack the back of his car with six 5 gallon buckets of big roses and several coffee cans filled with the miniatures and minifloras.  In our rush to get the flowers out of the sweltering heat and back into air conditioning, we forgot the empty water bottles that Joan had offered to us to use as disposable- nursing- home- safe vases.  But determined to create the give away bouquets anyway, I picked up some red party cups and started shortening the long stems and dividing up the beautiful bounty that had now completely overwhelmed my dining room table.

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I sorted and clipped and filled cups, but long past midnight, I was still working away.  Four storage bins, 40 solo cups and over 200 cut stems later, I was finally finished.
Our cat Titania stopped and smelled the roses as she inspected my work. I swear that she looked up and smiled at me. The roses were now approved for delivery.

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The next morning, I packed the bins in my car and drove to the Ely Manor Nursing Home in Allegan, Mi.  The staff people there were eager to help distribute the roses and found a cart to load the bins unto.  As I rolled the cart through the nursing home the smell of roses floated down the hallways behind me.   I stopped at an open doorway and poked my head in.  A woman was lying on her bed by the window.  “Would you like some roses?”  I asked.   “Yes” she answered sadly, “But don’t have any money”. “Well these roses are free!”  “Free?!” She said.  “I will take two!”   “How about a bouquet of five?”  I said, as I handed her a cup of loveliness.  “They are so beautiful!” She crooned.  “These are all really for me?”  “Yes” I replied.  “I’m the Pastor of the Presbyterian Church, and these are from the Grand Valley Rose Show in Grand Rapids this past weekend.  They are a gift to you.”  “Let’s put them in the window in the light!” She said.  As I left the room, her smile was brighter than the roses now glowing in the sunlight in a place of honor on her window ledge.

Further down the hallway, the staff person told me to bring a bouquet into one man’s room.  As I set the cup down his rolling table tray, I noticed that there were two trophy winning blooms in this particular group.  So I made a comment to the blank faced man sitting in the semi darkness with his blanket.  “These are award winning roses!  They won, and they are a gift to you!”   The man straightened up a little taller in his chair.  “I won an award!” he said with a tone of confidence. “I WON!” he pointed at the flowers whose very presence verified his idea of his life’s great accomplishment.  His face was no longer blank.  I left him nodding and smiling at me.

As the cart grew emptier, the spirit in air at Ely Manor was getting more festive as the rose smell found new corners to fill.  The staff were grabbing the blooms two bouquets at a time and delivering them like Santa’s elves, calling out “Roses!  Free Roses!” as they danced across the hallway and dashed into rooms.  I stopped to snap a picture of one delighted resident who had picked out a bouquet with “That Big Pink One!”  Her beautiful purple and pink shirt was the perfect backdrop for the rainbow of color that graced her hands.

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As I was standing there in the hallway with the cart, wondering which rooms were still left to visit, one of the staff  stopped me and asked for a cup that didn’t have any water in it, but that smelled good.  As I searched for the best group to give, the staff person explained that this particular resident was completely blind, and that the last time we had brought over a bouquet of show roses for her, she kept accidentally knocking it over and spilling the water everywhere.  Picking out a fine group, I handed a cup filled with highly scented roses but no water to the kindly faced woman in her wheelchair.  She held the blooms up to her face and deeply inhaled the rich rose perfume.  She leaned back with a huge smile on her face.  “IT SMELLS LIKE JUNE!”  She said delightedly.  And there in her face were the images of the roses of her memory, now brought back  clearly to her mind by the flowers in the cup in her hands.  Indeed.  It did smell like June.

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May all of the days of all of your June’s now past be long in your memory as you stop to smell all of the roses in your own life.
Peace and Roses,
Pastor Karen

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