Chapter Six
Belonging
At the beginning of Undivided, organizers projected an image of a heart symbol onto the screen. One word appeared in each of the three corners of the symbol: Relationships, Identity, Action. The teaching team wanted participants to know they had to grow in all three directions—reflecting on themselves, getting into relationships across race, and taking action—if they wanted to become part of the solution to systemic injustice. The trick was converting vulnerability into trust, instead of shame. Self-reflection could prompt some participants to become defensive, angry, or unwilling to engage, especially if they felt isolated. Relationships were the antidote. But the challenge, Chuck and the planning team knew, was that they could not force people into relationships. Instead, the curriculum had to evoke experiences of vulnerability that would open people to the possibility of trusting each other.
Jess’s group already had plenty of cordial, and even revealing, interactions. But they had not yet constructed relationships, which are distinct from interactions because both people expect the interactions to continue. That presumed future gives meaning to the exchanges people have and shapes the way they relate to each other. Jess was not sure if any members of her group expected to stay connected with her after the program ended.
Walking away from uncomfortable interactions with people like the Black man made it harder for Jess and her group to develop the kind of relationships Undivided leaders thought they needed. Some relationships remain forever transactional, in which both parties constantly seek to protect themselves and their own self-interest. Workplace DEI programs that mandate participation often struggle to move beyond such transactions. They turn DEI work into an exercise in checking boxes. Undivided wanted something different. They sought to cultivate what psychologists called “social relationships,” in which people give with consideration of the other person’s needs and wants, and without knowing what they might get in return. Such relationships, which are characterized by a sense of acceptance, exchange, and growth, create the sense of belonging people need to build trust.
When Jess was first released from prison, she was too busy for church. As part of her parole, she had to participate in outpatient drug treatment several days a week and check in regularly with her probation officer. To regain custody of her six-year-old son, she enrolled in parenting education classes through the Ohio Child Protective Services and navigated what turned out to be a year-long court process. It was all-consuming. Jess almost lost custody because her felony conviction made it challenging to find a home where she could live with her son. To salvage the opportunity, Jess’s mom moved out of her trailer so Jess could move in, enabling her to regain custody two weeks before her son’s seventh birthday. Jess never took her family’s generosity for granted. Initially, she had been unsure whether they would welcome her back, given the fact that she had stolen from them and forged checks in their names. But her mom and sister warmly welcomed Jess into their lives, even as Jess’s sister was pregnant with her first child.
So when her sister began battling a severe bout of postpartum depression, Jess was desperate to do something. She was afraid her sister was going to kill herself, and she didn’t know how to help her. Jess can’t remember who suggested trying Crossroads. But Jess had been wanting to find a church since Sergeant Harris had helped her develop a relationship with God. She convinced her sister to accompany her.
They felt a little sheepish the first time they attended services in late 2015. Jess and her sister hadn’t been to a megachurch like Crossroads before. The brightly lit lobby, the crowds of people milling around, the free artisan coffee bar, and the overtly friendly greeters overwhelmed them. They found two seats in the back of the auditorium.
Both were relieved when the house lights went down, spotlighting the band onstage. Like many other megachurches in America, Crossroads dispensed with traditional liturgical services. There was no reason, Crossroads thought, that prim steeples, august altars, and uncomfortable wooden pews had to define people’s church experience. The services themselves also lacked the stylistic trappings of traditional Protestant churches. During worship, there were no altars on the stage at Crossroads and the clergy did not wear traditional religious vestments. The services were multimedia, multisensory affairs with full bands and accompanying singers. An older white congregant in Crossroads who grew up in a traditional Presbyterian church once told me he hated Crossroads the first time he went. “It was so loud. So big. So irreverent.” But then he got hooked.
Irreverence was actually a source of pride for Crossroads. They wanted to be funny, hip, and modern, to engage people most churches could not reach. It worked for Jess and her sister. The first time they attended Easter services at Crossroads, the production team shot confetti from the stage, released balloons from the ceiling, and rolled out a giant cake with communion wafers nestled into the icing. “Jesus is alive!” they declared. “It’s a party!”
Sitting in the back of the dark auditorium in Oakley, listening to the messages about the promise of salvation through Jesus, and witnessing the impact of Crossroads in the community, Jess’s sister discovered a relationship with God, and soon after began attending therapy. After the Easter party in 2016, she decided to get baptized. Baptisms in nondenominational evangelical communities were often literally immersive affairs—the baptismal candidate was fully dunked in any available body of water. For Jess’s sister, it was a water tank Crossroads set up on the main stage in Oakley after weekly services. People lined up to get baptized under the spotlight while onlookers cheered. When Jess’s sister was pulled out of the water, dripping wet and committed to Jesus, Jess cried. A volunteer was waiting with a towel for her at the end of the baptismal tank, but Jess grabbed it out of the volunteer’s hands. “Let me do this part.” She wrapped her sister in the towel, the two of them sobbing uncontrollably.
“I’m convinced that Crossroads saved my sister’s life,” Jess said as she reflected on that moment. It felt like atonement. “If I did nothing else, at least I helped my sister find Jesus.”
Jess’s loyalty to Crossroads engendered a willingness to stick with Undivided even when she was uncomfortable. Connection cultivated commitment.
She was surprised one week in Undivided to see her college professor participating in one of the other small groups. Jess had gone back to school after regaining custody of her son through a statewide program dedicated to trying to help the formerly incarcerated obtain jobs with the state. As part of her degree, she landed in a sociology class with a Black professor. Near the end of the semester, he lectured on the Black experience in America. Jess remembered him beginning his lecture: “Most people think the last racist killed Martin Luther King and then racism was over.” Jess cocked her head, pausing while taking notes. That’s not true? she thought. Implausible as it was, Jess had never questioned the narrative that America’s race problem had been solved.
His lecture opened Jess’s eyes to things she had never known before—persistent racial disparities in income, wealth, and education, disproportionate incarceration rates of Black men, the history of the Black Panther Party, and so on. He introduced her to words that she had never heard, like blackface. During the lecture, she thought about the murders of Michael Brown in Missouri, Eric Garner in New York, and Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati, and the ensuing controversies about policing in America. Until then, Jess had never known what to make of the news, always unsure about the trustworthiness of the media. But by this point in the semester, she trusted her professor. People’s ability to enact change was often most potent within trusted social networks.
Jess called her sister as soon as the lecture was over. “You are not going to believe all this stuff,” she had said, flabbergasted by how different it was from what they had learned as kids. Each week after Undivided, she did the same, joking on the phone with her sister about her ignorance.
Bonds of community began to emerge in Jess’s group during the fourth week. That session was dedicated to helping people excavate their racial identities and break down their assumptions about race. After taking an implicit association test, people stood in a circle and the facilitator read out a list of statements. Those for whom the statement was true walked into the middle of the circle.
For Jess, the exercise started simply enough.
“I grew up with two parents at home.”
“I have a college degree.”
“I have been incarcerated.”
Jess froze.
By then, she had been pretty open with her group about her father and his past. But she had never considered admitting to others in Undivided that she was a convicted felon. She felt unprepared for this moment. The facilitator paused. Jess’s mind raced. I’m in church. Aren’t I supposed to be good? She considered staying where she was. No one else was walking to the middle of the circle. Jess looked down at her hands—she had just gotten a small lotus flower tattooed onto the inside of her left wrist. She described it to her friends as a symbol of “the journey of the spiritual self through life, love, death, and recovery.” The petals of the flower were colored in different shades of blue, and the stem was slightly twisted. Jess walked into the middle of the circle and stood there alone.
She locked eyes with Patricia, the older Black woman who was one of the cofacilitators in her group. Patricia blinked and her eyebrows lifted slightly. Cutting the tension of people’s gaze with her laughter, Jess said, “I guess no one looks at this white girl and thinks, ‘Oh, she’s a felon.’ ”
Everyone laughed. Jess walked back to the edge of the circle.
Later, the facilitator read another statement: “I have been addicted to drugs.” Jess walked into the middle of the circle and stood alone, again. This time, her group didn’t seem surprised. Jess looked directly at the Black man in the group, whose eyes she had been avoiding. He nodded. Jess smiled with relief and flicked her eyes to Patricia.
“My [child] is in recovery right now,” Patricia said.
“I’m still in long-term recovery,” Jess replied.
The exercise continued, asking people about their experiences with money, race, and poverty.
“I have gone to bed hungry.”
“I haven’t had enough money to pay my rent or mortgage.”
“I have been discriminated against because of my race.”
Jess was surprised to learn that the white, rather than the Black, participants in her group were more likely to have experienced poverty. She thought about all the things her dad and other relatives had told her about Black Americans being poor and lazy. The relief of acceptance loosened Jess’s guard. She blurted out, “Huh, I always thought Black people were poor.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Jess regretted them. Oh my God, she thought. I just said it out loud. But others in her group laughed instead of getting angry. They were willing to give her latitude.
As that night’s session was ending, one of the women asked if anyone wanted to continue the conversation over dinner. All eight people did. They found a Steak ’n Shake about a quarter mile from the Oakley campus that was open on a Monday night and decided to meet there. The restaurant looked like a classic 1950s diner with black and white tiles on the floor and red pleather seats arranged around Formica tables. There were not many other customers there, and it was easy for the group to rearrange the tables to seat everyone in their group together. Most people ordered burgers.
This impromptu dinner turned out to be a pivotal turning point for Jess and her group. There were two Black women, one Black man, one Asian woman, Jess, and three other white people. The Asian woman, an immigrant from China, described the legal challenges she had to go through to maintain her visa. Jess spoke about her experience in prison and finding Jesus. Patricia, the Black woman whose child was fighting addiction, traded stories about recovery and relapse with Jess. The Black man teased Jess gently about the stereotypes she had confessed to the group that night. His gentle jokes made Jess’s shoulders relax. She laughed with him about her ignorance. Generally cautious about the things she shared with others, Jess described herself as a private person, somewhat wary in social situations. But when she was feeling comfortable, she laughed deeply and heartily. “Those are just the things my dad told me,” she said.
“It’s not just your dad,” he said. “Everyone says those things.” The group discussed the way local news stations offered imbalanced portrayals of Black and white communities in the city. The white facilitator whom Jess had not liked the first week talked about how she had to work to dismantle media stereotypes of Black people she had internalized in her own mind. Jess felt like she was beginning to understand where the woman was coming from.
The waitstaff had to ask the group to leave at ten thirty because the restaurant was closing. They all got up to go, but they couldn’t stop talking among themselves. While the workers wiped down the chairs around them and swept stray fries and spilled sugar packets up from the floor, the group kept talking. It was a Monday night, and most people probably had to go to work the next day, but no one could bring themselves to leave until they were forced to.
Jess finally got into her blue 2007 Scion to drive home to Batavia. She thought about her dad, her struggle with heroin and other opioids, and then her time in prison. She thought about the hours of conversation with Sergeant Harris and felt, that night, that maybe he would be proud.