On The Ground - What Hate Feels Like

On the Ground - What Hate Feels Like

Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God. —Bob Pierce, founder of World Vision

I HAD NEVER experienced prejudice up close and personal. Before India, I hadn’t even seen it through a bus window. I was raised in a primarily white Southern town by parents and grandparents who considered the few African Americans who lived down the road part of our own family. In fact, in my early years, my parents entrusted my physical and emotional development to their care. For the first six years of my life, I probably spent more time cuddled up to the 44DD bosom of a black woman named Lerlene than I did in my own mother’s lap. To put our relationship in perspective, ’Lene, as I affectionately called her, sat proudly next to Mom in the family row at my first wedding.

But just because I hadn’t seen it looking out my bus window doesn’t mean it didn’t and doesn’t still exist. My girlfriend Mary Jo has experienced prejudice since New Year’s Day 1956—when she was not allowed to stay in the nursery at Gatesville Memorial Hospital simply because she was born black. Her mother, without a car or taxi, walked home with her New Year’s baby in her arms. The prizes and gifts reserved for the first baby of the New Year were given to a white mother.

Of the six adventuresome women accompanying me on the trip, three were African American. As some of us marveled at our “rock star” welcome in the slums and city streets, my “sisters” commented that they knew exactly why the children desired to reach out to touch our lily-white hands. My African American girlfriends had been “on the ground” with prejudice their whole lives and knew immediately what was happening. “It’s because you’re white,” Traci said. Not disgusted. Not hurt. Not mad. Not anymore. She just made a comment that laid the fact, as she understood it, on the table: whites were preferred. Of course, that statement left me confused. Traci, Froswa, and Star quietly tried to explain their lifelong front-row seat at the play of favoritism and hate. But I still couldn’t relate to what they were saying until it was me who was on the ground and starring in an unfamiliar role.

[Love] does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. (1 Corinthians 13:6)

Have you ever been hated just because you are whom God made you to be?