When I recognised race
by Rayshawn Graves, United We Pray:
[…] That day I felt the seeds of assimilation planted within seven-year-old me that told me that it was better, even if just cooler, to be white.
When I went home that afternoon and told my parents what happened, they reaffirmed that I was created in God’s image. This would’ve been a sufficient balm for my wound, but they didn’t stop there. My Dad did something that would stick with me to this day. He took my seven-year-old hand and clenched my fingers together in a fist. He held it up, and in a half-serious way he told me that the next time someone makes you feel bad for being black, hold up your fist and tell them, “I’m black and I’m proud.” He said, “Tell them black is beautiful.”
What my Dad did that evening might have looked like a display of black pride, a father’s teaching his son to look to his skin color for hope. Teaching me that I, along with everyone else, was created in the Imago Dei should’ve been enough, right? It should have been. The problem was that I had realized that not everyone in this world, historically and presently, perceived others in that way.
What my Dad did in that moment wasn’t an attempt to build my pride on the insufficient hope of my skin color or ethnicity. He wasn’t doing this to proclaim that to be black is to be better than everyone else. Rather, he was dignifying something that had been downtrodden. My father was lifting up my soul that had been bent down by the burden of what it meant to be black in America. Had he neutralized my blackness by insisting that “it doesn’t matter what color you are,” he might have placed a temporary band-aid on the woundedness of my soul that my next encounters with race and racism would tear open afresh. But by lifting up the downtrodden through his affirming the beauty and dignity in how God made me, my Dad was reflecting the character of our Lord who, in His justice and His love, is said to lift up the downtrodden and oppressed (Psalm 146:8 CSB).
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