Am I raising a racist?

That is the question I was asking myself as I listened to my daughter’s commentary on the people walking by our front porch. You see, we are from white-collar suburbia. However, several years ago when we were moving to St. Louis to attend graduate school, we made a decision that drastically affected our outlook on life and people in general. We decided that A) since we were very familiar with what we were coming from and B) since we were only going to be in St. Louis for a few years that we would take this opportunity to experience something different. So we ended up renting a duplex in downtown St. Louis, on a busy street, next door to the corner 7-eleven.

Being in an urban neighborhood, we were able to sit on our front porch and watch the myriads of people walk by on their way to and from the convenience store in pursuit of their orange crush slushy’s and crispy tacitos. One thing was evident and our children quickly picked up on this. These people look different than us.

The neighborhood that we were in had quite a unique ethnic mix. St. Louis is home to one of the largest Bosnian populations in the world. (Who knew?) Also, downtown St. Louis is a largely African American city. It has followed the majority of large U.S. cities in the pattern of “white flight”.

Here is the question posed to me by my oldest daughter, who at that time was around 4 years of age, while we were playing outside on our front porch. “Daddy, why are brown people so mean?”

I stopped dead in my tracks, first to make sure the guy walking down the sidewalk hadn’t heard what she had said. Second because I was interested in where she would have come up with such a conclusion. (I was also somewhat entertained, because she herself would be considered to be a “brown” person by many, since my wife is Peurto Rican.)

Here is what I discovered. She daily played on our front porch and waved at the people she saw walking back and forth to the corner store, but very few ever waved back. Therefore, in her 4 year old mind, “brown” people are not friendly.

Now here is what slapped me in the face. I was allowing my children to grow up in an environment where their only interaction with people different than them was waving at them from a distance. They had never seen an African American in our house, much less at our dinner table.

In Christian thinking, we say that there are sins of commission, sins which we actively commit through our actions, say for example stealing a purse or a car, and sins of omission, things which are sins because of our lack of action, such as not speaking truth into a situation where it would be required. What I realized was that I was teaching my children, thru my lack of providing positive interactions with people who are different than us, to see those individuals as somehow “less than”. While my wife and I were certainly not actively teaching our children racist or bigoted thought patterns, we were laying the foundations for racist and bigoted thinking because of what we were not doing.

So we began proactively having friends from various ethnic backgrounds over for dinner, in our home, providing a new framework thru which our children could view and discern that people are people, loved by God, therefore worthy of our affections and our attention.

Today, years later, by God’s grace, one of my daughter’s best friends in our neighborhood is a young girl from a vastly different ethnic, religious and cultural background than her own. She has singled this girl out for friendship, in part, because she is so different and because she sees her as a person to be valued rather than ostracized. Because of this relationship, our families have been able to spend some time getting to know each other as well. It has truly been amazing to have our children leading us into relationships in our neighborhood! (Thank you God, for letting us see something we may have actually gotten right in this whole parenting experiment!)

It is so easy for me to see how my actions are affecting the formation of the next generation and the expansion of God’s kingdom. Yet what I truly fear are those things I do not see. Those things that I am passing along, those affronts to God and his gospel which I am communicating thru my lack of paying attention or my failure to live life in a state of Spirit-directed awareness.

Father, open our eyes, expand your kingdom, and come quickly.